Dr. Jonathan AC Brown - Moral Progress and the Problem of Slavery - Zealots at the Gate | Episode 14

0:00 foreign welcome to zealots of the game a podcast of comment magazine I'm Matthew caming I'm Shadi Hamid together we research politics religion and the future of democracy at Fuller seminaries Mao Institute of faith and public life we are writing a book together this podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference thanks so much for joining us [Music] yes welcome friends and uh do make sure you subscribe wherever you listen please leave us a review five stars um we love all that feel free to join the conversation and ask questions by using our hashtag on Twitter the hashtag

0:46 is zealotspod you can also feel free to email us um you can you can find us uh at zealots comet.org and you can expect a good exchange so yeah why don't we get started by way of introduction you know shaddy and I are our good friends uh that said perhaps we shouldn't be you know I'm a I'm a Christian Shady's a Muslim I research and teach theology while Shady researches and teaches in the area of political science and international relations so we come from pretty different perspectives but this is our space to work those things out and discuss politics religion democracy and how we live together with deep difference and Shady today we've got a

1:33 good uh we've got a guest and a good spicy topic to explore so why don't you introduce Our Guest yeah thanks a lot Matt so we have a treat today for all of you our guest is Jonathan Brown who is a professor at Georgetown you see him waving there he is you know and I'm not just saying this because he's a friend I do think he is one of the most important and influential Scholars of Islam in Islamic history around today um he is a Muslim convert he's the author of a book which is an excellent primer on Islamic law and Islamic tradition it's called misquoting Muhammad we'll include a link to that in

2:18 the show notes highly recommended and his most recent book has a provocative title of Islam and slavery will also include a link to that in the show notes the topic we're going to be talking about today I'm excited about it but I'm also slightly apprehensive because I don't like thinking about certain things in the Islamic tradition sometimes it's better not to know and to not overthink things but one of one of Jonathan's big contributions is pushing us to contend with maybe uncomfortable things in the Islamic tradition one of those is slavery Islam or at least the Quran and and the

3:03 prophet Muhammad did not expressly forbid or prohibit slavery slavery is there in Islamic history and as we'll find out it's also in Christian history and Jewish history we'll get to all that but maybe just to share more of a personal perspective on this I think the bigger set of questions here is how do we understand or reinterpret the past in light of what we know now are we morally Superior today than the prophet Muhammad was or even Jesus Christ was because Jesus Christ did not um forbid slavery either so we have a bit of a conundrum here and what do we do about that how do we CR

3:50 how do we reconcile our sense of morality that we hold to so strongly today versus what was acceptable and what was customary centuries ago 14 centuries ago and and so forth and I'll just quote one thing that Jonathan says in his book on Islam and slavery which I think gets at this conundrum in a really profound way he says if slavery is a manifest in Universal evil Why did no one seem to realize this until relatively recently question mark it's a good question he also says I believe slavery is wrong what interests me is explaining how

4:35 almost all moral authorities in human history thought it was right there's a lot of implications here but maybe that's a good place to start um because let's imagine if we went back in time and we did talk to Prophet Muhammad or Jesus Christ um would we really get like all worked up and say hey profit um hey Divine figure you were wrong and we are morally Superior like just maybe try to imagine that as a kind of like um hypothetical scenario and that I think gets across the level the kind of puzzle so so Jonathan with that over to you how how would you respond to some of these earlier points as you know

5:22 many of our listeners will be believing Christians also um believing Muslims people who are religiously oriented and they may avoid looking at the past for precisely these reasons uh well yeah thanks guys for inviting me um uh shot I always like talking about this kind of stuff because you know you're not afraid to talk about these things I think that um there's two points to keep in mind one is that the question we're asking is a much bigger question than about slavery right slavery is the thing that forces us to ask the question but the question is really much bigger um which is how do we think about

6:08 are the The Authority that the past has over us if we're going to hold certain moral convictions today uh and it's a in in some ways like and this is not a Muslim problem right this is not a Christian problem this is a this is not an American problem this is basically an everybody problem and um and actually for a lot of communities and traditions it was actually slavery that forced this as well right um it's not a it's the the issue the moral problem of slavery isn't just something that let's say Christians or Muslims or Jews have had to wrestle with it's actually strongly influenced how people come to view their

6:54 scripture right so it's our our more you know imagine you go into a cocktail party today and you're like oh yeah I think slavery's fine I mean imagine what would happen you know imagine the reaction uh the the moral evil the profound trans-historical moral evil of slavery is a fixed point in our discourse it's it's a it's maybe like one of the few things that you can't question right so Holocaust is bad slavery is bad like that's that's you know maybe two things that just no one can disagree on and remain kind of a person in good standing in our society and in the kind of global Western Society more broadly um on the other hand there's no I I don't know of any

7:41 religious or philosophical tradition that prior to let's be let's be generous let's say 1700 but really probably more 1800 but let's say 1700 okay prior to the year 1700 of our Common Era was not totally comfortable with slavery didn't endorse it or defend it or consider it natural or tolerate it right so all of like the human Heritage prior to 1700 is essentially morally unacceptable according to our standards today and um if this is a you know it's sort of um mind-boggling that people don't have

8:28 to confront this all the time um and they tend to get very upset when they are confronted with it and a great place you can see this all you know constantly being performed in our society with these debates over statutes you know um I don't know if you want to play the the the clip from from Fox News but I'll just give an introduction about why I wanted to mention this is because when when I said I wrote this book on Islam and slavery in I think I started in uh 20s the very end of 2016. so basically after Trump had been elected right around the time of his inauguration inauguration is that correct yeah I was

