What Did Islamic Law Actually Permit in the Treatment of Enslaved Women?

Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Question

I know slavery is over, but I want to understand it properly: did Muslim men through history treat enslaved women the way ISIS treats its captives, and was force, or dismissing a woman’s fear and pain as beside the point because she was property, ever actually permitted?

Answer

In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.

Thank you for asking this carefully instead of assuming the worst about your religion. Nothing ISIS did was lawful, and none of it can be reconstructed as law: their captives were not lawfully taken, their war was not a lawful war, the authority that claimed to distribute those women was not a lawful authority, and no one alive today can bring a human being into slavery at all. That is not a technicality about paperwork. It is the whole answer to your first question. Shaykh Wahba al-Zuhayli (Allah have mercy on him), writing on the zakat share set aside for freeing slaves, states that no slave exists in the world today, and that whatever may be found of it has no permitted path in the Sacred Law. [Wahba al-Zuhayli, al-Fiqh al-Islami wa Adillatuhu 3:1956]

Your real question sits underneath that one: had the acquisition somehow been valid, would the cruelty have been licensed? Honesty serves you better here than defense. Jurists working inside an institution that the whole pre-modern world took for granted did permit, within it, things we would now name coercion, and I will not pretend otherwise. That we now name them coercion is a moral gain, and I hold it a real one. So do not defend the tradition by claiming its law criminalized every coercion. It did not.

What the law did do was bind the owner and press steadily toward the exit. Cruelty was sin, and kindness was commanded. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: “They are your brethren whom Allah has placed under your hands. So whoever has his brother under his hand, let him feed him from what he eats, clothe him from what he wears, and not burden him with work that overwhelms him; and if he does burden him with what overwhelms him, let him help him with it.” [al-Khatib al-Tabrizi, Mishkat al-Masabih 3345]

Revelation then pressed on the exit rather than the entrance. Where a bondsman sought to purchase himself and his good was known in him, his owner was to write him that contract and help him meet it from the wealth Allah had given him. The jurists read that directive as a recommendation rather than a binding order, with the purpose of freeing necks. [Wahba al-Zuhayli, al-Fiqh al-Islami wa Adillatuhu 3:1956] The same verse forbids the owner to force his bondwomen into prostitution, and it closes by turning to the woman who was forced, declaring Allah forgiving and compassionate toward her after she has been forced:

“And let those who find no means to marry keep themselves wholly chaste till Allah enriches them of His bounty; And those who want to purchase themselves from their masters, of bond servants your right hands own, write them a contract to do so if you know in them good, and give them to help them do so of the wealth of Allah which He has bestowed you. Nor force any of your bondmaids to prostitution when they full well want to remain chaste … And whoso may force them, Allah is to them after their having been forced all-forgiving, all-compassionate.” [Quran 24:33; Keller, The Quran Beheld]

As for the graphic particulars in your second and third questions, I will not treat them as live questions of Shariah, because they are not: no ruling waits on them, and there is no lawful slavery left to regulate.

A Structure Built to Empty Itself

The law was built to end slavery, and it has. What is left to you is not a hypothetical to litigate but a faith to hold: the revelation that regulated the world it inherited taught that world to feed the one under its hand from its own plate and to write out his freedom. The answers below work this ground at length.

And Allah knows best.

Faraz Rabbani

Related Answers

• What Does Islam Teach About Slavery and Enslaved Women? — Gives the fuller treatment of why the classical rulings cannot be reactivated today, and why the modern moral gain here is a real one.
• What Rights Do Female Captives of War Have in Islam? — Sets out the protections a captive woman actually held, and why captives were distributed by the ruler rather than picked at will.
• What Is Islam’s View on the Treatment of War Captives? — Covers the requirement of dignity and humane treatment, and the standing agreement that slavery’s permitting conditions no longer exist.
• Can a Man Take an Agreeing Woman as a Sex Slave? — Explains why no such arrangement can be created today, regardless of her agreement, since the only lawful path into slavery no longer exists.