Georgetown Islamic Studies Professor Jonathan Brown: Slavery OK, So is Non-Consensual Sex

Cornered by the negative publicity surrounding this lecture, this academic savage is now denying that he said these things. However, video of his talk is available, and as Robert Spencer has discovered, he said the same things on Facebook in 2015 (he has now taken down his Facebook page).

If Jonathan Brown were anything but a Muslim, he would have been repudiated and fired by Georgetown University by now. The fact that he has not been and will not be shows how much academia has degenerated.

“Georgetown Islamic Studies Professor: Slavery OK, So is Non-Consensual Sex,” by Ian Miles Cheong, Heat Street, February 10, 2017:

A professor at Georgetown University is teaching his students that men do not need consent to have sex with women, and that slavery is justifiable under Islamic teachings.

Islamic Studies professor Jonathan Brown recently lectured at the International Institute of Islamic Thought, where he shared his alarming beliefs with students in attendance in his lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery.” Freelance writer Umar Lee expressed his shock over the 90-minute lecture, which included explicit endorsements of rape and slavery.

Brown himself uploaded the lecture to YouTube.

According to Lee, Brown’s lecture was supposed to revolve around slavery in Islam, but the lecturer moved its focus to criticize the United States, United Kingdom and China. Brown described slavery in these non-Muslim societies as brutal, which they were, but lauded the historically inhumane practice in Arab lands and Turkey.

“Indeed, according to Brown, slaves in the Muslim world lived a pretty good life,” wrote Lee. “I thought the Muslim community was done with this dishonest North Korean style of propaganda. Obviously not.”…

The Islamic Studies professor said that in Muslim societies, “slavery wasn’t racialized,” unlike the United States. Lee points out that this is untrue, given that in the Arab world, black people are referred to as “abeed,” the Arab word for “slave.”Brown stated that slaves were “protected by Sharia,” omitting the various atrocities committed by slave-owners. Girls and women were forced into the sex trade and their male counterparts were often castrated.

“In general you don’t find the brutality that you see in American slavery,” said Brown, who described the historically common practice as “investments” and “walking venture properties” for slave-owners….

Historically, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams conducted warfare against vassal states of the Ottoman Empire to end the Barbary slave trade, in which North African pirates conducted constant raids into European coastal towns to capture men and women for slavery.Brown defended slavery, stating, “It’s not immoral for one human to own another human” by comparing it to marriage—a quid pro quo arrangement in which both slave and master benefited from the arrangement.

“I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us and we’re owned by people,” said Brown.

A female attendee asked Brown about the permissibility of sex with slaves, to which the professor stated that “Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex,” and defined consent as a Western concept that emerged with women’s suffrage and female body autonomy. Brown, he said, believes that marital rape was an invalid concept in Islam.

Had Prof. Brown’s words been spoken by a practicing member of any other religion, they would’ve lost their jobs and shunned out of the academic world.