Slavery and Concubinage
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The Quran regulates slavery without ever prohibiting it. It permits sexual access to “those your right hands possess” (Quran 4:3; 4:24; 23:5–6; 33:50; 70:29–30) — the technical phrase for slave women — including, per the occasion of revelation in Sahih Muslim 1456, women captured in war whose husbands were still alive. Muhammad himself owned, received, and gave away slaves; Mariya the Copt, mother of his son Ibrahim, was a concubine gifted by the Byzantine governor of Egypt. Classical fiqhfiqhIslamic jurisprudence — the human science of deriving legal rulings from the Quran, sunnah, consensus, and analogy.Full glossary → elaborated the institution in detail: the enslavement of war captives, the slave market, the rules of the umm walad, the discounted legal weight of slave testimony and slave life. No school of law treated abolition as a religious objective; the suppression of slavery in the Muslim world came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Ottoman decrees and European treaties — Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, Mauritania in 1981 — over recorded juristic objection that prohibition forbids what Allah permitted. The point was demonstrated catastrophically in 2014, when the Islamic State revived sexual slavery for Yazidi captives and defended it with accurate citations of classical fiqh.
Common Muslim Responses
The Muslim response is a trajectory argument, developed most fully in Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery and Islam (2019): the Quran channels an economy it could not abolish overnight toward humanization — manumission is a stated virtue (90:13) and a prescribed expiation for sins (4:92; 5:89; 58:3); mistreatment voids ownership in some schools; the umm walad cannot be sold and is freed at her owner’s death; and the religion’s deepest logic (all humans as God’s servants) points toward the institution’s extinction, which Muslim modernists treat as the revelation’s intended endpoint. Concubinage, on this view, regularized the status of captive women who would otherwise have been destitute, granting maintenance and legitimacy to their children.
Counter-Rebuttal
Critics reply that the trajectory is read into the sources, not out of them: a lawgiver who could prohibit pork, wine, and riba in plain words could have prohibited owning and bedding human beings, and instead issued permanent regulations presupposing the practice’s continuation — the jurists who systematized those regulations for thirteen centuries were not misreading. The expiation mechanism makes manumission a currency for the owner’s sins, which is charity within the institution, not a verdict against it. The 2014 test case is the decisive internal datum: when ISIS cited the fiqh, mainstream refutations argued changed circumstances, treaty obligations, and maslaha — not that the texts forbid slavery, because they do not. A moral law that requires the abolitionist’s conclusion to be imported from outside itself has failed the exemplar claim at the point where the modern conscience tests it most directly.