Stratification and Social Mobility, Slavery in Islam

Abstract

In this chapter we propose a Weberian three dimensionality of stratification to explore the amount of upward and downward movement that goes on within and between Islamic societies and the industrial world. Our argument regarding social mobility provides intriguing clues as to the connection between legal systems (specifically civic laws based on religious jurisprudence), and stratification systems. We will discuss the issue of slavery and status inconsistency and contrast it with the caste system, which forbids upward, downward, inter-caste and intergenerational social mobility. We argue that the slavery system of stratification is more complex than the caste system, as there is an element of uprising and resistance built into the slave system by means of religious economic values. We will pay close attention to the role of Islam as a belief system which provides pathways for social mobility through the production and distribution of goods and services. In a previous chapter on sociality and inequality, a general proposition was made that, as human groups are formed, ranking and hierarchies come into existence in correspondence with rewards and the manner in which they should be distributed. From this viewpoint, inequality is a manifest function of a sociality whose latent function is to create poverty. This is an ethical issue for which Islam devised a variety of mechanisms to address. . For Marx, with his locus of attention on the specific, inequality is a manifest function of capitalism whose latent functions, among others, are monopolization and the enlargement of stratification.