Freedom and Justice in Islam

Princeton's Bernard Lewis — one of the most influential 20th-century historians of the Middle East — on the concept of freedom in the classical Arabic-Islamic tradition. He observes that for most of Islamic history, "liberty" (hurriyya) was a legal rather than a political term: you were free if you were not a slave. The talk traces the consequences of that absence (and of the parallel theological and legal traditions of justice, ʿadl) for the development of political institutions in the Muslim world, and considers what the encounter with Western political concepts of liberty has produced.