Cassuis Marcellus Clay: great man great name!

[Zaroku]

That wasn't a slave in that passage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w4KMOfN0Oeo

This too. Scholarly publication

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2ZR46UGAB4

[siablo14]

Cookies on the BBC website We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the BBC website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookie settings at any time.
Continue
Find out more
British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC
Accessibility links Skip to contentSkip to local navigationSkip to bbc.co.uk navigationSkip to bbc.co.uk searchAccessibility Help
This page has been archived and is no longer updated.
Find out more about page archiving.
Religions
Slavery in Islam
Last updated 2009-09-07
Slavery in Islam
On this page

Introduction
Slavery and Islamic law
Muhammad and slavery
Compared to the Atlantic slave trade
Economic slavery
Elite slavery
Sexual slavery
Abolition
Find out more
Print this page
Introduction

Slavery in Islam

Chain Slavery was common in pre-Islamic times and continued under 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.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions

Top
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
Top
Muhammad and slavery

Muhammad and slavery

The Prophet Muhammad did not try to abolish slavery, and bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves himself. But he insisted that slave owners treat their slaves well and stressed the virtue of freeing slaves.

There are two different ways of interpreting this:

some modern writers believe that Muhammad intended his teachings to lead to the gradual end of slavery by limiting opportunities to acquire new slaves and allowing existing slaves to become free. This idea doesn't appear in early writings.
others writers argue that by regulating slavery the Prophet gave his authority to its continued existence, and that by having slaves himself he showed his approval
Muhammad treated slaves as human beings and clearly held some in the highest esteem.

For example, he personally ensured the freedom of Bilal, an African slave who had converted to Islam. Bilal was chosen as the first muezzin of Islam because of his beautiful voice. A muezzin is the person who calls the community to the daily prayers, and is a position of great prominence and responsibility.

Zayd was a young boy who had grown up in the household of the Prophet as a slave, and remained with the household, almost as an adopted son, even after he was freed. He was amongst the first four people to adopt Islam. Indeed when Zayd's father (a wealthy nobleman) tracked his son down and offered to buy his freedom from Muhammad, Muhammad told Zayd that he was free to go with his father with no money changing hands, and to his father's astonishment Zayd chose to stay with Muhammad.

The Prophet also married a Coptic Christian slave girl.

In his lifetime the Prophet introduced the following rules about slavery:

Stated that freeing slaves was the act that God found most acceptable
Zakat (charity - the third Pillar of Islam) was often used by the state to free slaves
Stated that freeing a slave was the appropriate way to gain forgiveness for certain wrongs
Ordered that those who committed certain wrongs should be penalised by having to free their slaves
Stated that slaves should be allowed to buy their freedom, and if necessary should be given the opportunity to earn money, or be lent money by the state, in order to do so
Allowed slaves to be freed in certain circumstances
Stated that slaves' contracts should be interpreted in favour of the slaves
Stated that the duty of kindness towards slaves was the same of that towards family, neighbours and others
Stated that when a slave owner had a child with a female slave, the child should be freed and could inherit from their father like any other child (as in the case of Ibrahim)
There are a number of hadith that show that the Prophet treated slaves well and expected others to do the same...

Red - Ah damn. The Black Muslims are gonna say they weren't Muslim slaves, so no big deal.

I gotta say it seems slavery under the Muslims was more human than chattel slavery over in America.

[DinoCop]

I think you are being romantic and I give you my reason:
Would you rather like that war captives to be killed rather than to be enslaved?
Banning enslavement would never be accepted after all, why wouldn't you enslave those who would enslave you?
Islam doesn't let you enslave another Muslim and encourages you to free a slave every time you do something wrong to gain God's forgiveness, God just favours those who free a slave. It's repeated so many times in El Quran.
Islam has progressively ended slavery in the region, when was the last time people in the East owned slaves in a significant scale? Can you compare by any means the number of enslaved people by Muslims to and Europeans?

