“Slavery and servitude in Islam: From the Middle Ages to ‘ISIS.’”

In a press conference in June 2017, Philippine military spokesperson, Jo-ar Herrera, described Islamic State militants as “evil personalities,” referring to the Islamist extremists who had besieged the Filipino city of Marawi for 5 weeks.

Herrera’s remarks didn’t just highlight the fact that these militants, affiliated with the Islamic State, had seized parts of Marawi City, resulting in the deaths of dozens. He was also alluding to reports that the militants had taken civilians hostage after looting their homes, forcing them to convert to Islam, and most significantly, treating them as sex slaves.

This was just one aspect of the battle for Marawi City that made headlines around the world. Just a week later, separate reports emerged from some 90,000km away in the Syrian city of Raqqa City, detailing the extent of the horror of Islamic State’s practice of slavery, primarily aimed at sexual slavery. Women who had been made wives to Islamic State fighters spoke out, revealing that their husbands had separated young girls as young as nine from their families to rape them and keep them as sex slaves.

Details and stories like these have repeatedly dominated headlines throughout the period of the Islamic State’s rule, which lasted for three years, leaving many people wondering about the relationship, not just of the Islamic State organisation itself, but perhaps Islam itself, with slavery.

Haifa, a 36-year-old woman from Iraq’s Yazidi community who was captured by ISIS as a sex slave, stands on a street during an interview with AFP journalists in the northern city of Dohuk on November 17, 2016.

The philosophy of Islamic slavery:

Slave market in Cairo. Published around 1846–1849. David Roberts/Louis Haghe/Library of Congress

Slavery existed in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Muhammad in the seventh century, where various tribes in the region engaged in frequent small-scale wars, and it was common to take captives as spoils of war — or slaves. Islam then organised and expanded this practice significantly, with the main reason being that a unified Islamic state was able to wage wars on a much larger scale than ever before and to invade new and larger territories.

The biography of Muhammad was filled with events that showed his and his companions’ ownership and trade of slaves, such as his adoption of Zayd ibn Haritha as his slave before freeing him to adopt him, and his ownership of a number of female slaves (concubines) during his lifetime, including Maria the Copt “Maria al-Qibtiyya”, Safiyya bint Huyayy, and Sirin bint Shamun, whom he later gifted to the poet Hassan ibn Thabit, “companions of Muhammad”.

Moreover, Muhammad used slavery (specifically sexual slavery) to incentivise his companions to wage raids on neighbouring tribes and empires, sharing the women of his enemies among himself and his companions as they shared property and wealth.

With the expansion of the Islamic state during the time of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” and the increased ability of Muslim Arabs to wage wars on a much larger scale than ever before, the slave trade became an important economic cornerstone for the state.
Slavery markets spread throughout the Islamic state, and some companions took on the role of “quality control,” such as Abdullah ibn Umar, who would inspect the “merchandise” of female slaves by touching their breasts and buttocks.

The Islamic state became known for its clear distinction and segregation between the free and the slaves, which included everything from ownership and marriage laws to dress code. The caliphs insisted on enforcing these distinctions fiercely, as demonstrated by Umar ibn al-Khattab’s beating of female slaves if they covered their hair and thus “resembled free women/(free faithful/believers).”

Some Muslims may object here, saying that Islam “fought slavery” by “equality” among people and made the liberation of slavery a type of worship. This is nonsense. If Islam wanted to fight slavery, it would have prohibited it — even in stages — just as it prohibited alcohol, or just as it prohibited sex outside of marriage- Extramarital.

However, the truth is that Islam turned slavery into a religious trade in which a Muslim trades the freedom of others in exchange for some good deeds and atonement for some sins, much like the principle of Indulgences, but using lives and souls instead of money.

Although the slave and the free are “equal before Allah” (i.e., in religious terms), social and class discrimination is evident in the worldly legislation of Islam.

Islam established a complete jurisprudential system to regulate the rules governing the status, treatment, and trade of slaves, placing slaves in a position similar to that of children, widows, the disabled, and women.

For example, the Quran permitted Muslim men to have sexual relations with their female slaves, or so-called “those whom their right hands possess/Slave women.”

