Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery & Islam is an important and well-researched book on the contentious issue of slavery in general and in the Islamic civilization in particular. It is an ambitious project in which Brown aims to offer an account of how slavery was conceptualized, practiced, and eventually abolished by Muslims. Strictly speaking, it is hard to categorize the book as belonging to a specific field of academic inquiry. Within its scope, it is a well-argued polemic of an American Muslim public intellectual, an extensive discussion on moral philosophy concerning slavery as an institution, an examination of the aspects of the social and legal history of slavery in Islamdom, as well as a thorough analysis of Muslim reactions to post-19th century European abolitionism.