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

1a] Slavery in Islam

1a]
Muslim slavery was not just economic
Unlike the Western slave trade, slavery in Islam was not wholly
motivatedby economics.
Although some Muslim slaves were used as productive labour it was not
generally on the samemass scale as in the West but in smaller
agricultural enterprises, workshops, building, mining and transport.
Slaves were also taken formilitary 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 slaveryin 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.:->

1] Slavery in Islam

1]
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 isnow 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
varioustimes, 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
ancientlegal 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 bythe 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 asproperty
*. 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
slavesa virtuous act
*. Islam barred Muslims from enslaving other Muslims
But the essential nature ofslavery 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 ledto the freeing of slaves created a
demand for newslaves 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
freeingslaves 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.

Some hadeeses

1] On Friday
On one Friday, Rasulullah ( Allah bless him & give him peace) said: "O
Muslims! Allah Ta'ala has made this day a day of eid . So have a bath
on this day, whoever has perfume should apply it, and use the miswaak.
" ( Ibn Majah )/
2] Auspiciousness of tears
It is related by Abdullah bin Masood that the Apostle of God said:
"The tears that fall from the eyes of a truthful Believer, out of the
fear of the Lord, and, then, roll down his face, however little they
are, even of the size of a fly [i.e., just one drop], shall prevent
the Fire of Hell from [touching] his face."
- Ibn Majah
Commentary
It shows that the face that gets wet, at any time, withtears shed in
response to the fear of the Lord will remain protected from theFire of
Hell .
When the happy tidings ofprotection against the Fire of Hell are given
in a Tradition, as a result of performing a virtuous deed, it,
generally, means that it is the characteristic attribute of that deed,
andGod will keep him safe from the infernal Fire who will carry it out
provided that he is not guilty of a mortal sin which calls for the
punishment of Fire, or if he has ever committed asin entailing
damnation, he has offered sincere repentance for it and resolved not
to do it again.It must not be taken for anattempt at explaining away a
difficulty but even in our common parlance such a condition is
supposed to be implied with a promise or assurance of that kind./
3] Do not be Envious of the Prosperity of an Evil Doer
Abu Hurayrah radhiyallahuanhu relates that the Apostle of Allah
sallallahu alayhi wasallam said:You should never be envious ofan
evil-doer (an infidel or a pervert) because of a blessing or
prosperity. Youdo not know what suffering he is going to endure after
death . At Allah's place (i.e., in the Hereafter) there is a killer
for him that will not die.
The narrator, Abdullah ibne Abi Maryam who related it, on the
authorityof AbuÊHurayrah radhiyallahu anhu says, "By 'killer', the
Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam meant the Fire of Hell (ie. the
evil-doer is going to live in Hell forever. To be envious of such a
man is rank foolishness and ignorance)."
(Baghawi)
Commentary
Often when a truthful Believer, who is spending his days in pain and
poverty, sees some wickedand godless person surrounded with comfort
and luxuries, the devil putsvarious doubts into his heart, or, at
least, he begins to feel envious of his happy circumstances. But it is
the height of ingratitude to Allah. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi
wasallam, in this Tradition,has warned that no believing person should
grudge the short-lived happiness and prosperity of those who are
devoid ofthe blessings of faith and good-doing because, after all,
they are going to undergo the torment of Fire in the Hereafter.
If the bitter end which is awaiting those unfortunate men can be
known, material comfort and physical pleasures they are enjoying will
appear to be no better than the special consideration that is shown to
those who are sentenced to death a few days before their execution.
This, exactly, is the nature of the prosperity and bodily enjoyment of
the rebels against Allah in the sight of the bondsmen who are blessed
with faith in the reality of the Hereafter, as related by the
Apostles. They do not view with envy their wealth and comfort but are
thankful to Allah that by endowing them with Faith He has saved them
from the frightful chastisement thatis in store for the impudent
slaves of the flesh.
The humble writer has known faithful bondsmen who, on seeing godless
men of the world, spontaneously recited the prayer of gratitude and
thankfulness to the Lord the sacred Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam
used to say when he saw anyone in distress: Praise be to the Lord who
saved me from that with which He hath inflicted thee, and made be
better than manyof His creatures./