Slavery in Islamic Law: Difference between revisions

Slavery was a widespread institution in antiquity and a major topic of Islamic legal jurisprudence, which addressed matters of buying and selling slaves, rights of owners including sexual relations, marriage, and many other facets. The two legitimate sources of slaves agreed upon by the Ulama were captives taken in war, and children born to slaves (unless the slave-owner was the father), though in practice various other means of slave acquisition occurred. The Quran assumes the existence of slavery and grants sexual access to slave owners, including for the prophet himself to enjoy from among the war-captives in his possession, as well as control over their marital status. It commands taking captives from the defeated disbelievers, though also that they be ransomed or released until the war is over, and encourages owners to grant contracts by which virtuous slaves may purchase their freedom, a practice also found in other late antique cultures. Slavery was a major feature of the Islamic world for over a thousand years. Largely as a result of pressure from colonial powers as well as economic and demographic changes, slavery was eventually made illegal throughout the Muslim world in the 19th and 20th centuries (though as of the 2020s persists illegally in a few places such as Mauritania<ref>As of the early 2020s, human rights groups estimate that 20% of the population are still enslaved including children https://www.newarab.com/features/modern-day-child-slaves-mauritania<BR />Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, but only criminalised slave ownership in 2007 and introduced punishment in 2015</ref>), and is now considered forbidden in the modern context by most scholars, though a minority argue that slavery remains Islamically legitimate.<ref>"Although the vast majority of contemporary Muslims agree that there is no place for slavery in the modern world, and some nineteenth and twentieth-century reformers such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan opposed the practice, the pressure to abolish slavery generally came from some combination of European colonial powers and economic and demographic shifts [...] Although abolition did eventually occur, there was not a strong internally developed critique of slaveholding based in religious principles."<BR />Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, London: Oneworld Publications, 2006, pp. 42 ff.</ref>

==Sources of slaves==

===In the Quran and hadiths===

===War captives and children born into slavery as the legitimate sources===

===Other sources of slaves in practice===

===Exemption for People of the Book subject to Muslim rule===

==Manumission of slaves==

==Other rights and protections==

==Manumission and other slave rights in wider late antiquity==

==Lack of sexual consent and slave marriages==

===In the Quran===

===In Islamic law===

Shafi'i - concerned, as with the minor non-virgin, with making sure every legal claim was respected - diverged on both points. He disallowed the master's after-the-fact ratification of a slaves' marriage. But not only was the master's permission vital for a valid contract, so was the slave's explicit consent: the contract was null if either had not consented in advance. Gender interacted with enslavement to define a male slave's agency for Shafi'i. As a slave, he could not marry without his master's permission, but as a man, he could not be compelled to marry. A certain irreducible masculinity prevented an adult male slave from losing the right to sexual self-determination for Shafi'i; he explicitly contrasts the male slave with a female slave, who was perpetually subject to coercion.<BR />

==Slave markets, harems, and eunuchs==

A number of hadiths relate anecdotes about Umar (the second caliph) and his son Ibn Umar, who was likewise a companion of the prophet, in relation to slave women and slave markets. Umar reportedly struck a slave woman for wearing a jilbab over her head because this was only to be worn by free believing women. Ibn Umar is reported to have routinely touched the breasts and buttocks of slave girls in the market when he wished to buy them. Imam Malik (d. 795 CE) reportedly complained of the slave-women of Medina going about with uncovered breasts. See [[Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Slavery]] for the relevant hadith reports which have been graded sahih by various scholars.

In his book ''Slavery & Islam'', Jonathan Brown writes, "Despite the objection of some Muslim scholars like Shayrazi (d. 1193-4), it seems to have been routine in Islamic civilization for buyers at slave markets to press on the buttocks and breasts of potential ''jariyas'' [slave girls]. Sometimes buyers even examined the genitals of male or' female slaves, though papyri of sale contracts from the 800s to 900s frequently include boiler-plate language suggesting they were not. Ultimately, slave women were sexually vulnerable and at the mercy of their masters."<ref>Jonathan Brown, ''Slavery & Islam'', Oneworld publications, 2019, p. 132</ref>

