Robert Hoyland has read Graebar (if not Hudson) and is applying the findings to the Hadith. The Roman legal maxim that "the free have no price", in spirit, is echoed in the opinions of Zubayrid-era Meccan jurist 'Atâ as transmitted to the famed Ibn Jurayj, as Motzkian "Meccan jurisprudence".
Islam came out of a late-antiquity as disliked that a man could sell his children, or himself, into bondage. Islam found itself in Judaism's position, so has reacted as did the Torah, putting restrictions on ta'bîd. We can hope for similar restrictions on usury today, law kariha X-liberals like Razib Khan and Richard Hanania.
Hoyland doesn't continue to the epilog: Islam would run full-thrust on chattel slavery of outsiders. The same happened in Christendom as the Portuguese and then Spain found themselves masters of a new, maritime, and vast empire over less-developed peoples. Between them, to their own shande, the Jews mediated, as their traders (as, once, the Vikings). Before them all I've argued that the Sasanians, with their explicitly racial "Aryan" ideology, and like Schwarzenegger never really caring about that "freedom" thing, ran plantations in bulk far later than they should have done.
To that: I suggest that the clear presence of a slave caste, especially if an alien caste, serves to make more egregious the debt-peons at home. A large-scale economy/oecumene informs all involved within it. This pits free labour, even indentured labour, against slave labour. As Larry Gonick observed around Delos in earlier Hellenistic times: "we're supposed to have slaves, not be 'em". As slavery and dhimmitude hardened as core to Islamic values, debt-peonage of now-Muslims got squeezed out of Islam.
Christianity meanwhile came to dislike that the concept of "slave" should exist... at all. It helped that we are not textual fundamentalists.
No comments:
Post a Comment