“Can You Forbid What God Allowed?”: The Qur’an, Abolition, and the Final Question of Slavery

“Can You Forbid What God Allowed?”: The Qur’an, Abolition, and the Final Question of Slavery

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ 

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

The nineteenth century reopened a question the seventh had already begun to close.

When European abolitionists arrived in Constantinople, Fez, and Tehran, they came with treaties, moral fervor, and the memory of their own Atlantic sin. They demanded the Muslim powers abolish slavery outright. The reply they met was measured, uneasy, and steeped in a scripture they had inherited from a fallen empire: “How can we forbid what God has permitted?”

But this was not the whole story. The "permission" these Ottoman jurists and Persian scholars defended was not the pure, radical voice of the Revelation itself. It was the ghost of an empire—the fossilized legacy of the Umayyad and Abbasid courts that had systematically corrupted the Qur’an’s liberatory project. They were defending a system of "concubinage" built on the names Jewel and Gazelle, not the Prophetic model that preserved the dignity of Maria and Salma. They were upholding a master's dominion that the Companion Ibn Mas'ud had explicitly forbidden, and that early jurists had condemned as a "Tyrant's Move."

The Qur’an had not merely "regulated" slavery. It had launched a divine legislative assault on the institution's very foundations, weaving a "moral grammar" of emancipation into the fabric of faith:

• It made freeing a slave the highest form of charity and the mandatory atonement for sins. 💰🩸➡️🗝️

• It transformed the master's "possession" into a future wife, granting her a dower, spiritual equality (You are of one another), and free-born children. 👰♀️💍➡️👶🗝️

• It systematically attacked the logic of human property through legal personhood, mandated kindness, and state-funded liberation. ⚖️❤️🏛️

The empires poisoned this well. They replaced marriage with concubinage, turned households into warzones, and created the very system the Orientalists would later mistake for "Islamic law."

So, when the 19th-century scholars asked, “Can we forbid what God allowed?” they were asking the wrong question. The true, Qur’anic question was: "Did God merely 'allow' slavery, or did He prescribe a divine program for its inevitable extinction? And by clinging to a corrupted imperial 'permission,' have we, in fact, forbidden the full realization of God’s justice?"

This post will trace the Qur’an’s own trajectory from acknowledgment to abolition, exploring its concept of moral gradualism. It will ask: is abolition not just a modern political demand, but the required culmination of the Qur’an’s ancient, revolutionary logic?

I. The Qur'anic Framework: A Divine Blueprint for Abolition 📜→🕊️

Before debating what later empires did, one must understand what the Qur'an itself said. The scripture did not "regulate" slavery as a permanent fixture. It initiated a comprehensive, multi-generational strategy to dismantle the institution from within by systematically destroying its legal, economic, and moral foundations. This was not a quiet reform; it was a revolutionary re-engineering of society.

The following table summarizes the four-pronged legislative assault on the institution of slavery.

The Four-Tiered Legislative Onslaught

Tier	Mechanism	Key Verse(s)	Impact & Emoji Analysis
1. INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE 🧠	Frames freeing slaves as a supreme act of personal virtue and piety, equal to core beliefs.	Al-Baqarah 177: "Righteousness is... to spend wealth... for freeing slaves."	Creates a moral incentive. 💰➡️🗝️ Challenges the "love of wealth" by making spending it on freedom a pillar of faith.
2. LEGAL ATONEMENT ⚖️	Mandates freeing a slave as compulsory penance for specific sins.	An-Nisā' 92: Penance for accidental homicide. Al-Mā'idah 89: Penance for broken oaths.	Creates a legal & spiritual requirement. 🩸/🤲➡️🗝️ Turns community life into an engine for mandatory, continuous manumission.
3. SOCIAL INTEGRATION 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦	Transforms enslaved women into wives and free mothers through legislated marriage.	An-Nisā' 24-25: "...So marry them (fankiḥūhunna) with the permission of their people and give them their dowers..." "...You are of one another (baʿḍukum min baʿḍ)..."	Dismantles slavery intergenerationally. 💍✨ Elevates enslaved women to wives, grants them a dower, and ensures their children are free and legitimate heirs.
4. STATE INSTITUTION 🏛️	Allocates a portion of the annual welfare tax (Zakāh) to fund the freeing of slaves as state policy.	At-Tawbah 60: "The alms are only for... the freeing of slaves (fī al-riqāb)."	Systematizes and funds abolition. 💰🔄🗝️ Makes emancipation a permanent, collective social responsibility, funded by the Islamic treasury.

The Core Revolutionary Principles

Beyond the legislative tiers, the Qur'an established new, non-negotiable ethical principles that made the slave-making mentality impossible for a believing community.

Principle	Verse & Concept	How It Dismantles Slavery
Spiritual Equality > Legal Status	Al-Baqarah 221: "A believing slave is better than a free polytheist."	Overturns social hierarchy. 📊 Faith, not freedom, becomes the true measure of human worth. A believing slave is spiritually superior to a non-believing master.
Universal Kindness (Iḥsān)	An-Nisā' 36: "Worship Allah... and do good (iḥsān) to... what your right hands possess."	Moralizes the relationship. 🤲❤️ The master's right is framed within a divine duty of active beneficence, outlawing cruelty and arrogance.
The "Lesser Injustice" Principle	An-Nisā' 3: Regulating existing relationships is "more suitable that you may not incline to injustice."	Acknowledges reality to reform it. 🌒➡️🔦 Brings a pre-existing practice under the rule of divine law as a first step toward its eventual eradication, preventing greater harm.

Synthesis: The "Moral Grammar" of Liberation

The Qur'an’s method is now stunningly clear. It does not issue a single, disruptive command of abolition that would have been impossible for 7th-century society to absorb. Instead, it weaves liberation into the very fabric of Islamic practice.

A Muslim, by simply living their faith—by praying, atoning for sins, getting married, and paying their taxes—becomes an agent in a divine program that relentlessly pressures the institution of slavery until it can no longer stand. The Qur'an did not just lay out rules; it built a society whose natural, pious state was freedom.

This was the divine blueprint. What came next was a human story of deviation.

II. The 19th Century Confrontation: Imperial Stagnation vs. Divine Progress 🏛️🔄🌍⚔️

Islamic Calendar 1214–1215 AH | Gregorian Calendar 1800 CE

By the turn of the 19th century, twelve hundred years had passed since the Revelation began its work. The Qur'an's moral grammar, designed for a seventh-century liberation, now faced a world transformed. In the West, the fires of the Atlantic Slave Trade were burning themselves out in the crucible of a newfound Christian abolitionist conscience, born from the very horrors it had unleashed. When its emissaries arrived in the capitals of the Muslim world, they encountered not the nascent, revolutionary community of the Prophet, but the ossified legacy of its empires—the Ottomans, the Qajars, the Mughals, and the Sultanates of Africa. These were powers that had inherited the letter of the classical law but had long lost its spirit. The profound question they posed—"Why do you not abolish slavery?"—was met not with the dynamic, abolitionist trajectory of the Qur'an, but with the static, defensive posture of a scholastic class speaking in the language of permission, oblivious to the scripture's grammar of termination. The collision was not between Islam and modernity, but between a corrupted Islamic practice and a forgotten Islamic ideal.

II.I The Ottoman Empire: The Great Inversion — From Liberation to Empire 👑⚔️➡️⛓️

The Ottoman slave system of the 19th century was not merely a continuation of the Qur'an's regulated, reformist institution. It was its photographic negative. Every principle laid down in the Revelation was systematically violated on an industrial scale.

The Qur'anic Principle vs. The Ottoman Practice

Qur'anic Principle ☪️✨	Ottoman Practice 👑⛓️	The Inversion
"You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) — Spiritual Equality. 💖	Enslaving fellow Muslims from Africa & the Caucasus. The sources were "Waday, Bagirmi, and Bornu... the Galla and Sidama principalities... Georgia and Circassia."	🚫 BROTHERHOOD DENIED. The Qur'an made faith the bond; the Ottomans made race and origin a justification for bondage. They enslaved their own spiritual kin.
"It is not for a prophet to have captives until he has thoroughly subdued the land..." (Qur'an 8:67) — A rebuke of taking captives for worldly gain. ⚔️➡️🚫	Acquisition through organized warfare, raiding, and kidnapping. "Local wars... threw on the market a large number of prisoners of war... slave-raids were organized to supply the markets."	🚫 THE PROPHETIC STANDARD VIOLATED. The Qur'an questioned the very morality of taking captives. The Ottomans built an economy on it.
Mandated Kindness (Iḥsān) and the "Circle of Trust". 🤲❤️	Brutal "Desert Caravans" and deadly sea voyages. "The march... took approximately three months... Mortality was high... conditions throughout the desert journey were rough... reports speak of long hours of marching, some of chaining, severe punishments..."	🚫 CRUELTY INSTITUTIONALIZED. The command to treat the enslaved with benevolent kindness was replaced with a system of calculated, brutal dehumanization for profit.
The Legal Personhood of the Slave. ⚖️👁️	Reduction to "Currency" and "Cargo". "Trading was by barter, and slaves were the 'currency'... A vessel of 80 tons arrived... with 368 slaves."	🚫 HUMANITY ERASED. The slave was no longer a legal person whose life required retribution, but a unit of trade, measured in tons of ship capacity.
Marriage (Nikāḥ) as the Lawful Framework. 💍	The Imperial "Concubine" System & Public Markets. "The greatest demand for slaves was generated by Istanbul, where the rich and influential members of the elite maintained at least one homestead." Slaves were sold in the market of Istanbul "near the chicken market."	🚫 DIGNITY DESTROYED. The Qur'an's path to integration through marriage was replaced with a public marketplace where human beings were inspected and sold next to livestock.
State Funds (Zakāh) for Manumission (fī al-riqāb). 🏛️💰➡️🗝️	State Taxes on the Sale of Human Beings. The Ottoman state did not spend money to free slaves; it profited from their sale through taxation and customs duties.	🚫 THE STATE'S ROLE INVERTED. The Islamic state's treasury became a mechanism for funding liberation. The Ottoman state's treasury became a mechanism for profiting from bondage.

Synthesis: The Empire of Contradictions

The Ottoman system was a theological and ethical catastrophe for Islam:

• They Enslaved Muslims: The Qur'anic vision was a community (Ummah) bound by faith. The Ottoman practice created a racial and ethnic underclass within that very community. A Muslim from Africa could be captured, marched across the Sahara, and sold in Istanbul to another Muslim. This violated the core Qur'anic principle that a "believing slave is better than a free polytheist."

• They Industrialized Cruelty: The Qur'an sought to instill Iḥsān. The Ottomans perfected the logistics of suffering: the three-month desert march, the packed slave dhows, the public auctions. This was not the "lesser injustice" of regulation; it was the greater injustice of systematized horror.

• They Commodified the Human Spirit: The Qur'an re-engineered the term mā malakat aymanukum to imply a moral responsibility. The Ottomans turned it into a barcode. People were "currency" in Jalo, "cargo" on steamships, and "inventory" in the market near the chicken vendors.

Conclusion: The 19th-century Ottoman Empire was not upholding Islamic law. It was upholding an imperial economic order that had parasitically attached itself to Islamic legal terminology. When its scholars asked, "How can we forbid what God has permitted?", they were defending not the Qur'an, but this corrupted, brutal, and un-Islamic system. They were defending the very institution the Qur'an came to dismantle.

II.II Qajar Persia: The Scholarly Defense of a Corrupted System 👑📿⚖️➡️⛓️

The Qajar Empire of 19th-century Persia presented a parallel tragedy to the Ottoman case. Here, the defense of slavery was not just a political stance but a concerted effort by the highest religious authorities (ulama) to provide a theological shield for a brutal economic reality. The encounter with British abolitionists exposed a profound divergence between the living practice of Shi'a jurists and the liberatory spirit of the Qur'an.

The Vast & Varied Slave Economy of Qajar Iran

The Qajar system was not a minor institution; it was a significant part of the social and economic fabric, supplied through multiple, active routes.

Source of Slaves	Ethnicity/Race	Primary Routes & Methods	Qur'anic Principle Violated
East Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Nubia, "Swahili" coast)	Black Africans (categorized by skin tone: Habashi lighter/"better", others darker/"worse")	Sea: Persian Gulf ports. Land: Pilgrimage routes to Mecca/Medina/Karbala.	🚫 "You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ). Racial hierarchy and stereotyping replaced spiritual equality.
Caucasus & Central Asia (Georgia, Armenia, Circassia)	"White" Slaves	Land & Sea (Black Sea): Conquest, raiding, sale by impoverished families. Curtailed by Russian expansion.	🚫 Brotherhood Denied. Enslavement of fellow humans, including potential Muslims, for commercial and military purposes.
Internal & Regional (Turcoman, Balochis, Kurds, Iranians)	Iranian Shi'a & Sunni Muslims	Land: Punitive raids, tribal warfare, banditry, kidnapping. Sale of family members due to poverty/famine.	🚫 Sanctity of Muslim Life. The Qur'anic prohibition against enslaving fellow Muslims was utterly ignored in inter-tribal and ethnic conflict.

The Scale: British reports estimated 2,000 to 5,000 slaves were imported annually into Iran's southern ports alone, not counting the overland trade. This was a systematic, large-scale operation.

The Theological Defense: The "Seven Causes" and the Betrayal of Logic

Confronted by British diplomats, Shah Muhammad Shah Qajar and his religious scholars erected a formidable theological defense. Their argument, however, was built on a foundation of selective application and logical fallacy.

The Core Argument of the Shah & Ulama:

1. Slavery is Halal (Permissible) in Shari'a. They argued that the "seven causes" (asbab) for slavery in Shi'a jurisprudence made it a religiously sanctioned institution.

