The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

freedom

The concept of freedom (ḥurriyya) was well-known to Islamic thought in all periods as the opposite of slavery. Although in premodern times there was no school of thought calling for the abolition of slavery, it was universally recognized that being a slave was an undesirable condition and being free a desirable one; at the same time, to manumit a slave was an act of virtue. This valuation colors some of the secondary uses of the contrast between freedom and slavery discussed in the following paragraphs.

As in other societies familiar with the institution of slavery, there was a tendency to use the relationship between master and slave as a metaphor for unequal relationships. Thus a saying ascribed to a daughter of the first caliph, Asma’ bt. Abi Bakr (d. 692), as well as to ‘Umar b. al-Khattab, ‘A’isha bt. Abi Bakr, and the Prophet, equates marriage with slavery; likewise, humans are thought of as slaves—or servants—of God in the sense that they are owned by Him. A well-attested strain in Sufi thought contrasts enslavement to the things of this world with the freedom that results from emancipating oneself from them.

In the political domain, premodern Islamic texts occasionally invoke the relationship between master and slave as a metaphor for oppression. Thus the Spanish Muslim Ibn Hafsun (d. 918), the leader of a rebellion against Umayyad rule supported mainly by Muslims of native Spanish descent, told his followers that the Arabs had enslaved them and that his wish was to deliver them from their slavery (‘ubūdiyya). An earlier example is a speech attributed to Abu Hamza al-Mukhtar b. ‘Awf, a Khariji rebel against the Umayyads in the later 740s. He says that Mu‘awiya, followed by the Marwanid rulers, “made the servants of God slaves,” and he ascribes to the Umayyads in general the sentiment that “the people are our slaves.” A story set on the eve of the Battle of Qadisiyya, around 636, takes us closer to the time of the Prophet: two of the envoys sent by the Muslim commander to negotiate with the Persian general Rustam tell him that the Muslims have come to Iraq to deliver those who so wish from being slaves of men to being servants of God. This wording echoes a letter said to have been sent by the Prophet to the people of Najran.

Two points need to be made about such attestations. The first is that they employ only one side of the metaphor: while the notion of political slavery as an undesirable condition is explicit, any notion of political freedom as its contrary remains implicit. The second is that this notion of political slavery is not taken up in the Islamic tradition of systematic political thought. Thus antidespotic and antipatrimonial values often expressed in terms of political freedom in the European tradition are articulated in other ways in the premodern Islamic tradition.

Since the late 18th century, the European idea of political freedom has spread widely in the Islamic world. One of the earliest responses to the idea was that of the Egyptian chronicler Jabarti (d. 1824–25) in his Ta’rikh Muddat al-Faransis bi-Misr (The history of the French presence in Egypt), in a critical commentary on the proclamation issued by Napoleon on his invasion of Egypt in 1798. The way in which Jabarti explains the term suggests that he misunderstood it (whereas the egalitarianism of the French seems to have been immediately intelligible to him). Later authors had no trouble understanding the concept and saw it as central to European success; thus the Tunisian statesman Khayr al-Din Pasha (d. 1890) distinguished “personal freedom” from “political freedom” and described freedom as “the basis of the great development of knowledge and civilization in the European kingdoms.” The idea of political freedom has thus become part of the standard vocabulary of political discussion in the Islamic world. In rendering the concept into Arabic, the metaphor at the root of the European concept was preserved: the word employed (ḥurriyya) is the same word that in premodern times denoted freedom as opposed to slavery (this contrasts with Chinese, where the term used to translate “freedom” originally meant “doing as one pleases,” with much less favorable connotations).

Despite the fact that it lacks an explicit precedent in the Islamic tradition, the idea of political freedom has also found favor among Islamists. Thus Mawdudi (d. 1979) emphasized the complete freedom people enjoyed in expressing their opinions under the early caliphs. More generally, he saw the message of the Qur’an as having set people free of “the bonds of slavery” and given them “a real charter of liberty and freedom.” Likewise Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), who was entranced by the message delivered by the Muslim envoys to Rustam, frequently used a language of liberation (taḥrīr) in his presentation of one of his favorite themes: the elimination of the domination of men over men. This is not, of course, to say that Islamists have espoused the idea of political freedom in the spirit of European liberals; while taking a positive view of freedom as such, they often criticize the excessive freedom they see as prevalent in the West.