Can People Sell their Children into Slavery? Cultural Relativism vs. Universality in Islamic Jurisprudence
Questions Raised in South Asia: Selling One’s Children and the Shariah For millennia, one of the ways people entered slavery was as children sold by their families. This seems unthinkable to many today. As the sociologist Georg Simmel (d. 1336/1918) observed, however, our valuation of goods like freedom only makes sense in a context of minimum safety and subsistence. Parents who lacked such basic needs might sell their children if they were threatened, if their family were starving, or if…