Islam is
Opposed to Slavery
The Myth:
Islam is
intolerant of enslaving human beings. The religion eradicated the
institution of slavery thanks to the principles set in motion by Muhammad, who
was an abolitionist.
The Truth:Muhammad captured, owned and sold slaves. The Quran explicitly gives slave-owners the freedom to
sexually exploit their slaves – not just in one place, but in at least four
separate Suras. Islamic law is littered with rules concerning the
treatment of slaves, some of which are relatively humane, but none that prohibit
the actual practice by any stretch.
The very
presence of these rules condones and legitimizes the institution of slavery.
Adding to this is the fact that Muhammad was an avid slave trader. After
providing ample evidence of his activities according to the most reliable Muslim
biographers, the Center of the Study of Political Islam summarizes its
findings as such:
Muhammad captured slaves,
sold slaves, bought slaves as gifts of pleasure, received slaves as gifts, and
used slaves for work. The Sira is exquisitely clear on the issue of
slavery.
(Muhammad
and the Unbelievers: a Political Life) Even the
very pulpit from which Muhammad preached Islam was built by slave labor at his
directive!
The Quran tells Muslims to emulate the example of Muhammad,
who has the most "exalted character". As such, the
deeply dehumanizing horror of slavery has been a ubiquitous tradition of Islam
for 14 centuries, including the modern plight of non-Muslim slaves in the Sudan, Mali, Niger, Mauritania,
and other parts of the Muslim world.
There has
never been an abolitionary movement within Islam (just as the religion produces
no organized resistance to present-day enslavement). The abolition of
slavery was imposed on the Islamic world by European countries, along with other
political pressures that were entirely unrelated to Islamic law.
Although
horrible abuses of slaves in the Muslim world were recorded, there has been
little inclination toward the documentation and earnest contrition that one
finds in the West. The absence of a guilty Muslim conscience often leads to the
mistaken impression that slavery was not as bad under Islam - when it is
actually indicative of the explicit tolerance the religion has for the practice
So
narcissistic is the effect of Islam on the devoted, that to this day many
Muslims believe in their hearts that the women and children carried off in
battle, along with their surviving men folk, were actually done a favor by the Muslim
warriors who, in fact, plucked them from their fields and homes and relegated them to
lives of demeaning servitude.
When Saladin conquored Jerusalem in 1187, he enslaved every Christian who could not fetch a ransom. A first hand account by one of his generals, Muhammad al-Isfahani, gleefully recounted the sexual defilement and humiliation of the women by Muslim men:
How many well-guarded women were profaned, … and miserly women forced to yield
themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty …
and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work,
and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered …
and happy ones made to weep! How many [Muslim] noblemen took them as concubines, how
many ardent men blazed for one of them, and celibates were satisfied by them, and
thirsty men sated by them, and turbulent men able to give vent to their passion
Shame and
apology, no matter how appropriate, are almost never to be found in Dar
al-Islam. Caliphs, the religious equivalent of popes, maintained harems of
hundreds, sometimes thousands of young girls and women captured from lands as
far away as Europe and consigned to sexual slavery. Hungarians were hunted
like animals by the Turks, who carried 3 million into slavery over a 150 year
period in the 1500-1600's. In India, 200,000 Hindus were captured and
transported to Iranian slave markets in just a two year span (1619-1620) by one
of the kinder Muslim rulers.
African
slaves were often castrated by their Muslim masters. Few survived to
reproduce, which is why there are not many people of African descent living in
the Middle East, even though more slaves were taken out of Africa in the 1300
years of Arab slave trading than in the 300 years of European slavery. The
400,000 slaves brought to America, for example, have now become a community of
30 million, with a much higher standard of living than their African peers.
There is
no William Wilberforce or Bartoleme de las Casas in Islamic history as there is
in Christianity. When asked to produce the name of a Muslim abolitionist,
apologists sometimes meekly suggest Muhammad himself. But, if a slave
owner and trader who commanded the capture and sexual exploitation of slaves,
and left a 13-century legacy of divinely-sanctioned slavery, is the best that
Islam can offer in the way of an abolitionist, then no amount of sophistry will be enough to convince any but
the most ignorant.
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