In Islamic law, the 'awrah of a woman are the areas of her body which must be covered in the presence of non-mahrams (men other than close relatives). Jurists did not require slave-women to be covered like free Muslim women based on their interpretation of {{Quran|33|59}}, allowing a slave's hair, arms and part of her legs to be uncovered. Many even considered a slave woman's 'awrah to be only from her navel to her knees. Khaled Abou El Fadl covers the detailed opinions in his book, ''Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women''.<ref>Khaled Abou el Fadl, ''Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women'', 2001, pp. 525-526 and endnotes 123-129</ref> Oliver Leaman and Kecia Ali summarise the situation: "Khaled Abou El Fadl points out that jurists disagreed as to whether enslaved women's breasts constituted ''awrah'' and had to be covered in public."<ref>Oliver Leaman and Kecia Ali, ''Islam: The Key Concepts", 2010, London: Routledge, p. 14</ref>

Beginning with the Umayyads, muslim caliphs were often famed for the very large numbers of concubines at their disposal, which also required the use of eunuch slaves who could be trusted not to engage sexually with them. In his book ''Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History'', El-Azhari Taef El-Azhari notes that "Like his father [Caliph Abd al-Malik, d. 705 CE], Caliph al-Walid owned a large number of concubines". Furthermore he writes, "Other Umayyad governors followed the pattern of their caliphs in their use of eunuchs. One example is Ibn Qutn, the governor of Andalusia in 733; he owned some 700 female slaves and a number of eunuchs. Clearly, the larger the harem became, the more eunuchs were employed for their service and protection." In the Abbasid era, Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861) "owned 4,000 concubines, in addition to other ''jawari'' [female slaves]". Caliph al-Muqtadir (d. 932) had vast numbers of eunuchs and "thousands of other jawari and concubines, the cost of which depleted the state treasury." Indeed, his court "held the largest number of eunuchs in Islamic history. The 'Abbasid court contained about 11,000 eunuchs: approximately 7,000 black eunuchs and approximately 4,000 white Saqaliba (Slavs), in additon to 4,000 ''jawari''". <ref>El-Azhari Taef El-Azhari, ''Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History'', Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 70-71, 158-162</ref>

William-Gervase Clarence-Smith observes, "By having sexual relations with a handful of women drawn from a vast harem, a master denied a family life to numerous unwanted concubines. In effect, he condemned them to a 'system of involuntary imprisonment,' together with their many female slaves. Chafing at enforced chastity, women might commit adultery, or engage in homosexual relations."<ref>W. G. Clarence-Smith, ''Islam and the Abolition of Slavery'', p. 89</ref> He further notes that Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia owned 3,000 slaves and "he distributed slave girls to his close collaborators."<ref>Ibid. p. 181</ref>

El-Azhari Taef El-Azhari writes, "Eunuchs were used in the Umayyad dynasty from the first to the last caliph in different numbers and capacities. We know that the Prophet had one eunuch, although we do not know if he was a castrated eunuch or a ''majbub'' [entire genitalia removed] (the difference is significant as the first type is still capable of copulation, as will be analysed later." He goes on to explain the utility of eunuchs when there is a harem in servicing parts of the palaces where males were not allowed. This was practiced also by some other ancient civilizations. He adds, "Although castration was forbidden in Islam, as the Prophet rejected the concept of resisting desire, as already mentioned, it was not prohibited to own one or more eunuchs. The act of castration was carried out mainly in early Islamic history in Spain and Byzantium from where white eunuchs were imported, and also Abyssinia and Taykur, Africa, from where black eunuchs were bought. This savage, inhumane practice was not condemned by Muslim laws at any age or time, which is surprising, given that it was an act of alteration to God's creation; the Quran had emphasised that the human being was created to best stature (mould) (Q. 95:4). The prophet's approval of female genital cutting, as mentioned earlier, may be compared here to approval to mutilate the human body permanently, resulting in dire psychophysical consequences."<ref>El-Azhari Taef El-Azhari, ''Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History'', pp. 68-69</ref>

{{Quote|John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue'', p. 178<ref>John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue'', Oxford: Oneworld, 2001, ebook edition published 2014, p. 178</ref>|The operation, done on boys aged between eight and ten, though prohibited under Islam, was carried out with an exceedingly high death rate. Gustav Nachtigal was told that on the whole about 30 per cent survived the operation in Bagirmi, while other estimates put the mortality rate at up to 80 per cent. This barbaric act was made particularly cruel for black victims in that, in contrast to their white counterparts whose operation did not deny them the ability to perform coitus, the castration of blacks involved what was popularly referred to as ‘level with the abdomen’, i.e. a complete amputation of the genitalia.}}