9:15 going to say coronation inauguration so like the um because Isis the Isis phenomenon happened and this had really caused a lot of Muslims big problems because Isis had been taking these you know sex slaves and reintroducing slavery and saying hey like slavery is in the Quran and the president of the Prophet Muhammad and slavery is in the Sharia so why are you guys all upset like what and Muslims didn't really have an answer for this you know and um and this was constantly a newspaper this was causing a lot of Muslim serious uh you know crisis in their faith and uh so I wanted to just kind of Write a response to this or try and answer these questions myself and when I did so like I found that when I tried to talk about this

10:02 you know everybody would get upset at me like it was so because and they'd say people would say things like academics Scholars would say things like uh the Quran prohibited slavery and I'd be like no no it didn't it didn't occur I mean look I understand you want to you you want to make Muslims look good you're not an islamophobe you know you're trying to push back against Trump and the Muslim ban all this I understand you have a good good intentions but like you can't say something that's not true you know you can't say that the Quran prohibited slavery because it didn't right um and uh people would say things like you know slavery is I remember this one Muslim guy was debating with me and he was like you need to say that slavery is wrong throughout history

10:48 and I said I was like look I don't know what you what is the case is either the prophet because the Quran allows slavery the prophet had slaves right um at least at some time in his life and so either that's wrong or you're telling me that the Quran of the Prophet Muhammad did something that you consider to be morally evil in which case you're not Muslim anymore right that like the cause you to exit Islam and even if it weren't like an official uh you know statement that makes you not Muslim why would any of us take like religious advice from somebody who thinks who thought slavery was okay like why I mean if somebody came today and was like Hey

11:34 I want to be president by the way I think slavery is fine would that person like get very far in political life I mean or public moral life right so um this I was like this is I was like how can you ask me to do something that you know is going to either result in me in sort of a absurd statement either I'm going to deny that history or I'm going to deny my own religion and I mean how can we have this discussion and when I when I confronted the guy about this he said well I I won't discuss this in public only in private I was like why are you asking me to make this public declaration you know um shady I don't want to interrupt you I just want to finish by saying like you know so when I was I remember I was trying to write the book this book on

12:21 Islam and slavery I decided to write and I was I remember I was in turkey that summer it was the summer of 2017 and there was the Charlottesville protests and uh it was about the uh the statute of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville the University of Virginia he was the founder of University of Virginia and you know he's of course the guy who wrote We believe all men are created equal et cetera Etc with certain inalienable rights to free to life liberty Pursuit of Happiness and yet here's a guy who owns slaves who had children with a slave female slave of his Etc and um so did you know all these other a significant number of the founding fathers and uh and then I remember watching

13:06 um Donald Trump speak about this and he he kind of summarized this in a way that only he just like a kind of with succinctness only he could he says George Washington had slaves are going to take down statute of George Washington and then you just think about the sort of what it would require for the American like political the American polity to disassociate itself from George Washington just the sheer like toponymical challenge of change names of everything you know and yet that's the logical conclusion like if you think slavery isn't gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time somebody who is conflicted in that is a is complicit with evil and they're not a qualified moral uh role model right they're not qualified to give us leadership or advice or anything I like

13:52 what you said and and I want to bring us back to that that statement which I think is so important I'd love to key in on is this is a universal human problem which is that we every movement every political movement every religious movement has Heroes and those Heroes have flaws and how do we wrestle with those historical moments and the clip from Tucker Carlson which I'd love to to play real quick here kind of captures that uh you know in a in a Punchy way that only dear dear good American citizen Tucker Carlson can can capture so let's let's play that clip and then I want to dig into that because it's it's a question that haunts me as a Christian as well um you know how do we deal with these

14:39 um the sins of our past so let's let's play that clip more attention than it will likely get yesterday a mob tore down a Civil War soldiers Memorial in Durham North Carolina police stood idly by and liberals across the country applauded it which statues are next the president asked Today George Washington Thomas Jefferson that's not a joke Suddenly It's a serious question Thomas Jefferson indisputably was a great man he was the author of the Declaration of Independence founder of the University of Virginia and maybe most importantly the greatest thinker in American political history all of us live in his shadow unfortunately however Jefferson was also a slave holder that's real it's a moral taint we ought to remember it but the Fanatics on the left it means

15:25 that Jefferson must be purged from public memory forever the demands are already coming that we do that in 2015 students at the University of Missouri demanded the removal of a Jefferson statue two years ago on CNN anchor Ashley Banfield suggested the Jefferson Memorial in Washington might have to go needless to say there is literally no limit when you start thinking like this last year hundreds of activists in New York demanded the statue of Theodore Roosevelt of the American Natural History Museum be dismantled they argued that Roosevelt was a racist that's the standard nobody is safe watch out Abraham Lincoln you're next now to be clear as if it's necessary slavery is evil if you believe in the

16:10 rights of the individual it's actually hard to think of anything worse than slavery but let's be honest up until 150 years ago when a group of Brave Americans fought and died to finally put an end to it slavery was the rule rather than the exception around the world and had been for thousands of years sadly Plato owned slaves so did Muhammad peace be upon Him many African tribes held slaves and sold them the Aztecs did too before he liberated Latin America Simon Bolivar owned slaves slave holding was so common among the North American Indians that the Cherokee brought their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears and it wasn't something they learned from the European settlers Indians were holding and trading slaves when Christopher Columbus arrived and by the way he owned slaves too now none of this is a defense of the

16:57 atrocity of human bondage it is an atrocity the point however is that if we're going to judge the past by the standards of the present if we're going to reduce a person's life to the single worst thing he ever participated in we had better be prepared for the consequences of that and here's why 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence held slaves James Madison the father of the Constitution had a plantation full of slaves George Mason the father of the Bill of Rights also owned slaves unfortunately but does that make what they wrote illegitimate if these men were simply racist villains and that's all they were then the society they created is as evil as they were there's no reason to respect its Traditions or uphold its laws so I think the

