Responding to “Hoteps” and “Afrocentrists”: “Islamic” Slavery

Initially, the term “hotep” was basically a “conscious” way to greet people; it signified that one had done some reading and research into Ancient Kemet. Throughout the preceding years, the term ‘hotep’ has become a term of opprobrium, indicating someone who is basically an ignorant, unapologetically misogynistic or cover for conservatism.

I use the term “hotep” here to describe a specific person who has developed an opposition to Islam from studying foundational Afrocentric texts, such as Chancellor Williams’ The Destruction of Black Civilization. Their argument is as follows: Islam is not indigenous to Africa. Rather it was brought by Arabs (sometimes identified as Semitic, sometimes as Caucasian) who invaded Africa, enslaving and raping their way across the continent. Their pillaging led to hundreds of millions of Africans being displaced. Islam is nothing but Arab nationalism, an unoriginal religion designed to hide Arab racial interests as they stole African land and riches. Black Muslims, they argue, betray African interests by following this ‘Arab’ religion.

In my view, Muslims should respond to these accusations as follows:

• The first important point is that Islam is not a white, Arab religion, foreign to Africa. The assumption that Islam is Arab colonialism is foundational to a great number of Afrocentric foundationalist critiques of Islam, ranging from Chancellor Williams to Molefi Asante and Wole Soyinka. But these critiques rest on the idea that Arabs are not indigenous to Africa. And beneath the comparison then, is an analogy that rests more on a misguided comparison of Arab migrations into Africa to European colonial migrations post-1492 than on conclusive evidence that this earlier Arab expansion also resulted in a massive displacement of Africans. As scholar Hisham Aidi points out, Cheikh Anta Diop, a scholar often quoted by contemporary Afrocentrists, himself refuted the idea of an Arab invasion in his classic work Precolonial Black Africa. Afrocentrists may have legitimate philosophical critiques of Islam, and certainly legitimate critiques of the failings of Muslims, but equating Islam with Arab colonialism is inaccurate.
• The second and related point is that the beginning of slavery in Africa does not date from the coming of Islam into Africa. Slavery was an ancient practice in any number of centralized and decentralized societies across the African continent. Slaves were more often than not criminals or war captives because in the absence of prisons, forms of servility and human bondage were the only available punishment (along with death or exile) for serious crimes. These forms of slavery were extremely variable, often gendered and cannot be simplistically categorized into ‘African slavery’ versus ‘Islamic slavery’.
• The third important point is that Afrocentrists pointing to the evils of the ‘Arab’ slave trade often rely uncritically on eighteenth and nineteenth-century European travellers in East Africa as their primary source material. These accounts contain much value, but must be read critically for their clear bias against Islam and Arabs and contextually as evidence of the growing nexus between abolition and colonialism. Their shocking accounts of the brutality of the slave trade were often designed specifically to demonize ‘Arab’ traders (who were oftentimes not even Arab), outrage a European public and advocate for European colonial intervention.

I do not want to be seen as apologizing on behalf of Arab slave traders or slave traders of any kind. The traffic, past and present, of human beings in bondage, was and is unethical, immoral and illegal. But these polemical accounts date from a time when the enslavement of Africans was a global business participated in by many ethnicities, societies, states and private companies, and of which British, French and Dutch colonials were a vital part. The ‘Arab’ slave trade is thus more accurately referred to as the Indian Ocean slave trade. In the nineteenth century, it became global in scope, as part of the global trade in ivory from Africa.

Afrocentrists often quote statistics derived from this aforementioned literature, about the total number of Africans taken over centuries of the ‘Arab’ slave trade. This is an empirically dubious exercise, for there are no accurate records on numbers of enslaved Africans for the early centuries of Islam, and the scattershot eighteenth and nineteenth-century estimates of amateur European travellers cannot be reliably taken as a statistical ground from which to derive any reasonable estimate about the past.

Afrocentrists often point to the Quran and Hadith’s sanction of slavery. It is true that Islam accepted slavery as a part of Arabian society, but there is no evidence the tradition actively encouraged the taking of slaves. If one wishes to speak of a particular ‘trajectory’ of Islamic interpretation based on the Qur’an and Sunnah, it is a trajectory of manumission, not abolition.1 The Prophet Muhammad assumed that if manumission continued to regularly occur, then slavery could continue to exist without being a trans-generational status, and would eventually die out.

The Prophet Muhammad challenged the practice of slavery in Arabian society by compelling the powerful to care for and protect the less powerful. If masters and slaves could share some basic moral assumptions, powerful masters would feel a social obligation to protect and show kindness to their slaves. In Islam, this is exemplified by a hadith enjoining the believer to treat their slaves as they would treat their own children. Slaves in Islam would (ideally) function more like kin and less like a separate caste of sub-humans. Their offspring, again ideally, would be free to assume their place alongside the freeborn. None of these reforms radically challenged the ‘natural’ reality of slavery itself.

Why didn’t Muslims abolish slavery earlier?

