from Part IV - Social and Religious Histories of Slavery on the Borders of the Empire and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2022
The issues of slavery in classical Islamic law and thought as well as the social reality of slaves and ex-slaves (clients) in the medieval Near East have been gaining increased attention in recent decades. Much remains to be done, however. For instance, I am not aware of any specific study (book or article) focusing on slavery and slaves in the Quran or Quranic environment. I will begin this chapter by briefly discussing the Quranic passages that have a bearing on slavery in the late antique Arabian context before moving on to deal in detail with one specific verse, Quran 52:24, which seems to suggest that, in fact, there might be slaves in the afterlife serving the believers. The crux of the matter is the interpretation of the expression ghilmān lahum, which could be understood as ‘slave boys belonging to them’, ‘young servants of theirs’, or simply ‘children of theirs’.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.