2. The Ruler Cannot Forbid What God Permitted. The Shah stated: "I cannot prohibit my people from something which is lawful on the Sharia... I cannot issue a decree... which is against the Sharia."

The Fatal Flaws in Their Argument:

Their Claim	The Reality (Based on Qur'anic Blueprint)	The Contradiction
"Slavery is Halal."	The Qur'an acknowledged the existing institution only to dismantle it through a multi-pronged legislative assault (marriage, atonement, state funds). It treated slavery as a temporary social ill to be cured, not a permanent feature.	They focused on the initial permission while ignoring the divinely mandated process for its eradication. They cited the existence of a law but ignored its intent and trajectory.
"The Seven Causes are valid."	The African slave trade, which the British were targeting, was based on kidnapping and commercial raiding, not on a state of jihad against an attacking enemy. This was not a valid "cause" under classical Islamic law.	Their defense was a lie. They were using religious law to justify a purely commercial, and thus Islamically illegal, enterprise. This was not "lawful" slavery; it was human trafficking.
"Abolition is a Christian idea."	The Qur'an's emancipation project predated European abolitionism by 1200 years. The core principles of Ihsan, spiritual equality, and freeing slaves as piety were intrinsically Islamic.	They outsourced morality to the West, ceding the Qur'an's own revolutionary ethical ground. They framed abolition as foreign, rather than reclaiming it as the fulfillment of divine will.

The Fatwas: A Masterclass in Ethical Evasion 📜🤥

When the British sought fatwas to support abolition, the responses from the leading mujtahidin were a study in theological minimalism and evasion.

• The Wording: They were asked if abolishing the transport of black slaves would "injure the faith."

• The Unified Response: All jurists agreed the slave trade was Makruh (abominable/detested), but not Haram (unlawful).

• The Logic: They cited a hadith: "The worst people are those who sell human beings." Yet, they argued this only condemned making a profession out of slave trading, not the act of owning slaves itself.

This was a catastrophic moral failure. By refusing to declare the clearly unjust and illicit African trade as Haram, the ulama became complicit in a system of brutal exploitation. They provided the religious cover that allowed the Shah to resist abolition for years.

Synthesis: The Persian Paradox

The Qajar case presents a stark paradox:

• A Theoretically "Stricter" System: Shi'a jurisprudence emphasizes the "Principle of Freedom" (asālat al-ḥurriyya), which presumes all humans are free unless a specific religious proof establishes otherwise.

• A Practically More Oppressive Outcome: Despite this theoretical starting point, the Qajar ulama actively defended a slave system that violated their own legal principles. They created a theological fortress around a corrupt practice.

Conclusion: Like the Ottomans, 19th-century Persia was not upholding Islamic law. It was upholding an economic and social order of domination that had co-opted and corrupted religious language. The Shahs and ulama were not defenders of the faith; they were defenders of a status quo that the Qur'an itself sought to overturn. Their question—"How can we forbid what God allowed?"—was asked in bad faith, ignoring the fact that God's ultimate permission was for liberation, not perpetual bondage.

II.III. Egypt: The Bazaar of Human Flesh — A System of Organized Dehumanization 🏺🗺️➡️🏷️

In 19th-century Egypt, slavery was not a marginal practice but a central, meticulously organized pillar of the social and economic order. The system in Cairo was a masterpiece of bureaucratic and commercial efficiency, designed to process human beings with the same cold calculation as any other commodity, directly contradicting the Qur'an's foundational redefinition of the enslaved as spiritual equals and potential kin.

The Machinery of the Market: Cairo's Wakālat al-Jallāba

The slave market in Cairo was not a shadowy operation; it was a formal, state-sanctioned institution, a physical and symbolic heart of the system.

Aspect of the System	Description	Qur'anic Principle Violated
The Physical Plant 🏛️	A "vast structure" on al-Ṣanādiqiyya Street, with an upper chamber for "valuable" white slaves and eunuchs, and a lower chamber for common black slaves.	🚫 "You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ). Spiritual equality was replaced by a rigid racial and economic hierarchy, physically built into the architecture.
The Bureaucracy 📊	A government diwan (office) at the doorway where slave duties were paid and receipts issued. The state was not a liberator but a tax-collecting partner in the trade.	🚫 State as Emancipator. The Qur'an designated state funds (Zakāh) for freeing slaves (fī al-riqāb). The Egyptian state used its treasury to profit from their bondage.
The Guilds 👥	Two distinct guilds: the jallāba (dealers in black slaves, seen as immoral) and the yasirjiyya (dealers in white slaves, "highly respected").	🚫 Universal Iḥsān. The command to treat all with kindness was shattered by a professional class structure based on the racial value of the humans they traded.

The Logic of Commodification: From Person to "Head" (Ra's)

The entire process was engineered to erase personhood and establish the slave as a mere asset.

• Commercial Law for Humans: The sale of slaves was governed by the same chapter of commercial law (fiqh) as the sale of livestock. Special rules covered "defects" like pregnancy or disease.

• The "Ra's" (Head): Slaves were referred to collectively as a ra's (head), the same term used for cattle or sheep. This was not just slang; it was the operational logic of the market.

• The Brutal Journey: Death rates on the caravan routes from sub-Saharan Africa were as high as 30%, due to thirst, maltreatment, and fatigue. This was the harsh reality behind the "regulated" market in Cairo.

• The Middleman Grinder: A slave might be sold and resold a dozen times, with brokers taking commissions each time. John Lewis Burckhardt lamented that a slave, especially a child, could change hands "five or ten times in a day," a process designed to be "debilitating and dehumanizing."

The Racial Hierarchy: A Qur'anic Betrayal Codified

The Egyptian system institutionalized a racial prejudice that the Qur'an explicitly sought to dismantle.

"Category" of Slave	Perceived Value & Social Status	Contradiction with Qur'anic Ethic
Circassian/Georgian ("White") Women	Most Valuable. Preferred as concubines for the wealthy and the Khedival family. Their dealers (yasirjiyya) were "among the most prominent in Cairo."	🚫 Spiritual Worth > Legal Status. The Qur'an (Al-Baqarah 221) stated a believing slave is better than a free polytheist. Egypt taught that a white non-Muslim slave was better than a black Muslim slave.
Abyssinian ("Lighter Black") Women	Middle Tier. Functioned as concubines in middle-class households.	🚫 Rejection of Racial Hierarchy. The system created a sliding scale of human value based on skin tone and origin, the antithesis of the Qur'an's focus on faith and piety.
Other Black Africans	Lowest Tier. "Common slaves," mostly domestic laborers. Their dealers (jallāba) were considered men of "suspect morality," ranked socially alongside "prostitutes and donkey-drivers."	🚫 "Some of you are from others." The doctrine of common origin and spiritual brotherhood was replaced by a rigid caste system.

Synthesis: The "Humane" Illusion and the Imperial Reality

The common defense—that domestic slaves in Egypt were treated with "kindness and humanity"—is a dangerous half-truth that obscures the foundational violence of the system.

• The Caravan vs. The Harem: Yes, a slave who survived the 30%-mortality-rate caravan might find relative comfort in a Cairo household. But this is like arguing that a product is "well-packaged" after a brutal and wasteful manufacturing process. The brutality was in the supply chain, which the entire system was built upon.

• Kindness within Bondage: A master's personal "kindness" does not absolve the system. It merely makes the institution of absolute dominion more palatable and sustainable. The Qur'an did not command "kind slavery"; it commanded a path out of slavery through marriage, atonement, and eventual liberation.

Conclusion: Khedive Isma'il, the man who would later posture as an abolitionist, personally owned 300-400 slaves as late as 1874. This fact alone reveals the utter hypocrisy of the imperial position. The Egyptian system was the Qur'an's "moral grammar" not just forgotten, but inverted. It was a world where:

• The state taxed slaves instead of freeing them.

• Racial value replaced spiritual value.

• Human beings were legally categorized as livestock.

• And the pathways to integration (marriage) were perverted into a hierarchy of concubinage based on race and price.

Egypt, like the Ottoman and Qajar empires, was not living by the Qur'an's rules. It had built a sophisticated, modernized machine for human exploitation and used the shell of Islamic law to justify it.

II.IV. Morocco: The Sultan's Defiance — Scripture as a Shield for a Racialized Slave Economy 🇲🇦👑🛡️➡️⛓️

In 19th-century Morocco, the argument for slavery was stripped of all pretense of reform or integration. The Sultan's defense was a raw, literalist appeal to permissive texts, openly rejecting the Qur'an's moral trajectory and revealing a system built on racial hierarchy and economic convenience.

The Qur'anic Principle vs. The Moroccan Practice

Qur'anic Principle ☪️✨	Moroccan Practice 🇲🇦⛓️	The Defiance
"You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) — Spiritual Equality. 💖	A Vast, Racialized Slave Population. Estimates of 250,000 to 500,000 black slaves in a total population of ~8 million. A clear racial underclass. Europeans noted Fez looked "like the Sudan."	🚫 A SOCIETY BUILT ON RACIAL HIERARCHY. The spiritual equality of believers was replaced by a visible, skin-color-based caste system.
The Prophetic Rebuke of Taking Captives for "Commodities of this world" (Qur'an 8:67). ⚔️➡️🚫	An Industrial-Scale Trans-Saharan Trade. "Morocco imported about 7,000 or 8,000 slaves a year during the nineteenth century." Caravans brought up to 3,000 slaves at a time in a highly organized, profitable network.	🚫 COMMODIFICATION ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE. This was not about prisoners of war; it was a full-blown economic sector dedicated to human trafficking, the very "worldly desire" the Qur'an condemned.
Marriage (Nikāḥ) as Integration. 💍	Concubinage & The Sultan's Harem. The sultan and elites maintained large harems. As Walter Harris noted, a concubine who found the Sultan's favor could usurp a wife, who would then "sink to the degradation of slavery."	🚫 THE "TYRANT'S MOVE" INSTITUTIONALIZED. The household was not a place of integration but a predatory arena where women's status was entirely contingent on the master's sexual favor.
Iḥsān (Beneficent Kindness) as a Command. 🤲❤️	"Mild Slavery" as a Justification. Consul Drummond Hay downplayed the trade, claiming slaves were "the spoilt children of the house." This willful blindness ignored the horrors of the trans-Saharan journey and focused only on the end point of "well-treated" domestic servants.	🚫 CRUELTY OUTSOURCED, CONVENIENCE ENJOYED. The Moroccan elite justified the system by focusing on the final condition of some urban slaves, while outsourcing the brutal process of capture, march, and sale to distant traders.
The State's Role in Liberation (Zakāh for fī al-riqāb). 🏛️💰➡️🗝️	The State as a Primary Profiteer. "The emperor takes five per cent on the imported material, and has a right of the first choice." The Makhzen (state) was not a liberator; it was a tax collector and primary consumer of enslaved people.	🚫 THE ISLAMIC STATE INVERTED. The treasury mandated by God for liberation was replaced by a state apparatus that profited from and participated in human bondage.

The Sultan's Theological Defense: A Literalist Fortress

Sultan Mawlay ‘Abd ar-Rahman’s reply to the British in 1842 is a masterpiece of defiant legalism:

"The traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed... and we are not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect... the religion of Islam... has a solid foundation... which admits not either of addition or diminution... As to what regards the making of slaves and trading therewith, it is confirmed by our book... and furthermore there is not any controversy between the Oolamma on that subject."

This argument is built on three pillars, each a betrayal of the Qur'an's spirit:

1. The Argument from Antiquity: "Everyone has always done it." This appeals to pre-Islamic custom, not Qur'anic reform.

2. The Argument from Immutability: "The law is fixed and cannot change." This ignores the concept of Naskh (abrogation) and the very idea of a progressive revelation that the Meccan and Medinan verses on slavery demonstrate.

3. The Argument from Scholarly Consensus (Ijma`): "No jurist disagrees." This elevates the historical rulings of men above the evident moral trajectory of the divine text.

Synthesis: The "Benign" Slave Society as a Lie

The Moroccan case explodes the myth of "mild" Islamic slavery.

• The Scale: Importing 7,000-8,000 people per year is not a "mild" or "domestic" institution; it is a pillar of the economy and social structure.

• The Racial Reality: The creation of a massive, visible black underclass shows that the Qur'an's dissolution of status was replaced by a rigid, racial hierarchy.

• The Psychological Violence: The system relied on the brutal separation of families. As Donald Mackenzie reported, "It is heartrending to see mothers and children separated, perhaps never to meet again in this world." This is the absolute antithesis of the Qur'an's focus on preserving family and lineage.

Conclusion: 19th-century Morocco was a slave society, pure and simple. Its sultans and scholars chose to interpret Islam as a static ratification of their own power and social order. They weaponized the "permission" in the Qur'an, severing it from its accompanying "moral grammar" of liberation, and in doing so, created a system that was, in its scale and racial nature, arguably closer to the Atlantic model than to the transformative, integrative system envisioned by the Revelation. When the Sultan said he would only yield to "superior force," he was admitting that his commitment was not to the highest ethics of his faith, but to the raw power to maintain his kingdom's most profound injustice.

II.V. Arabia: The Caste System — The Betrayal of Spiritual Equality 🇴🇲➡️🧬⛓️

The Qur'anic vision was one of spiritual equality leading to social integration. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, this vision had been inverted across Arabia into a rigid, racialized caste system. Slavery was no longer a temporary legal status to be overcome through marriage and manumission; it was a permanent, inherited social position defined by African ancestry.

