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Slavery and Islam

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most people – Muslims and non-Muslims – do not like talking about slavery. — location: 187 ^ref-45969

we use the word ‘slavery’ to refer to a vast spectrum of dramatically different relationships of labor and control that do not merit one, uniform moral judgment. — location: 207 ^ref-16696

some societies developed the technologies and economies of production that allowed them to dispense with coerced human labor earlier than others. — location: 215 ^ref-40401

Other historical phenomena that we also refer to conventionally as ‘slavery,’ however, have been much less severe and were closer to forms of wage labor than to dehumanizing domination. — location: 219 ^ref-43844

What we see when we look into the well of history is largely a reflection of ourselves, our beliefs, our categories and our assumptions. — location: 283 ^ref-44366

If the production of knowledge is an exercise of power, then there are few subjects more susceptible to the subjectivities this involves than the study of slavery. — location: 320 ^ref-33281

Clearly people have different skin colors. A person picked at random from Norway and a person picked at random from the Congo will probably look very different, and it is not surprising that one might draw on the vocabulary of lightness and darkness to describe their comparative features. This so far is a neutral process. But white/black and light/dark have also been synonymous with judgments about purity/pollution and good/evil in many civilizations, so employing a language of color rarely stays neutral for long. — location: 351 ^ref-62179

can one be a slave and not know it? — location: 385 ^ref-3362

there is no definition of slavery that covers everything we scholars in the West want to call slavery while excluding those things we do not want to call slavery. — location: 443 ^ref-1895

in almost all societies there has been a category, sometimes more than one, that Western historians, explorers, colonialists or ethnographers have seen fit to translate as ‘slave.’ To put it more crudely, no matter where you are, there seems always to be a lowest rung in society. — location: 1065 ^ref-14960