17:43 what's so he I think you have the kind of slavery conundrum um framed here and by the way it's good because in a Muslim session like a meeting you should have someone say call the God's peace and blessings down upon the prophet Muhammad and so Tucker did that for us so that's good our our medalists are is is acceptable and as a Muslim learning session I was surprised by that that I chuckled a bit and I assume he was being ironic but I wasn't entirely sure who knows he's he maybe he's you know he's surprising sometimes what's fascinating is actually he he doesn't really address the question he does a bait and switch because what he says I can't remember if he was in that I'm fairly sure it's in that segment what he

18:29 says is he says slavery is evil he says in fact if you believe in individual rights there's not much worse than slavery okay so but then he says slavery is a moral taint so it you of the one hand you have a statement says it's an evil basically throughout space and time there's not much worse than it on the other hand when it's associated with Thomas Jefferson or George Washington it's a taint it's not you know it's sort of takes the luster off a little bit right that that is a bait and switch you can't have both these things right so imagine if you say something is evil and someone is complicit in it like imagine you know cannibalism or something or human sacrifice or child sacrifice or something you don't you don't you wouldn't have somebody do child

19:15 sacrifice and then be like but they're a great man they're a great person right so there's there's an actually he does not have a way of dealing with this either you say this is evil throughout space and time and we're gonna act on that we're gonna save someone who's complicit in this or who defends it is disqualified morally or we're gonna say um that it's actually not a disqualifying evil throughout space it's essentially we're gonna have to reduce the sort of level of evil that we're giving it in in a in a kind of real trans-historical sense similarly you know something Matthew you said earlier um you said you know we have Heroes but they have flaws you know yeah um you know a flaw is

20:01 you know um they make a bad decision um they were you know maybe they're a great president but they're not the best father or something like that you know uh being okay with slavery does not qualify as a flaw in our in our moral sentiments today I guess what you're saying is it's not a mistake it's not a whoopsie to be uh to be a slaveholder yeah it's a it's a real it's a serious problem right and uh then the it's all it's interesting because another person who's tried to deal with this a kind of right-leaning person recently is Bill Maher on his show um when he talks about I guess some historian wrote a op-ed and about presentism and one thing I like about

20:46 Bill Maher is that although he's incredibly islamophobic and hates religion I don't agree with him on that is that he's he really does kind of intellectually engage with things in a way that very few other other people do and so he he talks about this idea of presentism and the idea that we're kind of holding the paths to the standards of the present and but his way of dealing with that is he sees it as absurd because it's like it's like us looking back at our childhood and kind of blaming ourselves or something we did when we were 10 or when we were 15 or something like that you know we gotta you know look everybody makes mistakes we can't hate ourselves for our past selves for what we did the problem is that's not how we view our past right if you're a Christian right or if you're a Muslim or if you're an American or

21:33 whatever and in theory like all these different Traditions who view their past either in terms of scripture or some kind of Storehouse of wisdom as having really strong authority over our present your past is not infancy your past is not childhood your past is in fact the best time we're living in a degenerate era compared to the time of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad or the time when Jesus was in the world right I mean this is we're we're living in like a shadow of of a Great era and uh we look back to that past to instruct us we don't see it as something that we can forgive ourselves for yeah so a couple things I I wanna

22:19 touch on here there's a lot maybe the first thing is that in hearing this I feel like my own apologetic instincts are coming out and let me just give voice to them as an example of what probably many Muslims would say in response to this discussion they'd probably as I'm about to right now make a certain set of clarifications that The Profit wasn't necessary so in the Quran and you can talk more about this if you'd like uh Jonathan the Quran encourages the the freeing of slaves there are really incredible and overwhelming incentives for the manumission of slaves and some Scholars argue that you know through that kind of natural

23:06 progression and organic development you'll have less and less slaves over time so that the Quran and the prophets example kind of um it it implants an ethical premise that leads to the emancipation of slaves that's one interpretation and I think it's one that like a lot of Muslims will gravitate towards because it allows them to sort of resolve the conundrum I think there's also major differences between not forbidding slavery and actively supporting it so that's where it gets a little bit tricky because in many of these cases whether it's the prophet Muhammad Jesus

23:53 Christ the Apostle Paul um they wouldn't have enthusiastically supported or encouraged slavery to my knowledge and I should just mention a couple examples Just In fairness to all of our faiths so we can be somewhat ecumenical I did mention earlier that Jesus did not forbid um slavery um the apostles included slave owners and Paul instructed slaves in scripture and then in the New Testament to quote unquote be submissive to their masters and to obey them as you would Christ Saint Augustine offered various justifications for slavery tied to the concept of original sin for a significant period of time a

24:40 Catholic Church was a leading slave owner um Catholic theorists in the natural law tradition did spend many many centuries finding justifications for slavery so on and so forth so I just want to be clear that we do have these various shades of either not condemning but that's maybe not the same as enthusiastically supporting but still if you're seeing slavery as the Pinnacle of sin these distinctions presumably won't matter you have to condemn something if it is one of the greatest sins in human history um and that's where maybe it's not about flaws because you know for example we we as Muslims don't uh believe the prophet is capable of major error or sin on

25:28 theological matters he can have more in you know Scholars debate whether he can have like more minor flaws and and be capable of just kind of some more ordinary things like that but when it comes to major sins we as Muslims don't believe that the prophet is capable of committing major sins and presumably Christians would say something similar about the apostles I just wanted to put that out there and feel free uh Jonathan to react to any of that again like I I my way of resolving I call it the slavery conundrum right so um the slavery conundrum is a condom a conundrum we create for ourselves and let's say kind of modern Global Western Society right where you basically have three axioms

