Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies. Perspectives from Legal and Intellectual History

In this speech I introduced a panel in which we presented the first results of TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies. Three Concepts from Islamic Legal Sources, a research project based at the Institute for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies at the University of Bern and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In this panel, we start from the assumption that a simple slavery/freedom binary does not take into account how different forms of slavery functioned in different historical and social contexts. To do this, we focus on three different concepts of slavery and dependency in the Islamic world, namely the umm al-walad (a female slave who has given birth to her master's child), the kitāba (a contract between a master/mistress and a slave, according to which the slave is obliged to pay a certain sum of money during a certain period in exchange for freedom), and the kafāla (originally a legal guarantee in commercial law, which in the 20th century became an instrument either for the guardianship of children, especially in the Maghreb, or for the control of labour migration in the Gulf, Lebanon and Jordan)