Muhammad's Views On Slavery - His Attitudes and Pronouncements Regarding Slavery

His Attitudes and Pronouncements Regarding Slavery

The circumstances where Muhammad reproved the beating of a slave who had transgressed against his or her master were those where the beating itself nullified the benefit to the master of the slave's punished independent charitable deed or otherwise because it created the circumstances of a blasphemy, not because of inherent abhorrence of aggression per se or of its effect upon the recipient. He condemned unjustified cruelty toward slaves even to the extent that for a master to slap her or his slave without just cause could only be atoned by freeing the slave. However, to his view the permission to beat a slave, still was broader than the analogous permission afforded to men with respect to free women under their authority. Generally he exhorted muslim believers to treat slaves with equanimity, and he commended the spirit of the act of manumission by a master equally to the degree that he damned the initiative of slave who might take their own freedom. To his very end he affirmed divine sanction for the authority of masters over slaves and he urged obedience to authorities - be they even peculiar foreign slaves - exercising Islamic rule.

Read more about this topic:  Muhammad's Views On Slavery

Famous quotes containing the words attitudes and/or slavery:

    Rarely do American parents deliberately teach their children to hate members of another racial, religious, or nationality group. Many parents, however, communicate the prevailing racial attitudes to their children in subtle and sometimes unconscious ways.
    Kenneth MacKenzie Clark (20th century)

    The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)