[Zaroku]

I think you are being romantic and I give you my reason:
Would you rather like that war captives to be killed rather than to be enslaved?
Banning enslavement would never be accepted after all, why wouldn't you enslave those who would enslave you?
Islam doesn't let you enslave another Muslim and encourages you to free a slave every time you do something wrong to gain God's forgiveness, God just favours those who free a slave. It's repeated so many times in El Quran.
Islam has progressively ended slavery in the region, when was the last time people in the East owned slaves in a significant scale? Can you compare by any means the number of enslaved people by Muslims to and Europeans?

Interesting choice. I need more time to think about this question.

[Zaroku]

Red - Ah damn. The Black Muslims are gonna say they weren't Muslim slaves, so no big deal.

I gotta say it seems slavery under the Muslims was more human than chattel slavery over in America.

Probably. But it’s still happening in Saudi Arabia.

http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/SaudiArabia.htm

[Zaroku]

Red - Ah damn. The Black Muslims are gonna say they weren't Muslim slaves, so no big deal.

I gotta say it seems slavery under the Muslims was more human than chattel slavery over in America.

Roman slaves could buy or win their freedom in the arena, or by distinguishing themselves in battle.

Jews had slaves too, emphasis on the word had!

American mainland colonial Jews imported slaves from Africa at a rate proportionate to the general population. As slave sellers, their role was more marginal, although their involvement in the Brazilian and Caribbean trade is believed to be considerably more significant.[12] Jason H. Silverman, a historian of slavery, describes the part of Jews in slave trading in the southern United States as "minuscule", and writes that the historical rise and fall of slavery in the United States would not have been affected at all had there been no Jews living in the American South.[13] Jews accounted for 1.25% of all Southern slave owners, and were not significantly different from other slave owners in their treatment of slaves.[13]

[siablo14]

Probably. But it’s still happening in Saudi Arabia.

http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/SaudiArabia.htm

Yeah man. Just another example of American hypocrisy since they consider Saudia Arabia an ally.

[Zaroku]

Yeah man. Just another example of American hypocrisy since they consider Saudia Arabia an ally.

Exactly. Sadam used to be our guy, until he ****ed with America’s money in Kuwait(first gulf war) then after crippling economic sanctions Sadam was going to sell his oil for euros, gold, yen, etc. that’s why we deposed him. America needs to make people buy dollars to buy oil, and Saudi is down with that, as long as we protect the house of Saud!

[Zaroku]

Yeah man. Just another example of American hypocrisy since they consider Saudia Arabia an ally.

The whole point of this thread was that Mohammed Ali had a great name, and he was named after a great man. A man who lived an amazing life, and forced Lincoln to emancipate the slaves, Cassius Marcellus Clay!

That man was a history changer for sure!

[Zaroku]

I think you are being romantic and I give you my reason:
Would you rather like that war captives to be killed rather than to be enslaved?
Banning enslavement would never be accepted after all, why wouldn't you enslave those who would enslave you?
Islam doesn't let you enslave another Muslim and encourages you to free a slave every time you do something wrong to gain God's forgiveness, God just favours those who free a slave. It's repeated so many times in El Quran.
Islam has progressively ended slavery in the region, when was the last time people in the East owned slaves in a significant scale? Can you compare by any means the number of enslaved people by Muslims to and Europeans?

I know Islam doesn’t allow for the enslavement of other Muslims. I’ve read that too. But, don’t you think many of the slaves taken were not involved in wars against Islam? I know in theory that Muslims were supposed to free a slave as an act of atonement after doing something wrong, but how many Muslims actually practiced this in reality? How many Muslims do you know that pay Zakat? There is always a big divide between what one ought to do, and what one actually does.

Question: don’t you think the avg slave would gladly convert to Islam quickly to gain his freedom? That seems obvious to me, and maybe most people. Words vs deeds. I’d say the shahada and become a Muslim right away and avoid slavery. Who wouldn’t?

Many people didn’t start wars against Muslims, but tried to defend themselves. No crime there, right?

Here’s Thomas Sowell telling the truth about Islam and slavery.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrfjUzYvPo

He’s quite knowledgeable, but keep an open mind.

Lastly, I’d rather not be attacked, enslaved or forced to become a Muslim.