26:15 that cannot be individually need none of which can be rejected but all of which cannot be held together at the same time right it's impossible so the first is slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil across space and time um slavery was wrong two thousand years ago slavery was wrong in Arabia slavery was wrong in South America it's anything called slavery is is evil throughout space and time doesn't matter two uh all slavery slavery right there's no like good slavery yeah it's not that bad it was okay it was more like you know being a servant there's no I mean again just imagine going into a cocktail party and someone's talking about slavery and you're like yeah but it wasn't that bad you know his owner was really nice guy and you know he treated him very well

27:01 and stuff I mean just imagine the kind of what would happen in that situation the third so the second Axiom is all slavery is slavery the third is that our pasts our past has some kind of moral or religious authority over us or legal authority over us right we we are beholden to our past and so we want to be beholden to our past we want to look to it uh as an authority and you can't have these three things either you say that free and you'll see like uh you know biblical commentary even today we'll say that um you know slavery in the Old Testament it was not like American you know Plantation

27:47 slavery it was more like servants and stuff like that it wasn't that severe so in that case they're getting out of it by saying not not all slavery is slavery right so you're violating the second the second Axiom um the uh you could say well um back then it was it was okay that would be violating the first Axiom or you could say take down all the statues we don't care yeah get rid of them all we should not be honoring slave owners and get rid of the third Axiom you know which is to say and this is by the way basically what William Lloyd Garrison a famous you know 19th century uh American abolitionist was most active in the 1830s and he had a magazine a journal called The Liberator he said about the Bible he says if it's between slavery and the Bible the Bible

28:34 has to go right but it's interesting that in the Liberator in one issue he's talking about George Washington having slaves and he says well yeah but you know we we don't really think he meant it he didn't really believe in this like so he he actually has an Orthodoxy right he might be religiously willing to disassociate himself with his tradition but he politically can't you know he can't go against the kind of patron saint or whatever the founder of our polity uh which is interesting and by the way in case you have any ideas about George Washington there's a book that came out a few years ago called never caught about the Washingtons had a female slave

29:20 who ran away when they were in Philadelphia and they spent the rest of their lives hunting her down they were not like oh it's okay you know we don't really like slavery anyway so it's good God bless her they it's called never caught about a slave named Ona judge I recommend reading it huh so I think that we have these axioms that we're committed to and very few of us are willing to make the sacrifice to actually make uh make them coherent um and I'm not saying that like I don't I mean I'm I'm Muslim I I cannot I refuse to say that what my Revelation and what my Prophet allowed is evil throughout space and time I I won't say that it would make me not Muslim so

30:06 uh but uh but uh you know other people are not as comfortable with this so Jonathan we want to encourage people to to read the book itself but if you would give us a little bit of preview of how you yourself wrestle with this conundrum and how how you how you how do you emerge out and uh make sense of all this yeah so what's the resolution basically yeah give it to us I feel like we just skipped the whole podcast and went to like the the resolution but what no big deal I think Christians have their own ways of wrestling with these kinds of things but I'm genuinely curious I mean it's really interesting because you can see um Muslims in the 20th and 21st centuries essentially doing the same thing to Christians in the 19th and

30:52 early 20th century were doing like you can it's like they're following the same script and it's not it that's not because they're copycats or it's like this is this is structurally what you have to do if you're presented with a revealed source that you look to as guidance from God and that is clashing with something that you are contending in the present isn't evil like that is it's uh the the process is is gonna be the same right so what's really interesting is to look at the debates that happen in the U.S uh between like founding fathers or so for example there's one of the founding fathers Benjamin Rush is is it was a committed abolitionist so it's very anti-slavery and he has

31:38 um you know it's a signatory one of the Declaration of Independence Etc and he's uh has this exchange of letters with this um southern slave owner and the slave owner is like um look the the Bible allows slavery and Benjamin Rush says well okay yeah it's in the Old Testament but Jesus came to sort of he was this like force of Liberation and wants us to and like sets us on the trajectory to end this like yeah he didn't say it's wrong um because if he had it would have been too disruptive and to uh cause you know too much you know uh Strife or something and the slave owners like Okay

32:25 um you're telling me that like the Son of God comes to earth right Jesus the guy who's like never makes any makes any waves right and he didn't just have he didn't just say like hey slavery's wrong like maybe you can't get rid of it right now but it's it's morally evil right um so you're basically saying the Son of God on Earth doesn't have the courage of his convictions to say this thing is wrong there's no answer to that similarly you can engage in what um Shady suggesting which again is a a Christian at response and a Muslim response which is essentially what's called trajectory hermeneutics which is to say that yeah let's say the Quran or the Bible doesn't say slavery's evil get rid of it

33:11 but it Crea it puts us on a trajectory towards that right it kind of sets up a system of values or priorities that eventually will allow us to realize that when it's feasible the problem with that is it allows us to make sense of moral progress what it doesn't do is explain how God could ever have allowed something that's evil right so the problem isn't us talking about how it's good not to have slaves or how we should end slavery like that's that's a theological discussion that and it's hermeneutic discussion that Muslims and Christians have been able to have amongst themselves very productively right uh which can be a separate topic but that's not the issue the issue is

33:58 if slavery is an evil across space and time why did God allow it even in the Old Testament right it's not good enough to say Jesus came and fulfilled the law and was a new law that replaced the law of the Old Testament et cetera et cetera if if you believe the Old Testament is the word of God or revealed wisdom how did God ever allow that if it was an evil across base in time and there's no answer to that except either to say it was okay back then or it wasn't as as bad as the slavery that you think is really bad in America or something that a lot of Christians conclusion a lot of Christians came to the Old Testament is not the actual word of God right it's not actually the Timeless wisdom and revealed

