Slavery in Islam
A Forensic Demolition of Apologetic Myths
When modern apologists insist that Islam was a progressive force against slavery, they rely on selective memory, strategic omissions, and historical revisionism. The claim usually goes something like this: Islam limited slavery, encouraged manumission, and ultimately planted the seeds of abolition centuries before the West. It sounds noble — until you actually look at the Qur’an, Hadith, and the long, bloody history of Islamic empires. What you find instead is an ideology that normalized, codified, and perpetuated human ownership for over a millennium, while modern defenders perform rhetorical gymnastics to hide it.
This article dismantles that apologetic narrative in detail, exposing the contradictions and missing pieces that revisionists prefer to ignore. Rather than quoting every apologetic sentence, I’ll integrate their arguments into a smooth flow and tear them down point by point, with hard evidence from Islamic sources and history.
The False Frame: "Islam Attacked Slavery"
Apologists love to open with a sweeping declaration: Islam attacked slavery at its root. The claim sounds bold — but it collapses instantly when tested against reality. The Qur’an never abolishes slavery. Instead, it regulates it. The Hadith collections — considered authoritative in Sunni Islam — are riddled with references to owning, buying, selling, and sexually exploiting slaves. The classical jurists of every Islamic school of law built detailed chapters on slavery, outlining conditions of purchase, inheritance, concubinage, and punishment.
In short: the roots of slavery were not cut by Islam. They were watered, pruned, and institutionalized.
The Qur’an’s Silence on Abolition
If Islam were truly opposed to slavery, the Qur’an would say so. Instead, it speaks in matter-of-fact terms about slaves (`abd, amah, raqiq). Surah 23:5–6 permits sexual access to “those whom your right hand possesses.” Surah 4:3 allows men to marry up to four wives and to possess slave women. Surah 4:92 permits manumission of a slave as compensation for involuntary manslaughter — treating slaves as currency of expiation.
Nowhere does the Qur’an command abolition. Nowhere does it declare human ownership illegitimate. Instead, slavery is taken as a given fact of life.
Compare this with alcohol: the Qur’an took progressive steps to phase out drinking, moving from tolerance to condemnation to outright prohibition (5:90). If Allah wanted slavery gone, He could have followed the same model. He didn’t. That silence is deafening.
Manumission: Charity, Not Liberation
Apologists pivot to the Qur’an’s encouragement of freeing slaves as a form of charity. Yes, manumission is praised (90:13, 2:177, 24:33). But praising manumission is not the same as outlawing slavery. In fact, it presupposes slavery’s ongoing existence. A society where people are regularly encouraged to free slaves is a society where slavery is still fully operational.
Moreover, manumission was often tied to sin-expunging rituals — free a slave to atone for breaking an oath, for accidentally killing someone, for failing to fast. This turns the enslaved person into a token of religious bargaining, not an individual with inalienable rights.
The Hadith: Sexual Slavery Codified
Hadith literature demolishes the myth more than anything else. The most famous collections — Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, and others — record Muhammad and his companions capturing women, distributing them as war booty, and sanctioning sexual relations with them without marriage. One Hadith in Sahih Muslim (8:3432) describes Muslims practicing coitus interruptus with captive women. Muhammad doesn’t condemn the practice of rape — he only clarifies that Allah has already predestined the fate of every soul.
This isn’t a fringe interpretation. It became mainstream law. Every Sunni madhhab permits concubinage — sexual relations with female slaves acquired through jihad, purchase, or inheritance. That isn’t abolitionist; it’s institutionalized exploitation.
Jurisprudence: Slavery Systematized
By the time Islamic law matured, slavery was a fully systematized institution. The four Sunni schools agreed: slaves could be bought, sold, inherited, leased, and used for labor or sex. Manuals of fiqh — from Malik’s Muwatta to al-Mawardi’s Al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah — detail rules for slave contracts, punishments for runaway slaves, and legal distinctions between free persons and slaves.
Slaves could not marry without permission, could not inherit, and could be beaten (with limits). Children born to slave women were the property of the master unless formally acknowledged. And the sexual rights of masters over female slaves were enshrined — no consent required.
This isn’t the picture of an ideology dismantling slavery. It’s the picture of an ideology obsessed with regulating it.
The Historical Record: Expansion Fueled by Slavery
Far from eradicating slavery, Islam expanded it. The Arab conquests created a vast slave economy stretching from Spain to India. Prisoners of war were enslaved en masse. Markets in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Cordoba thrived on the sale of men, women, and children. The trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades supplied Islamic empires for centuries.
Black Africans were particularly targeted — so much so that the Arabic word for slave, "abd," became synonymous with "Black." The Abbasid caliphate used thousands of African slaves as laborers in brutal conditions, sparking the Zanj Rebellion in the 9th century. That uprising wasn’t about manumission as a virtue; it was about slaves resisting catastrophic abuse.
The Ottoman Empire, hailed by some as a glorious Islamic civilization, maintained slave markets into the 19th century. White European captives from the Mediterranean were sold in North Africa. Balkan boys were enslaved through the devshirme system, converted, and forced into military service. Women filled harems as concubines. This was not accidental drift from Islamic principles; it was their application.
The Apologist Sleight of Hand
How do apologists square all this with their claim that Islam “attacked slavery”? They cherry-pick verses on manumission, strip them from context, and ignore the mountain of evidence showing slavery’s normalization. They present Muhammad’s freeing of some slaves as though it were systemic reform, while ignoring the dozens of others he owned and distributed. They trumpet the rarity of manumission incentives while conveniently omitting the ubiquity of slave-taking.
They also weaponize comparison: “Yes, but the West was worse.” This tu quoque dodge fails for two reasons. First, Islam claimed divine perfection, while Western civilization did not. Second, the West abolished slavery centuries ago, while Muslim-majority societies only formally abandoned it under colonial and international pressure in the 19th and 20th centuries. Saudi Arabia, for example, only abolished slavery in 1962.
The Missing Piece: No Ethical Revolution
The heart of the apologetic failure is this: Islam never introduced an ethical revolution against slavery. At best, it added some charitable encouragements. At worst, it entrenched slavery deeper by giving it divine sanction. Contrast this with genuine abolitionist movements in the 18th and 19th centuries, which explicitly argued that slavery was incompatible with human dignity and moral law. Nothing like that appears in Islamic scripture or tradition.
If Islam truly “attacked slavery,” why did every major Muslim empire run on slaves for over a thousand years? Why did no Islamic scholar issue a binding abolitionist ruling until the modern era, when pressured by Western powers? Why was slavery practiced openly in Mecca and Medina during the 20th century?
The answer is simple: because Islam never attacked slavery. It enshrined it.
Conclusion: The Myth Collapses
The apologetic essay claiming Islam attacked slavery is not just misleading — it’s propaganda. The Qur’an regulates slavery instead of banning it. The Hadith institutionalizes sexual slavery. Sharia law builds an elaborate slave code. Islamic empires profited massively from human trafficking. And modern Muslim societies only abandoned slavery under external pressure, not internal conviction.
The myth survives because repetition numbs critical thinking. Say often enough that Islam was anti-slavery, and eventually some will believe it. But history, scripture, and law tell a different story: Islam was not the liberator of slaves. It was their jailer.
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Final Mic Drop: Islam didn’t fight slavery. It baptized it in divine authority — and it took the rest of the world to break the chains that Muhammad and his successors left locked for centuries.
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