Slavery in Islam

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Slavery in Islam

Introduction

Slavery in Islam

"Slaves were owned in all Islamic societies, both sedentary and nomadic, ranging from Arabia in the centre to North Africa in the west and to what is now Pakistan and Indonesia in the east. Some Islamic states, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and the Sokoto caliphate [Nigeria], must be termed slave societies because slaves there were very important numerically as well as a focus of the polities' energies.

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Slavery

Many societies throughout history have practised slavery, and Muslim societies were no exception.

It's thought that as many people were enslaved in the Eastern slave trade as in the Atlantic slave trade.

It's ironic that when the Atlantic slave trade was abolished the Eastern trade expanded, suggesting that for some Africans the abolition of the Atlantic trade didn't lead to freedom, but merely changed their slave destination.

It's misleading to use phrases such as 'Islamic slavery' and 'Muslim slave trade', even though slavery existed in many Muslim cultures at various times, since the Atlantic slave trade is not called the Christian slave trade, even though most of those responsible for it were Christians.

Slavery before Islam

Slavery was common in pre-Islamic times and accepted by many ancient legal systems and it continued under Islam.

" Although Islam is much credited for moderating the age-old institution of slavery, which was also accepted and endorsed by the other monotheistic religions, Christianity and Judaism, and was a well-established custom of the pre-Islamic world, it has never preached the abolition of slavery as a doctrine.

Forough Jahanbaksh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran, 1953-2000, 2001

"The condition of slaves, like that of women, may well have improved with the coming of Islam, but the institution was not abolished, any more than it was under Christianity at this period.

Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World, 2000

How Islam moderated slavery

Islam's approach to slavery added the idea that freedom was the natural state of affairs for human beings and in line with this it limited the opportunities to enslave people, commended the freeing of slaves and regulated the way slaves were treated:

Islam greatly limited those who could be enslaved and under what circumstances (although these restrictions were often evaded)

Islam treated slaves as human beings as well as property

Islam banned the mistreatment of slaves - indeed the tradition repeatedly stresses the importance of treating slaves with kindness and compassion

Islam allowed slaves to achieve their freedom and made freeing slaves a virtuous act

Islam barred Muslims from enslaving other Muslims

But the essential nature of slavery remained the same under Islam, as elsewhere. It involved serious breaches of human rights and however well they were treated, the slaves still had restricted freedom; and, when the law was not obeyed, their lives could be very unpleasant.

The paradox

A poignant paradox of Islamic slavery is that the humanity of the various rules and customs that led to the freeing of slaves created a demand for new slaves that could only be supplied by war, forcing people into slavery or trading slaves.

Muslim slavery continued for centuries

The legality of slavery in Islam, together with the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who himself bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves, may explain why slavery persisted until the 19th century in many places (and later still in some countries). The impetus for the abolition of slavery came largely from colonial powers, although some Muslim thinkers argued strongly for abolition.

Slaves came from many places

Unlike the Atlantic slave traders, Muslims enslaved people from many cultures as well as Africa. Other sources included the Balkans, Central Asia and Mediterranean Europe.

Slaves could be assimilated into Muslim society

Muhammad's teaching that slaves were to be regarded as human beings with dignity and rights and not just as property, and that freeing slaves was a virtuous thing to do, may have helped to create a culture in which slaves became much more assimilated into the community than they were in the West.

Muslim slaves could achieve status

Slaves in the Islamic world were not always at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Slaves in Muslim societies had a greater range of work, and took on a wider range of responsibilities, than those enslaved in the Atlantic trade.

Some slaves earned respectable incomes and achieved considerable power, although even such elite slaves still remained in the power of their owners.

Muslim slavery was not just economic

Unlike the Western slave trade, slavery in Islam was not wholly motivated by economics.

Although some Muslim slaves were used as productive labour it was not generally on the same mass scale as in the West but in smaller agricultural enterprises, workshops, building, mining and transport.

Slaves were also taken for military service, some serving in elite corps essential to the ruler's control of the state, while others joined the equivalent of the civil service.

Another category of slavery was sexual slavery in which young women were made concubines, either on a small scale or in large harems of the powerful. Some of these women were able to achieve wealth and power.

These harems might be guarded by eunuchs, men who had been enslaved and castrated. Where did the slaves come from?

Muslim traders took their slaves from three main areas:

Non-Muslim Africa, in particular the Horn

Central and Eastern Europe

Central Asia

The legality of slavery today

While Islamic law does allow slavery under certain conditions, it's almost inconceivable that those conditions could ever occur in today's world, and so slavery is effectively illegal in modern Islam. Muslim countries also use secular law to prohibit slavery.

News stories do continue to report occasional instances of slavery in a few Muslim countries, but these are usually denied by the authorities concerned.

Slavery and Islamic law

Law and slavery

"Islamic law and custom provided no basis for the abolition of slavery or even for the curtailment of the slave trade.

Bernard Lewis, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, 1994

"Although the vast majority of contemporary Muslims abhor slavery, it remains part of their religious law.

'Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Shari'a and Basic Human Rights Concerns, in Liberal Islam, ed Charles Kurzman, 1998

Context

Islamic sharia law accepted (and accepts) slavery, as did other legal systems of ancient times such as Roman law, Hebrew law, Byzantine Christian law, African customary law and Hindu law.

The world was very different in those days, and practices that seem profoundly unethical to modern minds were common and accepted.

"During the formative stages of shari'a (and for the next millennium at least) there was no conception of universal human rights anywhere in the world. Slavery was an established and lawful institution in many parts of the world throughout this period...

'Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Shari'a and Basic Human Rights Concerns, in Liberal Islam, ed Charles Kurzman, 1998

Slavery was too fundamental to the structure of Arabian society in the 7th century to be abolished easily. Doing so would have estranged many of the tribes that Muhammad sought to bring together, and severely disrupted the working of society.

"Prohibiting slavery in the context of seventh-century Arabia apparently would have been as useful as prohibiting poverty; it would have reflected a noble ideal but would have been unworkable on an immediate basis without establishing an entirely new socioeconomic system.

Jacob Neusner, Tamara Sonn, Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam, 1999

But this was a problem, since Islam placed a high value on human dignity and freedom.

"The fact that slavery is a major concern in Islamic law no doubt stems from the prevalence of slavery at the time when Islam was instituted combined with the fact that the Qur'an clearly presents universal freedom and human dignity as its ideal society. Its recommendation that slaves be freed is on the same plane as its recommendation that the poor be clothed and the hungry be fed.

Jacob Neusner, Tamara Sonn, Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam, 1999

So the early Muslims restricted and regulated slavery to remove some of its cruelties, but accepted that it was legal.

"... The most that shari'a could do, and did in fact do, in that historical context was to modify and lighten the harsh consequences of slavery and discrimination on grounds of religion or gender...

Shari'a recognized slavery as an institution but sought to restrict the sources of acquisition of slaves, to improve their condition, and to encourage their emancipation through a variety of religious and civil methods.

Nevertheless, slavery is lawful under shari'a to the present day.

'Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Shari'a and Basic Human Rights Concerns, in Liberal Islam, ed Charles Kurzman, 1998

Is slavery still legal in Islam?

The answer is that slavery is legal under Islamic law but only in theory. Slavery is illegal under the state law of all Muslim countries.

Theoretically Islamic law lays down that if a person was captured in a lawful jihad or was the descendent of an unbroken chain of people who had been lawfully enslaved, then it might be legal to enslave them.

"Nonetheless, should the legal condition for the enslavement of anyone be proven (because he had been taken prisoner fighting against Islam with a view to its extirpation and persisted in invincible ignorance in his sacrilegious and infidel convictions, or because there did exist legal proof that all his ancestors without exception had been slaves descended from a person taken prisoner conducting a warfare of such invincible ignorance) Islam would be bound to recognize such slavery as legal, even though recommending the freeing of the person and if possible his conversion, in this modern age.

Tabandeh, Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoted in 'Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Shari'a and Basic Human Rights Concerns, in Liberal Islam, ed Charles Kurzman, 1998

In practice, it seems virtually impossible that there will ever again be a jihad that is lawfully declared according to the strict letter of the law, and there are no living descendants of lawful slaves, which means that legal enslavement is unthinkable.

The law on slavery

Islamic law recognises slavery as an institution within society, and attempts to regulate and restrict it in various ways.

Different Islamic legal schools differ in their interpretation of Islamic law on slavery. Local customs in Muslim lands also affected the way slaves were treated.

"In the merchant cities of South-East Asia the sharia helped forge a legal distinction between slave and non-slave unknown in the rural hinterland.

More frequently, however, the application of the sharia outside the Middle East was tempered by local customs. This allowed Muslims in regions as distant as Somalia, India and Indonesia to argue for the maintenance of pre-Islamic and other local structures of slavery even if these ran counter to the prescriptions of the sharia.

Gwyn Campbell; Frank Cass, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, 2004

Islamic law clearly recognises that slaves are human beings, but it frequently treats slaves as if they are property, laying down regulations covering the buying and selling of slaves.

It encourages the freeing of slaves, which has the good effect of diminishing the slave population of a culture and, paradoxically, the bad effect of encouraging those whose livelihood depends on slave labour to find new ways of acquiring slaves.

Who can be enslaved

Under Islamic law people can only be legally enslaved in two circumstances:

as the result of being defeated in a war that was legal according to sharia

if they are born as the child of two slave parents

Other legal systems of the time allowed people to be enslaved in a far wider range of circumstances.

The sharia limits were often either ignored or evaded, and many instances of slave trading by Muslims were in fact illegal, but tolerated.

The following groups of people cannot be made slaves:

Free Muslims, but note that:

Slaves who convert to Islam are not automatically freed

Children born to legally enslaved Muslims are also slaves

Dhimmis

Slave rights

Islamic law gives slaves certain rights:

Slaves must not be mistreated or overworked, but should be treated well

Slaves must be properly maintained

Slaves may take legal action for a breach of these rules, and may be freed as a result

Slaves may own property

Slaves may own slaves

Slaves can get married if their owner consents

Slaves may undertake business on the owner's behalf

Slaves guilty of crimes can only be given half the punishment that would be given to a non-slave (although some schools of Islamic law do allow the execution of a slave who commits murder)

A female slave cannot be separated from her child while it is under 7 years old

Female slaves cannot be forced into prostitution

Slave rights to freedom

Islamic law allows slaves to get their freedom under certain circumstances. It divides slaves with the right to freedom into various classes:

The mukatab: a slave who has the contractual right to buy their freedom over time

The mudabbar: a slave who will be freed when their owner dies (this might not happen if the owner's estate was too small)

The umm walid, a female slave who had borne her owner a child

Slaves must accept

Owners are allowed to have sex with their female slaves

Restrictions on slaves

Islamic law imposes many restrictions on slaves:

Slaves cannot carry out some religious roles

Slaves can have only limited authority

Slaves cannot be witnesses in court

Killing a slave does not carry the death penalty in most schools of Islamic law

Slaves are punishable under Islamic law if they commit a crime - although for some major crimes they only receive half the punishment of free people.

Last updated 2009-09-07

Source: BBC