[In a Q & A session following a speech on Islam and slavery]

Brown: [1:02:22] Let me ask you this question. You started saying ‘wrongs done by Arabs to other people.’ What wrongs?

Questioner: Well—

Brown: Just tell me. I know what you’re going to say so I’ll answer your question for you. The fact that there was slavery is a wrong.

Questioner: Yeah.

Brown: Ok, that’s, how can you say, if you’re Muslim, the Prophet of God had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that. Was he—are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No you’re not. I’ll answer your question for you.

[...]

Brown: Slavery cannot just be treated as a moral evil in and of itself because slavery doesn’t mean anything. The moral evil is extreme forms of deprivation of rights and extreme forms of control and extreme forms of exploitation. I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us, and we’re owned by people.

[...]

Brown: [1:08:35] In general, you don’t find the brutality that you see in American slavery. As far as I can tell, generally it is simply not very common. Slaves in Islamic civilization were mostly investments.

[...]

Brown: [1:19:20] The first question was about the concubines. So this is a very difficult discussion to have. We don’t have time to have it today, but I would say that—. It’s very hard to have this discussion because we think of, let’s say in the modern United States, the sine qua non of morally correct sex is consent. We think of people as autonomous agents. Everybody’s an autonomous agent and it’s the consent of that autonomous agent that makes a sexual action acceptable. Correct?

If you take away the consent element, then everyone starts flipping out. Right? At that but you get, rape you get sexual acts done by people who are too young we perceive to consent (1:20:15). And these are sort of the great moral wrongs of our society. So the idea of someone who is a by definition non-consensual sexual actor in the sense that they have been entered into a sexual relationship in a position of servitude that’s sort of ab initio wrong.

The way I would respond to that—

Brown: —is to say that as – I mean this is just a fact – this isn’t a judgment, it’s a fact. For most of human history human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of morally correct sexual activity. And second, we fetishize the idea of autonomy to the extent that we forget, again who’s really free? Are we really autonomous people? I mean what does autonomy mean? Can I just drive—can I be like a cowboy and in a movie or an action TV series where I just get on my motorcycle and just ride to the West? No, I got kids. I have a mortgage. I mean we’re all born into and live in a network of relationships and responsibilities and duties, but we have this obsession with the idea of autonomy. And the fact is that—and this is not to demean the status of woman in Islam or Islamic civilization at all, but a concubine’s autonomy was not that different from the autonomy of a wife, because for most of human history and most of Islamic civilization, women got married to the person that their family wanted them to get married to. The idea of being autonomous and saying, “I need to be in love with him. I need to go have this, you know, Jane Austen-like courtship with him. That was hogwash.

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Brown: What’s the difference between someone who is captured in a raid in the steppes of Central Asia brought to Istanbul’s slave market, sold to an owner, who, by the way, might treat her badly, might treat her incredibly well. She’s going to bear him children. She’s going to be a free woman. She’s going to be the mother of his children. If he’s high status, she’s going to be high status. If he dies she might be a very desirable wife. That person’s situation? What’s the difference between that and some woman who’s a poor baker’s daughter who gets married to some baker’s son without any choice because no one expects her to have any choice? And that baker’s son might treat her well. He might treat her horribly. The difference between these two people is not that big. We see it as enormous because we’re obsessed with the idea of autonomy and consent, would be my first response. It’s not a solution to the problem. I think it does help frame it.