Islam
Main articles: Islam and slavery and Arab slave trade See also: Muhammad's slavesIn certain circumstances, Islam allows for slavery. Such slaves are to be able to purchase or acquire their freedom in various ways. The prophet Muhammad had several slaves himself. He himself said one of the best deeds is to free a slave. In total his household and friends freed 39,237 slaves. One of them bore him a son, who died as an infant. The slavery endorsed by the Qur'an limited the source of slaves to the children of two slave parents and non-Muslims captured in war. The Qur'an provides for emancipation of a slave as a means (or in one case, a requirement of) demonstrating remorse for the commission of certain sins. Proclamations of emancipation and repudiations of participation in slave trafficking did not occur in Muslim lands until after the Christian-European Colonial era - as late as 1962 in Saudi Arabia, 1970 in Oman and Yemen, and 1981 in Mauritania.
Read more about this topic: Slavery And Religion
Famous quotes containing the word islam:
“The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)