Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures

by Bernard K. Freamon

In Possessed by the Right Hand, the first comprehensive legal history of slavery in Islam ever offered to readers, Bernard K. Freamon, an African-American Muslim law professor, provides a penetrating analysis of the problems of slavery and slave-trading in Islamic history. After examining the issues from pre-Islamic times through to the nineteenth century, Professor Freamon considers the impact of Western abolitionism, arguing that such efforts have been a failure, with the notion of abolition becoming nothing more than a cruel illusion. He closes this ground-breaking account with an examination of the slaving ideologies and actions of ISIS and Boko Haram, asserting that Muslims now have an important and urgent responsibility to achieve true abolition under the aegis of Islamic law.

Genres: Islam, History, Religion

570 pages, Hardcover

Published June 20, 2019

Reviews

[Ahmed Louaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possessed by the Right Hand is a book about Islamic slavery, wrote it by Professor Bernard K. Freamon, and published in 2019. In this book, professor Freamon seek to rebuild the story of Islamic slavery from the beginning to now days, by using several ways and methods. Also, the author collects many resources, from different discipline, such as history, law (Islamic law and others), linguistic etc...
In the introduction, the author presents the main problem of his research, which he addresses throughout most of the book. This problem revolves around the extent to which Sharia was concerned with abolishing slavery. Were there genuine jurisprudential discussions within the Islamic world regarding the abolition of slavery? Or was the abolition of slavery influenced by external factors and pressures from Europeans, particularly the British?
The first chapter, professor Freamon try to give a brief history of slavery, including laws that were applied to slaves, and how people were enslaved in the pre-Islamic, not only in the Middle East, but also among the ancient peoples and civilizations that were in contact with the Middle East, And those people were the Jewish and the Roman and the Greek and the Egyptian and the Semitic people in Mesopotamia. All these different cultures influenced the forms and types of Islamic slavery, and the way in which the Qur’anic text and Sunnah legitimized the provisions regulating and legalizing slavery.
In next chapters, the author wrote about slavery in early of Islam and the empires that exist in Islamic world between medieval and modern age, and by tracing the history of slavery in Islam, Freamon sheds a light on the history of many caliphates and Islamic countries. Also, He traces the changes that occurred in the forms of slavery, and when those changes appeared. But what I found it very interesting about those chapters is the modern period, when Islamic elite faced the idea of abolition, and the way that some ulama like Rashid Rida tried to find justification for the abolition through Qur’an and Sunna.
The writer also discussed slavery in the Indian Ocean, in regions such as India, Iran, Oman, and Zanzibar, and considered that slavery in the Indian Ocean is as old as trade there, dating back thousands of years. Then he studied how Islamic reformers in that area tried to abolish slavery, and he mentioned several of them, like the Indian reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan who lived in 19th century.

overall, I can say that this work is one of the best books I had ever read about Islamic slavery, and I read this year many books on this subject. But I record several points about it, like the way Freamon concluded that the Qur’anic text and Sunnah were preparing Muslims for abolition, though the slavey continued until the late of 20th in some regions. and using the same methodology used by linguistics to analyze Quranic discourse, he reached conclusions different from those reached by Mohammed Ennaji, for example, in his book "Slavery, The State, and Islam" which considered that the Qur’anic discourse was consolidating slavery by establishing laws for it and framing it within Islamic sharia

[Ibrahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book on slavery across the Islamic world, since the Prophet to the present day, with a focus on how pre-Islamic slavery informed Islamic slavery, how slavery was constituted across different Islamic entities across time, how it evolved with the coming of the Imperial Caliphate and the subsequent fracturing, the Islamic legal basis behind it, and Islamic response to abolition and current day issues of Islamic slavery (de jure and de facto). A book that every Muslim grappling with the permission of slavery in Islam should read, well researched and argues well that there is a current day Islamic consensus supporting abolition.

Fundamentally, I do think the book shows that any attempt to abolish de jure or de facto slavery requires a total overhaul in the dominant mode of thinking in the Islamic world, and especially in countries where modern day slavery is rampant. The interpretations of the Quran and Sunnah to support slavery or oppose it are secondary to material developments in the existence and practice of slavery as shown by the transformation of Islamic slavery with the Imperial Abbasid era, the Zanj rebellion and other such developments. So a change in material conditions predicated on the total overhaul of social relations is the only way to get around to this necessary change in thinking that is required for the abolition of modern day slavery.

Its not a surprise that the reactionary return of slavery with ISIS only arose after the dramatic deindustrialization and regression in development of Syria and Iraq, post fall of the Soviet Union.