Slavery, the State, and Islam By Mohammed Ennaji; trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 260 pages.)

Abstract

Slavery, the State, and Islam is Fagan’s English rendering of Mohammed Ennaji’s
2007 work Le Sujet et le Mamelouk: Esclavage, Pouvoir et Religion dans
le Monde Arab, a historical study of the economics of power in the relationship
among slavery, Islam, and monarchy. Ennaji investigates the structure and nature
of the “bond of authority” as it manifests itself in servitude between the
king and subject, master and slave, God and believers. The bulk of his primary
historical material belongs to the first few centuries of Islam. However his intention,
as he notes in the introduction, is to also make sense of contemporary
modes of power that govern the scene of authority in the individuals’ proximity
to the state and, in some instances, to one another.
The opening chapter tells an anecdote of a nineteenth-century Moroccan
official who was stripped of his title as Local Governor (in Arabic, Qaid), declared
dead to the public, and kept as a slave in the sultan’s palace. Ennaji
challenges the official narrative and weaves novel threads of the story to show
the degree to which the bond of authority between the sultan and his servants
depends upon uninterrupted flat obedience.
The second chapter questions the issue of slavery during Islam’s early
years. The author claims that the new religion made little practical changes to
this institution and, in certain cases, made slaves even more abjectly submissive
to their masters. Ennaji particularly details Islam’s termination of the statuses
of sa’b (a sā’ib is a slave who has attained full unconditional freedom) and
ṭalq (repudiation) and its admission of mawlā (freed slaves must remain loyal
to their ex-master). He also elaborates on the non-provision of part of the public
funds to free more slaves, as well as the practice of depriving freed slaves of
the spoils of war and discouraging people from marrying them.
In the third chapter, Ennaji undertakes the king-subject relation in light
of the notion of servitude. He probes the sociolinguistic roots of several conceptualizations,
including ‘ibādah, ra’īyah, and ṭā‘ah (translated successively
as adoration, people, and obedience). He also examines the semiotics of various
expressions of servitude and presents a prolonged discussion of the different
uses of the hand in this context. Ennaji contends that the transition to
Islam barely changed anything in the structure of authority and the masterslave
relationship. As he puts it, with the advent of Islam there was “a reorganization
of the authoritarian space that reshuffled the division of power
between the king and the divine authority” (p. 82). This redistribution of power
is elaborated in the fourth chapter, where the author draws on concepts used ...