I believe much of that concern comes from videos portraying Muhammad as a contributor to the African slave trade and describing “Islamic slavery” as uniquely brutal.
The conversation forced me to clarify something essential.
Because my research focuses on the ancient worlds behind the Abrahamic traditions, I am especially cautious about projecting later institutions backward onto prophetic figures.
I do not apologize for history, and I do not deny the injustices committed in societies ruled by Muslims. But I also do not accept the collapse of Arab history, Muslim history, imperial history, and the life of Muhammad into one undifferentiated accusation.
Arab is not synonymous with Muslim.
The actions of later Arab, Ottoman, African, Persian, or Muslim-ruled societies cannot automatically be attributed to Muhammad.
Muhammad was not an abolitionist in the modern political sense. I understand him as a liberator operating within the social world presented to him, a world in which slavery already existed across Arabia and the wider ancient world.
His work was not to reproduce a nineteenth-century abolitionist movement thirteen centuries early. His record points toward humane treatment, moral accountability, the honoring of agreements, repeated encouragement of emancipation, and the elevation of people society had degraded.
Within that wider institution, some enslaved people could enter contractual arrangements for release, while other forms were plainly coercive. History should not be sanitized. But historical precision still requires us to distinguish among captivity, debt bondage, servitude, contractual manumission, domestic dependence, and racial chattel slavery.
For many Black Americans, the word slavery immediately invokes hereditary racial ownership, family separation, forced labor, and permanent dehumanization.
That response is historically understandable. Our history gives the word a particular moral force, but historical understanding requires more than reacting to the word itself. It requires asking:
What institution existed? How did it function? What restraints or reforms were introduced? What moral direction was established?
And what later practices were wrongly projected backward onto the Prophet?
The work of a Nabi is not necessarily to dismantle every inherited institution instantly. It is to deliver the command of Allah, confront injustice, establish accountability, and move people toward the moral order required of them.
That distinction does not excuse history. It helps us read it honestly.
His uncle wants to read my book, We Were Not Looking: Reconstructing the Patriarchal World Through Ancient Near Eastern Context, but he remains puzzled by my conversion to Islam.
I believe much of that concern comes from videos portraying Muhammad as a contributor to the African slave trade and describing “Islamic slavery” as uniquely brutal.
The conversation forced me to clarify something essential.
Because my research focuses on the ancient worlds behind the Abrahamic traditions, I am especially cautious about projecting later institutions backward onto prophetic figures.
I do not apologize for history, and I do not deny the injustices committed in societies ruled by Muslims. But I also do not accept the collapse of Arab history, Muslim history, imperial history, and the life of Muhammad into one undifferentiated accusation.
Arab is not synonymous with Muslim.
The actions of later Arab, Ottoman, African, Persian, or Muslim-ruled societies cannot automatically be attributed to Muhammad.
Muhammad was not an abolitionist in the modern political sense. I understand him as a liberator operating within the social world presented to him, a world in which slavery already existed across Arabia and the wider ancient world.
His work was not to reproduce a nineteenth-century abolitionist movement thirteen centuries early. His record points toward humane treatment, moral accountability, the honoring of agreements, repeated encouragement of emancipation, and the elevation of people society had degraded.
Within that wider institution, some enslaved people could enter contractual arrangements for release, while other forms were plainly coercive. History should not be sanitized.
But historical precision still requires us to distinguish among captivity, debt bondage, servitude, contractual manumission, domestic dependence, and racial chattel slavery.
For many Black Americans, the word slavery immediately invokes hereditary racial ownership, family separation, forced labor, and permanent dehumanization.
That response is historically understandable. Our history gives the word a particular moral force, but historical understanding requires more than reacting to the word itself. It requires asking:
What institution existed? How did it function? What restraints or reforms were introduced? What moral direction was established?
And what later practices were wrongly projected backward onto the Prophet?
The work of a Nabi is not necessarily to dismantle every inherited institution instantly. It is to deliver the command of Allah, confront injustice, establish accountability, and move people toward the moral order required of them.
That distinction does not excuse history.
It helps us read it honestly.