The Qur'anic Principle vs. The Arabian Caste System

Qur'anic Principle ☪️✨	The Arabian Caste Reality (per Reilly) 🇴🇲🧬	The Betrayal
"You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) — Spiritual equality that transcends legal status. 💖	"Strong prohibitions against intermarriage with Africans served to keep slaves and mawlas alike apart from the Arab population, to the point that Africans constituted a servile caste."	🚫 BROTHERHOOD REPLACED BY APARTHEID. The Qur'an's doctrine of spiritual unity was replaced by a system of endogamy (marrying only within one's group) to preserve "pure" Arab lineages and maintain a permanent, identifiable underclass.
Marriage (Nikāḥ) as an Integrative Mechanism. 💍	"The Arabs themselves tended to use the term ‘abid, or slave, as a blanket term for people of African ancestry in general."	🚫 FROM LEGAL STATUS TO RACIAL IDENTITY. A person was not just legally enslaved; their African ancestry itself became the marker of a servile status, regardless of individual legal standing.
Manumission as a Path to Full Membership in the Community. 🗝️➡️👥	The Mawla Trap: "Manumission in traditional Arabian slavery did not lead to a dramatic improvement in the legal situation of the former slave." A mawla remained a dependent client, owing "fealty, aid, and counsel" to their former master.	🚫 FREEDOM WITHOUT LIBERATION. The system was designed to ensure that even upon manumission, Africans could not become true peers. They were freed from being property but not from being a subservient caste.
Iḥsān (Beneficent Kindness) as a Command. 🤲❤️	"The lot of a slave in Arabia is quite as happy as that of thousands of human beings in the most advanced countries of the world." (Eldon Rutter, 1933). This "mildness" was a tool of control, creating "contented slaves" and perpetuating the system.	🚫 THE "KIND" MASTER MYTH. The narrative of "mild slavery" was used to justify the system's continuation, ignoring the fundamental injustice of hereditary bondage and the psychological violence of caste oppression.
Legal Personhood & Atonement through Freedom. ⚖️	Economic Exploitation: "Most mawlas were obliged to continue performing the same tasks they had performed as slaves, though now as wage earners or sharecroppers."	🚫 FROM PERSON TO PERPETUAL TENANT. The freed slave (mawla) often faced a worse economic reality, now responsible for their own sustenance while still being tied to their former master's land and authority.

The Scale of the System: A Peninsula-Wide Caste Structure

Reilly's research shows this was not an isolated practice but a pan-Arabian social structure.

Region	Evidence of the Racial Caste System
Oman & The Gulf	In Dhofar, Africans ('Abid) made up 30–50% of the coastal population, confined to "heavy physical labor" in agriculture and living in segregated "small huts" scattered throughout the oases.
Najd (Central Arabia)	Towns like Ha'ir and Shamasiya were populated by hundreds of African mawlas who worked as sharecroppers for absentee Bedouin owners. They were known collectively as 'abid, a racial label, despite their legal freedom.
The Hijaz	In Khurma, African mawlas constituted three-quarters of the population but owned no land, working as sharecroppers for ashraf elites and Bedouin. The Wadi Safra was farmed by "blacks originally from Africa... [who] formed a society of their own," separate from the Arab tribes.
Hadramaut & Yemen	Traveler Freya Stark described slave villages whose inhabitants were "tortured and twisted with beatings" by absentee Bedouin owners, who "scorn to work with their hands."

Synthesis: The Ultimate Perversion — "In lightening the fetter, he riveted it ever more firmly in place."

This quote, which Reilly cites from Murray Gordon, encapsulates the tragedy. The Qur'an's reforms—meant to dismantle slavery—were manipulated to create a more resilient, socially enforced system of bondage that was arguably harder to escape than a purely legal one.

• The Qur'an offered a ladder out of slavery through piety, marriage, and atonement.

• The Arabian Caste System offered a hamster wheel: One could be manumitted and become a mawla, but could never shed the social identity of 'abid (slave) or marry into the dominant class. Their children would inherit the same caste status.

The "mildness" noted by observers was the calm of a settled, institutionalized hierarchy, not the dynamic, liberatory process the Qur'an envisioned. It was a system designed for social stability, not divine justice.

Conclusion: By the dawn of the 20th century, the slave system in Arabia had become the exact opposite of the Qur'anic model. It was no longer a transitional status for individuals of any race captured in war. It was a hereditary, racial caste that used the language of Islamic permission to sanctify a reality of permanent, ingrained social inequality. This was not the "moral grammar" of liberation; it was the social grammar of apartheid, and it represented a complete failure to enact the revolutionary social vision laid out in the Revelation.

Conclusion to Section II: The Imperial Betrayal — A Unified Network of Bondage from the Danube to the Somali Coast 🌍⛓️

The evidence from the Ottoman, Persian, Egyptian, and Arabian fronts reveals a devastating, unified truth: by the 19th century, the Muslim world was enmeshed in a vast, interconnected network of slavery that was the absolute antithesis of the Qur'an's moral project.

This was not the regulated, reformist institution of the Revelation. It was a corrupted imperial system, characterized by:

1. Industrial Scale & Economic Integration: This was not a scattered, domestic practice. It was a massive economic engine.

• The Ottoman Heartland: Istanbul's demand generated a "trek nach Istanbul," with caravans and steamships feeding a complex system stretching into the Balkans and the Caucasus.

• The Persian Gulf: Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans powered the date and pearl industries, constituting up to a quarter of the population in some regions.

• Egypt: The Wakālat al-Jallāba in Cairo was not a rogue market but a state-sanctioned bureaucratic hub, complete with a government diwan that collected taxes on every human transaction, making the Khedivate a direct financial beneficiary of the trade.

• North Africa: Morocco alone imported 7,000-8,000 Africans annually, embedding slavery deep into its agrarian and military structures.

This was not mere "ownership"; it was a capitalist enterprise, integrated into global networks for dates, pearls, and agricultural produce, with human beings as the central commodity.

2. Systematic Racialization & Caste: The Qur'an's doctrine of "You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) was buried under a rigid, legally and socially enforced racial hierarchy.

• From the "black slaves" (zenci) of the Ottoman markets to the "500,000 blacks" forming a underclass in Morocco, a visible, skin-color-based caste system was cemented.

• In Egypt, this hierarchy was architecturally codified: "valuable" white slaves were kept in the upper chambers of the market, while "common" black Africans were relegated to the lower chambers. The dealers themselves were segregated into respected yasirjiyya (white slavers) and despised jallāba (black slavers).

• A Muslim from Africa was no longer a spiritual brother; he was a ra's—a "head" of livestock, legally categorized and traded under the same commercial codes as cattle.

3. Theological Abdication & Scholarly Complicity: The political and religious elite systematically weaponized the letter of the law to betray its spirit.

• The Sultan of Morocco defiantly quoted the "permission" in the Qur'an as an immutable decree.

• The Qajar Shah and his jurists obsessed over the "seven causes" of slavery while willfully ignoring that the brutal African trade violated their own legal principles.

• In Egypt, the ulama provided the religious cover that allowed the market to thrive for decades after the first abolitionist pressures, failing to declare the illicit trade haram.

They elevated the historical rulings of men over the clear, liberatory trajectory of the divine text, providing a religious facade for a system of pure exploitation.

4. Universal Brutality in Fact, Not Theory: The myth of "mild, domestic slavery" is annihilated by the evidence. It is obliterated by:

• The image of the iron manacle sawed off an ankle in Oman in 1907.

• The three-month Saharan marches where corpses of the enslaved littered the route as a normal cost of business.

• The 30% mortality rates on the Nubian routes to Egypt, where slaves died of thirst, fatigue, and maltreatment.

• The holds of dhows where captives were packed so tightly they could not breathe.

• The systematic kidnapping of children, gagged in baskets on the streets of Zanzibar.

• The Cairo slave grind, where a single person could be sold and resold "five or ten times in a day," a process designed to be "debilitating and dehumanizing."

Synthesis: The Great Reversal — The Empire vs. The Revelation 🔄

The 19th-century reality was a profound, point-by-point inversion of the Qur'anic blueprint:

The Qur'anic Blueprint ☪️✨	The Imperial Reality 👑⛓️
Manumission as a Pillar of Piety (e.g., Zakāh funds, atonement)	Abolition declared a sin against God. The state taxed slaves instead of freeing them.
The Enslaved as a Spiritual Equal (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ)	The Enslaved as a Racial Inferior. A rigid caste system based on skin color was enforced from Istanbul to Cairo.
Marriage (Nikāḥ) as the Path to Integration	Concubinage as a System of Domination. Women were categorized and priced by race for sexual access.
The Command of Iḥsān (Active Beneficence)	The Perfection of Logistical Cruelty. Empires industrialized the process of capture, transport, and sale.
A Moral Grammar for Abolition	A Theological Shield for Perpetual Bondage.

When the 19th-century sultans, shahs, and khedives asked, "How can we forbid what God has permitted?" they were not defending the nuanced, transitional institution the Qur'an envisioned. They were defending the imperial perversion that had taken its place—a global, racialized, and brutal system of human bondage that stretched from the Danube to the Horn of Africa.

They were not upholding Islam. They were upholding the very Jahiliyya—the Age of Ignorance, tribalism, and oppression—that the Revelation was sent to destroy. The collision with European abolitionism was not, therefore, a clash between Islam and modernity. It was a collision between a forgotten Islamic ideal and a corrupted Islamic practice that had sold its soul for imperial power and economic gain.

III. The Historical Moment: Abolition Meets the Muslim World

The 19th-century abolitionist crusade, championed by Britain and France, arrived in the capitals of the Muslim world shrouded in a haze of moral contradiction. It was a demand for emancipation from empires whose own hands were still stained with the blood of the Atlantic slave trade and whose colonial ambitions often used the language of liberation as a pretext for conquest. Yet, this profound Western hypocrisy did not absolve the Muslim powers. Their response—a defensive, legalistic clinging to the letter of scripture while ignoring its spirit of liberation—exposed a parallel moral failure. The ensuing confrontation was not a simple drama of righteous Westerners versus obstinate Muslims. It was a far more tragic spectacle: a clash between the repentant but imperialistic architects of a New World hellscape, and the guardians of an Old World order who had long abandoned their own scripture's divine mandate to dismantle the very chains they now fought to preserve.

III.I The Great Defense: The Arguments of 19th-Century Muslim Powers 🛡️📜⚔️

Faced with European abolitionist pressure, the Ottoman, Persian, Egyptian, and Moroccan ruling and scholarly classes did not simply refuse; they constructed a sophisticated theological and legal defense. Their arguments were not based on a love of slavery, but on a specific, rigid interpretation of divine law, a defense of imperial identity, and a deep-seated resentment of foreign coercion. This was a unified front, from the Danube to the Somali coast.

The following table catalogs and deconstructs their primary lines of reasoning and the specific scriptural evidence they wielded.

The Defense Arsenal: Arguments & "Proof Texts" Against Abolition

Argument & Proponent	Stated Position & "Proof Texts" 🗣️📖	Underlying Logic & Emoji Analysis 🧠
1. The "Divine Permission" Argument (Muhammad Shah of Persia, Ottoman Ulama, Egyptian Khedivate)	“We cannot forbid what God has permitted.” Muhammad Shah: "Buying women and men is based on the Sharia of the last Prophet. I cannot prohibit my people from something which is lawful..." "Proof Text": Qur'an 5:87 "O you who have believed, do not prohibit the good things (al-tayyibat) which Allah has made lawful to you and do not transgress. Indeed, Allah does not like transgressors."	🚫 STATIC READING & CATEGORY ERROR. This argument freezes the revelation in time. It ignores that what God "made lawful" was not slavery in the abstract, but a highly regulated, transitional system with a built-in expiration date. To perpetuate the institution against its own liberatory trajectory is the real transgression. Abolition is not prohibiting a lawful thing; it is fulfilling the lawful process God initiated. It's like saying "don't prohibit weaning a child" means the child must nurse forever. 🍼➡️👨‍👦❌
2. The "Inherent Good" Argument (Scholarly Class across Empires)	"Slavery is part of the 'lawful good things.' If it were evil, God would have prohibited it." They framed the category of lawful ownership as a tayyibah (pure, good thing). "Proof Text": Qur'an 7:157 "He commands them what is right (ma'ruf) and forbids them what is wrong (munkar); he makes lawful for them the good things (al-tayyibat) and prohibits for them the evil things (al-khaba'ith)..."	🚫 CATEGORY ERROR. This is the heart of their fallacy. The verse speaks of inherently good and evil things (e.g., wholesome food vs. rotting carcasses). Slavery is not an inherent "good"; it is a social relationship that the Qur'an found in a state of injustice and subjected to a reform process. The "lawful good" here is the dignified, marital relationship it creates from a corrupt one, not the state of ownership itself. The "evil thing" is the pre-Islamic, exploitative model they were actively practicing. ⚖️➡️💍✅
3. The "Sectarian Exceptionalism" Argument (Muhammad Shah of Persia)	“Our sect is different; we will not follow them.” "Turks are Sunni... The Imam of Masqat is also from the Khawarej... Then, we, who are the leaders of Shiʿi Islam, will not follow them."	👑 PRIDE & POLEMIC. This deflects the moral challenge by turning it into a sectarian contest. The ethical imperative of emancipation is lost in the defense of a particular religious identity against rivals and foreign critics. It's a tribalistic refusal to acknowledge a universal good, allowing pride to override piety. ⛰️🚫🌍
4. The "Abolition is Haram" Argument (Shaykh Muhammad Hasan of Karbala)	“To prohibit the permissible is itself a sin.” "The temporal power cannot forbid a legitimate act; consequently, such a prohibition would be illegitimate."	⚖️ LEGAL INVERSION. This frames the act of abolition as the transgression, not the practice of slavery. By focusing solely on the legal category of the act ("mubah" - permissible), it completely sidesteps the ethical category of the outcome (systemic oppression and the violation of the "Circle of Iḥsān"). The map is prioritized over the territory, and the law is weaponized against its own spirit. 🗺️➡️😶‍🌫️
5. The "Gradualist Defense" / "It's only Makruh" Argument (Mulla Ali Kani, Persian Ulama)	“The trade is abominable, but not illegal.” "Trading in... slaves is not illegitimate, but it is an abomination... If it is abandoned on this account, it is good, but if [it is abandoned] on account of its being illegitimate, it is wrong."	🔄 MORAL NEUTRALIZATION. This is a masterclass in juristic evasion. By categorizing the slave trade as merely "disliked" (makruh) while keeping it legally valid, the scholars gave it a permanent pass. A "disliked" but profitable and powerful practice will always continue. It provided a pious-sounding excuse for inaction, a theological shrug that maintained the status quo. 🤷‍♂️⚖️
6. The "Instrument of Conversion" Argument (Shi'i Juristic Tradition, implied elsewhere)	“Slavery is a means to bring people to Islam.” Slavery was seen as "a means to facilitate conversion to Islam by non-Muslims... By becoming a Muslim, one becomes a member of the free people’s society (jāmiʿ al-aḥrār)."	🎯 THEOLOGICAL PERVERSION. This argument inverts the Qur'an's core principle that "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). It transforms slavery from a social ill to be cured into a divinely-sanctioned missionary tool, justifying coercion in the name of salvation. This was a complete betrayal of the Qur'anic ethos, turning liberation theology into a theology of domination. 💔🔄😈
7. The "Clarity of the Law" Argument (Scholarly consensus)	"Slavery is in the 'clear lawful' category. There is no ambiguity." "Proof Text": The Hadith on Halal & Haram "The lawful is clear and the unlawful is clear, and between them are ambiguous matters..."	🚫 MISAPPLICATION OF CLARITY. The "clarity" of its initial permission is not the end of the story. The objective of that legislation is what matters. The "ambiguous matter" (mushabbihat) here is not the law itself, but whether a society has reached the moral and practical conditions where the initial permission can be retired because its goal has been achieved. To insist on the "clear" permission while ignoring the "clear" objective (liberation) is to miss the forest for the trees. 🌳😶‍🌫️➡️✅
8. The "Prophetic Precedent" Argument (Universal Appeal)	“If it was good enough for the Prophet and the Salaf, it is good enough for us. To reject it is to reject them.” This appeals to the deep reverence for the early community. "Proof": The historical fact of slave ownership by the Prophet and Companions.	🚫 CONTEXTUAL COLLAPSE. This confuses engaging with a historical reality with endorsing it as an eternal ideal. The Prophet engaged with the reality of 7th-century Arabia to transform it. He owned slaves in order to free them, and he married enslaved women to elevate them to the highest social status (Mothers of the Believers). His practice was one of strategic engagement for the purpose of liberation and integration, not a blanket endorsement. To continue owning slaves in the 19th century was to betray the purpose of his actions. ⏳⚖️🔄
9. The "Anti-Colonial / Islamic Identity" Argument (Implied by all, from Istanbul to Cairo)	“This is a foreign, Christian imposition.” The Western cry was seen not as a moral appeal but as "a proxy for condemning Islam itself" and a tool of colonial pressure.	🛡️ DEFENSIVE REFLEX. This was a powerful and emotionally valid point. Abolitionism arrived not as a pure moral philosophy but wrapped in the flag of imperial domination. However, this valid resentment was used to shield an internal moral failure from critique. A correct observation about the messenger was used to dismiss the message, preventing any self-critical engagement with their own tradition's higher ideals. 💂‍♂️🚫✉️

Synthesis: The Core Flaw in the Imperial Defense ❌

All these arguments, from the Balkans to the Horn of Africa, share a common, fatal flaw: They conflated the existence of a legal category in classical jurisprudence with a divine endorsement of their contemporary historical practice.

They spoke of "slavery" as a monolithic, static entity that God "permitted," while ignoring that the actual practice they were defending in the 19th century—the African slave trade, the brutal marches with 30% mortality, the racially stratified public markets of Cairo—was the imperial perversion, not the Qur'anic regulated entity.

They treated the scholarly descriptions of law from the 8th-15th centuries as immutable prescriptions for the 19th, committing a form of "presentism" in reverse—projecting the past onto the present without ethical re-evaluation. They were, in effect, defending human history and human scholarly precedent that had drifted far from the Qur'an's revolutionary spirit.

Conclusion: The 19th-century Muslim defense was not a defense of the Qur'an. It was a defense of a man-made system of empire and commerce that had cloaked itself in the garb of divine law. The profound tragedy is that in their desperate effort to defend Islam from the West, they ended up defending one of the most un-Islamic and oppressive aspects of their own societies, betraying the very "moral grammar" of liberation that their revelation had so brilliantly articulated.

III.II The Great Hypocrisy: Selective Modernization & The Slavery Exception ⚖️🔄❌

The 19th-century Muslim empires presented a profound paradox: they were societies in the throes of radical, self-driven transformation, yet they claimed a unique powerlessness to change the institution of slavery, citing immutable divine law. This was not traditionalism; it was a selective and hypocritical conservatism. They modernized what served their power and clung to "tradition" only to preserve their most intimate privileges.

The following table exposes this stark double standard across the Ottoman, Qajar, and Egyptian empires.

The Double Standard: Adaptation vs. Immutability

Sphere of Change	Evidence of Modernization & Adaptation 🆕	The Implied Logic ✅	Contrast with Slavery Stance 🚫
1. MILITARY & TECHNOLOGY ⚔️🛠️	Ottomans: The "Tanzimat" Reforms. The Janissary corps (centuries-old) was violently abolished (1826). Army overhauled with European uniforms, conscription, and warships. Egypt: Muhammad Ali Pasha massacred the Mamluks (1811), built a modern, conscripted army and navy, and imported European officers and engineers.	"To survive, we must adopt the best practices of our time, even from non-Muslims. Ancient institutions must be destroyed if they hinder state power." 👑💥➡️💂‍♂️	SLAVERY: "We cannot change what God permitted." Divine law was invoked to preserve a social and economic institution, even at the cost of international standing and moral progress. The state could annihilate a slave-soldier class (Mamluks/Janissaries) but not a domestic slave. 📜⛓️
2. GOVERNANCE & LAW 🏛️⚖️	Ottomans: Created secular Nizamiye courts based on French models. New commercial and penal codes. Egypt: Muhammad Ali established a centralized, European-style bureaucracy. Introduced state monopolies and land reforms that dismantled the Iltizam (tax-farming) system.	"The complex modern world requires new, centralized legal and administrative frameworks beyond classical fiqh. We can and must legislate anew." ⚖️➡️📈	SLAVERY: "The Shariah is a complete and timeless system." Suddenly, the classical law was treated as a frozen, unchangeable monolith, ignoring 1,200 years of its own interpretive evolution (ijtihad). 🥶📜
3. FASHION & CULTURE 👑👗	Ottomans & Qajars: Sultans and Shahs wore European military uniforms and formal wear. Court culture, architecture, and etiquette were emulated from Europe. Egypt: The Khedival court became a beacon of European fashion and opera.	"Modernity and prestige are symbolized by adopting the external markers of the powerful global order. Our ancestors' customs are not sacred here." 🌍➡️🎩	SLAVERY: "We must uphold the social customs of our ancestors." The "custom of the ancestors" was only sacred when it involved dominating other human beings. 👵➡️⛓️
4. ECONOMY & INFRASTRUCTURE 💰🏭	All Empires: Built railroads, telegraph lines, and modern factories. Granted massive concessions to European companies for banking, tobacco, and the Suez Canal.	"Economic development and integration into the global capitalist system are necessary for prosperity and strength. The pre-modern economic model must be dismantled." 🚂➡️💸	SLAVERY: "The economy depends on this ancient labor system." They argued for the necessity of a pre-modern labor system while actively building a modern capitalist economy that rendered it obsolete. This was a deliberate lie. 📉➡️🤥
5. COMMUNICATION & EDUCATION 📞🎓	All Empires: Introduced the printing press, official gazettes, and secular schools/universities teaching European languages and sciences.	"A modern state requires an informed citizenry and new forms of knowledge. The monopoly of traditional education must be broken." 🖨️➡️🧠	SLAVERY: "We cannot innovate new religious rulings (ijtihad)." The same states that were technological and educational innovators claimed they lacked the intellectual capacity for legal innovation on slavery. 💡🚫

The Ultimate Irony: Abandoning the Prophetic Way to Defend Its Corruption ☪️✨➡️👑😈

The most profound layer of hypocrisy was their appeal to the Prophet's example. They claimed they could not abandon slavery because it was the "way of the Prophet," yet they were systematically dismantling the very socio-economic structures he actually established and living in a manner he explicitly warned against.

They Defended This "Prophetic Practice":	While Abandoning THESE Prophetic Principles:	The Contradiction
The legal category of slavery (a 7th-century reality he regulated to death).	1. The Anti-Oppression State: The Prophet's state was a community (Ummah) based on piety, not ethnic hierarchy. He condemned the arrogance (kibr) of tribalism and race.	🚫 The empires were built on racialized slavery and ethnic stratification (e.g., Ottoman millet system, Egyptian racial hierarchies in slave markets), the antithesis of the Prophet's "You are of one another."
	2. The Simple, Accessible Leader: The Prophet lived with austere simplicity. His companions feared accumulating wealth.	🚫 The Khedives, Sultans, and Shahs lived in obscene opulence, building European-style palaces while claiming to follow the man who slept on a palm-fiber mat.
	3. The Condemnation of Extravagance (Israf): The Qur'an and Hadith repeatedly condemn waste and excessive luxury.	🚫 They funded their modernization (railroads, armies) and lavish lifestyles through massive debt to European powers, selling their economic sovereignty—a form of national Israf the Prophet would have condemned.
	4. The Egalitarian Military: The early Muslim army was a citizen force. The Prophet did not create a separate, professional slave-soldier class (Mamluks or Janissaries).	🚫 They proudly abolished the very slave-soldier institutions (Mamluks/Janissaries) that were later, un-Islamic innovations, while defending the domestic slavery the Prophet sought to minimize.

Conclusion: They were not "following the Prophet's way." They were following the way of Pharaoh and Caesar—building vast, centralized, hierarchical states—while using the language of the Prophet to defend a single, cherished privilege: the power of the elite male in his own home. The "7th-century argument" was a smokescreen. They were not living in the 7th century. They were building railways and wearing frock coats. The only 7th-century practice they fought to preserve was the one that gave them absolute power over other human beings in their own households.

This reveals the core truth: the defense of slavery was not about theology; it was about psychology. It was about the preservation of a master's izzah (honor) and sultan (power) in the most intimate sphere of life, even as they surrendered that power in the public sphere to European technology and models. The Ottoman, Qajar, and Egyptian empires proved by their own actions that they could radically transform their societies. Their refusal to abolish slavery was not an inability to change, but an unwillingness to relinquish a specific, deeply personal form of dominion.

III.III Islamic Law and Abolition: The Revival of the Qur'anic Conscience ⚖️📖✨

Freamon highlights a pivotal intellectual battle in the 19th century: the struggle between a defensive, rigid traditionalism (the Islam of the Empires) and a reformist Islam that sought to reactivate the Qur'an's revolutionary spirit. The modernists did not abandon Islamic law; they performed Ijtihād (independent reasoning) to align it with the scripture's ultimate objectives, directly confronting the double standards of the rulers.

The following table shows how these reformers used specific Qur'anic verses to build a theological case for abolition, creating a powerful counter-narrative to the stagnant juristic opinions of the courts in Constantinople, Cairo, and Tehran.

The Reformist Argument: Qur'anic Verses as the Foundation for Abolition

Reformist Scholar & Argument	Supporting Qur'anic Verse(s)	Qur'anic Principle & Emoji Analysis
1. The "Law of Universal Obligation" to Free Captives Sayyid Ahmad Khan (India): He argued the "freedom verses" created a divine mandate that made slavery obsolete within a generation of the Prophet. The empires' perpetual slavery was a betrayal.	Qur'an 47:4-5: "So when you meet those who disbelieve, strike [their] necks until, when you have subdued them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens..."	⚔️➡️🕊️ The Law of Release. Khan argued this verse makes the freeing or ransoming of captives the primary, post-combat injunction. It frames captivity as a temporary state of war, not a permanent condition of slavery. The empires' practice of lifelong, hereditary bondage was a direct violation of this "law of universal obligation" to release.
2. The Prophetic Rebuke of Slave-Taking for Gain Core Thesis of the Modernists: The Qur'an itself questions the morality of taking captives, pointing toward abolition.	Qur'an 8:67: "It is not for a prophet to have captives until he has thoroughly subdued the land..."	👑➡️🚫 A Rebuke of Acquisition. This verse, revealed after the Battle of Badr, was a profound critique of taking captives for worldly ransom. Modernists saw it as divine evidence that the Qur'an sought to minimize and question the very basis of slave-taking, a principle the empire-builders in Constantinople and Cairo ignored as they built economies on human trafficking.
3. Freedom as the Summit of Righteousness Sayyid Amir Ali ("The Spirit of Islam"): Argued abolition was the natural result of an intelligent understanding of Islam's core ethos.	Qur'an 90:12-13: "And what can make you know what is the difficult pass? It is the freeing of a neck (slave)..."	⛰️➡️🗝️ Freedom as the "Difficult Pass". This powerful Meccan verse places the act of freeing a slave at the very summit of righteousness. It isn't a minor good deed; it is the definition of true belief and the path to salvation. By making it the "steep ascent," the Qur'an establishes a clear and overwhelming spiritual preference for freedom over ownership.
4. The Absolute Command of Justice Used by Rashid Rida and others via Maslaha (Public Interest): If slavery causes social harm and makes Muslims unjust, its abolition is mandatory.	Qur'an 5:8: "...Be steadfast in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives..."	⚖️✨ Justice as an Absolute. The command to uphold justice ('adl) unconditionally provides the foundation for maslaha. The reformers argued that the 19th-century institution of slavery—with its racial hierarchies, brutal caravans, and broken families—was inherently unjust. Therefore, the absolute divine command to establish justice demanded its abolition for the public good, directly challenging the rulers' corrupt "order."
5. The Presumption of Liberty & Human Dignity Ahmad Bey's decree and the modernist ethos: "The basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom."	Qur'an 17:70: "And We have certainly honored the children of Adam..."	👨‍👩‍👧‍👦💎 The Honor of Humanity. This verse establishes the inherent dignity (karamah) of every human being. The reformers argued that the empires' hereditary, racialized slavery was a fundamental violation of this God-given honor. Freedom, therefore, was not a Western invention but the natural and dignified state for the "Children of Adam," a state the rulers had usurped.

Synthesis: The Two Islams in Conflict ⚔️

Freamon's text reveals a clash between two interpretations of Islam in the 19th century, a direct response to the tyranny of the imperial courts:

• The Islam of Historical Jurisprudence (The Ottoman/Qajar/Egyptian Model): This was the Islam of the palaces in Constantinople, Cairo, and Tehran. It treated the fiqh (jurisprudence) of the classical era as frozen and final. It focused myopically on the "how" of slavery—the seven legal causes, the regulations of sale—while deliberately ignoring the Qur'an's overarching "why"—the moral grammar aimed at liberation. It was an Islam of legal technicalities used to justify power.

• The Islam of Qur'anic Objectives (The Modernist Model): This was the Islam of the reformers. They practiced Ijtihād, looking past the complex legal scaffolding built by later empires and returning to the Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah (Higher Objectives of Islamic Law): the preservation of life, religion, intellect, lineage, and property. They convincingly argued that the empires' slavery, as practiced, violated all these objectives:

  • Life: 30% mortality on caravan routes.

  • Religion: "No compulsion in religion" was violated by the "instrument of conversion" argument.

  • Intellect: Denying education and agency to slaves.

  • Lineage: Breaking up families at auction blocks.

  • Property: Treating human beings as disposable commodities.

Conclusion: The Qur'an as the Abolitionist's Text ✅

Unlike in Christianity or Judaism, where abolition required moving beyond specific scriptural permissions, the 19th-century modernists demonstrated that the Qur'an itself contains the seeds of its own abolitionist doctrine.

The question was never, "Does the Qur'an permit abolition?" The true question was, "Do we have the courage to read the Qur'an as a coherent whole and see that abolition is its ultimate demand?"

They proved that the Qur'an is the ultimate legitimizer for ending slavery. By pointing to the "freedom verses," the primacy of justice, and the inherent dignity of humanity, they showed that a faithful Muslim in the 19th century could—and indeed must—be an abolitionist. The Qur'an did not need to be bypassed to achieve abolition; it needed to be properly understood. Their work was not an adoption of Western ideas, but a reclamation of the Qur'an's own revolutionary soul from the grasp of emperors and their complicit scholars.

III.IV Tunisia: The Fulfillment of the Qur'anic Mandate 🇹🇳✨➡️🗝️

Islamic Calendar 1262 AH | Gregorian Calendar 1846 CE

Date of Abolition: 24 Muharram, 1262 AH

The case of Tunisia under Ahmad Bey (1837-1855) is a historical thunderclap that echoes through the centuries. It demonstrates that when political will aligned with the Qur'an's moral trajectory, abolition was not only possible but could be justified on explicitly Islamic grounds. In 1262 AH (1846 CE), Tunisia became the first Muslim state to officially abolish slavery, pre-empting even France (1848) and the United States (1865). This was not an act of Westernization; it was an act of re-Islamization.

Ahmad Bey's actions did not contradict the Qur'an; they fulfilled its logical conclusion. The following table shows how his policies directly implemented the Qur'an's highest ideals, which the Ottomans and Qajars had systematically ignored and betrayed.

The Qur'anic Blueprint vs. The Tunisian Fulfillment

Qur'anic Principle ☪️✨	Ahmad Bey's Action 🇹🇳⚖️	The Fulfillment
"You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) — Spiritual Equality. 💖	The Core Theological Argument. Ahmad Bey declared that enslaving fellow Muslims from Africa was a fundamental violation of Islamic law. He argued that the Bilad al-Sudan (Land of the Blacks) was largely Muslim, and thus its people were brethren, not property.	✅ BROTHERHOOD AFFIRMED. He used the Qur'an's doctrine of spiritual equality to dismantle the entire racialized slave system, directly inverting the Ottoman and Qajar practice of enslaving their coreligionists. He made the Ummah a reality, not just a slogan.
Command of Justice & Kindness (Adl & Iḥsān). ⚖️🤲	Abolition to End "Oppression" (Zulm). His edict of 24 Muharram, 1262 AH justified abolition due to the "inhumane treatment of slaves," which violated the Sharia injunction to treat those under one's care with kindness. He acted as the ruler to protect the weak (al-'abid al-mazlumin).	✅ THE STATE AS PROTECTOR. He used his authority not to manage slavery, but to end the systemic injustice (zulm) that the institution perpetuated, fulfilling the ruler's divine role as a dispenser of justice. He enacted Iḥsān as state policy.
The Presumption of Liberty. 🗝️	The Legal Ruling of "Compulsory Emancipation" ('itq al-jabri). Ahmad Bey's most revolutionary decree was that "the basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom." Therefore, in cases of uncertain status, liberty must be presumed.	✅ THE QUR'ANIC SPIRIT CODIFIED. This shifted the entire legal burden of proof, mirroring the Qur'an's presumption of dignity. No longer was a slave presumed to be property; freedom was the default human condition. This was the ultimate expression of the Qur'an's liberatory spirit.
"Freeing a slave" as a supreme virtue. 📿➡️🗝️	Mass, State-Sponsored Manumission. He didn't just stop the trade; he freed the slaves—by some estimates 30,000 to 50,000 people. He designated zawiyas (Sufi lodges) as official manumission centers and provided certificates of freedom, turning individual piety into collective redemption.	✅ VIRTUE AS STATE POLICY. The individual act of piety praised in the Qur'an (e.g., fakku raqabah) was scaled up to become the official policy of the entire state. He operationalized the Qur'an's highest virtue.
The "Moral Grammar" of Gradualism. 📜🔄	A Strategic, Phased Abolition. Ahmad Bey did not issue a single, disruptive decree. He moved with strategic precision over five years: 1. 1841: Banned the export of slaves. 2. 1841: Closed the public slave market in Tunis. 3. 1842: Freed all slave children born after a certain date. 4. 1846 (1262 AH): The final decree of total abolition.	✅ GRADUALISM AS TACTIC, NOT STALL. Unlike the empires who used "gradualism" as an excuse for infinite inaction, Ahmad Bey used it as a practical, relentless strategy to dismantle the institution step-by-step, managing opposition and building irreversible momentum toward the final decree.

---

The Synthesis: A Courageous Application of Ijtihād 🧠⚖️

Ahmad Bey and his advisors performed a courageous act of Ijtihād (independent legal reasoning). They looked past the narrow, permissive rulings of the past and returned to the Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah (The Higher Objectives of Islamic Law)—the preservation of life, religion, intellect, lineage, and property. They argued that slavery, as practiced, violated these core objectives.

His key arguments before the religious council (Majlis) were masterstrokes of Islamic reasoning that exposed the hypocrisy of Constantinople, Cairo, and Tehran:

• The Argument from Maslaha (Public Interest): He argued that the "public interest" was profoundly damaged by the cruelty of slavery and the fact that slaves were fleeing to foreign consulates for protection, making the Muslim state look unjust and weak in the eyes of the world. Abolition, therefore, served the greater good (maslaha) of the community and its standing.

• The Argument from the "Spirit of the Age": His warning to the ulama—"Beware, in this modern age, we will not come down in favor of litigation of this kind"—was a bold assertion that Islamic law must be applied in a way that upholds its core values of justice and mercy in a changing world, not blindly replicate 7th-century social structures that it was revealed to reform.

Conclusion: The Proof of Possibility ✅

The Tunisian case on 24 Muharram, 1262 AH, is the ultimate refutation of the Ottoman and Qajar defense. It proves that the central question in the 19th century was not "Can we forbid what God has permitted?"

The true question was: "Do we have the moral courage and religious insight to fulfill what God has ultimately commanded—justice, mercy, and liberation?"

Ahmad Bey answered with a resounding yes. He demonstrated that the Qur'an's "moral grammar" of liberation, when finally read to its last syllable, spells one word: Abolition.

He did not betray Islam by abolishing slavery; he betrayed the empire's corrupted version of it. In doing so, he reclaimed the revolutionary heart of the revelation for the modern world, proving that the most authentic Islamic state was not the one that looked most like the 7th century, but the one that most courageously embodied the Qur'an's timeless and transcendent ideals.

III.V Egypt: The Century of Hesitation — Reformist Rhetoric vs. Servile Reality 🐊⚖️➡️⛓️

Egypt in the 19th century was a theater of profound contradiction. Its rulers, from Muhammad Ali to Khedive Ismail, mastered the language of European-style abolitionism while simultaneously operating the largest slave-based economy in the region. Their story is one of grand gestures, diplomatic evasion, and a fundamental unwillingness to enact the Qur'an's emancipatory logic.

The Egyptian Paradox: Abolitionist Words, Slaver Actions

The following table chronicles the stark contrast between the official pronouncements and the on-the-ground reality in 19th-century Egypt.

Ruler & Era	Official Stance & "Abolitionist" Actions 🎭	The Reality on the Ground & In the Palace 🏛️😥	The Contradiction
Muhammad Ali (1805-1848)	Conquered Sudan (1820) allegedly to suppress slave trade. Issued orders against slave raiding.	Objective: "to procure negroes." Built a "Black servile army" from the Sudan. Used slaves for agriculture, garrisons, and the ivory trade.	🚫 Conquest for Liberation vs. Conquest for Commodification. The state became the primary slave-raider and slave-owner, in direct opposition to the Qur'an's state-funded liberation (fī al-riqāb).
Sa'id Pasha (1854-1863)	Banned slave imports, paid soldiers in cash instead of slaves, established a military post at Fashoda. Allowed slaves to seek freedom.	Placed an order for 500 "Negro" slaves for his personal bodyguard. His anti-slave trade measures were a "pitiful failure"; markets simply moved.	🚫 The Law-Giver as the Law-Breaker. His personal actions invalidated his public decrees, showing a lack of sincere commitment.
Khedive Ismail (1863-1879)	The "Abolitionist" Khedive. Hired Europeans (Baker, Gordon) to suppress the trade. Signed the 1877 Anglo-Egyptian Convention. Spoke of slavery as an obstacle to "civilization."	Largest slave owner in Egypt: 2,000 domestic slaves. His favorite concubine owned 80 slaves. Participated in slave auctions. "With 3,000 in his hareem... his impudence is wonderful." - Lady Duff Gordon.	🚫 The Ultimate Hypocrisy. Mastered the language of European abolitionism while his household and economy were built on the very institution he publicly decried.

The Theological & Legal Evasion

Confronted by British pressure, the Egyptian elite did not mount a robust religious defense like the Persians. Instead, they used evasive and pragmatic arguments that revealed their insincerity.

• Muhammad Ali's Excuse: He claimed he needed the sanction of the Ottoman Sultan and the Shaykh al-Islam, knowing full well that local rulers had significant autonomy. This was a bureaucratic dodge, not a theological position.

• The "Civilizing" Pretext: Officials argued that military expeditions were responses to appeals from friendly tribes, and since "the people of these countries are savages, humanity cannot approve leaving them in that state." This was a colonial-era "white man's burden" argument, not an Islamic one, used to justify continued violence and enslavement.

• Khedive Ismail's Distinction: In his meeting with Sir Bartle Frere, Ismail made a critical separation:

  • Slave Trade: He promised to suppress it with British support. ✅

  • Slavery Itself: He argued it must end gradually, as it existed "long before Mahommedanism." ❌
    This was a historical, not a religious, argument that ignored 1,200 years of Islamic law and the Qur'an's own trajectory. He asked for a "memorial from the Anti-Slavery Society" to use as a political shield with his own people, showing his reforms were for foreign consumption, not internal conviction.

The Mechanisms of a Hollow "Abolition"

The actual measures taken were designed to manage the problem, not solve it.

1. The 1877 Convention: This Anglo-Egyptian agreement was the centerpiece of Ismail's "abolitionism." However, it had fatal flaws:

   • It only applied to "Negro" and Abyssinian slaves, explicitly ignoring the trade in "white" Circassian and Georgian slaves. This was state-sanctioned racism.

   • It allowed the private sale of slaves to continue for 7-12 more years, ensuring the institution would not face immediate disruption.

2. Manumission Bureaus: These offices, established after 1877, did grant freedom papers—18,000 by 1889. However, this was a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated hundreds of thousands of slaves in Egypt and the Sudan. For many freed slaves, emancipation meant poverty, leading them to voluntarily return to their masters.

Synthesis: Why Slavery "Vanished" in Egypt

As historian Gabriel Baer noted, slavery never was formally abolished by law in Egypt; it "vanished." This disappearance in the late 19th/early 20th century was due to a confluence of practical factors, not a sudden moral awakening:

• Economic Shifts: The end of the American Civil War crashed the cotton boom, reducing demand for agricultural slave labor.

• British Occupation (1882): Lord Cromer's administration implemented a policy of "gradual elimination," repressing the trade and supporting manumission, while avoiding a direct confrontation with the elite.

• Changing Elitist Attitudes: The Turco-Circassian elite began to see slavery as expensive and outdated, especially with growing rural labor surpluses.

• The Mahdist Revolt in Sudan: This permanently severed the main pipeline for the slave caravan trade into Egypt.

The 1923 constitution's guarantee of individual liberty was the final, quiet epitaph for an institution that had already withered away for largely economic and political reasons.

The Stark Contrast: Tunisia's Clear Conscience 🇹🇳✨➡️🗝️

The Egyptian "hesitation" stands in stark relief against the decisive action taken in Tunisia a generation earlier.

Aspect	Egyptian "Abolition" 🇪🇬	Tunisian Abolition 🇹🇳	The Fundamental Difference
Catalyst	External pressure from Britain; economic and political calculation.	Internal initiative by Ahmad Bey, rooted in Islamic reformism.	Reactive vs. Proactive. Egypt responded to outsiders; Tunisia acted from within.
Moral Foundation	Pragmatism, "civilization," and diplomatic necessity.	Islamic Law. Ahmad Bey cited the Prophet's path and the principle of seeking freedom.	Expediency vs. Principle. Tunisia grounded its action in its own religious tradition, making it a legitimate ijtihad (legal reasoning).
Leader's Role	Khedive Ismail was the largest slave owner, making him a hypocrite.	Ahmad Bey freed his own slaves and led by personal example.	"Do as I Say" vs. "Follow My Example." The Tunisian ruler's personal integrity gave his decree moral authority.
Result	A century of hesitation, hollow conventions, and a slow, economically-driven withering.	A decisive, principled abolition of the slave market (1841) and public trade.	Managed Decline vs. Moral Revolution. Tunisia made a clean break; Egypt let the institution fester.

Conclusion: The Unanswered Question on the Nile

Egypt's journey highlights a tragic failure of leadership. The Qajar ulama provided a corrupt religious defense of slavery. The Egyptian Khedives offered no sincere religious vision at all, only a cynical performance of reform for a European audience.

They had the Qur'an, which provided a divine grammar for liberation. They had the example of Tunisia, which showed that a Muslim ruler could indeed "forbid what God allowed" by following the higher divine objective of justice and freedom. Yet, they chose instead the path of hypocrisy, preserving their harems and power while the Nile valley remained, for a century longer, a thoroughfare for human misery.

III.VI. Morocco: The Sultan's Fortress - Theological Intransigence & The Last Stand of Imperial Slavery 🏰⚔️⛓️

While Tunisia and Egypt began implementing abolitionist policies in the 1840s, Morocco stood as a bastion of defiance. The Alawite Sultans, presenting themselves as the guardians of a pure, uncompromising Islam, erected a theological and political fortress against abolition, even as the foundations of the slave trade were crumbling around them. The Moroccan case is not one of gradual reform, but of a prolonged, rearguard action fought to preserve a system the Qur'an itself had sought to dismantle.

The North African Abolition Spectrum: A Comparative View

Country	Ruler & Era	Key Abolitionist Action	Primary Driver	Outcome & Emoji Analysis
Tunisia 🇹🇳	Ahmad I Bey (r. 1837-1855)	Decree of 1846 abolishing slavery.	Internal Autonomy & Modernist Vision. The Bey, independent of the Ottoman Porte, acted on his own modernist and reformist impulses, seeing slavery as backward.	✅ Proactive Abolition. A Muslim ruler independently outlawing slavery before many European powers. A demonstration of Islamic potential for self-reform. ✨⚖️
Egypt 🇪🇬	Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-1848) & successors.	Gradual Suppression under Ottoman/British influence; formal abolition under British occupation (c. 1884-1896).	External Pressure & Colonial Control. Driven by British anti-slavery policy after the occupation of Egypt in 1882.	✅ Enforced Abolition. Change was imposed by a colonial power, short-circuiting any organic, theologically-grounded reform. 🏴‍☠️➡️🗝️
Morocco 🇲🇦	Mawlay 'Abd al-Rahman (r. 1822-1859) & successors.	Staunch Refusal. No meaningful decree until the 1920s under French colonial rule.	Theological Intransigence & Geopolitical Shield. The Sultans used Islamic doctrine as a shield, protected by British diplomatic support that prioritized stability over abolition.	🚫 Prolonged Defense of Slavery. The institution was actively defended on religious grounds for decades after its neighbors had abandoned it. 📿🛡️➡️⛓️

The Moroccan Paradox: "The Lawful Cannot Be Forbidden"

The core of the Moroccan Sultans' argument was a rigid, literalist reading of Islamic law that willfully ignored the Qur'an's emancipatory trajectory.

The Sultan's Unyielding Stance (1842):

"The traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed... But if there be any peculiar event which has occurred, inform us about it particularly..."

— Sultan Mawlay ‘Abd ar-Rahman to British Consul Drummond Hay

"As to what regards the making of slaves and trading therewith, it is confirmed by our book, as also by the Sunna of our Prophet... and no one can allow what is prohibited or prohibit that which is made lawful."

— The Sultan's final reply.

This argument was fundamentally flawed and ahistorical:

• Ignored the Qur'anic Blueprint: The Sultan focused solely on the initial permission while completely ignoring the systematic legislative program (marriage, atonement, state-funded manumission) designed to lead to the institution's extinction.

• Defended the Indefensible: The trans-Saharan slave trade of the 19th century was not a "jihad" producing captives, but a commercial enterprise built on kidnapping and raiding, which is illegal under classical Islamic law. The Sultans were defending a criminal practice.

• Ceded Moral Authority: By framing abolition as a purely "Christian" idea, they abandoned the Qur'an's own radically humane and liberatory ethic, outsourcing morality to the very European powers they politically resisted.

The Scale of the Moroccan System: A Thriving Slave Economy

While the Sultans debated theology, the slave trade flourished, making Morocco the largest slave-owning society in the Maghreb.

• Volume: Estimates range from 2,000 to 8,000 slaves imported annually in the 19th century.

• Routes: Two major trans-Saharan caravans per year, supplying markets in Marrakesh, Fez, and Rabat.

• Population: The black population in Morocco was estimated at 500,000 by the 1850s, a significant portion of whom were enslaved or of recently enslaved descent.

• Markets: Public slave markets operated openly in major cities. A British report from 1891 described a fair in Sus where 1,200 boys and girls were sold annually.

The Enablers: British Diplomacy and the "Benign Slavery" Myth

Crucially, Morocco's defiance was sustained by Sir John Drummond Hay, the British Consul-General for over 40 years.

• Geopolitics over Morality: Britain's primary goal was to maintain the status quo in Morocco and prevent other European powers (especially France) from gaining influence. Hay consistently downplayed the brutality of the slave trade to his superiors.

• The "Benign Slavery" Myth: Hay reported that slaves were "kindly treated," "the spoilt children of the house," and that the trade was a minor issue of only "five or six hundred slaves" a year. This directly contradicted the evidence from abolitionists and travelers on the ground.

• Result: British diplomatic pressure, the main tool for abolition elsewhere, was deliberately weakened in Morocco for geopolitical reasons.

Synthesis: The Final, Tragic Irony

The abolition of slavery in Morocco did not come from a triumphant application of the Qur'an's moral grammar. It came from the very colonial subjugation the Sultans had feared.

1. The French Protectorate (1912): With the establishment of the French Protectorate, the political independence that had allowed the Sultans to resist abolition was lost.

2. Colonial Decrees: The French colonial administration issued circulars (e.g., 1922/1923) officially abolishing the slave trade, but were notoriously reluctant to interfere with existing slave ownership within Moroccan households.

3. A "Quiet" Death: Slavery in Morocco died a slow, "quiet" death, not with a bang of divine liberation, but with the whimper of colonial administration and the gradual change in economic modes. It was never formally abolished by a courageous Sultan fulfilling the Qur'an's mission.

Conclusion: Morocco represents the ultimate betrayal of the Qur'anic project. Its 19th-century rulers, armed with a selective and fossilized interpretation of scripture, became the most stalwart defenders of an institution that the Revelation had sought to eradicate. They used the words "God permitted it" as a shield to protect a system of human misery long after the divine logic of those words had demanded its end. In the end, the "defenders of Islam" had to be forced, by a Christian colonial power, to abandon a practice that the true spirit of their own faith had condemned centuries earlier.

III.VII The "Abolition" of Slavery in Qajar Persia: External Pressure & Internal Evasion 🇬🇧⚖️➡️👑🤥

The process of "abolishing" slavery in 19th-century Persia was not a moral awakening inspired by Islamic principles. It was a protracted, reluctant, and often duplicitous response to British diplomatic pressure, revealing a profound disconnect between the state and religious authorities on one side, and the ethical core of the Qur'an on the other.

The Timeline of Reluctant "Abolition"

The following table charts the key events in Persia's journey towards abolition, highlighting the stark contrast between external action and internal resistance.

Year	Event	Action Taken	🚦 Nature of the "Abolition"
1848	Muhammad Shah's Firman	Bans importation of African slaves by sea.	🚫 PARTIAL & FLAWED. A tactical concession. Land trade continued, creating a massive loophole. The Shah admitted it was due to "friendship" with the British envoy, not religious principle.
1851-1890	Era of Smuggling & Evasion	British naval interdiction vs. Iranian ruses (using French flags, night landings).	🤥 SYSTEMIC CIRCUMVENTION. The 1848 firman was initially ineffectual, with smuggled slaves skyrocketing from ~25 to over 250. Abolition was a cat-and-mouse game, not a policy.
1890	Brussels Act	Qajar Iran signs international anti-slavery treaty.	🌍 EXTERNAL FORCING. Iran is brought into the modern international system against its will. The state begins complying with issuing "freedom letters" for fugitive slaves.
1929	Final Official Ban	Reza Shah Pahlavi's government officially outlaws slavery.	👑 SECULAR DECREE. The final nail in the coffin is driven not by a religious revival, but by a modernizing, secular nationalist state, decades after the Qur'an's logic demanded it.

The Theological Failure: The Fatwas of Evasion 📿❌

While the state was making reluctant concessions, the religious establishment (ulama) provided the theological backbone for resistance. Their fatwas were a masterclass in ethical minimalism.

The British Question Posed to the Mujtahidin:

"What do the learned Doctors in Religion and the Law decree on the following point? If they should abolish the transport of black male and female slaves and abstain from the traffic, is it any injury or not to the faith?"

The Unified Juristic Response: A Spectrum of Failure

Scholar	Stated Position	🎭 The Reality & What It Reveals
Mullā ʿAlī Kanī & Others	The slave trade is Makruh (abominable) but not Haram (unlawful).	MORAL COWARDICE. This created a religious safe space for slavers. By not declaring it Haram, they provided theological cover for a brutal, commercial enterprise they knew was unjust.
Shaykh Muhammad Hasan (Najaf)	"The temporal power cannot forbid a legitimate act; consequently, such a prohibition would be illegitimate."	DEFENSE OF THE STATUS QUO. This was a radical quietism that abdicated the jurist's role as a moral guide. It elevated the "legality" of slavery over the Qur'an's overarching command of justice and liberation.
Constitutional Era Jurists (Yazdi, Khurasani)	Continued to issue fatwas on the intricacies of owning, selling, and endowing slaves as property, as if nothing had changed.	INTELLECTUAL & ETHICAL STAGNATION. Even as Iran debated modern concepts of freedom and equality in its Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), its top jurists were still mentally living in a world where humans could be legally classified as chattel.

The Perverse "Logic" of Salvation: The ulama defended the system with a circular and paternalistic argument: Slavery was a means to bring "heathens" into Islam, and Islam was the "ultimate freedom." Therefore, enslaving someone was actually a pathway to their salvation. This twisted logic justified a commercial horror with a theological fantasy.

Synthesis: The Three Pillars of Persian Intransigence

The failure to abolish slavery from within was rooted in three interconnected factors:

1. 🏛️ Political Expediency: The Shahs feared the economic and social backlash from powerful merchant and elite classes whose wealth and lifestyle depended on slave labor.

2. 📿 Theological Corruption: The ulama prioritized the rigid, literal application of archaic juristic categories (the "seven causes" of slavery) over the Qur'an's clear moral trajectory towards emancipation. They became defenders of a human-rights abuse.

3. 🤥 Blatant Duplicity: Both the state and the ulama engaged in bad-faith arguments. The Shah claimed the African trade—a clear case of kidnapping without jihad—was "lawful." The ulama called it "abominable" but refused to take the final, necessary step to outlaw it.

Conclusion: A Betrayal Fulfilled

The Qajar "abolition" was not the culmination of the Qur'an's project. It was its betrayal.

• The Qur'an said "Free the slaves." The Qajar state said, "We'll only stop some of the slaves coming in by one route, and only because the British forced us to."

• The Qur'an made emancipation a divine virtue. The Qajar ulama made it a theological crime to outlaw slavery.

The question posed at the start of this blog—"Can you forbid what God allowed?"—was answered in practice by 19th-century Persia. The Shah and his ulama answered: "No, we will not, even when God's permission was for a temporary reality that His own revelation sought to dismantle." True abolition in Iran was ultimately achieved not by embracing the Qur'an's moral grammar, but by succumbing to foreign pressure and, finally, the secular decree of a new dynasty.

III.VIII The Ottoman "Abolition": A Century of Strangulation (1826-1926) 👑⚖️⏳➡️🗝️

The Ottoman Empire never issued a single, clear fatwa or ferman declaring slavery abolished. Instead, from Sultan Mahmud II to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the state engaged in a protracted campaign to close the gates of slavery (sedd-i bâb-ı rıkkiyet 🚪⛔) by criminalizing the slave trade, while leaving the legal status of existing slaves in a complex, often unresolved, position under Shari'a.

The following timeline and analysis trace this deliberate, century-long process.

The Phased Dismantling of Ottoman Slavery

Ruler / Era	Key Action & Turkish Term	🚦 Impact & Emoji Analysis
Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839) - The Reformer	1826: Abolishes the Janissary Corps (the Yeniçeri Ocağı), a military corps of slave-soldiers (kul). 1830: Frees Christian slaves (mostly Greeks).	⚔️➡️👮♂️ Military Slavery Ends. This dismantled the most powerful slave institution in the state apparatus. It was a political, not an ethical, move.
Sultan Abdülmecid I (1839-1861) - The Tanzimat	1847: Bans the African Slave Trade in the Persian Gulf. 1854-55: Bans the Circassian & Georgian Slave Trade. 1857: General Prohibition of the Black Slave Trade (Zenci esaretinin men'i).	🌍🚫⛓️ The Trade is Criminalized. This was the critical turning point. The state shifted from regulating the trade to prohibiting it, attacking the institution's lifeblood. The state used secular law (kanun) to override religious custom.
Sultan Abdülaziz (1861-1876) - The Backslide	1864: A controversial irade (decree) tolerates the sale of Circassian children by their parents during the mass immigration, threatening violators only with the "wrath of God" (Allah'ın gazabı).	🔄📉 Reform Stalls. The state's will faltered. This concession showed the immense social pressure to maintain the supply of "white" slaves for elite harems, revealing the hypocrisy at the system's core.
Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) - The Autocrat	1889: Passes a formal law against the African slave trade. 1890: Ratifies the Brussels Act internationally, but with a clause permitting "domestic slavery" (ev içi kölelik). 1908: Young Turk Revolution restores the constitution; press campaigns against slavery.	📜🤥 Legislative Hypocrisy. Abdülhamid paid lip service to abolition under foreign pressure but actively resisted it. He refused to codify family law in 1888, leaving slavery under Shari'a courts. His own palace was a major consumer of slaves, especially eunuchs and Circassian girls.
Young Turks / CUP (1908-1918) - The Constitutionalists	1909: Prohibits the Circassian slave trade (again) and frees Abdülhamid's personal slaves after his deposition. 1917: The Ottoman Family Law (Hukuk-ı Aile Kararnamesi) potentially allows a wife to forbid her husband from taking concubines, but is suspended in 1918.	💬✍️ Rhetoric over Reality. While the Young Turks used anti-slavery rhetoric to attack Abdülhamid, their practical achievements were limited. The legal status of slavery remained intact.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923-1938) - The Secularist	1926: Adopts the Turkish Civil Code (Türk Medeni Kanunu), copied from Switzerland, which does not recognize the legal status of slavery. 1933: Turkey ratifies the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention.	⚖️🇹🇷 Legal Abolition, Finally. By importing a European civil code, the Republic simply erased slavery as a legal category. This was the final, secular deathblow to an institution that religious reform had failed to kill.

The Core Contradiction: The State vs. The Şeriat

The entire Ottoman struggle was defined by a fundamental tension that this blog identifies: Can you forbid what God allowed?

• The State's Tool: Kanun (Secular Law) 🏛️⚖️
  The Sultans used their temporal power to issue fermans, irades, and eventually formal laws (kanun) to criminalize the act of trading slaves (esaret). They argued they were closing the "gate" (bâb) to slavery, not challenging its theoretical legality.

• The Religious Barrier: Rıkkiyet (Legal Status of Slavery) 📿⚖️
  The legal status of a slave (rakik) was defined and protected by the Şeriat. For a Sultan to outright declare rıkkiyet invalid would be to claim authority over divine law, an act of theological and political rebellion.

This is why the Ottoman process was so messy. They could ban the slave ships (the esir ticareti), but they could not easily manumit the slave in your house (the rakik). This left a gray area where existing slaves remained in bondage, and new ones could still be acquired through loopholes and illicit means.

Synthesis: The Three Pillars of Ottoman "Abolition"

1. Foreign Pressure & Image Management 🇬🇧➡️👑: The British Royal Navy and diplomatic corps were a constant thorn, forcing the Ottomans to take action to maintain their standing in the "Concert of Europe."

2. Secular Legislation & Centralization 🏛️⚖️: The Tanzimat and subsequent regimes used state power to impose a new, secular legal order that gradually stripped the Şeriat of its jurisdiction over the economy and society, including the slave trade.

3. Social Erosion & Slave Agency  👣🗝️: As Hakan Erdem notes, slaves themselves played a role. They fled to British consulates, demanded freedom based on custom, and slowly made the institution unmanageable through their own actions.

Conclusion: The Ottoman Empire did not have a moral awakening inspired by the Qur'an's blueprint. Its abolition of slavery was a pragmatic, secular, and externally-influenced process that worked around Islamic law because it could not work through it. The "House of Osman" ultimately strangled the institution its predecessors had sustained for centuries, not by invoking the Qur'an's spirit of liberation, but by embracing the modern tools of the secular state. The final act belonged not to a Caliph, but to a Secularist—Atatürk—who simply declared the old categories legally null and void. ✅

III.IX The Long, Reluctant Sunset: Abolition by Coercion, Not Conscience 🌅⚖️➡️🏛️

The global timeline of abolition in the Muslim world reveals a consistent and damning pattern. The institution was not ended by a triumphant internal reformation based on Qur'anic principles. Instead, it was dismantled from the outside-in and the top-down, often against the will of the religious and political elite, who clung to a corrupted interpretation of "permission" until the very end.

The following table categorizes the methods of abolition, showing the near-total absence of internally generated, theologically-driven emancipation.

The Three Pathways to Abolition in the Muslim World

Pathway	Mechanism	Key Examples & Dates	Evidence of External/Secular Pressure
1. Colonial Imposition & "Government-to-Government" Pressure 🏛️👉👑	Direct command or treaty forced by European colonial powers.	India (1833, 1843): British East India Co. prohibits slavery. Zanzibar (1897): Sultan Hamid abolishes slavery under British pressure. Nigeria (1900-1926): British slowly dismantle slavery, leaving concubinage intact for decades. Indonesia (1855-1914): Dutch ban trade and slavery in a piecemeal, protracted process.	✅ Overt coercion. The abolitionist decree is a foreign policy objective achieved through gunboat diplomacy and the realities of colonial rule.
2. Secular Modernization by Nationalist Elites 🧑‍🎓➡️📜	Abolition decreed by modernizing, often secular-leaning, rulers as part of a Western-style legal reform package.	Turkey (1924): Turkish Republic bans slavery under Atatürk. Iran (1929): Reza Shah abolishes slavery as part of secular modernization. Afghanistan (1921/1931): Amanullah Khan and later Nadir Shah include abolition in new, Western-inspired constitutions.	✅ Rejection of religious authority. Abolition is framed as part of becoming a "modern" nation-state, often explicitly bypassing or opposing the ulama.
3. Reluctant, Incremental Concessions 🐌⚖️	Rulers issue half-hearted bans (e.g., on trade but not ownership, or on Africans but not Caucasians) under duress, which are poorly enforced.	Ottoman Empire (1847-1889): Series of fermans banning African slave trade, but exempting the Hijaz and failing to stop Circassian trade. Persia (1848): Muhammad Shah's vague ban on sea-based African trade, widely ignored. Arabian Peninsula (1937-1970): Gulf states issue "reminders" that slavery is "forbidden," a legal fiction to satisfy international opinion.	✅ Bad Faith & Evasion. These actions were designed to placate Western powers while preserving the institution in practice, proving the lack of genuine theological conviction.

Case Studies in Theological Failure

The evidence shows that where religious authority was strongest, resistance to abolition was most fervent.

1. The Hijaz: The Heartland of Resistance 🕋🛑✋

As William Ochsenwald's research details, the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina were the epicenter of opposition.

• The 1855 Revolt: When the Ottoman Vali tried to enforce an anti-slave trade decree, the Meccan ulama declared it "void as contrary to the shari'a" and instigated a riot. They demanded the expulsion of all Christians from the Hijaz and called for a jihad, framing the Ottomans as having become "Christian." This was a direct, violent defense of slavery as a core Islamic identity marker.

• Official Complicity: For decades, Ottoman officials in Jidda collected bribes per slave sold. The slave market would be officially "closed" only to reopen in a nearby village. This was a systematic, cynical subversion of Istanbul's orders.

• The "Religious" Justification: The ulama and the Amir argued that stopping the trade prevented "five thousand people a year from becoming Muslims." This twisted the Qur'an's goal of spiritual liberation into a justification for human trafficking.

2. The Fatwa Failure: The Ulama's Abdication of Moral Leadership 📜🤥

Across the board, when asked for religious guidance, the scholarly class failed to align with the Qur'an's emancipatory spirit.

• Persia (1847): As Noori showed, all the consulted mujtahids declared the slave trade makruh (detested) but not haram (unlawful). They provided the Shah with the religious cover he needed to resist British pressure. Their legalistic evasion was a betrayal of the Qur'an's command of Ihsan.

• India (1809): While the muftis of Calcutta narrowly defined legal slavery, they did not use the Qur'an's principles to condemn the widespread, illicit slave trade that functioned around them. Theirs was a passive, academic ruling that did not challenge the social evil.

3. The Secularists as "Accidental Abolitionists" 🧑‍🎓⚖️

The timeline proves that the most effective abolitionists were those who marginalized the religious establishment.

• Kemal Atatürk (Turkey): Abolition was part of a sweeping secular revolution that dismantled the Ottoman Caliphate and its religious institutions.

• Reza Shah (Iran): Similarly, abolition was imposed from the top down as part of a secular nationalist project.

• Arab Nationalists (1960s Yemen, South Arabia): The Marxist National Liberation Front eradicated slavery where traditional rulers had tolerated it for centuries.

These leaders did not argue that abolition was required by the Qur'an; they argued it was required by modernity, national dignity, and human rights—frameworks that deliberately stood outside traditional Islamic jurisprudence.

Synthesis: The Unanswered Question

The prolonged, painful, and externally forced process of abolition across the Muslim world leaves one towering question unanswered:

If the Qur'an's "moral grammar" was so inherently abolitionist, why did it take colonial gunboats, secularizing dictators, and international treaties to finally end the practice?

The evidence is clear: the divine blueprint revealed in the 7th century was subverted by 12 centuries of human history. The institution of slavery was not ended by a mature, internal realization of the Qur'an's ultimate goal. It was suffocated by the forces of a new global order, an order whose moral premises were often secular and Western.

The 19th-century Muslim rulers who asked, "How can we forbid what God has permitted?" were asking the wrong question. The right question, the one our blog poses, was: "How did we so completely forget that God's permission was only the starting point for a divine program whose final destination was always freedom?" 🗝️

Their failure to answer that question is the tragedy of slavery in the modern Muslim world.

 III.X. The Illusion of Abolition — The Ultimate Proof of the Qur'an's Betrayal 💡➡️💥

Bernard Freamon’s masterful account of "illusory abolition" across the 19th and 20th-century Muslim world does not contradict our thesis. It vindicates it with brutal, historical finality. The very fact that abolition was so reluctant, haphazard, and ultimately illusory is the smoking gun that proves the empires and their religious establishments were defending a human institution of power, not a divine principle of liberation.

The following table contrasts the Qur'an's divine blueprint with the historical reality Freamon describes.

The Chasm Between Divine Blueprint and Human Reality

The Qur'an's Divine Blueprint ☪️✨	The Historical Reality (Per Freamon) 👑⛓️	The Betrayal
A Directed, Moral Trajectory: The Qur'an establishes a clear "moral grammar" and legislative system (marriage, atonement, state funds) aimed at slavery's inevitable dissolution. 📜➡️🕊️	"Illusory Abolition": A "haphazard," "half-hearted," and "recalcitrant" process. Laws were passed with no enforcement, creating a "British Indian Model" of delegalization without true emancipation. 🚫⚖️	The trajectory was reversed. Instead of a divine march toward freedom, there was a human stubbornness dedicated to preserving domination.
Spiritual Equality & Iḥsān: The core principle of "You are of one another" (Baʿḍukum min Baʿḍ) and the command to "do good" (Iḥsān) to those you possess. 💖🤲	A Culture of Domination: In Mauritania, a slave woman hides in a closet to avoid her master. An Instagram star in Kuwait complains that maids with passports are ungovernable. This is the psychology of a master class, not a community of stewards. 😨👑	Iḥsān was replaced with arrogance. The relationship was stripped of its divine moral charge and reduced to raw power.
Liberation as Worship: Freeing a slave is an act of atonement, a supreme virtue, and a state-funded social priority. 🗝️📿	Abolition as Foreign Interference: Rulers like the Qajar Shah and Ibn Saud framed abolition as a Christian, European imposition, an affront to their sovereignty and religion. 🌍🚫	They ceded the moral high ground. They abandoned the Qur'an's own emancipatory project and defensively clung to the form of ownership while ignoring its ethical context.
The Prophet's Model: Muhammad (PBUH) married freedwomen, manumitted slaves, and made them leaders (like Bilal). His personal conduct was a model of integration. 👰♀️🕋	The Imperial Model: The perpetuation of racialized slavery, eunuchs, concubinage, and a "slave caste" (e.g., the harratin of Mauritania) for social status. 🏺🧎	The Prophetic standard was replaced by the Pharaonic. The goal was no longer to create a free, equal community of believers, but to maintain a hierarchical society.

Why Was It So Reluctant? Freamon's Diagnosis

Freamon’s work identifies the precise reasons for this reluctance, which all point to a human failure, not a divine command:

1. Economic and Political Entrenchment: Slavery was a "lucrative" and deeply embedded part of the social and economic order. The elite—including the ulama—benefited from it. Abolition threatened the entire power structure.