It also specified the clothing of slaves — female slaves were not allowed to cover themselves like free women. It regulated their personal affairs — prohibiting male slaves from marrying free women (free faithful/believers) and exempting a Muslim from the obligation of Zakat al-Fitr for his slave.

It also set laws for the sale and purchase of slaves, including restrictions on selling a Muslim slave to a non-Muslim buyer.

Therefore, we see the impact of Islam’s endorsement and legislation of slavery in Islamic history from the dawn of this religion until today, as we will clarify in the following paragraphs.

Slavery in Islamic History:

Yemeni slave market in the 13th century

Slavery in the Islamic Caliphate was at its worst in the lands between the rivers -Mesopotamia (Iraq and its surroundings). With the conquest of Persia, Muslims seized hundreds of thousands of war captives, most of whom were children and young girls. They were sent to the centre of the Islamic empire, where they were sorted for almost all existing tasks. While older men and women cleaned the streets and homes of wealthy families, boys (Ghulams -servant) and girls (Jawari — a term often used for female slaves in the medieval Islamic world) were kept as sexual property.

As for the young male slaves who were taken as infants or toddlers, they could be trained to become soldiers, forming the essence of special forces known for their discipline and rigour, used to break enemy resistance. Tens of thousands of male slaves were also castrated, removing both testicles and the penis, and forced to work in mosques and as guards for women.

Male slaves, particularly Africans, were specifically chosen for gruelling work in the salt mines and sugar plantations that were prevalent in Iraq at that time. These individuals endured incredibly harsh living conditions, with beatings and rape often inflicted upon many household servants, if not the majority of them. Additionally, severe floggings, administered with a whip or rod, were used as a form of motivation and intimidation for Africans in the mines and plantations.

The treatment experienced by African slaves under the Abbasid Caliphate is considered the worst in the history of Islamic slavery.

The harsh treatment and miserable conditions endured by slaves on farms and in mines contributed to the outbreak of the Zanj/blacks Rebellion in the late ninth century.

This rebellion is one of the bloodiest uprisings that the Abbasid Caliphate faced, resulting in the deaths of at least 5,000 people.

When it ended, Muslim leaders focused on preventing similar liberation movements in the future. Some of the reforms that emerged from the Zanj/blacks uprising were practical measures, such as laws to limit the concentration of slaves in one area and strict control over their reproduction, accompanied by castration and a ban on extramarital sex among them.

Military slavery also spread in Islamic caliphates, particularly under the Abbasid state and especially among the Ottomans.

Who hasn’t heard of the famous Janissary soldiers known for their strength and ruthlessness? What many don’t know is that these soldiers were slaves in the hands of the Sultan, abducted from their Christian families at a young age and raised with Islamic military training by the Sultan’s officers.

Of course, the era of these elite units ended in 1826 with the Janissary incident, in which Sultan Mahmud II ended the lives of more than 6,000 Janissaries before completely dismantling the Janissary units. The culture of military slavery was so widespread throughout Islamic history that in the early thirteenth century, they were able to establish their own caliphate: the Mamluk Sultanate, which emerged from the ranks of slave soldiers of Turkic, Coptic, Balkan, and Circassian origins enslaved by Muslim caliphs over the centuries to exploit them in their military campaigns.

African slave trade:

An old picture of the deportation of black citizens from East Africa (then Zanzibar) to Basra and the East in order to sell them into slavery in 1881.

Of course, slavery in Islamic history was not limited to consumption; Arabs and Muslims also excelled in the trade of individuals.

The philosophy of Islam, which restricted the conditions of slavery without completely prohibiting it, led to a devastating side effect: the expansion of slave trading with foreign lands, whether in importation or exportation.

The difficulty of directly enslaving people due to legal restrictions led to the flourishing of importing slaves from outside the state for consumption or re-exportation.
It is estimated that approximately 5 million African slaves were purchased by Muslim slave traders during the era of the Ottoman Caliphate alone.

Many slaves were sent to mines and farms in the Middle East, and many of them were transported to Islamic lands in India and Indonesia after being purchased from African slave traders. These slaves were also used as a form of international currency.

Hundreds of them were given as gifts to Chinese diplomatic delegations, as mentioned in many ancient Chinese writings. As Islamic power expanded, Arab slave traders/Esclavizados spread to North Africa, where their trade flourished frighteningly in the Mediterranean basin.