34:43 teachings of God to mankind it's something that was revealed to specific people at a specific time in their own words with their own worldview uh and is not actually binding on people uh in other times and places so with those options which answer would you so how yeah I mean in some sense this is this is the challenge I mean I have a sense of where you where you land on this but maybe just spell it out a little bit more of yeah so I can't tell I can't tell if Matthew is like about to combust or is like I'm mellow about this she's like I don't know let's see where this guy's let's see where this guy's going I don't know I mean so I don't want to foreclose on Christian responses yeah I'm I'm giving my take on them and

35:30 then um and by the way the reason I'm even bringing them up is because it's actually a common script right it's a common their approach is shared between Muslim and Christians there might be like a little tweaking here and there but I think they're fairly similar so you know a fun fact on on this point for people one of the great um Muslim theologians of the 20th century someone who I've written about in my work Rasheed Rita actually Drew very directly from Western arguments where he basically said that the Quran couldn't have expressly forbid slavery because it doing that would potentially lead to civil strife and Chaos because slavery was so

36:17 interwoven in the fabric of these pre-modern societies and he used the American Civil War as an illustration that even in the West trying to prematurely abolish slavery can lead to civil Strife on a massive scale which is just absolutely fascinating to me yeah I it's interesting because I mean I I don't want to say like if the Civil War was a good thing or bad thing I'm not going to get into that but it is interesting though I I've read that with the money that was spent on this like the Northern war effort they could have literally like bought all like essentially compensated the entire southern economy for its slave economy um which is interesting so earlier for

37:02 those who are just listening and and not watching on on YouTube uh I was sending a variety of non-verbal cues that I was getting uncomfortable or had something to say and Jonathan very very thoughtfully uh saw that so yeah I I do have a number of smaller quibbles with uh what each of you have said about Christianity and slavery and I don't want to get lost in the quibbles about this or that but more sort of this broader um this broader discussion about um guilt and and how we think about the the failures of of um people who are are very important to us and I guess to just interject on the Christianity side

37:50 um as a Christian my faith does not hang on whether or not Abraham was a good guy or David was a good guy or Peter or Paul were good guys my faith hangs on whether or not Jesus was a good guy and um so the the Bible itself is filled with stories about the failures of these people um Abraham lying and being a coward um in one story Peter once again being a coward and lying um scripture itself is filled with the moral failures of Our Heroes you know King David um committing adultery and murder you

38:36 know and we sing his songs it really does hang much more on the person of Jesus and so I it's what's interesting to me in this conversation is how there are so many similarities between Islam and Christianity wrestling with this issue but there's also some really important differences for example our understanding of scripture itself um that one that scripture comes directly it is the speech of God and the other that uh human beings many human beings wrote the Bible over centuries in very different contexts in in Exile and in um and in kingdoms and throughout the Roman

39:24 Empire so you have sort of this wild diversity in the Bible of writers who are themselves flawed and finite uh and that's a that's a different kind of holy text to wrestle with um that makes the conversation a little bit different I think um and so anyways just just my own little reflection on there are moments when I listen to the two of you talking where I completely identify with the moral wrestling that you're having with the legacy of Muhammad uh and then there are Parts where I just can't identify at all so for example the fact that Abraham had

40:11 slaves that doesn't bother me at all in in sort of the broader that doesn't create a moral crisis for me because my faith doesn't hang on him um being perfect and to just then just to make the larger thing of you know this discussion about the the the moral standing of George Washington um and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and these other figures what I'm thinking about in terms of our culture today is what is this longing for Our Heroes to be morally pure what is this longing that they have to

40:58 um or they will be canceled what's going on in our political culture that we we long for this level of Purity from these people that it is so scandalizing um that they had a different moral vision from us um it seems it seems that something different has happened over the last 20 years um that there is it it has a feeling of a sort of desire for a heightened level of moral purity um that you know for for me I I love David's Psalms you know those are very important poetry and prayer to me and I can enjoy

41:46 those things knowing that he did some abominable things but it seems that our American culture today can't abide that and I'm just wondering I'd love to hear your Reflections on what is it about our political culture today that we cannot we cannot abide uh yeah moral diversity or development today I think there are you're correct there are really important differences between Muslim approach and a Christian approach some of these questions for example in the Islamic tradition a pro prophets are morally uh upstanding right there so the story of David Bathsheba is not acceptable from from the point of view of the vast

42:34 majority of Muslim theologians right um uh on the other hand I would say that uh you say your faith doesn't hang on Abraham being a good guy okay but what about the law right so the law that's revealed to Moses is divine guidance I think even from a Christian perspective uh you could say it's superseded to Divine guidance right it's divine guidance that is later superseded by um with the coming of Christ but that law allows slavery and tells the the Israelites to take slaves and tells it you know it allows Israelites to have slave concubines etc etc right so I

43:20 would and again I'm not I really don't I really don't like trying to trigger crises of faith in other people so I'm not trying to do that but like um you know I don't I won't push this I won't just say that I'm a seminary Professor so I'm used to these kinds of dialogues this is you're not triggering me I mean I would say that uh by just so funny you know the other day my my kids watch that the don't tase me bro clip what happens having to go back and like tell them about the don't tase me bro so the um like I think that my contention and I can I'm not Christian so I'm not gonna push this right I would just say what I've noted is that I think that there are more weeds to wrestle with and get

44:07 out of on this than a lot of the Christian explanations suggest the the other thing I I think it's interesting you mentioned is this this notion of a a quest for Purity or a demand of Purity in our current age and I think that is certainly uh the case and I know uh Chad and I almost certainly on the same page in this I I hope I'm not like implicating him in this but I mean like you know when you're saying that a movie that came out like 10 years ago is does didn't held up hold up well like can't be watched now it you know maybe you're being a little puritanical about demands on the past on the other hand I would say that when we say when people say I don't want I will

