Slavery was a fact of the world into which the Quran came, as it was in Rome, Persia and Arabia. It rested on war captives, debt and birth, and it was assumed by every legal system of the age. A fair account asks what the Islamic sources did to it, and what they did not do.
The six sections below set out the texts on manumission, captives, contracts of freedom and the treatment of slaves, then the record of former slaves in high office and the position of scholars today. The hard parts are stated along with the favourable ones: the Quran regulated the institution and never abolished it by name.
The Quran asks “What will make you know the steep path? It is the freeing of a slave.”[1] Elsewhere it lists freeing slaves among the marks of true righteousness. Freeing a slave is the expiation for breaking an oath, for killing by mistake and for breaking the fast of Ramadan, and it is a use of zakāh (the obligatory alms) funds.[2] No other institution in the Quran has so many exits written in.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is reported to have said that whoever frees a believing slave, God will free from the Fire a limb of his for each limb of the slave.[3] The Companions acted on this: freeing slaves was a common act of piety in the first generations, and the jurists wrote a full chapter of law on manumission.
The strongest objection is that these texts assume the institution will continue, since there must be slaves for the expiations to free. That is true as a description of seventh-century society. What the texts do is create a steady demand for freedom and attach religious reward to it, while the sources of new slaves are narrowed in the entries that follow.
It gives two options for captives of war: “either release as a favour or ransom.”[4] Enslavement is not one of them. The verse comes right after the instruction to fight, and it governs what happens once the fighting has ended.
The objection is that Muslims did enslave captives. They did. Classical jurists held that the ruler could choose among several options for prisoners, which for many of them included enslavement, and they based this on the practice of the Prophet and the Companions.[5] The Quran also recognises “what your right hands possess” as a legal category and permits sexual relations with female slaves within it.[6] The biographical literature records captives ransomed after Badr and others released without payment.
Many modern scholars read the matter differently. They hold that the Quran’s two options bind the believers, and that the older practice was the custom of the age, kept in step with the enemy’s custom of enslaving Muslim captives, which no longer applies.
“Those of your slaves who seek a contract of freedom, write it for them if you know good in them, and give them of God’s wealth.”[7] This is the mukātaba, a contract under which the slave works and pays for his own freedom, and the owner is told to write it. Most jurists took the command as recommended, while a minority, including the Zahiri school, held it binding on the owner when the slave asked and was trustworthy.
The sources record that the Prophet encouraged it. Salman al-Farisi, a Persian, bought his freedom by contract, and the Prophet helped him by having his Companions bring date-palm shoots and by planting them himself.[8] The funds of zakah can be used to pay, since the Quran lists those in bondage among its recipients.
The same verse forbids owners to force their slave girls into prostitution for money. Commentators report that it was revealed about Abdullah ibn Ubayy, who did exactly that.[9] The objection is that a contract still treats a person as property. The reply from the text is that it gave the slave a recognised route to freedom, backed by a Quranic command, by the Prophet’s encouragement and by public funds, even where the majority of jurists left the final decision to the owner.
The Prophet said: “They are your brothers. God has put them under your hand. Let him who has his brother under his hand feed him from what he eats and clothe him from what he wears, and not burden him beyond his capacity.”[10] The Quran lists kindness to “those your right hands possess” beside kindness to parents and neighbours.[11] A master who struck his slave was told to free him as expiation.[12]
A woman who bore her master’s child became an umm walad and could not be sold, and was free on his death. The majority of jurists held this, though some early authorities differed and the rule was settled over time.
None of this made slave and free equal in law, and the sources do not claim it did. A slave woman who committed a grave offence faced half the penalty of a free woman, which the Quran states, and slaves had weaker standing in several areas of the law.[13] The rights listed here limited what an owner could do. They did not turn the slave into a legal equal.
