Slavery, History, and the Modern Question

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The story of Māriyah forces the question of slavery, and it is a topic impossible to speak of without bias. We are all biased in one direction, we believe this man to be a prophet, and that is a legitimate bias: we therefore take what he did as permitted and sanctioned by Allah for its time, even where the Ummah has since moved on. If you do not share that belief, it is not my task to convince you through the story of Māriyah.

❧"Look at Solomon"

When a Christian or Jew asks how our Prophet ﷺ could have wives and a concubine, the Muslim reflex is to point at the Biblical prophets, and it is a fair point to a believing Christian or Jew. The Bible has Ibrāhīm and Mūsā, and Dāwūd with over seven hundred and Sulaymān with over a thousand women between wives and concubines. How then criticise a man who for more than twenty-five years had but one wife, and married nine only in his fifties and sixties?

But in our age there are few believing Christians and Jews, and the agnostic simply answers that those figures were wrong too, so the appeal to the past fails with him. To him the most one can say is that it was a different world, a different time and custom and role, and that peoples across the globe held different views of this. Researching this the shaykh came upon a Jewish question-and-answer site, their equivalent of an IslamQA, where a man asked Rabbi Perry Rank of New York how he could remain a Jew given that Solomon used a hundred thousand slaves to build the Temple. The rabbi answered that history tends to be brutal and strips us of our cherished illusions; that forced labour was an accepted institution for thousands of years, that our disillusionment with it is only some three hundred years old and, in America, about a hundred and fifty; that the Torah laid down extensive rules to humanise it; and that to read antiquity through contemporary eyes and then judge it is not fair to our ancestors. He was careful to say this is no defence of slavery, he too is a child of the anti-slavery age, and the shaykh agrees with every word of it. You cannot look through the lens of 2014 at 620 CE and expect them to have arrived where we have.

❧American slavery, and Islamic

Here something must be said plainly, not as sugar-coating but as fact. The slavery practised in America in the 1800s is perhaps the most brutal manifestation the institution has ever known, free people seized and imported, used worse than cattle, held to be less than human; even the ancient Greeks treated their slaves better. And precisely because it was so savage, the abolitionist movement rose against it, and rightly so.

But slavery did not exist in Islamic lands as it did in America. There were slaves, of course, this is not to deny it, but the first Europeans to visit Ottoman and Muslim lands were astonished at how gently the slaves were treated compared to their own countries; one remarked at a slave answering back to his master, arguing to have his work reduced. And in our history slaves rose to become kings: the Mamlūks, mamlūk means "owned," the slave dynasty, were the very rulers who broke the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan's line, and ruled much of the Muslim world for nearly five hundred years until Napoleon, whose guns defeated their swords. A dynasty of slaves who became caliphs.

❧Boko Haram, ISIS, and the scholars

If someone still wants to find fault, that is the perspective of 2014 projected back onto 610, and there is nothing to be done about it; as a Muslim who holds this man to be a prophet of Allah, I accept that it was acceptable for its time and place. The matter is compounded today by extremist groups, Boko Haram, ISIS, who seize and enslave innocent women and claim to be following the Prophet ﷺ. This is ludicrous, because what they do is itself ḥarām. The Sharīʿah forbids uncategorically the taking of a free person as a slave; the one lawful channel was prisoners of war not ransomed off. To raid a Christian village and seize schoolgirls in broad daylight, or to do what ISIS does to Yazidi families, what crime did they commit, what jihād is being waged, who is the caliph, where are the prisoners of war? It is pure ḥarām.

And the scholars of our era have agreed that slavery is a thing of the past. The shaykh knows of no ʿālim calling for its return. One example he knows for certain: his own teacher, Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn, reckoned very conservative, was asked during the Bosnian war of the early nineties, a war everyone acknowledges was a legitimate defence against the Serb massacres, by men on the ground who held prisoners they could not ransom: may we take them as milk al-yamīn? And he answered: no, this is not permitted in our times. A faqīh who understood that this is not something to be resurrected from the books of fiqh. It was permitted for its time; it is not to be brought back.