veiled4allah: slavery and exploitation are still with us

Zack Ajmal has posted about slavery and Islam.

First, a disclaimer. My blog entry contains only some very preliminary thoughts about one aspect of the question of slavery. It does not represent the totality of my views by any means. As time permits, I hope to explore some other aspects as well, inshallah.

Although the formal institution of slavery has been abolished in most places, there is still widespread economic exploitation of people, particuarly of people in or from the developing world, who work for minimal wages in dangerous or poor conditions and who often have only the most limited of legal rights to challenge their treatment.

Additionally, we are a society that locks two million of our members (a disproportionate share of whom are not white) in confinement for years on end, where they have few rights and no privacy. We call it our prison system.

When the formal institution of slavery was more or less abolished, the wealthy and the powerful simply found other means to continue exploiting other human beings for economic gain. Slavery is evil but it is not uniquely evil; it is merely a more extreme form of an evil that still exists today and shows no sign of going away. By focusing on a very narrow issue such as the formal institution of slavery, we run the risk of ignoring or minimizing how very far we still have to go to end the social and cultural attitudes that lead to slavery. A lot of wrong is done to people that isn't given the name of slavery but that resembles it in some very important ways.

It seems that there is something innate in us as human beings or in the societies that we build that leads us to treat others (especially those who can be easily identified as "them" rather than "us") as if they were not fully human. Any system of belief and conduct that aims to help human beings improve themselves will have to deal with this innate tendency.

Looking at our society today, what is the best way to bring about reform? Should we use a radical approach or a gradual one? Should we overturn all the institutions of exploitation, or should we allow them to continue to exist while seeking to reform them and to raise the moral consciousness of society until by common consent we can agree to abolish them? If you agree that the gradual approach is more pragmatic and more likely to succeed than the radical one, then perhaps you can understand why religious scriptures such as the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran allowed slavery to continue to exist while seeking to reform it and to raise the moral consciousness of the people. In fact, this did ultimately succeed in eradicating the formal institution of slavery. Given enough time, will we eradicate the other forms of exploitation in our society? That is the continuing challenge before us.

Some additional reading:
*A comparison of slavery in the Muslim world with the peculiarly race-based American system of slavery.
*To broaden our discussion beyond Islam, an examination by a Christian blogger how Christian leaders in America not only failed to confront the evil of slavery but created religious arguments to try and justify it.
*A look at the economic exploitation of immgrant workers in America today.
*The prison industrial complex.