“Of course, Islamic rules that dictate moderate treatment of slaves (by Islamic standards) were not applied to any of the Africans who were bought and sold in the Mediterranean. During his visit to the slave market in 1609, the Portuguese missionary João dos Santos wrote that Arabs slaveowner ‘they circumcise their female slaves — female circumcision, especially the young ones, to make them unable to conceive, thus making them sell for a better price.’

Long caravans of slaves, including those with black, brown, and white skin, traversed the deserts for over 1200 years. These journeys took months, and the numbers of slaves who perished during them were immense over many years.

The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt mentioned in 1814: ‘I have repeatedly witnessed some of the most obscene and brutal scenes, which were a source of laughter for the owners who were a major factor in these scenes, and I dare say that very few of the female slaves who have passed the age of ten reached Egypt or the Arabian Peninsula as virgins.’

Despite these accounts, when African slavery is mentioned today, many people think of the transatlantic trade more than anything else, which saw the trading of over twelve million African slaves from around 1500 to 1800, until British and American fleets began intercepting slave ships. But few realise that Islamic slave trade, which exceeded the transatlantic trade in scope and brutality, began with Arab invasions in the early eighth century and remained active until today.”

1 — An emancipation document for “Sabah al-Jirxiya/Circassian/alsharkisia” in which it is written: “White colour, tall, of medium body, with eyes with open eyebrows, and a round face, yellow hair, and she had no marks. She was a servant and slave to her Turkish mistress, “Hanim Agha”, who lived in Qena Governorate- Egypt, at the end of the 19th century, one year before the British occupation of Egypt.

2 — An emancipation document for “Sabah al-Jirxiya/Circassian/alsharkisia” in which it is written: “White colour, tall, of medium body, with eyes with open eyebrows, and a round face, yellow hair, and she had no marks. She was a servant and slave to her Turkish mistress, “Hanim Agha”, who lived in Qena Governorate- Egypt, at the end of the 19th century, one year before the British occupation of Egypt.

Historian Dr. Muhammad Fouad Shukri says in his important book “Egypt and Sudan” that England insisted on Isma’il Pasha-Khedive of Egypt liberating the treaty banning the slave trade in 1877, and also insisted on setting provisions, including that the slave trade in Egypt end for 3 years.
After the treaty, and banning it in Sudan for 12 years, he pointed out that: England made these offers after its recognition of Egypt’s properties in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, parts of Uganda and Abyssinia. “Abyssinia was an ancient region in the Horn of Africa situated in the northern highlands of modern-day Ethiopiaand Eritrea”.

Islam’s Sexual Enslavement of White Women “White Gold”:

Not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements, generally running their craft onto unguarded beaches, and creeping up on villages in the dark to snatch their victims and retreat before the alarm could be sounded.
Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were taken in this way in 1631, and other attacks were launched against coastal villages in Devon and Cornwall.
Samuel Pepys gives a vivid account of an encounter with two men who’d been taken into slavery, in his diary of 8 February 1661.

The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way. Professor Robert Davis investigates. Here

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves.

This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale.

Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history.
Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour.
As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime.

In 2018, leftists and their media lost their minds after Germany’s only conservative political party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), used the following painting in its election campaign to illustrate one of the many reasons it was against immigration (predominately 3rd world Muslims).

Painted in France in 1866 and titled “Slave Market,” the painting was described as “show[ing] a black, apparently Muslim slave trader displaying a naked young woman with much lighter skin to a group of men for examination,” probably in North Africa.

The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) put up several posters of this painting with the slogan, “So that Europe won’t become Eurabia.”

Many on both sides of the Atlantic were “triggered” by this usage; even the American museum where the original painting is housed sent AfD a letter “insisting that they cease and desist in using this painting” (even though it is in the public domain).

Objectively speaking, the “Slave Market” painting in question portrays a reality that has played out countless times over the centuries: African, Asiatic, and Middle Eastern Muslims have long targeted European women — so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries.

As it happens, there is something else — another medium besides writing — that documents this reality: countless more paintings than the one in question concerning the abduction, trafficking, and sexual enslavement of European women; altogether they further underscore the ubiquity and notoriety of this phenomenon.

