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Does slavery have a future? The ISIS challenge through Jewish lens

Human Rights Watch recounts the journey from slavery to freedom of Rewshe, a Yazidi teenager from the Iraqi village of Sinjar, who was among 200 women and girls carried to Raqqa, ISIS’ de facto capital in Syria.
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October 22, 2014

Human Rights Watch recounts the journey from slavery to freedom of Rewshe, a Yazidi teenager from the Iraqi village of Sinjar, who was among 200 women and girls carried to Raqqa, ISIS’ de facto capital in Syria. There, she was auctioned off for $1,000 but escaped before her slaveholder could make her his wife, his concubine or his household drudge. 

Her story has singular drama, but should we really pay that much attention when estimates are that 20 million to 30 million people, mostly young women and men, are victims of modern slavery, held as sex slaves or forced laborers in not only Arab and Muslim countries, but also in European or U.S. brothels or sweat shops? Even Israel is not immune to complaints of human trafficking, which President Barack Obama has correctly denounced as a modern-day form of slavery. 

The difference is that modern slavery — sometimes called “the dark side of globalization” — tries to exist beneath the radar. Those responsible offer no real justification except in some places, such as Saudi Arabia, where the fiction still prevails that foreign-born domestics, forced into virtual slavery, are really willing maids. 

What makes ISIS different is that — alone among modern slaveholders — it has thrown down the gauntlet in order to rationalize its revival of slavery as a Quranic “positive good”: a justification not heard in the U.S. since the master class theories of South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. (In 1860, New York Rabbi Morris J. Raphall delivered a notorious sermon condemning abolitionists, but even he was careful to distinguish slavery in ancient Israel, as found in the Bible, with “harsher” American plantation slavery.) 

According to Dabiq, ISIS’ slick new Internet magazine, the Yazidis are mushriks (idolators or devil worshippers) whose subjugation is demanded by none other than the Prophet Muhammad. They are to be enslaved as modern-day war booty: “The Muslims today have a loud, thundering statement, and possess heavy boots. They have a statement to make that will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism, and boots that will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature.” This indeed is “boots on the ground” with a vengeance; it demands more than a bootless response. 

A convert to Judaism, David Brion Davis — the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently received an award from Obama for a lifetime devoted to the study of slavery and abolition — offers a cautionary note about history-and-progress that’s partly informed by his understanding of the Jewish experience. In “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation” (2014), the concluding volume of his great trilogy, Davis warns that history does not necessarily move in a linear direction. It often has moved — and may still move — in cycles with regressive downturns or backward movements, wiping out the periods of advance. Davis’ caution is a counterpoint to the optimism of Steven Pinker’s best-selling “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), which is very much in the tradition of Jewish modernity and forward-looking modern science. 

Modern-day slavery — despite its global reach — is an ideological aberration, really at home only in places such as oppressed Burmese villages, Nepalese carpet mills and North Korean slave-labor camps. In contrast, liberal capitalist societies, warts and all, are founded on free labor. About this, Karl Marx agreed with Adam Smith. 

ISIS’ revival of slavery is a real embarrassment because it raises a fundamental question of how a movement that has conquered large junks of Iraq and Syria can brazenly justify its crimes against humanity in the name of Islam and Shariah law. 

Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962. Even Al Qaeda has never called for its revival; this is probably one reason that ISIS does champion slavery, in order to differentiate itself from its parent organization. Polls indicate minimal support for ISIS throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Yet there are places — such as Nigeria, where Boko Haram apparently has just agreed to accept political ransom for 200 kidnapped Christian girls — that an Islamic rationale for slavery’s renewal strikes a responsive chord. 

We can paper over this truth for politically correct reasons, but draconian interpretations of Shariah law, prescribing the death penalty for such offenses as apostasy and homosexuality, remain popular in much of the Arab and Muslim world. In Saudi Arabia, slavery is technically illegal. Yet in 2003, Sheik Saleh Al-Fawzan issued a fatwa declaring: “Slavery is a part of Islam. It is a part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” He strongly objected to Muslim scholars who denied slavery as an Islamic practice, saying: “They are ignorant, not scholars … They are merely writers. Whoever says such things is an infidel.” As of last year, Al-Fawzan was a member of the Council of Senior Scholars  — Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body — and  the imam of Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh. What probably was purely theory — or hard-line Wahhabi theology — for Al-Fawzan, ISIS has now put into practice. The result may be the beginnings of an internal struggle for the soul of Islam of a kind of Christianity experienced during the Reformation and Enlightenment, and Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple almost 2,000 years ago. Islam has to accept as irreversible the moral foundations of the modern world, just as have Christianity and Judaism. 

Is there anything — in either theory or practice — among Christians or Jews in this day and age to compare to ISIS’ revival of slavery? There is this much: The tiny following of Rousas John Rushdoony’s “Bible commonwealth” perhaps still dreams of a day when the breakup of the U.S. may allow them to revive their version of “Old Testament slavery” in some Rocky Mountain redoubt of “Christian Reconstructionism.” 

Rushdoony died in 2001, dreaming of a reactionary apocalypse. Short of that happening, ISIS — and its overt or covert fans — will continue to monopolize the field among religious true believers trying to reverse history and human progress by seriously reviving slavery. 

Let’s not just hope — but act — to support those who struggle to ensure that Islam has a better future alongside the other great religions than a restored age of bigotry and bondage, and that ISIS is headed for the dustbin of history.


A consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, historian Harold Brackman is co-author with Ephraim Isaac of “From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans” (Africa World Press, forthcoming)

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