| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

William Gervase Clarence-Smith. Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xxvi, 293. $29.95.
In this bold and pioneering study, William Gervase Clarence-Smith surveys the history of slavery in the vast Muslim world from the time of the Prophet to the twenty-first century. Readers may become somewhat confused in the first part of the book as they are bombarded with names and facts and plunge from the Philippines to Morocco, Turkistan, West Africa, and India within a few pages. But the book gains continuity and coherence as one moves on, in part because of the focus on Islamic responses to Western antislavery values.	1
The reader soon realizes that slavery in Muslim lands not only preceded and fed into slavery in the New World but persisted in major ways for nearly a century after 1888, when Brazil outlawed the last remnant of the institution in the Americas. Further, for over thirteen centuries the Christian world has been bordered and penetrated by an often-expanding Muslim universe, so that even in Brazil one major slave insurrection was led by Muslims. In other words, even apart from its inherent significance, this long-neglected subject is of crucial importance for a non-parochial understanding of slavery in Europe and the Americas.	2
One central point on which I side with the historians Clarence-Smith criticizes, such as John Hunwick, Suzanne Miers, and Paul Lovejoy, pertains to an incipient antislavery mentality or trend within Islamic history. Clarence-Smith quotes these and other distinguished scholars who deny such a tradition. While I have long argued that human slavery has always generated tensions and contradictions, I have also held that even Christianity harbored no such incipient abolitionism until the seventeenth-century English civil wars generated a new radicalism that eventually combined in complex ways with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and evangelical revivals.	. . .

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