Muhammad's Views On Slavery - Slavery in Islam

Slavery in Islam

The major juristic schools of Islam have historically accepted the institution of slavery. Muhammad and those of his companions who could afford it themselves owned slaves, some of which they emancipated, and others of which they additionally acquired from amongst captured prisoners of war. Arabian slaves are posited to have benefited from the Islamic reformulation, through "reforms of a humanitarian tendency both at the time of Muhammad and the later early caliphs".

In Islamic law, the topic of slavery is covered at great length. Muhammad's fiqh brought major changes considered to have been of far-reaching effect to the practice of it inherited from antiquity, from Rome, and from Byzantium.

His Qur'an propounds manumission to be a meritorious deed either prescribed or allowed as a condition of repentance for certain grave sins and shortcomings. Fiqh treats slavery as an exceptional circumstance, applying a rebuttable presumption of freeborn status to those of doubtful or unclear origins. Moreover, as opposed to pre-Islamic slavery, it permits the origination of enslavement in only two classes or circumstances: capture in war, or birth to parents who are themselves both already enslaved. Also, the innovation of the mukataba availed slaves deemed worthy an opportunity to purchase or earn their own eventual emancipation, and Islamic elevation of the status of an umm walad (a female slave who had born a child acknowledged by her master as his offspring) restricting some of the possibilities for such a woman to be enslaved to an alternative master while the child remained alive.