Slavery In Christian & Muslim Thought: Disambiguating The Polemic

Welcome to Orthodox Shahada. I am Lewis, and in this video we explore the attitudes and understanding of slavery in Christian and Islamic history and theological thought.

A number of Muslim apologists, when presented with the facts of the Qur’an, Sunnah and Sharia’s permission for Muslims to buy and own slaves, as well as exploit them for sexual pleasure, respond with a 'tu quoque', by arguing that slavery has also existed in Christian history and that Christians and the Church thought it was fine back then, implying that Christians are being hypocritical in their attempt to present the issue of slavery as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon.

This is an oversimplification of the history on the part of Muslims, and in order to deal with this apologetic, we will present a number of theses which are intended to disanalogize Christianity from, at least, Sunni Islam on the issue of slavery according to relevant differences. This is an immensely broad topic and much more literature could have been read, so this video is by no means exhaustive and will only focus on certain historical aspects, sometimes with broad brush strokes. By no means do we exhaust the literature on this topic; the aim, rather, is to lay the foundations for a comparative approach between Islam and Christianity.

Video Editted by: The Upstart ([email protected])

0:00:00 Opening Title
0:00:10 Opening statement
0:00:21 Introduction
0:03:09 History & Nature of Slavery: pre-Christianization of the Roman Empire
0:12:37 An Analysis of Slavery in the New Testament
0:22:18 Slavery in the Patristic Mind: General & Specific
0:44:55 A Case Study of Slavery in Christianity: Byzantium
1:00:11 Slavery in Islam: Qur’an, Sunnah, Fiqh
1:28:51 Slavery in Islamic History: African Case Study
1:47:50 Modern & Post-Modern Developments in Islam & Christian worlds
2:07:26 Concluding Summary