The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

slavery

Chattel slavery was a well-established reality of political, legal, and social life in the pre-Islamic world. The advent of Islam did not change this; the revelations of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s sunna accepted slavery as an ordinary aspect of human existence. Yet the Qur’an and the Prophet explicitly recognized the humanity of the enslaved, seeking to ameliorate suffering and injustice and encouraging emancipation. Many modern jurists have therefore argued that one of the purposes of the Qur’anic revelation was to bring about the gradual disappearance of slavery and the advent of a society free of slavery. While a fair reading of the texts might support this view, the actual history of slavery and slave trading in the Muslim world belies this perspective. The slave trade and the suzerainty of slave-holding regimes in the Islamic heartlands flourished for more than 1,300 years after the death of the Prophet; in many places slavery and slave trading were robust, a source of great wealth, a sinew and building block for the construction of empire, and a central feature of Muslim political, legal, military, economic, and social life. Significantly, vestiges of slavery and slave trading, taking the form of human trafficking practices using transportation routes established in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as forced labor regimes and extremely brutal forms of domestic servitude, still remain in some parts of the contemporary Muslim world, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and on the Indian subcontinent.

Slavery and slave trading flourished in the early modern and modern eras because of a curious paradox created by the Islamic law. The classical law, developed by Muslim jurists over a 300-year period following the death of the Prophet, considerably reformed pre-Islamic slave systems. Under these pre-Islamic systems, one could enter the state of enslavement in a number of ways, including capture in war, birth, self-sale and sale by parent or guardian, as punishment for crime, as satisfaction for debt, as expiation for sin, and as a foundling or other disenfranchised person without means of support. The classical shari‘a reduced the means by which one could be lawfully enslaved to just two: birth from two lawfully enslaved parents or capture as a prisoner in a lawful jihad. All other forms of enslavement were abolished. Furthermore, no Muslim could be lawfully enslaved (although conversion to Islam after enslavement did not automatically result in emancipation). The Qur’an expressly permitted marriage between enslaved and free, observing that marriage to a Muslim slave is preferable to marriage to an unbelieving free person. The Qur’an also declared the emancipation of slaves to be an act of great piety, entitling the believer to reward in the afterlife. Interpreting these provisions and others like them, the jurists concluded that there should be a presumption of human freedom in all social and political affairs (al-aṣl huwa al-ḥurriyya), and any reasonable doubt with respect to one’s servile status should be resolved in favor of emancipation. The jurists also declared that the children of unions between slave and free were also free and that the mother of such children (umm al-walad) was entitled to freedom at the death of her owner. This was an important rule in elite households, where a man might own large numbers of concubines. Heads of state in the Muslim world often traced their heritage to a slave mother. It is said that 34 of the 37 Abbasid caliphs were born of such relationships.

Islam’s ameliorative approach to slavery thus resulted in frequent emancipation and great fluidity in social movement of persons who had once been enslaved, paradoxically creating a constant demand for more slaves. This demand was satisfied by entrepreneurs, slave traders, and unscrupulous marauders and plunderers who illegally captured and transported fresh slaves to the Muslim cosmopolitan centers from many distant places, including West and East Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Asian Steppes, India, and the islands of Southeast Asia. The classical law was essentially ignored, and many individuals, particularly women and children, were violently uprooted and relocated to the central lands of the Muslim world. Africans were particularly vulnerable to slave raiding, but by no means were they the only victims. The great majority of slaves in the Muslim world performed domestic household duties, but many worked as soldiers and sailors, concubines, agricultural and mining laborers, or as servants of governments.

The presence of significant numbers of enslaved persons in the Islamic heartlands, particularly military slaves, had a profound effect on Islamic political thought. In 1250, military slaves (mamluks) of the Ayyubid dynasty based in Cairo overthrew the sultan and established their own dynasty, which lasted for almost 300 years (1250–1517), deriving its success from the continuation of the codes of behavior established under the traditions of slave soldiery. Another dynasty of slaves and former slaves was established in Delhi, lasting for almost 100 years (1206–90). Similar events occurred in other places, and it is fair to say that military slaves were influential in a number of Islamic centers of power for nearly a millennium, from the rise of the Abbasid caliphate beginning in the eighth century until the decline of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century.

Military slavery and concubinage were not the only aspects of the Muslim slave systems that influenced political thought. Medieval and premodern jurists developed elaborate rules governing the commercial buying and selling of slaves, the resolution of disputes over slaves arising out of insolvency, the liability of slaves for crimes, the disposition of prisoners of war, and myriad other circumstances, making slavery an important aspect of the Islamic legal and political culture. This feature of the culture remained part of the political milieu in the major centers of Islamic thought until well into the 20th century. In fact, the conventional historical wisdom tells us that there was never any significant indigenous impetus for the abolition of slavery in the Muslim world and that slavery and slave trading came to an end in the Muslim world only because of the abolitionist edicts of colonialist Western governments and the persistent efforts of antislavery activists, particularly the British. While there is considerable truth in this assertion, it cannot be said that Muslim thinkers played no role in abolition. It was difficult to eradicate the old thinking among religious conservatives, but a number of 19th- and early 20th-century liberal Muslim scholars and political leaders, notably Ahmed Bey (1784–1850) in Tunisia, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) and Sayyid Ameer ‘Ali (1849–1928) in India, and Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935) in Egypt, were critical of slaving and slave trading by Muslims and sometimes vigorously sought to influence public opinion to end it. This struggle to make Muslims aware of the history of slavery and abolition in the Islamic world and to eliminate the vestiges of slavery and slave trading, referred to earlier, continues to this day.