Explores the ways in which new Muslims of slave origins were integrated into early Islamic society
This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members?
By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, Conquered Populations in Early Islam reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic community and celebrates the dynamism of Islamic history.
Key Features
¿ Brings together three separate groups (freedmen, slave women and the children of enslaved mothers) as parts of the same prism of unfreedom
¿ Recovers enslaved women's voices and treats them as important agents of historical change
¿ Combines close textual analysis with large-scale demographic study to provide multiple levels of understanding
¿ Shows how the Muslim community developed from a few Hijazi Arab tribesmen to a multi-lingual and multi-cultural empire united by a vibrant faith of global reach
¿ Challenges simplistic notions of ethnicity and shows the categories of 'Arab' and 'non-Arab' are historically contingent
Elizabeth Urban is Assistant Professor of the Islamic World at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Text

1. Introduction: Why Muslims of Slave Origins Matter

2. Insiders with an Asterisk: Mawali and Enslaved Women in the Quran

3. Abu Bakra, Freedman of God

4. Enslaved Prostitutes in Early Islamic History

5. Concubines & Their Sons: The Changing Political Notion of Arabness

6. Singers & Scribes: The Limits of Language and Power

7. Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Elizabeth Urban is Assistant Professor of the Islamic World in the Department of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She has published articles in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Journal of Qur'anic Studies and peer-reviewed chapters in edited volumes published by Peeters, OUP and Brill. This is her first book.