An Anti-Slavery Treatise from Medieval Iraq
A lecture by Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia)

In 869 CE, thousands of East African agricultural slaves rebelled in the southern Iraqi city of Basra and formed an independent state that fell to the Abbasids fourteen years later. A generation or two after, a small collective of Muslim philosophers based in Basra composed a revolutionary, anti-slavery treatise. In this lecture, Kristina Richardson will trace the development of abolitionist philosophies from the ninth-century slave revolt to the tenth-century treatise and beyond, offering an original excavation of medieval abolitionist thought.

A Global Middle Ages Lecture

April 15, 2026 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall