“What Is Islamic About Slavery in Muslim Societies?” Cooper, Concubinage and Contemporary Legacies of ‘Islamic Slavery’ in North, West and East Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“What is Islamic about slavery in an Islamic society in Africa?”, historian Frederick Cooper asked in 1981. He explored the answer in terms of how Islam acted as a hegemonic ideology in nineteenth-century East Africa, drawing both masters and slaves into its legal and cultural world view. Almost forty years later, McDougall argues that Cooper’s question is still central; we have not yet fully understood the role gender played in this process. She asks: “How did the experience of being female, rather than male, shape the reality of Muslim masters’ and slaves’ lives?” Cooper had also reminded us that slavery was an institution shaped by a dynamic between owners and owned. Since, research in a variety of Muslim societies has revealed other networks of relationships between slaves and slaves, and slaves and freed slaves, for example, that are also ‘gendered’ in essence but almost invisible if viewed only through frameworks focused on dichotomies of power.McDougall’s exploration of these realities and relationships is based on oral histories of female masters, slaves and concubines from the author’s fieldwork in Morocco and Mauritania, alongside published accounts by M.G. Smith (Northern Nigeria) and Margaret Strobel (East Africa). Her focus on the household highlights the role of mistresses in managing the labour and lives of their slaves, often including intra-slave/freed slaves’ marriages, habitation, birth and other rituals, while always necessitating responsibility for ensuring early Islamic education and morality. The controversial notion of ‘constructed kin’ is invoked in this context, not only between mistresses and slaves but between slaves and freed slaves themselves. The focus on the concubine argues that the elusive element of what makes Islamic slavery Islamic may be in large part located in this core female-slave legal status—“the most detailed area of social life in Islamic texts” (Cooper). The stories reveal differences in how individual masters and mistresses treated concubines and their legitimate offspring, as well as between ‘customary practices’ that inserted themselves locally into religion. But most importantly, they illuminate a widely shared understanding that the concubine articulated a crucial intersection between Islam, slavery and society that has left a living legacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".