Indeed, this was such a well-known theme that many nineteenth and early twentieth century artists and painters specialised in it, often based on their own eye-witness accounts. (As one art gallery puts it, “Many … of the most important painters did travel [to the Muslim world] themselves, and what they painted was based on the sketches they had made while they were there…)

Below are just 20 such paintings (there are many more),

“The Bulgarian Martyresses,” by Konstantin Makovsky, 1877. It depicts events from a year earlier when Ottoman irregular soldiers (the so-called bashi-bazouks or “crazy heads”) raped and massacred the Christian women of Bulgaria and their children. American journalist MacGahan, who reported from Bulgaria, wrote the following of this incident: “When a Mohammedan has killed a certain number of infidels he is sure of Paradise, no matter what his sins may be.…[T]he ordinary Mussulman takes the precept in broader acceptation, and counts women and children as well…. the Bashi-Bazouks, in order to swell the count, ripped open pregnant women, and killed the unborn infants.”

“The Abduction of a Herzegovinian Woman,” by Jaroslav Čermák, 1861. From the museum’s official description: “Disturbing and extremely evocative, it depicts a white, nude [and pregnant?] Christian woman being abducted from her village by the Ottoman mercenaries who have killed her husband and baby.”

The Slave Market,” by Otto Pilny, 1910.

“The Abduction,” by Eduard Ansen-Hofmann (1820–1904).

“Abducted,” by Eduard Ansen-Hofmann (1820–1904).

“Namona,” by Henri Tanoux, 1883.

“The Bitter Draught of Slavery,” by Ernest Norman, 1885.

“A New Arrival,” by Giulio Rosati (1858–1917).

“The New Slave Girl,” by Eduard Ansen-Hofmann (1820–1904).

“Examining Slaves,” by Ettore Cercone, 1890.

“Slave Dealer,” by Otto Pilny, 1919.

“Slave Market,” by Eduard Ansen-Hofmann, 1900.

“Slave Trade Negotiations,” by Fabio Fabbi (1861–1946).

“White Slavery in the East — Going to the Slave Market,” by Harper’s Weekly, April 1875.

“The Serbian Concubine,” by Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, 1876.

“Slave Market,” by Jean-Leon Gerome, 1871.

“Harem Captive,” by Eisenhut Ferencz, 1903.

“Scene from the Harem,” by Fernand Cormon, 1877.

Post-colonial slavery:

(Mabrouka) from Mauritania, 20 years old, was uprooted from her mother’s arms when she was still a little girl and was also enslaved — Photo: Seif Kousmate

Much of the Islamic slave trade outside the Islamic world came to an end during the colonial era, as Europeans attacked slave forts, seized slave ships, and gradually closed slave markets beyond their territories. The prevalence of slavery even decreased within Islamic countries, as Italian authorities banned slavery in Somalia in the early 20th century, and British, French, and German colonisers imposed laws against it in their colonies in the Levant and North Africa.

The humanitarian crisis of slavery didn’t end with the fall of Islamic rule in the region; religious teachings remained alive among Muslim adherents. Consequently, after the collapse of European empires in the mid-20th century, slavery resurged in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where direct control over those regions was no longer feasible.

#الرق في #الإسلام استمر ولم يُحرم أبدًا ، إنما بدء تجريمه ومكافحة تجارته بـالإكراه تحت ضغوط #أوروبية.
فـبعد ضعفها في القرن 19 وبـقوانين محدودة المجال والتأثير ، كـ فرمان «السلطان محمود الثاني» سنة 1830 الذي بـمقتضاه تم تحرير العبيد البيض ، أصل الضغط كان من #روسيا.. واستفاد من… pic.twitter.com/xt1XY8IF1K

— Rami Zahra (@rami_zahra) September 3, 2023

While Europe and America attempted to end slavery in the Islamic world through financial and economic pressures, the results of these demands were sometimes futile or unacceptable.

For example, Mauritania has repeatedly claimed to have banned slavery: in 1905, then in 1981, and again in 2007.

However, the Global Slavery Index estimates that more than 43,000 people living in this country are still enslaved. Nevertheless, the Muslim Mauritanian government insists that there are no slaves in their country and that any talk of this kind “is a Western manipulation and an aggressive act against Islam.”