44:55 not look up to someone who thought slavery was fine that's not like a you know being too demanding I mean that's a again it is a it is a fixed point of inquiry in our discourse today that slavery is a trans-historical gross intrinsic moral evil um so saying that I don't want to respect or venerate someone who engaged in that even if they did other things that were good uh that's not a I think I kinda of outlandish claim or outlandish demands but Jonathan no it seems that no one's really willing to take that premise to its logical conclusion because if they really believe that that you can't take moral advice from anyone who was complicit in slavery or didn't condemn

45:41 it even then you would have to basically remove the entire history of human existence before as you said Circa 1700 so you would lose every single philosophical and religious tradition so I would maybe just I would wonder if they're if they're holding to the if if they have the courage of their own convictions yeah so it's interesting you say that when when this happened like when I can't remember oh it was when the Charlottesville thing was happening like that year that moment like if you I have so many screenshots from that time because you just get like this incredible display of every possible point that can be made in this debate and there are some like there was this one guy who is

46:26 like a block into intellectual activists and he had this like kind of tweets or memes or something and it was like uh um racists and they're saying oh so we're going to get rid of the Statue of George Washington and then it's like black people respond yes and then the racists are like dot dot dot we don't know how to respond so there are some people and I think I mean think about this from like a kind of marxist March of History towards some kind of perfection chatty right uh there's no problem with getting rid of our past right our past is just a is just a a parade of failures that that we're we're marching towards a more perfect future in theory so we have no attachment to the Past

47:12 so there are people who from a variety of kind of social justice activists leftist perspectives and I'm not trying to sort of lump all that together and dismiss it I'm just trying to say convenience right I I think are actually quite willing to pay that uh price would do it happily to get rid of all the statues and all this Heritage so Jonathan in in the modern moral imagination uh moral progress is possible potentially even inevitable I'm curious as a Muslim um what are what are your thoughts or feelings in terms of moral history do you do you think moral progress is possible or is is happening or is inevitable so I mean this is a really uh I mean

47:59 this is the point I wanted to get into actually when we were talking earlier because when you say like kind of what is the solution to the slavery conundrum um you like what I would say is and again I say this if someone wants to go and get me in trouble I'm going to say I have a relate to my religious beliefs right I I refuse to I refuse to condemn my profit and my scripture and if somebody wants to say John Jonathan Brown is the bad person because of that then I guess you know I'm guilty as charged right like I'm not going to say that the Quran allows something evil on the prophet did something morally I will not say that okay so what I'm in terms of those three uh axioms I would

48:46 actually disagree with the first two I would say one slavery is not a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time and part of the reason you can say that is because not all slavery is slavery I don't think that all things that we call in history slavery are actually the same and that they deserve the same moral judgment I think that some of them are a lot less severe than others okay there could be certain things like the way that a field hand is treated in Georgia getting whipped and raped and all this stuff like that um yeah I'd say that is a gross intrinsic mole evil throughout space and time and I think that if that's done to anybody in history that's evil but I don't think that um all slavery throughout human history things that we call slavery today in the

49:32 past can be labeled with that moral judgment okay then here's the second problem right okay Professor Brown you say how do you explain my I'm a Muslim or I'm a Christian right and I feel in my gut this slavery is wrong like there's a lot of Muslim shadies probably met these people um you know they'll say things like if you tell me that the prophet had slaves or that that he allowed slavery I won't be Muslim anymore like they're like for them the the the moral certainty of the evil of slavery is fixed and and any other commitment they make has to fit with that right so that's the that's the

50:17 immovable point and any faith commitment or confession they make has to accept passive tailor to that right um so how do you explain if you're telling me slavery's not as gross in intrinsic evil throughout space and time explain to me how I feel such certainty that it is and that gets to the question of moral progress how how is it that um you us three right I'm in a bank I'm gonna guess that all three of us when we watch 12 Years a Slave or roots or Amistad when that guy's saying like give us us free all of us are probably our eyes were like pouring water okay I'm just gonna you know and guess we're we're not Heroes for this we're

51:03 just Americans and good moral standing who've been raised well in our society okay so if you're having that reaction how can you like that's not like how can you then go and say that this in the past was not evil like how can your moral conviction today is testimony to to the evil in the past to this the evil slavery of the past so my answer to this is uh just because something is felt to be in our gut to be a profound real moral evil doesn't make it that morally true throughout history that a lot of our moral certainties although we feel that they have to be true for everybody in history are some that's simply not the

51:49 case right so and this is an interesting I I bring this I I always tell my you know discuss with my students which is I'm gonna I would contend and I don't know if you guys disagree with me the two things that will turn your stomach not just not just you say this is bad not just to say I disapprove it's wrong but really make you sick slavery and pedophilia am I right that's fair I think okay if I say if I say hey guys you know a guy down the street was brutally murdered two weeks ago somebody took his body chopped it up and um you know spread it on the lawn be like oh yeah that's messed up but I didn't feel anything right I mean

52:34 murder's wrong but somebody if then you told me a guy on my street a 50 year old guy had sex with a six-year-old like I actually feel something in my stomach or you say like you know someone has a slave there's a slave chained up in his house like like but here's the thing all Societies in human history have considered murder wrong most Societies in human history the vast majority did not consider slavery wrong and would not consider a 50 year old guy having sex with like getting married to like let's say a six or seven year old this was actually totally fine me out okay even but it's true

53:19 Saint Augustine his fiance was 12. he was in his 30s right you know so the the point this was complete and that's not even a big deal the prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old and his critics people who literally sat around looking for things to criticize him for especially in his sex life didn't criticize him for that no one criticized him for that until the very late 19th century do you understand my point right yeah so it is interesting that the two things that make us morally sick to our stomachs are two things that were actually relatively uncontroversial until the very recent past Okay so

