Several works on slavery in the Islamic world were published in 2019, including Bernard K. Freamon's Possessed by the Right Hand and Mary Ann Fay's edited volume, Slavery in the Islamic World. What distinguishes Jonathan A.C. Brown's contribution to this scholarship is its central question: how are believing Muslims supposed to make sense of Muhammad as both a moral exemplar and a slave owner?

Brown begins the book by positioning himself as a practicing Muslim for whom this question did not feel particularly relevant until ISIS emerged in 2014. ISIS’ enslavement of minority religious groups in Iraq impelled a flurry of debate within and outside the Muslim community about the Qurʾan and the Prophet's stance on slavery—the question suddenly became urgent, and it defied easy answers. Brown tackles the question using a combination of history, law, and philosophy. He states his argument clearly in the Introduction to the book: “Not everything that we label ‘slavery’ in history was always wrong in every time and place” (p. 5). This argument is bound to make readers uncomfortable. Brown acknowledges that slavery is an uncomfortable topic and that “the study of history is inherently destabilizing” (p. 8). Nevertheless, he insists that we consider the topic seriously.

In Chapter 1, Brown discusses the difficulty of defining slavery and argues that riqq (the Arabic term often translated as “slavery”) does not mean the same thing as the English word “slavery.” After laying this definitional groundwork, Chapter 2 highlights the often ambiguous, contested nature of rulings on riqq in the shariʿa. Brown also explicates the rights and restrictions of slaves in the shariʿa, including rights of religious practice, life, and physical protection. In Chapter 3, Brown reminds his audience that Islamic civilization cannot be reduced to the shariʿa. This chapter surveys the diverse forms of slavery practiced across the far-flung Islamic world from the 7th through 19th centuries.

Building upon these legal and historical overviews, Chapter 4 uses philosophical tools to tackle the book's central question. For Brown, the moral conundrum of Muhammad as a slave owner is resolved when one relinquishes the idea that riqq is the same thing as “slavery.” Certainly, the abuses people have in mind when they think of “slavery” today are morally reprehensible, but riqq as an abstraction cannot be declared morally reprehensible. That does not mean that riqq is necessarily good—it is an unfortunate situation to be avoided and ameliorated—but it is not inherently evil.

Nevertheless, most Muslims today think slavery is wrong. Chapter 5 therefore analyses various strains of Muslim abolitionist thinking, showing that Muslim scholars until very recently offered no moral condemnation of slavery per se, but rather prohibited slavery if it was done badly, in inappropriate circumstances, or in conflict with the interests of Muslim governments. The fact that the shariʿa can prohibit but not morally condemn slavery leads to the uncomfortable realization that slavery could be reinstated in the future if the conditions were deemed right. Enter ISIS in Chapter 6, who claimed the time was in fact right to reinstitute riqq. Brown dismisses ISIS as a “grotesque and egregious exception”(p. 262) and rejects any attempts to invoke ISIS as evidence that slavery and Islam go hand-in-hand. Brown ends this chapter by arguing that the Prophet and early Muslims were “veritable turbines of emancipation,” and that emancipation was “baked into the Shariah's internal logic and functioning” (p. 263–4). While I agree that the early Islamic tradition strongly encourages manumission, this emancipatory ethic has a paradoxical outcome that Brown fails to address adequately, which is that the frequent manumission of slaves historically also drove demand for more slaves.

In Chapter 7, Brown discusses the thorny problem of concubinage and consent. He points out that the modern notion of “consent” is just as arbitrary and amorphous as other abstractions. While the shariʿa does not recognize consent as a salient aspect of sexual relationships, the shariʿa does recognize the principle of ḍarar (harm). If non-consensual sex (including concubinage) is deemed harmful by our society, then it is acceptable for shariʿa to prohibit it. While Brown's solution is rather ingenious, it does not resolve any of the problems he previously raised with the notion of consent. Moreover, it appears to this reviewer that “harm” could be just as slippery a concept as any other, and just as open to abuse, injustice, and inequality. I found this chapter to be the most troubling and least convincing in the book.

The book ends with six fascinating appendices, which are short excurses ranging from a translated account from the Hilyat al-Awliya to a consideration of whether historical Sunni thinkers considered it legal to enslave Imami Shiʿa.

Overall, this book is erudite and thought provoking; it will be of interest to scholars of slavery in many fields. Brown synthesizes a great deal of secondary scholarship and cites evidence from numerous primary sources. The book is especially strong in its presentation of hadith evidence (both sound and unsound), as well as its discussion of Sunni legal thinkers from the late Medieval period, such as Taqi al-Din al-Subki (d. 1355) and Ibn Hajar (d. 1449), whose views on slavery have been insufficiently studied. Brown also engages with the thought of numerous 20th- and 21st-century Muslim intellectuals, from Abul Aʿla Maududi (d. 1979) to the contemporary Iranian intellectual Mohsen Kadivar. Brown's writing is engaging and accessible; he uses illustrative examples from social media, Game of Thrones, and other sources that non-specialists and students will find relatable. Despite this relatability, readers should expect to feel uncomfortable while reading this book, and probably to disagree with many of Brown's arguments.

I will conclude by acknowledging my own positionality as a secular, non-Muslim historian. I am comfortable with the idea that people in the past had different moral standards than we have today. When I study the past, I do not ask whether something was right or good but merely seek to understand what was. That is, I feel no need to defend the morality of the past because I do not look to the past for moral authority. I therefore cannot say whether Brown's conclusions will be satisfying for those Muslim readers who do accept the moral authority of the early Islamic past, but I suggest they read the book to find out for themselves.