Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World

Gwyn Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317320074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This volume of essays contains case studies of debt bondage covering the impact of an expanding globalized economy, increased commercialization, colonial and post-colonial societies, and emerging economies.

1 DEBT AND THE COERCION OF LABOUR IN THE ISLAMIC LEGAL TRADITION

William G. Clarence-Smith

Introduction: Enslavement and Debt in Islam

Enslavement was the only acceptable form of coercion of labour in the Islamic legal tradition, and this held to a considerable degree in practice. Chattel servitude was permitted and regulated by the Qur’an, hadith (tradition), Prophetic biographies, and the huge body of exegetical legal texts. The religious legitimacy of slavery was only gradually challenged from the 1870s, as Islamic abolitionism began to develop.¹ At the same time, the ulama consistently taught that there was no sanction in the holy texts for bonded or coerced labour of any type other than slavery.²

This religious view of the matter did not always prevail, especially under powerful rulers, who might pay little heed to the law of God. Thus, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria, who wore their religion rather lightly, employed much forced labour for construction and other purposes.³ Similarly, the Ottoman sultans press-ganged or conscripted men to supplement slave rowers on Mediterranean galleys, together with some convicts.⁴ Muhammad ‘Ali was notorious for the extent to which he imposed corvée labour across Egypt in the early nineteenth century.⁵ However, Egyptians denounced this kind of forced labour (sukhra) as illegitimate ‘tyranny’.⁶

Religious syncretism might result in forms of labour mobilization other than slavery. The Circassians of the north-western Caucasus were famed alike for their superficial Islam and for their harsh system of serfdom, which coexisted with slavery proper.⁷ Baluchistan, straddling modern Iran and Pakistan, exhibited similar traits.⁸ In South India, a type of serfdom, reinforced by caste, prevailed among Hindu populations. Muslims were noted as being lords of such communities, even if Hyder Ali, the reforming late eighteenth-century ruler of Mysore, tried to turn pariahs into free Muslim cultivators.⁹ In Islamic West Africa, slaves typically became more akin to serfs from the second generation, and thus subject to less oppression, but also less likely ever to be manumitted fully.¹⁰

Despite such exceptions, the general dearth of forms of coercion intermediate between slavery and free labour meant that there was little social space for the emergence of types of debt bondage that did not lead to chattel slavery. Only in areas where the sharia was particularly weak did substantial non-slave forms of control through debt emerge. For most Muslims, the crucial question was whether unredeemed debt could legitimately result in enslavement as a chattel, both for the debtor and for members of the debtor’s family.

The Religious Prohibition of Enslavement for Debt

A hadith told of the Prophet selling a debtor by the name of Surraq, and this was used by early Muslims to justify enslaving insolvent debtors. However, the Surraq Hadith was classed as a ‘weak’ tradition, for its chain of transmission was uncertain, and it was eventually excluded from all the canonical collections. As the era of the early caliphs passed, and as the jurists of the schools of law hammered out a compromise position on slavery by around AD 800, a consensus arose that the Surraq Hadith was spurious. From then on, it was decided, no believer was to be enslaved for debt.¹¹ Believers could sell neither themselves nor their children into slavery, whether to redeem an obligation or for any other purpose.¹² Not only was this formally prohibited for Muslims, but the infidel ‘people of the book’ (dhimmî), living peacefully under Islamic rule, also had to forbear from reducing debtors to slavery.¹³

The assertion that Islam was hostile to debt itself because of a ban on the lending of money at interest (ribâ) can only be accepted as a possible factor in lessening the overall burden of debt on Islamic societies.¹⁴ As Sidi al-‘Arabi Burdalah put it pithily in a fatwa issued in Fez (Morocco) around 1708: Allah hath permitted trade and forbidden usury’.¹⁵ However, this prohibition could be side-stepped, and, even if applied, it did not eliminate debt as such.¹⁶ As a highly commercial and monetized civilization, Islam certainly created many possibilities for debt.¹⁷

That Islamic lands continued to be home to many people reduced to chattel slavery as a result of debt can be attributed to different factors, including the sinfulness of the faithful. Many owners of debt slaves believed themselves to be good and pious Muslims, however, and it is argued here that there were more structural causes for the existence of debt slavery. Loopholes in the law left a place for this practice, especially when the loss of freedom occurred beyond the frontiers of the faith.

Enslavement for Debt Beyond the Frontiers of Islam

Justification for the methods of enslavement employed by non-believers beyond the frontiers of Islam became an issue after the time of the rightly-guided caliphs, from the late seventh century onwards. The Umayyad dynasty permitted non-Muslims to supply slaves to believers, as trade goods, gifts or tribute, even though the theological and legal underpinnings for this decision were extremely weak. In turn, this raised the problem of whether methods of enslavement employed by unbelievers in the abode of war (dâr al-harb) should be of any concern to believers. There existed a long-standing tension among the ulama, with some seeing sharia precepts as valid only for Muslims and dhimmî, whereas others considered that they were more widely applicable to all the ‘sons of Adam’ (and, by implication, the ‘daughters of Eve’).

