Riqq: Bondage in Early Islam and the Sharīʿah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The prisoners of Ḥunayn open the difficult, much-asked question of bondage in early Islam, a topic long delayed, given here only in brief.

❧The word itself

The shaykh avoids the English term "slavery," which is historically loaded: it summons the image of American chattel slavery of two centuries ago, honestly among the worst manifestations of the institution in human history, harsher than even the Romans practised, a form that never existed in Islamic history. Better to use the Arabic riqq or ʿubūdiyyah, and to weigh the matter from two angles: within the context of its own age, and against the modern world's abolition of the institution.

❧In its own time, Islam reformed it

Bondage was then universal, Roman, Greek, Chinese, Indian, Arabian, and no society had ever banned it. Islam was the first to legislate it under checks and balances. First, it restricted the source to one only: prisoners of a legitimate war between states who go unransomed, whereas every other civilization allowed free people to be seized and sold. Second, it commanded humane treatment, "your bondservants are your brothers (إِخْوَانُكُمْ خَوَلُكُمْ); feed them from what you eat and clothe them from what you wear", so that often master and servant could not be told apart. Third, it opened many roads to freedom: manumission as the expiation (تَحْرِيرُ رَقَبَةٍ) for a false oath, for breaking a Ramaḍān fast, and more; and وَفِي الرِّقَابِ, freeing the enslaved, as one of the eight categories of Zakāt. Fourth, freeing a person was made among the highest virtues, a way to free oneself from Jahannam, so ʿĀʾishah and others would seek out captives to free. Fifth, and remarkably, the Sharīʿah regulates the institution without requiring it: remove bondage entirely and Islamic law stands whole, which shows it was never meant to be permanent. No scholar today calls for its return.

❧The hardest part, and its reforms

As to conjugal relations with a female captive (amah), a rule every prior society shared, with references in the Old and New Testaments, and in our own lineage through Hājar, the Qurʾān still reformed it: she must be his alone (forbidding the Jāhilī practice of hiring her out); a child of such a union is 100% equal to a child of marriage, as Ismāʿīl and Isḥāq are equal, so that the majority of the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphs were sons of such mothers, without stigma; and the mother herself is at once upgraded to umm al-walad, no longer to be sold or transferred, and freed automatically upon her master's death. A framework unknown to any other civilization. And note that the Prophet ﷺ himself never kept a personal bondservant: every servant he had, he freed, and many then attached themselves to him of their own will. (Māriyah al-Qibṭiyyah was not a servant of his, and there is ikhtilāf over whether she accepted Islam, to be taken up later.)