This is a valid question and it is worth it for Muslims to reflect very hard and critically about it, especially if one is seriously committed to practising the tradition. But when Afrocentrists ask Muslims why Islam did not abolish slavery, there is a hidden assumption that non-Muslim African societies had already abolished the practice. But in fact, many powerful non-Muslim African societies depended on slavery for their wealth and resented European imposed abolition for that reason, for instance, the Asante empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also, Dahomey was notably involved in the slave trade even without the adoptions of Abrahamic religions. The founder of one arguably Africa’s greatest empire was a former slave named Askiah Muhammad, which again shows the nature of the slave trade during that time versus what we are holding today as the blanket view on all forms of slavery as referring to chattel.

ENSLAVED SWAHILI MEN IN STONE TOWN, ZANZIBAR, C. 1890 (VIA BBC NEWS)

Abolition as an ethical dilemma only occurs because we inhabit a very different time from the early Muslims, as well as most pre-colonial African societies. We often forget that for Jesus, Muhammad and other moral teachers of the past, the master-slave relationship was both a fact of life and a metaphor of our relationship with the Divine. The more relevant question then, is not ‘why didn’t Muslims abolish slavery?’, but ‘what makes our time different from the time of the early Muslims?’

One possible answer to that question is that we now live in a global society where we take the freedom of an individual as an irrevocable human right. Although this ideal is often traced to Western origins, it is important to note that it has other global, non-Western genealogies that are both Muslim and African. Haitian revolutionaries, among whom were African Muslims, were first among those insisting on this freedom in their struggle to end slavery in the late 1700s. At around the same time, the West African Muslim ruler Abdul Kader Kane sought to abolish the slave trade in his realm, in order to protect his subjects from the French-controlled slave trade at Saint Louis.

Formerly enslaved Muslims also helped to reshape community perceptions of slavery. In East Africa especially, the abolition of slavery coincided with the new popularity of Sufi brotherhoods as tools for the mass propagation of Islam. Sufism became the language by which formerly servile people appropriated the message of Islam to undermine the ijma around the social status of slaves and ex-slaves. In Lamu, Kenya, the ‘Alawi shaykh Habib Saleh angered the town’s former slaveholding elite by teaching ex-slaves. In Bagamoyo, Tanzania, an ex-slave from the Congo rose to become a Sufi shaykh and one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the region; he faced strong opposition from former slave owners. The first five decades of the twentieth century in Africa revealed Muslims reshaping the consensus on slavery. This process of reshaping ijma was not only an elite scholarly one; it included formerly enslaved Muslims, who contested their rights within the idioms of Islam, moulding Islamic cultural repertoires to critique the exclusionary social practices of Muslim elites.

Traditions, Islam included, are not closed caskets but open conversations and debates often characterized by shifting notions of what is permissible. Slavery is one such shifting notion. There is nothing in the Islamic tradition mandating slavery. Thus, the overwhelming majority of Muslims today find slavery distasteful and have no desire to practice it. They have internalized a desire not to own people that is very modern. This is a direct result of the most oppressed and vulnerable elements of human global society forcing the world to accept a more robust and inclusive concept of individual freedom. Concepts of abolition and freedom are the product of centuries of struggle by enslaved Africans and others to radicalize and decolonize the values of the societies they found themselves forcibly dragged into. They constitute a valuable tool that a range of activists today, from the Rabaa Square protests in Egypt to the garment worker strikes in Bangladesh to Black Lives Matter activists in the US, use to launch more radical critiques of global inequality, exploitation, and other conditions analogous to slavery.

CAPTURED AFRICANS IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA (MODERN-DAY TANZANIA), C. 1890 (VIA BBC NEWS)

The Prophet Muhammad’s attempt to protect the enslaved and to grant them protection and rights, without abolishing slavery, was not a moral failing, but the advancement to the limits of what it was possible to envision within his era. If we do not acknowledge this, we will continue to reproduce two stale arguments of past Muslim apologists: that abolition is a Western concept that fetishizes consent and freedom, or that the Prophet Muhammad was an abolitionist. Neither of these are tenable positions, and there are severe moral costs to holding them, that compromise the moral compass of Muslims and leave serious and inquisitive outsiders with a suspicion that Muslims are more interested in theological apologetics than an honest reckoning with history. For instance, it is but a short step from the saying abolition is a Western concept to making the argument, like the late Islamist philosopher Abu Ala Mawdudi, that we need to retain slavery as a mark of Muslim moral independence from the West. And there is simply no evidence from our tradition that the Prophet Muhammad ever contemplated abolishing slavery.

My argument is distinct from both of these extremes. I have argued that Western notions of abolitionist freedom have already fused with Islamic values and that it is dangerous to try to extract one from the other. There are a number of positive benefits from embracing this position. For one thing, it provides Muslims with a powerful language not only to challenge slavery but many other forms of similar domination and exploitation that go by different names. It seems to me that Muslims who are using this fusion of moral horizons to critique both Muslim and Western complacency with regards to forms of oppression analogous to slavery are engaged in an urgently necessary and positive reinvigoration of the Islamic tradition.

Disclaimer: I view religion as a personal commitment that can aid in the revolutionary aspects of the oppressed masses.

“Our people who have never seen religion as the opium of the masses. That of course coming directly out of the European culture…[for Africans] religion & revolution go hand in hand…If one is truly religious, one must be revolutionary!” — Kwame Ture

My debut book “Thoughts Of An Unchained Mind” is coming soon, June 25th, 2021.