A certain physician said: “Before I learned medicine I used to wonder how man dies; and when I had learned medicine I began to wonder how this man manages to live.”

I recalled this saying while thinking of the Arab woman in that far-flung state, reaching into every quarter of the earth, over whose possessions the sun never set — the state of which Harun al-Rashid said, addressing the cloud: “Go and rain where you will; your tribute will still come to me.”

Yes, I thought of this state, so short-lived among the lifespans of states — it rose swiftly and vanished more swiftly than it rose — and I thought of the woman within it, and I said that one may well wonder how she recorded for herself no glory: not cultural, not political, not social, not even religious. Yet no sooner does one look into history than one says: the wonder is not in this result; the wonder would be if the result were other than it is. For how could woman attain glory in a state of that condition — and how could a state endure when woman within it was in that condition?

There is no doubt that Islam raised woman's condition above what it had been in the Jahiliyya: it gave her the right to own, made her an heir, and restored to her rights proportionate to her duties: “And they have rights like those over them, according to what is equitable.” But this interval of fairness did not last long; fairness melted away before it could take firm hold on souls, in the flood of victory, the intoxication of fame, and the ease of new-made wealth. Woman was struck in the dearest of her sanctities, and by that blow the Arab nation was dealt the fatal stroke.

Slavery was no Arab or Islamic innovation. All the ancient states knew the institution of slavery;

it was a direct result of people's view of power in those ages — the strong had a natural right to enslave the weak. The feudal system, still standing in some parts of the earth, is but a surviving remnant of this slavery.

Islam urged the believers to man-umission and made “the freeing of a neck” one of the ways by which man draws near to his Lord, as he draws near by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The Prophet gave the believers the good example: he freed his slave Bilal and treated him with a kindness that became proverbial for gentleness and equality. Yet in spite of these lofty teachings, and of the humane teachings of the Christian religion before them, slavery remained a prevailing social institution throughout the world, in all its religions and its states, down to modern times.

Slavery in the other states, however, was very different from what it was in Islam. Roman law, for instance, did not raise the slave or his offspring to the rank of free citizens until at least two generations after manumission — that is, after the grandchildren had forgotten that their grandfathers had been slaves or non-Romans, and had, in that stretch of time, been schooled in practicing the calling of the Roman citizen, so that no danger to the Roman state remained from the foreign element.

The teachings Islam derived, on the other hand, bound the manumitted slave by no restriction of this kind: it sufficed that the slave be freed for him to become free, with the same full rights as anyone else. And the view with which some Arabs regarded the mawali was relative, confined to one class of Arab circles boastful of their Arabness — a view that could deprive the mawali of no single right. If they were barred from holding judgeships in the early days of the Umayyad

state, that bar was never a registered law, but a mentality that held sway for a time over the Umayyads because of the intensity of their Arab clannishness, and it soon vanished in the last days of their rule.

Yet slavery, in spite of these aspects, would not have consti-tuted a swift danger to the Arab state, but for the danger that struck the Arab woman through concubinage, which was made a lawful institution for the man. Concubinage is the man's right of enjoyment “by what the right hand possesses” — that is, of the slave girls his hand owned; and “what the right hand possesses” made woman lawful to the man, married or unmarried. From this it followed that the Arab woman was struck by another Jahiliyya, which threatened her being in a harsher form. For the first Jahiliyya, if it did not bind the man to a single marriage, still safeguarded woman by a kind of excessive concern with lineage on both branches, the mother's branch and the father's together: the free life was reserved solely for the man nobly born on both his father's and his mother's side, and in the story of Antara we have shining proof of this truth.

In Islam, however, and above all at the state's zenith, the matter slackened, and lineage on the mother's side came to be neither heeded nor cared for. This laxity was the wrecker's pick in the fabric of the Arab state, and its downfall was hastened by way of the peoples to whom the sons of bondwomen and slave girls belonged. The influence of the Turks in the Abbasid state was nothing but the result of al-Mu'tasim's leaning toward his mother, who was a Turk. And when we know that slave girls were within any man's reach — because of their great numbers, owing to the many wars and numerous conquests (for prisoners of war fell inevitably into slavery) and owing to the slave trade, which had become a profitable commerce — yes, when we know the enormous number of slave girls, at times exceeding several thousand, that a single man could obtain, we know what absolute freedom he enjoyed in choos-