A common and entirely modern claim is that Islam was intended to gradually eradicate slavery. In his book, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', John Azumah argues that if such a view is entertained, Islam failed to the greatest extent imaginable to produce such ends. Slavery was so integral to the religious, cultural and economic life of certain Muslim societies in Africa that despite British colonial anti-slavery policies elsewhere, in such places colonial laws allowed the continued legal status of existing slaves, though stopped slave raiding and trading. In Sudan, abolition was seen as an interference against their way of life and opposed to Islam.<ref>John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue'', Oxford: Oneworld, 2001, ebook edition published 2014, pp. 141-2, 174.</ref> He also observes that Islam brought an ideology of slavery to Africa for the first time with the main justification for slavery being ''kufr'', or disbelief.<ref>Ibid. pp. 144-9. This has been recognised also by other scholars, though controversially, Azumah argues with quotes from medieval texts that there was in addition a racist dimension to this ideology (pp. 149-161), and that slavery was marginal in Africa prior to becoming an institution under Islamic rule (pp. 131-137). Both of those claims have been criticized by Clarence-Smith as misleading (while acknowledging that there were undoubtably racist views) or for ignoring some important scholarship on pre-Islamic slavery in Africa. Clarence-Smith, W. G. (2003). [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1581854 Review of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-Religious Dialogue, by J. A. Azumah]. Journal of Religion in Africa, 33(3), 334–336.</ref>

Enslavement of traditional black Africans occurred from the beginnings of Islam and throughout Islamic history. It became even more intense in the 18th and 19th-century jihad periods, while the East African slave trade expanded when the Sultan of Oman, Said bin Sultan (d. 1856), moved his capital to Zanzibar and established plantation farming there.<ref>Ibid. pp.162, 165, 167</ref> Mohammed Bashir Salau observes that the Jihad of Usman dan Fodio against the Hausa kingdoms of Northern Nigeria resulted in the Sokoto Caliphate with millions of non-Muslim slaves, one of the largest slaveholding societies in the world.<ref>Mohammed Bashir Salau, [https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/126/1/429/6244003 Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study]. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018</ref> While detailing each of the various Muslim slave caravan routes in Africa, John Azumah quotes accounts from 19th century eyewitnesses:

{{Quote|John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', pp.162-3|Muslim Arabs were the chief agents of the traffic of black Africans as slaves from East and Central Africa into the Islamic heartlands virtually right from the seventh century.

The route from the interior of Africa through Lake Tanganyika to the coast was littered with skeletons as a result of slaves dying from exhaustion, hunger or the brutality of their couriers, sometimes still yoked together. Deaths during the journeys were so numerous that it has been estimated that for every slave who reached the coast in Zanzibar four or five lives were lost in transit. An Arab slave dealer, by name Syeb-bin-Habib, is reported in 1882 to have admitted that out of 300 slaves he acquired from the interior, only 50 reached the coast alive. David Livingstone observed that if the slaughter committed during the raids is taken into account in addition to the deaths along the routes, then the price of every single slave who arrived at Zanzibar would be about ten lives.}}

After detailing the Trans-Saharan slave route, he writes:

{{Quote|John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', pp. 165-6|Many eyewitness accounts talk in very sobering terms of the loss of life along the route. One such account given by an eyewitness in 1822 talks about a well near Bir Mushuru where ‘the ground around is strewed with human skeletons, the slaves who have arrived exhausted with thirst and fatigue’. At one spot there were ‘more than one hundred skeletons’. Gustav Nachtigal talked about littered skeletons and ‘half-buried in the sand the mummified corpses of some children, still covered with the blue cotton rags’ at the same well. At other wells referred to as ‘the wells of El Hammar’, the skeletons were countless. The route itself was equally littered with skeletons accumulated at the rate of eighty and ninety a day.

The methods of killing exhausted or sick slaves and those who attempted to escape in East Africa were also used on the trans-Saharan route. Nachtigal accompanied a caravan of hundreds of slaves from Bagirmi to the slave markets of Kuka and witnessed exhausted and sick slaves being slaughtered and their arteries cut open. After such horrid experiences, Nachtigal pointed out that ‘in estimating the weight of the burden placed by the slave trade on its Pagan victims, it had to be borne in mind that for every one who arrived at Kuka there were probably three to four who died or disappeared on the way’.

A French observer estimated that the price for one slave sold in the slave markets of North Africa might represent the loss of ten others who were killed in the raids or died in transit. Apart from this significantly high loss of life during the raids and the journey into servitude, conservative estimates suggest that between eleven and fourteen million Africans were transported into Muslim lands outside tropical Africa over the past fourteen centuries.}}

Azumah writes of slave markets in Mecca:

{{Quote|John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', pp. 166-7|The holiest city of Islam, Mecca, became ‘the centre of the slave-trade in the world’ and remained so well into the twentieth century; from there slaves captured and brought from East Africa and the Sudan were distributed to all parts of Arabia and the Muslim world. [...] The buying and selling of slaves went on in the slave markets of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman, most especially in Mecca, well into the twentieth century. As late as 1960 some Tuareg notables were reported to have sold slaves in Arabia to defray part of the expense of their pilgrimage.}}

In 1962 when Slavery was abolished in the Kingdom, "United Nations anti-slavery reports estimated between 100,000 and 250,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia at the time", while the overthrow of the ruler of Oman in 1970 revealed some 500 slaves kept by the sultan in his palace.<ref>John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'',  p. 174</ref> An American documentary filmed in 1964 and widely available on Youtube shows the continued existence of illegal slave markets in Saudi Arabia a couple of years after the official abolition.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds2kliM2Yb4 Slave market in Arabia (1964)] - Youtube.com</ref>

A number of myths about the historical facts of slavery under Islamic rule are commonly propogated in Islamic apologetics discourse as well as by some credulous Western academic authors. These tend to be misplaced theoretical assumptions based on rules for the treatment of slaves in Islamic texts, or because various travellers observed that slaves serving as domestic servants were generally loyal and treated well. Others point to the potential for slaves to advance to positions of military, political and even economic power. However, Azumah points out that unlike the Mamluks (a dynasty established by slave-generals which ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250-1517 CE), being a eunuch was "virtually the only route by which a black could attain high office’ of any kind within the Muslim world outside black Africa." Moreover, while most slaves in Muslim lands were destined to be domestic servants, many female slaves were used as concubines (especially but not only in harems), and significant percentages of slaves were put to work on plantations, as infantry, or were castrated to serve as eunuchs.<ref>John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', p. 175</ref> Slaves put to work on plantations were treated with harshness and cruelty:

{{Quote|John Alembillah Azumah, ''The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa'', pp. 181-182|As early as the ninth century, the Zanj, according to the great Arab historian al-Tabari, were employed in gangs of between 500 and 5000 in the salt marshes of southern Iraq. Al-Tabari observes that their condition was ‘extremely bad’ and that they were literally pinned down there, hopeless and homeless’. Their reward consisted of ‘a few handfuls of meal’. Their miserable condition led to several rebellions, the fiercest of which lasted for fifteen years from 868 to 883 CE.

A nineteenth-century eyewitness described the condition of slaves in the Persian Gulf regions as ‘a dreadful thing’; he went on to state that ‘perhaps the worst part of the whole thing is the pearl-diving’. The stronger male slaves were chosen for the task:

::And before they dive for the pearl oysters a clip is put on their nose to prevent their breathing. They then jump out of the boat, armed with a hammer and a light basket, and on coming to surface pass the oysters into the boat, and after a whiff of air are sent down again. If they don’t succeed in sending up a certain number of oysters they get severely beaten. Before long their lungs begin to give way, and then it is soon all over with them.

A twentieth-century eyewitness described the same situation as ‘a repulsive and dreadful thing. Men and women live on the level of animals. As little is spent on them as possible, they being regarded simply as pieces of equipment for pearl diving’. It has equally been pointed out that slaves in North Africa in general and Egypt in particular worked naked on starvation rations and in the unbearable climatic conditions, as a result of which they died by the hundreds, if not thousands.

Within tropical Africa itself, Muslim states and communities used slaves extensively in peasant and large-scale agricultural production. The condition of slaves throughout such Muslim communities was anything but mild. In 1820, Rene Callie reported numerous slave-based plantations in the Senegambian region where slaves lived in several small slave villages. Callié accompanied one of his Muslim hosts to his rice plantation and described the condition of the slave workers in the following words: ‘The poor slaves work entirely naked, exposed to the heat of the burning sun. The presence of the master intimidates them, and the fear of punishment expedites the work ... the women, who had little clothing, had their children tied to their backs.’ Reporting on massive Maraka slave desertions during the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, one French administrator noted: ‘If the Maraka had treated their slaves with less stinginess in their food [ration] and with more humanity in their customary relations, then escapes would have been less frequent.’

In Zanzibar, it is well known that slaves who advanced in age or became ill, and were of no economic value, were left to fend for themselves, and most of them ended up destitute and starved to death. Some were brutally killed by their masters and their bodies thrown by the seaside.}}