Bilal, a former slave from Abyssinian stock, was the first muezzin, chosen by the Prophet to give the call to prayer. Zayd ibn Haritha, a freed slave whom the Prophet adopted before the adoption was abolished by revelation, commanded armies. His son Usama was appointed to lead an army in the Prophet’s last illness, with senior Companions serving under him.[14]
The pattern continued. The Mamluk dynasty ruled Egypt and Syria for over two and a half centuries, the Delhi Sultanate had a “slave dynasty”, and several generals of the caliphs were freed slaves.[15] Soldiers of slave origin were trained, freed and promoted until they held the state.
The objection is fair: these are the exceptions that history remembers. Most slaves laboured in households, fields and workshops, and some endured great hardship. The revolt of the Zanj, African slaves who worked draining salt marshes in southern Iraq in the ninth century, lasted about fourteen years and shows how bad conditions could be.[16] The record shows that Islamic law and society had no colour bar on high office. It does not show that slavery under Muslim rule was mild.
Muslim scholars today hold slavery to be forbidden. The conditions that justified it, which were the exchange of captives in war, no longer exist. States have bound themselves by treaty not to enslave prisoners, and Islamic law requires that agreements be kept.[17] International law and the laws of every Muslim country prohibit it, and fatwas by scholars condemn the groups that revived it.
The practice ended late in some places. Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished it in 1962, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1981.[18] In 2014, 126 Muslim scholars signed an open letter to the leader of ISIS which says that slavery was abolished by consensus, and condemns the enslavement of Yazidi women.[19] Reformers including Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida argued earlier that the Quran’s direction of travel was toward the end of the institution.
The strongest objection is that the Quran never says “abolish”. The scholarly answer rests on the structure of the law. The permitted sources of slavery had been reduced to one, the captive of a war between states, and a state that has renounced the practice by treaty has no lawful way to acquire a slave.
The bottom line
The sources did three things with an institution that was universal in their world. They closed most of the routes into it, opened many routes out of it, and attached rights and religious reward to treating slaves well. They also left the institution standing, regulated concubinage and the sale of persons, and for centuries Muslim societies kept slaves and traded in them, sometimes harshly.
The plain conclusion is that the Quran and the Prophet moved the law in one direction, toward freedom, and that the scholars of today have taken it to its end point. Anyone who uses the texts to defend slavery now contradicts the consensus of the scholars. Anyone who claims Islam never permitted it at all has to ignore what the classical jurists wrote.
Notes
- Quran 90:12–13; see also 2:177.
- Quran 5:89; 4:92; 9:60; Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Fasting, on the man who broke the fast of Ramadan. Sahih al-Bukhari 1936 (Book of Fasting, “Sexual intercourse with one’s wife in Ramadan and the expiation for it”), report of Abu Hurayra, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 4, p. 163 (Shamela text).
- Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Book of Manumission. Sahih al-Bukhari 2517 (Book of Manumission), report of Abu Hurayra, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 5, p. 146 (Shamela text).
- Quran 47:4.
- See al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya, on the ruler’s choice regarding captives; the schools differed on details.
- Quran 23:5–6; 70:29–30.
- Quran 24:33.
- Musnad Ahmad, the account of Salman al-Farisi; the Quran lists those in bondage as recipients of zakah at 9:60.
- Sahih Muslim, the report on the occasion of Quran 24:33. Sahih Muslim 3029a (Book of Commentary on the Quran, “Force not your maids to prostitution”), report of Jabir, checked on sunnah.com.
- Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Sahih Muslim 1661a (Book of Oaths), report of Abu Dharr, checked on sunnah.com.
- Quran 4:36.
- Sahih Muslim, Book of Oaths. Sahih Muslim 1657a, report of Ibn Umar: “He who slaps his slave or beats him, the expiation for it is that he should set him free”, checked on sunnah.com.
- Quran 4:25.
- Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Military Expeditions (Maghazi), on the battle of Mu’ta and the expedition of Usama. Sahih al-Bukhari 4261, report of Abdullah ibn Umar, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 7, p. 510 (Shamela text).
- David Ayalon, Studies on the Mamluks of Egypt.
- Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century.
- Quran 5:1; 16:91.
- Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- “Open Letter to Dr. Ibrahim Awwad al-Badri, alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” 2014.