54:06 there's a lot there um so I I think that one thing that you're saying is that our deepest moral intuitions and convictions can be wrong just to kind of put it bluntly we can be wrong about the things that we feel most deeply and resolutely which has I think profound implications if it is in fact true okay I don't want to say they're wrong they're right in our time right so when I say uh I don't want my daughter to marry get married when she's nine like that's not I'm not wrong and saying that that's actually completely correct in our society because she has to go to school and she's probably immature and she wants to you know she has to go to med school and all these other things right or if I say like I don't think we

54:53 should have slaves in our time that's totally correct it's totally unnecessary right we don't it it's not it is not chance that humans started to come to a new conclusion about the immorality of slavery at the same time that they were had discovered that you could use fossil fuels to create steam to move stuff and you don't need animals and humans to move stuff anymore like that's not coincidence right even Aristotle says in his politics there will be slavery until looms like the things that we weave cloth until looms move themselves which actually is the case that's basically what happened right so it's these moral intuitions are not wrong now they're contingent they're historically contingent yes but they're the intensity

55:39 with which we feel them makes us as makes us just assume like it has to be the case that these are true for all human beings they're like biological reactions we have that all humans have to have and then we can't that's why we're disgusted by the fact that previous people didn't have them and it we're mystified because we don't understand how thinking sentient moral competent moral thinkers and spiritual reasoners could not have these reactions there's something wrong with them in the past yeah so I just two points I want to make and then I want to get Matt's thoughts on this um so I think one way of dealing with this

56:25 and you know various theologians have made this point probably the most prominent is called that if you see something in Scripture that CR that provokes this gut reaction this sense that we can't reconcile our moral convictions to scripture or reveal text that we can sort of we can sort of suspend judgment that we actually give up hope in finding a resolution and have faith that in the end presuming we believe in God God will give us clarity as to what was ultimately right and wrong and until that moment of final judgment we can issue I think what he calls a

57:11 faith-based objection which is to kind of acknowledge our discomfort but then suspect then say that it can't have a resolution so maybe that's one way of resolving and probably in some ways that's what I would lean towards a kind of more sophisticated version of shrugging one's shoulders I know that's not an available option for everyone the other point I want to make in and Matt this is more relevant to you but I think it brings us back to some of these bigger questions um you know with Christian scripture with the Christian tradition Traditions matter to different degrees and perhaps in the Christian context it's it's less Central than the discursive Islamic

57:56 tradition but still so if we're talking about you know let's say 1700 1700 years there is the New Testament there is the example of Christ there is his word made flesh and people who are committing themselves to that for many many centuries how do you I just would want to hear more from a Christian perspective how do you make sense to the fact that all of the great Christian thinkers who were faithful to Christ were not able to see this flaw which is and I know that your your faith only hangs on Christ but presumably people who follow Christ are doing so for what they consider to be legitimate reasons and they're not

58:43 coming to the same big definitive conclusions that you are and I'm just curious how you would how you would grapple with that and maybe related to that I mean why didn't Christ himself expressly condemn and forbid slavery because that is the question that was posed to Benjamin Russian I'm actually not sure what the answer to that could possibly be because unlike the prophet Muhammad if Christ is divine if he is God a Son of God and and has this kind of definitive sovereignty and Authority presumably there would be no obstacle to him proclaiming this in a clear way but he did not

59:29 yeah yeah wonderful questions um I think that one thing to say is um I think to your first point it actually speaks to what I was thinking and feeling a lot listening to Jonathan um was I don't um I don't feel a sense of urgency to resolve this moral conundrum in with quite the level of intensity um because there are so many of these questions why did why did God allow slavery why does God allow War why does God allow pain or suffering if God is omnipotent God could have done all of these things

1:00:15 um so my faith is filled with mystery and questions that God has decided not to give me the resolution resolution too so I'm not I'm not so haunted by um the things my my forefathers have done um in that in sort of an ex and that's what was going on with sort of this contemporary desire for moral Purity um and so I think yeah this is this is too broad of a statement but I think that in general the Christian imagination might make space for a more moral mystery um

1:01:01 then the Islamic moral imagination and I'd be I'd be interested to hear your your Reflections on on that but sort of the moral messiness of life and the sense that I I hang on the the goodness and Holiness of God um and that and that that is that God is steadfast in God's love and Justice and mercy um and mysteriously God continues to work with morally flawed human beings and cultures throughout time in history because God is gracious um and um and I don't know why God does not

1:01:47 come and immediately set everything right right now or in 1800 America or in the year 100 in in Rome I don't know why God is not making those things and in the Christian tradition we have this word Maranatha which means come Jesus quickly come quickly you know stop this um and so we have to live with this mystery of why why do we live in this time of God's patience God is being patient with with evil and Injustice and violence and that is a mysterious question but we we rest in knowing that God is good and just and is wise and so

1:02:37 um that may be an intellectual cop-out right so that might be just unacceptable in the academy to sort of say well it's mysterious um but that's sort of my my initial thing in terms of why Jesus didn't condemn slavery outright or why Abraham didn't or David or Paul um I think that what I would say is um Jesus did not condemn uh the Roman Empire for Wars of aggression he did not condemn the gladiatory games uh he did not condemn prostitution um he did not condemn a wide variety of

1:03:23 you know moral evils um and part of that is that he's within a moral Universe of first century Judaism which already knew a lot of things about what God wanted and so these things he didn't have to state prostitution is wrong because in the Jewish moral imagination that was sort of well understood um and I think what's notable about ancient Israelite culture is how restrained um any kind of Engagement with slavery was I think that's what's historically notable that's what's

