As part of the BCDSS' Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series, Elizabeth Urban from the West Chester University in Pennsylvania, USA, gave a Lecture on How elite Arab-Muslim households treated unfree women from 600 to 800 CE.
Examining mawlayāt, servile women who were not technically enslaved, this Lecture delves into their scarcity, domestic roles, and social networks. It cautions against uncritical reading of sources, which often convey biased messages. Mawlayāt offer insight into power dynamics in early Islamic society, occupying an intermediate position between enslaved and free.
Elizabeth Urban is Associate Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in the first two centuries of Islamic history. She is particularly interested in studying how Islam transformed from a small and relatively egalitarian Arabian piety movement into the official doctrine of a hierarchical Near Eastern empire. Her first book, Conquered Populations in Early Islam (Edinburgh UP, 2020) analyzes how Muslims of slave origins joined the Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. The book posits that enslaved and freed persons
provide a fruitful window onto early Islamic history because, as liminal figures, they sparked debates about the political, social, and religious boundaries of the expanding Islamic community. Her current research continues to explore early Islamic history through the lens of unfreedom or asymmetrical dependency. She is currently studying the depiction of unfree women’s bodies in early Islamic historical sources, including
descriptions of physical labor, corporal punishment, hair, clothing, and piercing.