The Lock Already Picked

When they tell you that a thing can never be done, find out whether it has been done already. The strongest argument against the impossibility of a change is a precedent, and the best precedents are the ones a tradition has forgotten it set.

The Decree of Ahmad Bey

In January 1846 the ruler of Tunis, a Muslim prince named Ahmad Bey, signed a decree abolishing slavery throughout his dominions.

He did it nineteen years before the United States and two years before France. No foreign army compelled him. He had already closed the slave market in his capital and freed the slaves of his own household. Now he ordered that any enslaved person in the country who asked for freedom was to receive a certificate of it, and he sent notaries to the shrines to write them out.

It was an astonishing act for a Muslim sovereign, because the institution he was ending had the full sanction of the law. The Quran regulates slavery. It does not abolish it. It assumes the existence of slaves, permits a master to take the women he owns to his bed, and legislates the terms. The Prophet and his companions owned slaves. For twelve centuries every manual of Islamic law had contained long chapters on their purchase, sale, and inheritance.

Ahmad Bey knew that he needed the scholars, and he wrote to the religious council of Tunis with his reasons. The Quran, he argued, is full of urgings to free slaves and counts it among the highest acts of piety. The evident purpose of the law is liberty. In his own time the conditions that the jurists had laid down for lawful enslavement were being violated on every side, and free Muslims were being kidnapped and sold. A ruler has the right to forbid what the scripture merely permits when permitting it leads to evil.

The council accepted the argument.