1:04:08 curious that's what causes me to question how is it that slavery was so restricted in ancient Israelite culture why did that happen where did that come from because it was so prevalent everywhere um that I I find that more morally interesting um that's that seems to me to be the problem to wrestle with um so yeah and then finally I don't I don't see the Bible as a universal rule book where I read a verse and understand that to be a universal rule I see the Bible to be a complex patchwork

1:04:53 of um poetry and stories and laws and teachings um to a very diverse network of peoples over you know a thousand years and they have very different moral questions that different books and different verses are interacting with and so I see that um if I want to understand what is a a quote-unquote Biblical understanding of politics I'm going to get a lot of different insights and my task is not to sort of grab on to one verse or another but to put them in conversation with one another to to say okay I see this is being said

1:05:39 over here but I also see this is being said and so for me the fact that the very first thing that the people of Israel learn about God their very first encounter with God is that he hates their slavery and wants to save them from it that he hears their cry and he responds and he liberates them that's the first thing they learn about God and that's the thing that they rehearse throughout their history is God saved us from slavery and whenever moral questions come up it's always the same thing it's treat the Widow and the Foreigner uh like yourselves because you yourselves were

1:06:26 slaves in Egypt so the the whole Israelite morality is built off this understanding that God liberated you so you should liberate others you should have this community that is a is a just and liberating Force because of who your God is um and so yeah I mean those are just some of my Reflections and I I welcome uh pushback on these kinds of things but um yeah those are some of the things I'm thinking about I mean I would say like so a couple of things I want to mention um kind of respond to that also building on our earlier discussion which is you know um

1:07:11 when we think about moral progress I think one of the really important things to ask ourselves is what is the source of morality right we we especially I think the United States tend to think uh it's interesting we tend to be very actually high-minded about morality in the sense that we we kind of have this expectation that there's these moral truths out there that we're kind of accessing and discovering and committing ourselves to and we talk about things like custom and moral relativism with kind of their sort of disdained ideas you know moral relativism is kind of lazy it's it's cowardly um it's not con it's not a conviction uh and yet I I think that for me it's very

1:07:57 clear and this is actually the the general uh position of Muslim Scholars historically uh almost all human morality is customary right it's based on custom so God gives us certain rules don't steal don't fornicate don't eat pork right and everything else is customary it's just you know do you tip or not um does it does the husband help cook dinner or not does the husband change diapers it's all customary uh how you know when you're parking you know if a guy comes in front ways and backways in the parking space who gets this is all custom right so um morality is dictated by custom and that's not a bad thing like that's when you have a customary moral conviction

1:08:44 that's a real moral conviction so if I um if I see uh somebody yelling at somebody on the street or treating them badly and I'm disgusted by that and I go and intervene that's based on custom but that that's a real that's a moral reality like that has legal reality if we're in a court that has moral reality right and um yet so much of this is actually technological and and economic and I I mean one example I like to give students is the idea of cleanliness so if you come across somebody who smells really bad really dirty they smell they've horrible Bo they're you know there's almost this like moral revulsion that this is a dirty person they're not really well behaved there's some but you know the idea that you can be smell good

1:09:31 and can shower every day or twice a day or whatever and have access to hot water and soap like this this is a very this is entirely economic and technological reality there's no moral element to it right and yet you know the prophet Muhammad these guys bathe once a week maybe if they're a lot I mean once a week maybe and then maybe more than once a week but they probably you know the companions of the Prophet the people that we the Disciples of Jesus probably did not smell that good we would be shocked by their environment right and so I think we have to think about a lot of custom if of so much of our morality is actually custom and so much of custom is actually shaped by technology and economic and economics

1:10:16 then we have to understand that that can change and that doesn't mean that it's not meaningful it doesn't mean it's not meaningful it just means that it's not our morality is not constantly just accessing these different moral truths it actually our morality is much more contextual and defined by historical contingencies like economic resources and Technology the the second thing um I wanted to say in response what Matthew is saying is it's interesting that what the first people Who start to organize and express abolitionist sentiments are first of all they're they're Quakers in 1689 1690 in Pennsylvania and they are 100 religiously motivated right so

1:11:02 it's it's very interesting that you have a religious tradition in this case Christianity which never had any problem with slavery yet the the first real motions of abolitionism and objection moral objections of slavery come from people whose in whom that objection is 100 religiously motivated Christian religiously motivated right they and there's two things there's one important thing to keep in mind here the people who in the late 1600s and early 1700s and even someone a little bit earlier like bartolomew De Las Casas in um the Caribbean and Spain Who start to really criticize slavery

1:11:47 and morally criticize it they do so because of their direct experience with the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas like there is something that Atlantic slave trade and slave trade in the Americas is a is something that is so violent and so grotesque that it really shocks people it shocks people someone like De Las Casas or uh British or French um Christians in the late 1600s early 1700s who in their own countries were not troubled by slavery it was just it was not a big deal but when they see the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the plantation slavery in the Caribbean specifically it shocks them and that when you see these uh Quakers

1:12:36 and then later abolitionists in the 1700s in the U.S and Britain it's almost all um what is it called uh non-conformists so basically different Protestant Puritan groups who are who see their objection to slavery as an expression of their love for their fellow man and they the unacceptability of how fellow human beings are being treated like this so we it's interesting to think about that that people's motivations to their their kind of opposition to slavery their moral objection can come out of that same ethos and that same tradition that had previously essentially approved of this but what changes is the level of

1:13:23 violence and degradation and similarly the justification most slavery and human history the vast majority of slavery in human history is not justified racially it's not justified based on how you look or what your your hair is like right it's based on you're just someone from not our group that we captured we don't care what you look like right the idea that you're saying these people are enslaveable because of how they look and because of where they come from also really uh uh discuss some of these early abolitionist figures and especially kind of Enlightenment people like condorsay

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