One of the most controversial aspects of Islam is its doctrine of slavery. It incites controversy because slavery in the modern world is clearly considered a contemptible practise. In Islamic doctrine however, it isn’t. For centuries, abolitionist groups from the West and non-Western world lobbied strenuously to see slavery become abolished in Western colonies from Africa to India and beyond. The formal abolishment of slavery in Muslim countries was not enacted in all of Islam’s one thousand three hundred years or so history at the time, until the intervention of the West. Saudi Arabia finally caved in and formally abolished slavery in 1962 only upon continued Western imposition. Although slave trade was banned in Niger by French colonists a century ago, the cultural practice of slave ownership was not banned until recently in 2005! In Islamic culture, Islamic doctrine sanctions a tripartite model of slavery that encompasses Enslavement (domestic and industrial labor), Slave trade and Sex-slavery. Prophet Muhammad himself who didn’t participate in any of these practices prior to taking up his Islamic mission, inaugurated this tripartite model into Islam. He set the template for his followers by selling female slaves off in exchange for weapons and horses, making slaves of common folk whom he captured in warfare, and making a concubine of beautiful widowed Rayhana the same night he murdered her relatives and husband’s entire Banu Qurayza tribe! Prophet Muhammad said that Allah has ‘made war booty legal‘ for the Muslim, and that Muslim men are allowed to do as they please with their female war captives including having sexual relations with them against their will. Islam does not permit men to rape their male captives, but there is absolutely no limit to the number of female sex-slaves a Muslim male is allowed to keep. In obedience to Allah’s set principles in the Quran, many Sultans who ruled over conquered territories had harems bursting with concubines in the thousands. Moulay Ismail had 4,000, Akhbar had 5,000, and the harem of And al-Rahman III (d.961) in Cordoba contained over 6,000 concubines, to name a few. Concubinage was sealed into the DNA of Islamic culture. Prior to these Sultans, leading Muslim men during Muhammad’s time kept numerous sized concubines – women acquired as ‘booty’ from jihadi onslaughts. The Prophet never dissuaded them from such practice. Islam is pretty clear on whether or not slavery is lawful. It is lawful. Islam only forbids the enslavement of born Muslims.

At first blush, Muslim apologists approach the issue of Islamic slavery by saying that Islam never really approved of slavery, that the Prophet temporarily endorsed slavery only because he sought to abolish the contemptuous pre-islamic practise gradually. Thus according to Muslim denialists, Islam regulated slavery which already existed among the jahiliya people, but it did not endorse it. After Britain gained control over India, it took less than a century (1757- 1843 when the Indian Slavery Act V was passed) to ban Islamic slavery there. Islam after having spent centuries conquering infidel lands and enslaving the infidels, never sought to abolish it from there, or anywhere else! Omniscient Allah after having looked into the future, never thought to pre-empt the British Empire and give to Polytheist Indians, a taste of the dignity that comes with freedom from slavery – that man everywhere truly desires. Also, contrary to apologist accounts, historical records show that due to the advent of Islam, slave-trade after a long hiatus, suddenly became introduced to India where although slavery previously existed, chattel slavery didn’t! There was not a single slave market in India pre Islam. Previously wealthy Middle class Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh Natives of the Indian subcontinent who were abducted as war captives during Muslim rulers’ numerous jihad campaigns to expand Islam’s imperial domain, were instantly reduced to slave status and sold at the new slave markets, to common Muslim households at home and abroad in neighbouring Iraq and Khurasan which were “swelled” with (non-Muslim) slaves. In Africa too, chattel slavery was not the norm until Islam, over the course of centuries, established it. Slavery in traditional African societies generally took the form of indentured servitude, which is a stark contrast to the global enterprise ran by Arab merchants, that demanded village raids to procure slaves for supply to the Muslim world, where slaves dutifully commenced a new life of service to their Muslim masters who purchased them.

