Framings of Enslavement in Islamic Law: The kitāba as Case Study

Slavery, which is often understood as the antonym of freedom, can without doubt be considered a societal institution of crucial relevance for many societies since centuries and even millennia. Scrutinising this assumption of a clear-cut binary between slavery and freedom in Islamic law in the pre-modern era lies at the core of this paper, which introduces the participants of the MCAS Early Career Workshop (Hamburg, 2 December 2021) to a more nuanced picture of forms and legal framings of enslavement in Islamicate societies. To do so, I firstly map out the main changes the institution of slavery underwent after the establishment of the Islamic realm in the 1st/7th century. Secondly, I give a brief overview on different manifestations and legal framings of slavery prevalent in pre-modern Islamicate societies. This is followed by a more in-depth presentation of the kitāba as case study, the term referring to a contractual agreement between an enslaved person and his or her owner, which regulates the self-purchase of the enslaved person through paying a fixed sum to the owner in instalments. In the last part of this paper, I show that a more balanced perception of different forms of slavery building on intersectionality has immense potential to not only overcome an assumed binary between freedom and slavery. Moreover, it can foster new perspectives within the field of Slavery Studies, for example when it comes to looking at factors such as the slave’s labour, which are up to this day widely neglected