IIT is an Islamist Brotherhood project. It's utterly unsurprising that Brown expected a compliant and friendly audience there. Or that this would be the kind of material presented there.
IIIT is a prominent endorser of the book Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, an authoritative compendium of sharia written by an eminent 14th-century Islamic jurist. By IIIT's reckoning, the English translation by Umdat al-Salik is "a valuable and important work" that is highly successful in "its aim to imbue the consciousness of the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim with a sound understanding of Sacred Law." According to Andrew McCarthy, Reliance "denies freedom of conscience, explaining that apostasy from Islam is a death-penalty offense"; contends that "a Muslim apostatizes not only by clearly renouncing Islam but by doing so implicitly--such as by deviating from the 'consensus of Muslims,' or making statements that could be taken as insolence toward Allah or the prophet Mohammed"; "approves a legal caste system in which the rights and privileges of Muslims and men are superior to those of non-Muslims and women"; "penalizes extramarital fornication by stoning or scourging"; endorses the death penalty for homosexuals and for people who make interest-bearing loans; venerates jihad; and exhorts Muslims "to strive to establish an Islamic government, ruled by a caliph."
So that is what we're dealing with here. And the various promoters of it are complicit in it. Georgetown has been ground zero for Islamist apologetics.
Brown is using the standard intellectual tools of the left to legitimize the unacceptable. He deconstructs what slavery is.
If we are searching for the phenomenon of slavery, what are we really looking for? Is it the label 'slave' that matters? Or is it the reality of the condition behind it?
Never mind the persistent use of the term "Slave". All
Brown has to do is argue that slaves were well off under Islam. Better off than some people in America today. This argument rather resembles that of some advocates for the Confederacy.
But never mind that.
After the scandal broke, Brown declared on Twitter, "Islam as a faith and I as a person condemn slavery, rape and concubinage."
Of course.
All Brown has to do is redefine slavery, rape, etc and then he can safely condemn it. If Islamic slavery and rape no longer mean
owning another human being and non-consensual sexual acts, then Brown isn't rejecting them.
"And this obsession with thinking of slavery as property it's [unintelligible]. I think that's actually a really...odd...and...and...and unhelpful way to think about slavery, and it kind of gets you locked in this...way of thinking where, if you talk about ownership and people...that you've already transgressed some moral boundary that you can't come back from. But I don't think that's true at all. Uh, [unintelligible] I'm trying to think about what slavery actually means, and to show that it doesn't really...the term doesn't really mean anything. Uh, that it...it that there's...so many different phenomena that we would lump under this"
" So...the idea of someone who is a by-definition non-consensual sexual actor in the sense that they have been entered into a sexual relationship...in a position of servitude. That's...sort of...ab initio wrong. The way I would respond to that is to say that...as...I mean this is just a fact. This isn't a judgment, this is a fact, okay? For most of human history, human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of moral...of morally correct sexual activity. And second...we fetishize the idea of autonomy, to the extent that we forget...again, who's really free? Are we really autonomous people? And what does autonomy mean?"
We're just so obsessed with autonomy that we think of rape as being wrong. But what does autonomy mean? Does anyone have free will? Let's define free will before we condemn slavery and rape.
This is the sort of sophomoric garbage that Brown is peddling as justification for rape and slavery. It's another symptom of how our society can now justify anything as long as it's politically correct.
Slavery and rape are considered the worst modern evils. But play a little word game and suddenly Islamic rape and slavery are okay. Because they're not really rape and slavery. Because who are we to say that autonomy even exists.
The final comment goes to Umar Lee who exposed this.
It seems many in progressive media are too PC to call out a Musim professor even when he's advocating rape and slavery? Wrong is wrong and this is why I have a limited amount of respect for the white-liberal at times. My piece has went viral and unfortunately it's mostly conservative media that has picked it up. If there is no opportunity to virtue-signal within popular narratives or get a cute selfie it seems the paperclip heroes are MIA. So, just to put a little cherry on top this is from Jonathan Brown of Georgetown Facebook page

(Editor's note: The same Facebook grab appears twice in the original article.)
This article originally appeared at FrontPageMag.