The mention of Islam here is not coincidental; religion has been used as a veil for slavery throughout history, and this problem is resurfacing in countries with Muslim majorities, where dictatorships with a civilised façade have fallen, replaced by Islamic religious regimes.
For example, according to the Global Slavery Index, Qatar alone is home to about 30.000 slaves, primarily working in construction projects and the sex trade.

It is highly likely that this estimate is conservative and inaccurate, as many forms of slavery, such as forced and continuous labor akin to servitude, are not accounted for, and no one in Qatar is obliged to report details of human rights violations against foreigners in the country.

The same picture is found in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia in the form of the kafala system “a sponsorship system” of enslavement, especially in Libya, where slave markets and trafficking have reappeared outdoors after decades of absence under Muammar Gaddafi — the only Arab leader to offer a formal apology to Africans for his country’s historical role in their enslavement over the centuries.

An Iraqi Yazidi woman holds a sign during a demonstration outside the United Nations office in the Iraqi city of Erbil on August 2, 2015, in support of women from their community who were kidnapped in the Sinjar region by the Islamic State — ISIS. Perhaps no contemporary regime is as enamored with slavery as the Islamic State.

Slavery under the modern Islamic state:

The issue of slavery under modern Islamic states is epitomised by the contemporary embodiment of the ancient Islamic caliphate: the “Islamic State” organisation, also known as “ISIS” or “Daesh”.

As part of this authentic embodiment, we witness the resurgence of sexual slavery, slave markets, capture, and enslavement in all their former glory.
Practically speaking, this means that any non-Muslim person living in an area under ISIS control faces a dual burden of living under specific taxes and restrictions based on their religion (following the Quranic teachings regarding the People of the Book).
Additionally, they may face recruitment of family members as fighters for the state’s army, following the examples of the Abbasids and Ottomans.

This also means that non-Muslim women and girls (i.e., those not adhering to the Sunni sect) must live in fear of being taken as sexual commodities.

As expected, Christian or Shiite women and girls in ISIS captivity are subjected to beatings and rape, followed by a journey to the slave market, where they are sold at public auctions.
Mosul, at one point, was the site of the largest gathering of ISIS slaves, but recent developments saw the Iraqi army reclaim the city and shut down the market.

Since the rise of ISIS, Yazidi women in Iraq have been a particular target for enslavement, with girls as young as six being abducted and sold throughout the Islamic State.

In ISIS’s interpretation of Islam, there is no sin in raping non-Muslim captives, as it does not constitute “zina” (adultery) as it would with a Muslim woman; rather, it is considered as owning what one’s right hand possesses, as stated in Surah Al-Mu’minun, “And those who guard their private parts. Except from their wives and their right hand possessions, for then, they are free from blame.” 23vs6

„ISIS ‘Slave Market Day“

Today is the slave market day, says one of the Isis men with a smirk. Today is distribution day,God willing.Everybody takes his share.
Where is my Yezidi girl? says another, laughing.
The price differs if her eyes are blue, says the first man… pic.twitter.com/B24MAMgZfL

— Zidan Ismail (@zidan_yezidi) August 2, 2023

This interpretation is supported by a plethora of Islamic juristic opinions on slavery and concubinage from the dawn of Islam to the present day.

The stories of survivors from the Islamic State seem never-ending, often recounting the harsh treatment they endured at the hands of ISIS’s Muslim adherents, including beatings, rape, and imprisonment.

Such brutal treatment remains perpetuated by Quranic legislation on slavery and the vast number of Islamic fatwas analysing slavery and concubinage to this day. The stain of slavery will persist as long as theocratic Islamic regimes continue to dominate the Middle East and North Africa.

A 25-year-old Yazidi woman showed a “Certificate of Emancipation” given to her by a Libyan who had enslaved her. He explained that he had finished his training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore setting her free.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Pictures by the French photographer “Lehnert et Landrock — 1904” during his stay in Tunisia.

Showing slaves naked, in compliance with Islamic orders that say that “Awrah of Slave Women — the private parts of slaves are from the navel to the knee only.”

(It was narrated by Yahya ibn Salam in his Tafsir (1/441): Hammad and Nasr ibn Tarif told me, from Thumamah ibn Anas ibn Malik, from Anas ibn Malik, who said: “The slave women of ‘Umar used to serve us bare-headed, with their breasts jiggling and their ankles showing.”)