Muhammad's Views On Slavery

Muhammad's Views On Slavery

Available historical sources confirm the circumstances of Muhammad's direction and ownership of slaves including slave concubines – amounting to at least 34 males and some 16 females – commencing in his infancy with the death of his father and continuing uninterrupted until his own death more than six decades later.

His slaves and slave associates, including former slaves, came from a diversity of African and Middle Eastern origins. Amongst them are those whom he inherited or qualified to own as offspring of his existing slaves, those he accepted as gifts, those that he purchased or sold, some of whom he personally manumitted or otherwise assisted to emancipate, those who were captured – often in his military campaigns, and even some of his wives and other members of his household.

In its early days his revealed religion possessed a particular appeal to slaves and former slaves for its humanism and benefited at certain points from expressions of slave discontent.

His attitudes and pronouncements regarding the subject of slavery reveal abiding belief in the principle of a slave's loyalty to her or his master and in a master's circumscribed duty of reciprocation. By their fiat a master could sell and may trade their slaves, was not required to free or repatriate those no longer wanted, and was empowered to deem which were worthy to be granted a mukataba while holding authorisation to deny property and earnings to those not so deemed. Female slaves were not permitted to withhold their fertility from a master even through married to another at the time of their enslavement, they had no ownership of their mahr, they could not marry without their master's consent, and they might (in the interpretation of Shi'a jurisprudence) even be compelled to sexually serve a third party.

Muhammad would send his companions like Abu Bakr and Uthman ibn Affan to buy slaves to free. Many early converts to Islam were the poor and former slaves like Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi.

He restricted the traditional means of enslavement, he established a principle that slaves may have authority over free men in Islamic government and religious and military affairs, he urged compassion and moderation as the general rule for their treatment, he enforced emancipation as the necessary atonement for having assaulted one's slave without just cause, and he deemed manumission as either meritorious or as a means or requirement for muslims to earn forgiveness for serious transgressions.

Read more about Muhammad's Views On Slavery:  Slavery in Islam, His Slave Associates, His Slaves, Themes in His Dealings With Slaves and His Approach To Slavery, His Attitudes and Pronouncements Regarding Slavery, See Also, External Links

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