1b] Slavery in Islam

1b]
Is slavery still legal in Islam?
The answer is that slaveryis legal under Islamic law but only in
theory. Slaveryis illegal under the state law of all Muslim countries.
Theoretically Islamic law lays down that if a personwas captured in a
lawful jihad or was the descendent of an unbroken chain of people who
had been lawfully enslaved, then it might belegal 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 infidelconvictions, 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, eventhough 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
themaintenance of pre-Islamic and other local structures of slavery
even if these ran counter to the prescriptions of thesharia.
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 asif 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
diminishingthe 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 thetime allowed people to beenslaved 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 iftheir 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 beforced 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