Clearly, the advent of Islam did not regulate slavery, it took slavery to unprecedented heights and made people even more barbaric than they previously may have been. During the Western colonial era, Muslim slave trading routes were interrupted. Many of the previous slave-destined Muslim regions also became Western protectorates thus had to do away with some of the practices they were accustomed to. Slavery, however, exists till this very day in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Its indigenous black populace have been specially targeted by the government and prosecuted for their Animist religions. Their indigenous languages have been banned at schools and instead they are mandated to learn the sacred language of the Quran – Arabic. The post-colonial Mauritanian government has allegedly sought to ban slavery, three times now; but banning it is clearly at odds with the Islamic call to adhere to a prophetic tradition that stretches back generations in Mauritania. The cumulative resurgence of Political Islam in Sudan following its independence from Britain in 1956 also saw a resurgence of fresh jihadi zeal and the penchant for enslaving war captives that naturally goes with it. Before the Second Sudanese war, 1.5 million people from the rebellious Animist and Christian south had already been killed. The second civil war began because President Nimeiri sought to expand Islam’s domain by islamising all of multi-cultural Sudan into a single Arabic culture. He declared all of Sudan an “Islamic state”, along with a sharia constitution to impose on all citizens. Naturally, the people of the South who had been fighting to preserve their ancient and more progressive culture for centuries rebelled again. By the end of the Second Sudanese war, a record additional 2 million people were added to the death toll. It trumps the ‘War on Terror’ death toll from Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Many of Sudan’s dead were the courageous resistance groups and freedom fighters of the South. Their women were abducted, raped and sexually enslaved in mass quantities. From the perspective of Islamic law and jihad, these atrocities were lawful. Abducting and purchasing female slaves for sex was a most common motive for the purchase of slaves throughout Islam’s history, as it was crucial to boosting the natural resources (populace, foot soldiers) of the expansionist Islamic Empire. By law, children born to slave mothers while in the Muslim slave master’s house are automatically Muslims. Their mothers are not allowed to indoctrinate or baptise them into any other religions. Thus, Sudan’s non-Muslim southern population were specially selected on a grand scale, for ethnic cleansing and sex slavery: a jihad by-product that dates back to the Prophet’s relationship with the infidels of Arabia. Sinisterly, Islamic leaders in Sudan occasionally justified their atrocities by publicly citing religious texts and the Prophetic traditions.

Then there are Muslim apologists who argue that there is nothing really diabolical about Islam sanctioning slavery if Islam equally mandates that slaves should be treated well. These spectacular apologists argue that slaves were more like servants, and not entities without rights. But a slave is a slave. How does one glorify, justify or even condone slavery by differentiating slaves treated well from slaves not treated well? A slave in Islam is not a servant but a slave – a property owned, which a master moves and does with as he pleases. Islam does not punish a Muslim master for not treating his male slave well.

Islam also does not punish a Muslim master for raping his female sex slave . To the contrary, Islam entitles him the latter right (Islamic sex-slaves are female captives abducted in war and used for co-habitation and procreation, i.e satisfying Muslim men’s sexual needs and swelling the Muslim populace) to the fullest degree. Servants are citizens with full rights in courts, but in Islamic courts a slave cannot under any circumstance bear testimony! A slave also cannot own property and can marry, but only with the master’s consent. A slave is not a servant, a slave is a chattel, the moveable property of the slave owner. It is only 7th CE Islamic benevolence that settles for such a thing as ‘treating slaves well’. It doesn’t require an awful lot of observing ideologies around the world to realise that the rest of the world already moved on from glorifying slavery centuries ago. These spectacular pseudo-benevolent apologists are merely writing their own version of the Quran. A taqiyya version for the unquestioning infidel. A heretic version neither validated by Allah’s own scriptures, the Prophetic traditions, nor the history of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. A deceitful version meant to facilitate a fallacious re-branding of Islam to the non-Muslim world, while simultaneously disarming the non-muslim world in preparation for Islamic conquest.

In 2003, shaming the perfidious apologists, Al Fawzan, a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body and a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, the Imam of Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh and a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, whose religious teachings instruct millions of Muslims in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world, and Muslims in the non-Muslim world clarified that: