What role did religion play in the discourses of justification and abolition that emerged in the nineteenth century in both the antebellum South and the Ottoman Empire? Religion played an important role in the discourse used to justify as well as challenge slavery in both the Ottoman Empire and the antebellum South. These two slave societies employed Islam and Christianity respectively in the rhetoric of slavery that emerged as early as the eighteenth century and continued to reinterpret the Scriptures over time to support one side or the other. The abolitionist impulse in America arose from Jefferson's idea of ​​enlightenment, which called for religious awakening. Northern Quakers and evangelists pushed for this religious revivalism in hopes of undoing what they called the “greatest sin ever committed against the will of God.” In the early 19th century, the evangelical abolition movement emerged along with the formation of “abolitionist churches.” According to John Mckivigan, the American abolitionist movement emerged “during the 1930s as a byproduct of the wave of revivalism popularly known as the Second Great Awakening.” This meant a harsh critique of slavery using Christian rhetoric that defined slavery as a “personal sin…requiring immediate and complete repentance in the form of emancipation.” Christianity here came to hold masters morally responsible for participating in sin. Before the emergence of the abolitionist movement in the United States, only a few small churches criticized the evil and inhumane nature of slavery. However, small denominational churches, such as the Quakers, resisted slavery by using Christian teachings. They argued that to gain God's favor, Christianity must return to "its original form, untainted by the beginning... middle of paper...", and Maurice J. Bric. A comprehensive history of antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Puckett, Newbell N. The Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926. Reprinted from Dover, New York, 1969. Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, 1994. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2004. Segal, Ronald Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Snay, Mitchell. Gospel of Disunity: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Toledano, Ehud R. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.