Volume 37, Number 15 · October 11, 1990
Slaves in Islam
By David Brion Davis
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry
by Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 184 pp., $24.95
In 1855, five years before South Carolina defied all United States authority and seceded from the federal union, fearing that Lincoln's election would inevitably imperil the South's 'peculiar institution,' the Ottoman Empire ordered the governors of its far-flung districts to ban the commerce in slaves. For rebellious Arabs in the Hijaz, the province in western Arabia that contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, this was exactly the kind of anti-Islamic, Western-influenced measure they had been waiting for as a cause for throwing off Turkish rule. Assured by the ruler of Mecca that Ottoman power could never survive the Crimean War, which was then raging far to the north, Shaykh Jamal issued a legal ruling, Bernard Lewis informs us,
Review, 4810 words
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