Whether those enslaved for debt in the abode of war might legitimately be purchased by Muslims was examined in an influential fatwa. Taqî al-Dîn Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) was a noted jurist of Damascus, whose opinions are revered by Wahhâbî and other ‘fundamentalist’ strands of Islam to our own day. He was once asked whether a Muslim, finding himself in lands beyond the abode of Islam (dâr al-Islâm), could legitimately buy debtors who had sold themselves; whether he could buy children who had been sold to discharge a debt; and whether the believer could bring such slaves back to the lands of Islam and sell them there. Ibn Taymiyya replied that if the said Muslim was in a land of infidels who had a pact or treaty (amân) with Muslims, then some great jurists allowed such a transaction, but others did not. The Hanafî school of law (madhhab) thought it permissible, but not the Shâfi’î school. As for the Mâlikî madhhab, it was divided down the middle on the issue. Curiously, Ibn Taymiyya seems not to have revealed the views of his own Hanbalî school. In any event, Muslims in lands where infidels had no covenant with Islamic states could, with a clear conscience, purchase debt slaves for re-sale at home.¹⁸

This opinion was contested. While jurists for a long time turned a blind eye to what went on beyond the borders of Islamdom, Western critiques in the nineteenth century encouraged the ulama to look again at the issue. Increasing numbers of Muslim scholars suggested that the rules regarding enslavement in the dâr al-Islâm should also be applied in the dâr al-harb, even in lands that had no pact with believers. This effectively reduced legitimate slaves to those non-believers either born into slavery or captured in ‘just war’, a concept which was hard to define for lands with other religions and laws.¹⁹

In the hands of a Moroccan scholar from Sale, Ahmad b. Khâlid al-Nâsirî (1834–97), such arguments turned into quasi-abolitionism. He wrote his attack on slavery in 1881, as part of a history of the Maghrib, and his opinions were more widely disseminated through a posthumous publication in Paris in 1906. Al-Nâsirî not only denounced unacceptable conditions of enslavement in the lands of unbelief, but also rejected the justification of slavery in terms of the ‘curse of Ham’. As he additionally affirmed that no wars after the time of the Prophet and his companions could be called holy wars, he effectively challenged the status of all existing slaves in Islamic lands.²⁰

Enslavement for Debt within the Frontiers of Islam

More shocking to the pious and sharia-minded was the peristence of enslavement for debt within the dâr al-Islâm itself, imposed on Muslims and dhimmî alike, in part because the sharia coexisted with other types of law. Firstly, rulers were allowed to promulgate decrees, known as qânûn, or statute law. Secondly, the ulama recognized a subordinate place for custom, ‘âda or ‘urf, terms that covered everything from unwritten local lore to the elaborate and ancient codes of conquered peoples. In theory, these bodies of subordinate law were only tolerated as long as they did not override the law of God. In practice, relations between the sharia and other laws were often conflictual.

The ulama generally upheld the primacy of the sharia, but local communities were not necessarily of the same opinion, especially in regions where conversion to Islam had been peaceful, recent and gradual.²¹ A Kazakh qâdî in Inner Asia dispensed a bewildering amalgam of Turkic custom, Mongol law, Russian codes and the sharia, and this mix was only codified in the 1820s.²² A proverb from Aceh, North Sumatra, held that holy law and custom were ‘like the pupil and the white of the eye’, both emanating from God.²³ Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch scholar of Islam, commented acidly that adat was really the ‘mistress’ and sharia ‘her obedient slave’.²⁴ This was even a problem in the heart of Islamdom, for Bedouin ‘customary law could be as distant in Arabia itself from the Shari’ah law of the books as in the remotest corner of the hemisphere’.²⁵

That said, statute law rarely played a role in enslavement for debt, for rulers tended to follow the sharia in this matter. At worst, practical considerations at times led to the toleration of the enslavement of debtors. Making slaves of criminals and debtors was a convenient alternative to putting them in prison, and was even a humane alternative under certain conditions of incarceration. Similarly, self-enslavement and the sale of children in times of want parried the nefarious effects of natural disasters and social crises, which often gave rise to unredeemable debt.

Customary law, in contrast, frequently decreed enslavement as a penalty for crime and debt, and sanctioned the sale of oneself or one’s dependents for the repayment of debt. The practice was allowed in Roman law, common throughout much of the early Christian world, which formed the ‘âda of many of the western lands of Islam.²⁶ Slavery in Hinduism could originate in a similar manner, although debt gave rise to a wider variety of possible statuses.²⁷ Buddhism inherited slavery for debt from Hinduism,²⁸ though Theravada Buddhist kingdoms were dominated by a variety of serfdom, and numerous unredeemed debtors blended into this wider serf population.²⁹ Muslim reformist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Debt and the Coercion of Labour in the Islamic Legal Tradition
• 2 Debt, Pawnship and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century East Africa
• 3 Debt and Slavery in Imperial Madagascar, 1790–1861
• 4 Credit and Debt in the Lives of Freed Slaves at the Cape of Good Hope: The Case of Arnoldus Koevoet, 1697–1735
• 5 Debt, Labour and Bondage: English Servants versus Indentured Immigrants in Mauritius, from the Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century
• 6 Ransom, Escape and Debt Repayment in the Sulu Zone, 1750–1898
• 7 Debt and Slavery among Arabian Gulf Pearl Divers
• 8 The Political Economy of Debt Bondage in Contemporary South India
• 9 The Name of the Slave and the Quality of the Debt: When Slaves Are Not Debtors and Debtors Are Not Slaves in the Family Narrative of a Filipina Comfort Woman
• 10 Two Bonded Labour Emigration Patterns in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Southern China: The Coolie Trade and Emigration to Southeast Asia
• 11 Debt Slaves in Old Korea
• 12 The Debt-Servitude of Prostitutes in Japan during the Edo Period, 1600–1868
• Notes
• Index