Rosalind

Rosalind addresses me in the comments. She says this.

@jonecc: not sure if you'll get this, but you made a good point in the thread about slavery. I think you are right to say that had the Qur'an been a bit more explicit about banning slavery instead of giving slaves more rights (i.e. had Islam adopted a revolutionary rather than a reformatory approach to slavery), it may not have lingered on for 12 centuries. But I am not so sure to be honest and here's why. I think that slavery was more or less an inevitable stage in human quest for progress, it is no more than a primeval way to acquire labour in exchange of social/economic security in some form. I realise it sounds horrendous and I find slavery revolting, but if we try to look at it impartially, we may be able to recognise that were it not for industrial revolution and progress in machinery, the need for slavery would have never ceased, because human societies need labour.

In old times, people bought not the human being (at least I don't think it registered in their heads quite that way, although of course there were exceptions), but their services, but they did it in a strange way - they paid upfront and shared their homes and food with the servant. It was like a contract, except that the rights of the servant differed from society to society.

What Islam did was give servants quite a number of interesting rights. Many slaves or servants went into slavery by choice and many were not inetrested in being free, although it does sound very strange. The way the pharaoh described Moses to his wife for example was more or less how you'd describe a slave or a servant, Joseph was also a slave/servant (Chapter 12). I do think that if we deconstruct the meaning associated with the word slave or servant and fit it within the social, economic and cultural time period, we'd find many parallels with modern labour markets, especially in conjunction with technological advancement of the era which I think is quite a crucial factor. I'd be interested to hear your viewpoint on that.

I replied with this.


You say that slaves often chose their status for themselves. I wonder how many, and whether it was a free choice or the result of debt and destitution. Slave owners in the west used to say the same kind of thing.

You also say that low technology mandated slavery. There is no reason why that should be true either. The simple fact that the economic development of a society requires a great deal of manual labour to supply the basics is no justification for making some members of that society do the work, while others enjoy the return of their labours.

The problem with the way the Qur'an handles subjects like slavery is not that it is worse than other human institutions. The problem is that it is like them. If I thought a book was written by God, I would expect more from it. I wouldn't expect to have to hunt round for muddy compromises to mitigate its association with shameful human practices. I would expect it to at least rise to the moral level of say a Martin Luther King.

In general, the Quran's defenders in these debates are constantly being forced to equivocate, to invent ever more complicated ways of explaining away the actual text as it is appears on the page. You argue that certain passages were only meant to apply in the past, despite the absence of any indication of this in the text. You dismiss gloating descriptions of posthumous torture as mere metaphors. You dig out obscure alternative meanings of Arabic verbs. You insist that every verse must be read in the context of the whole, then use the most benign verses to set that context, forgetting that the reverse could just as easily apply.

You, Rosalind, you set to with a will. When David Pavett offers detailed refutations of Sardar's arguments you come back with arguments, while he merely whines and sneers. I rarely agree with you, but at least you're prepared to argue properly, and if I was the Editor of the Guardian I would give you authorship of the whole blog. I just wonder if you ever think "Why is it this much work?"