Paper short abstract:

For 30 years, a social movement of those of slave descent (haratin) in Mauritania has sought to challenge such legal probisions of sharia regarding the practice of slavery. This paper aims to reconstruct the evolution of this counter-discourse.

Paper long abstract:

In February 2010, around 20 imams of slave origins (haratin) held a press conference to denounce the persistence of slavery in the The Islamic Republic of Mauritania. They insisted that free-born "white" Moor ulama are complicit with existing social hierarchies because they have always refused to declare slavery illegitimate according to Islam. Two years later, a group of anti-slavery activists decided to publicly burn copies of the Mukhtasar of Khalil, one of the central texts of Maliki jurisprudence that is actively used and deeply respected in the region. The perpetrators of such a "blasphemy" argued that such texts are not fully Islamic because they are the basis on which slavery and social hierarchies are legitimized and hence perpetuated in Mauritania.

Increasingly, the denunciation of the legality of slavery and inequality or persons in Islam is an important feature of the anti-slavery discourse and practice. This paper aims to reconstruct the evolution of this counter-discourse that is being developed not only by anti-slavery activists in the Islamic public sphere, but also by a number of other Muslims willing to challenge the official Islamic authorities, including non-haratin Muslim intellectuals.

Among pther ideas, I argue that despite what "the industry of terrorism" (following Madawi al-Rashid) leads us to believe, various militant movements within Muslim societies sometimes imagine, practice, and engage with Islam in a non-Islamist fashion.