But wouldn't it better to just free them? Maybe I'm just looking at it from my view but I'd rather be free than a slave that is treated fairly. Imagine how being a slave would affect your pysche. You'd pretty much be dirt.
Dr. Jonathan Brown:
consent. They were conceived of as harm inflicted on the wife. And in Islamic history wives could and did go to courts to complain and get judges to order husbands to desist and pay damages. So yes, non-consensual sex is wrong and forbidden in Islam. But the operating element to punish marital rape fell under the concept of harm, not non-consent.
5) Slavery in Islam: Muslims began curtailing slavery early on. In the 1000s, the great Persian scholar Juwayni gave a fatwa that slave girls captured in Central Asia should not be sold as concubines. In the 1780s, the scholar-king of Senegal Abd al-Qadir Kan abolished slavery in his realm and banned the French from slave trading there (note: this preceded the beginning of organized abolition in Britain. In fact, the first abolitionists cited Kan as a model ruler). In 1846 (before Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation), Ahmad Bey, the governor of Tunis, banned the slave trade there and emancipated all slaves in his realm. By 1900, many leading Muslim scholars had agreed that slavery should be prohibited. As Muslim states signed treaties banning slavery in the early twentieth century, the practice all but disappeared (if you’re thinking, hey, what about bonded laborers today or convicts in America… I agree! That’s the whole point I was making in my paper: don’t get fooled by labels that make slavery invisible, look at the realities behind them. Watch the documentary 13th (link)).
A crucial point is that slavery isn’t one thing. It has varied dramatically across time and space, from the horrors of racist, inhuman chattel slavery on the plantations of the American South to mukataba in the Ottoman Empire. Mukataba was an emancipation contract for a fixed time and with rights to own property and marry; it was closer to being a wageworker in a 19th-century British factory than what we think of as American slavery. In the Islamic world, slaves actually ruled entire states. The ruling dynasty of one empire, the Mamluks, was all slaves. The administrative and military elite of the Ottoman Empire, the most powerful and richest people in the realm, were technically slaves of the Sultan.
In the Quran and Sunnah, the only avenue left for slavery was dealing with people who had been captured in war. All other forms were outright abolished. The Prophet ṣallallāhu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) guaranteed them appropriate food, clothing, shelter and no overly taxing labor. They could be disciplined no more harshly than one’s own kids. The Quran instructed owners to make mukataba agreements with slaves if they were fit and able to make it on their own, and Muslim scholars understood that it was better to keep those who were otherwise too old or unable to fend for themselves as slaves rather than setting them free to starve. The Quran and Sunnah made clear over and over that freeing slaves was one of the best deeds a Muslim could do. The Shariah saw freedom as the natural state (asl) of all humans. And, as the legal maxim stated, the Shariah “aimed towards freedom.”
As Muslims spread out across the globe and new peoples and cultures entered the faith, existing traditions of slavery took on an Islamic veneer. Sometimes the humane values of the Shariah prevailed. Sometimes local customs and systems of exploitation continued, moderated only a little by God’s law. Slavery in Islam was never tied to one race, but in certain times and places it could become racialized, as happened with the prevalence of black African slaves in Egypt in the 1700s-1800s.
Slavery of some sort has existed in almost every human society since the dawn of time. Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, Aristotle and Plato all considered the slavery in their times to be accepted features of life. Islam considered slavery, even in its restricted form, to be an ‘incapacity,’ an injustice (zulm), as the Muslim jurist Shaybani called it around the year 800 CE. But it was an economic and social condition, and it was usually temporary. As economic life changed in the 1800s, Muslim societies saw that this institution could be gotten rid of completely. The great Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abu Zahra summed it up: Islam would welcome a day when slavery was banned.
The deep disgust we feel at slavery is precisely why we need to talk about it. Slavery in Islam raises the critical question of how we as Muslims deal with elements of our tradition that clash with values we feel deeply today. It forces us to think about whether right and wrong change over time. If they do, can we make universal claims about morality? Can we judge people in the past by present-day values, and can the past make moral demands on us today? If, on the other hand, right and wrong are fixed and don’t change over time, then who in history defines them? Jesus or modern human rights? Aristotle or Lincoln? The Quran clearly sought to restrict and regulate slavery in Arabia at the time, and there’s a strong argument that it aimed to end slavery altogether. The Prophet Muhammad ṣallallāhu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) freed every slave given to him. But how do I as a Muslim deal with the fact that God and the Prophet ṣallallāhu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) did not abolish slavery altogether? Would it have been too economically disruptive, so that gradual abolition would be better? This was the answer offered by the famous scholar Rashid Rida, who pointed to the challenges America faced in integrating former slaves after the Civil War.
As a Muslim today, I can say emphatically that slavery is wrong and that Islam prohibits it. This has been the consensus of the ulama, and it’s well within the power of states to prohibit what was previously allowed if doing so serves some public interest (maslaha) (this is known as taqyid al-mubah, restricting the permitted). It’s easy for me to say this looking back on slavery in American history, because American slavery was a manifestation of the absolute domination of one human being by another that is, in my opinion, a universal wrong across time and space.
I actually think it was trying to. No other religious/political movement until very recent history had such emphasis on the virtue of freeing slaves. A slave could even free himself by teaching people how to read/write.
Also
1. There is a daleel to abandon slavery. There is no hasanah in taking a slave but there is in freeing them so 100% it is islamically valid to make slavery haram.
2. Even slavery in those times is not even necessary. The khalifs had four choices.
One to free prisoners of war,
Two to ransom them for freedom ( often happened in prophets time if the slave could teach ten Muslims to read and write he was freed)
Three they are taken as captives (slaves) by the khalifa who would allocate them to individuals.
Four. If there was no possibility of pacifying the male slaves. And the resources of taking them captive is not possible and they are a great risk to Muslims then they can be executed.
In Islam if you hit a slave you must free him. A woman cannot be separated from her child. They must eat what you can and they must wear what you wear. This is not djamgo unchained that shit is always haram.
If you can't even hit them how can you rape them??? Absurd.
Why didn't the prophet just free all war captives? Because he did it twice out if the kindness of his own heart to two Jewish drives during the medinan period and they both reinforced the enemy and posed further risk to Muslims. They don't deserve immediate freedom they were enemies of Muslims who were going to kill them.the critical crime in capitivity the blatant violation of dignity, humiliation, sufferinv etc has always been haram from day one. Only the freedom to leave and go is not there and for justifiable reasons as mentioned ( they are a threat etc)
Slavery (real accurate term is war captive not slavery) is a temporary solution to a problem that only existed in those times.