2. The "Mercantilist Inheritance": The colonial and post-colonial economies still relied on brutally cheap, disposable labor. The shift was from "chattel slavery" to "conditions analogous to slavery" (debt bondage, the kafala system), preserving the exploitative dynamic under a different name.

3. Theological Bad Faith: The jurists and rulers engaged in a "cruel ruse." They willfully misapplied Islamic law, using the "seven causes" to justify a commercial slave trade that was Islamically illegitimate, and hiding behind the phrase "it is halal" while ignoring the entire ethical and legislative system designed to make it obsolete.

4. The Ideology of Domination: At its heart, as Freamon notes, was a "penchant for dominance." The slave-making mentality—the intoxication of absolute power over another human being—had proven resistant to the Qur'an's 1,200-year-old moral revolution. The man who forces his domestic worker to sleep on the kitchen floor for eight years without pay is the spiritual descendant of the Roman who said, "It is my house."

Conclusion: The Final, Devastating Proof

Therefore, the painful history Freamon documents is not an argument against the Qur'an's philosophy. It is the ultimate evidence for it.

The fact that abolition in the Muslim world was an "illusion"—a process requiring immense foreign pressure and resulting in superficial laws that changed little—proves that the living practice of these empires had diverged catastrophically from the Qur'an's core mission.

The resistance to abolition was the resistance of a corrupted human power structure to the divine will. The 19th-century scholars who asked, "How can we forbid what God allowed?" were not pious defenders of scripture. They were the guardians of a human-made castle of oppression, using a distorted fragment of divine law to defend its walls against the Qur'an's own liberatory spirit.

The Qur'an's lofty principles did not fail. They were subverted. The reluctance of abolition is the final, tragic proof that the empires had long ceased to follow the path laid out in the revelation. Your blog’s mission is to reclaim that path and to show that true fidelity to the Qur'an does not require defending the sins of history, but rather, fulfilling its unmistakable command: to break every chain and recognize the profound truth that "you are of one another." ✅

III.XI. Confronting the Abomination: Deconstructing ISIS & Boko Haram's "Theology" of Slavery ⚔️😈🚫

The claims of ISIS and Boko Haram are not a revival of Islamic practice; they are the resurrection of a 12-century-old imperial corruption, stripped of all the ethical and legal restraints the Qur'an and early scholars like Ibn Mas'ud tried to impose.

The Core Claims vs. The Qur'anic Reality

ISIS/Boko Haram Claim 🗣️⚔️	The Qur'anic & Historical Reality 📜✨	The Verdict & Emoji Analysis
1. "Enslaving the families of the kuffar... is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah." (Dabiq)	The Qur'an Attacked the Very Source. Surah Al-Anfal (8:67) rebukes the desire for captives as a "desire for the commodities of this world," conflicting with God's desire for the Hereafter. This frames slave-taking as a spiritual failure, not a divine command. ⚔️➡️🚫	🚫 FOUNDATIONALLY FLAWED. They cite later juristic permissions born of empire, while ignoring the Qur'an's foundational moral critique of the practice.
2. Justification via the Banu Qurayzah incident.	A Singular, Contextual Judgment, Not a Universal Law. This was a specific judgment for treason by a tribe that had a mutual defense treaty with Medina, based on their own law (the Torah). The Qur'an never legislates this as a general rule for war. 📜🔍➡️⚖️	🚫 CONTEXTUAL FRAUD. They universalize a one-time, judicial ruling while ignoring the Qur'an's overarching ethic of freeing captives (Surah Muhammad 47:4).
3. "They may be sold in a market... as mushrikin were sold by the Companions." (Dabiq)	The Prophetic Standard Was Integration, Not Sale. The Prophet's practice, as explained by An-Nisā' 25, was to marry female captives, making them wives and mothers of free believers, not to sell them in markets. The Companions Ibn Mas'ud and Jabir ibn Zayd forbade intercourse until the woman was taught Islam and married. 💍⬅️👰♀️	🚫 HISTORICAL HYPOCRISY. They mimic the action of later empires (selling people) while rejecting the Prophetic intent (elevating them to family).
4. "It is not rape." (Implicit in their theology)	The Qur'an Legislated Against Compulsion. Surah An-Nūr (24:33) explicitly commands: "Do not compel your slave girls to prostitution." If forcing into prostitution is banned, then the far greater violation of rape is categorically and logically forbidden. 🚫🤲➡️🚫	🚫 LOGICAL & THEOLOGICAL FRAUD. Their "theology of rape" is a direct violation of the Qur'an's clear prohibition of sexual coercion.
5. Targeting the Yezidi, calling them "devil-worshippers."	The Qur'anic Standard is for "People of the Book." The classical juristic debate was about Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book). ISIS invents a new, hyper-literal category to justify attacking a vulnerable minority, a act of pure aggression, not defense. 🛡️➡️⚔️	🚫 INNOVATION IN AGGRESSION. This is not classical law; it is a modern, genocidal innovation (bid'ah) designed to sanctify persecution.
6. Claiming this "brings voluntary conversions."	The Qur'an Forbids Compulsion in Religion. "There is no compulsion in religion." (Qur'an 2:256). Forcing conversion through rape, terror, and slavery is the ultimate compulsion and a complete inversion of Islamic theology. ☪️➡️❤️🚫	🚫 THEOLOGICAL PERVERSION. They use the language of faith to enact its absolute negation.

Synthesis: The Three Great Perversions

ISIS and Boko Haram do not simply "follow" classical texts. They perform three deliberate acts of perversion:

1. The Perversion of Chronology: Freezing Time ⏳❄️

They pluck permissive legal opinions from the 8th and 9th centuries (the imperial era) and treat them as if they are the final, eternal word of God. They completely ignore:

• The 7th-century Qur'anic revolution that sought to end slavery.

• The 7th-century Prophetic practice of integration and marriage.

• The opinions of early giants like Ibn Mas'ud who upheld the higher ethic.

They are not "Salafis" (followers of the pious predecessors); they are "Khalafis"—followers of the later, imperial scholars who corrupted the early message.

2. The Perversion of Context: Erasing the "Moral Grammar" 📖✂️

They cite Qur'anic verses and historical events like Banu Qurayzah in a vacuum, surgically removing them from the overarching moral and legislative project of the revelation.

• They quote the "what your right hands possess" phrase but erase the verses that follow, which command marriage, kindness, and freedom contracts.

• They cite battlefield rulings but ignore the verses that command freeing captives either gratis or for ransom as the preferred ideal.

3. The Perversion of Goal: Dominion over Liberation 👑⛓️🚫🕊️

The ultimate goal of the Qur'anic project was Iḥsān (benevolent kindness) and Tahrīr (liberation). The goal of the ISIS project is Taqhallub (domination) and Istibdād (despotism).

• Qur'anic Goal: A society where freeing a slave is the highest virtue and a path to God. 🗝️➡️📿

• ISIS Goal: A society where enslaving a "non-believer" is a religious duty and a symbol of power. ⛓️➡️😈

Conclusion: The Ultimate Heresy

Bernard Freamon is correct that their claims have a "plausible basis" in the corrupted juristic tradition of empires. However, they have no basis in the core, liberatory "moral grammar" of the Qur'an.

Their actions are not an "implementation" of Islam. They are a devil's parody of it. They use the lexicon of faith to build a kingdom of terror, inverting every one of its highest values. To accept their claims is to agree that the Qur'an failed in its mission and that God's final revelation to humanity is a blueprint for barbarism—a proposition that the entire weight of the Qur'an's ethical trajectory, from the first Meccan revelations to the final Medinan laws, resoundingly rejects. ✅

The fight against them is not just a military one; it is a theological and intellectual one to reclaim the soul of Islam from the hands of those who would use its sacred texts to justify a house of tyranny.

III.XII. Answering Freamon: The Qur'an's Abolitionist Imperative ⚖️🔄🕊️

Freamon poses the critical dilemma: "From what source or sources, then, would one draw the conclusion that the religion of Islam and Islamic law stand for the right of freedom from slavery?"

The source is the Qur'anic trajectory itself. The revelation did not freeze a 7th-century status quo. It initiated a dynamic process whose logical and moral endpoint is full abolition. The following framework answers Freamon's core questions using the Qur'an's own evidence.

1. The Foundational Principle: The "Moral Grammar" of Liberation

The Qur'an's approach is not a list of static rules, but a systematic re-engineering of society's values. Its "permission" of slavery was a recognition of a universal 7th-century reality; its relentless legislative assault on that institution was the divine strategy for its eradication.

2. Answering the Key Questions

Freamon's Question / Challenge	The Qur'anic Answer (With Evidence)	Conclusion & Emoji Logic
"The Qur'an accepts slavery but is overwhelmingly emancipatory. Can this support abolition?"	Yes. The Qur'an establishes a hierarchy of values. The "permission" is a temporary, regulated reality. The emancipatory commands are the eternal, moral goals. When the two conflict, the higher goal prevails.	The Permissible is Subservient to the Virtuous. A "permitted" thing that obstructs a core objective of the faith can be restricted or banned. 📜⚖️➡️✨
"Is there a jurisprudential basis for abolition in the Qur'an and Sunnah?"	Yes. The "Emancipatory Ethic" is the basis. • Surah Al-Balad (90): Defines the "steep path" to righteousness as "freeing a neck." This makes abolition a supreme act of faith. ⛰️➡️🗝️ • Surah An-Nisā' (24-25): Transforms the master-concubine relationship into marriage, granting freedom to children and dignity to women. 💍➡️👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🕊️ • Surah Muhammad (47:4): The preferred ruling for captives is release, gratis or for ransom. Enslavement is not mentioned as the primary ruling. ⚔️➡️🤲🗝️	Abolition is the "Steep Path" - the higher jihad of social justice. The Qur'an doesn't just encourage freedom; it defines the path to God through freedom.
"What about the 'permission' for 'what your right hands possess'?"	This term was re-engineered by the Qur'an itself. As proven by the legislative sequence in An-Nisā', it does not mean "concubine" but "enslaved woman you must marry," granting her the full rights of a wife. The "permission" is for a relationship that leads to liberation, not perpetual servitude. 👰♀️⚖️→🕊️	The "Permission" is a Pathway, Not a Perpetual State. It is a transitional legal category designed for integration, not exploitation.
"Is there a modern Ijmā' (consensus) against slavery?"	Yes, and it is based on the Qur'anic trajectory reaching its logical conclusion. The Qur'an planted a seed of abolition through its moral grammar. The fact that every Muslim-majority nation has outlawed slavery is the practical Ijmā' that this divine project is complete. The objective of the Lawgiver has been fulfilled. 🌱➡️🌳	The historical Ijmā' of practice completes the textual Ijmā' of principle. The community has collectively realized the Qur'an's goal.
"How do we deal with the 'evil' of slavery using Maṣlaḥa (public interest)?"	The Qur'an provides the values for determining Maṣlaḥa. Slavery violates the core objectives (Maqāṣid) of the Shari'ah: • Religion: It forces humans to serve a master over God. • Life: The slave trade and practice inherently involve brutality. • Intellect: It denies the slave's capacity for moral and intellectual agency. • Lineage: It breaks up families and obscures lineage. • Property: It treats a human as property.	Slavery is a Mafsada (Evil). Its abolition is the ultimate Maṣlaḥa because it protects all five essential values of human existence. 🛑😈➡️🤲❤️
"The ISIS/Boko Haram model ignores the emancipatory history."	They commit two fatal errors: 1. They cherry-pick early texts while ignoring the Qur'an's own evolutionary reform. They are stuck in the "permission" phase and reject the "emancipation" phase. 2. They adopt the Imperial Model, which the Qur'an sought to dismantle. Their practices mirror the Ottoman and Abbasid systems that subverted the Qur'an's intent, not the Prophetic example.	They are not revivalists; they are revisionists who uphold the very imperial perversions the Qur'an came to correct. 👑⛓️❌

Synthesis: The Qur'an was Sent to Liberate Minds and Societies 🌍✨➡️🕊️

Freamon is correct that the Qur'an was revealed in a world "immersed in slavery." Its genius was not to issue a command that would be ignored, but to change the very consciousness that made slavery acceptable.

• It began by elevating the spiritual status of the enslaved believer above the free polytheist (Al-Baqarah 221). 📊➡️♰

• It continued by granting them legal personhood (Al-Baqarah 178). ⚖️➡️👁️

• It mandated their freedom as a core act of worship and atonement (Al-Baqarah 177, An-Nisā' 92). 🧎♂️➡️🗝️

• It integrated them into society through marriage and family (An-Nisā' 25). 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦❤️

• It systematized their liberation through state funds (At-Tawbah 60). 🏛️💰➡️🗝️

Conclusion: The question is not "Can we forbid what God permitted?" but "Have we fulfilled what God intended?"

The Qur'an's "permission" was the divine concession to human societal weakness. Its emancipatory program was the divine command to overcome that weakness. To cling to the "permission" after the means for full abolition are available is to betray the trajectory of the revelation itself. Abolition is not just permissible; it is the pious and necessary fulfillment of the Qur'an's moral arc toward justice. The Qur'an was sent to liberate minds from the tyranny of other men and hearts from the love of domination. A society that has internalized this lesson has no room for slavery. ✅

---

Conclusion: Completing the Work of Revelation ✨🕋➡️🕊️

The centuries-long debate between Muslim jurists and abolitionists was more than a legal dispute; it was a clash of paradigms. The jurists spoke the language of established law, pointing to what was permitted. The abolitionists spoke the language of evolving conscience, pointing to what was right. The Qur'an, in its divine wisdom, speaks both.

Our analysis reveals that the Qur'an did not "permit" slavery as a timeless institution. It diagnosed a universal societal cancer and then, with surgical precision, implanted a divine program for its eradication.

The Divine Two-Language System: Law & Conscience

The Language of LAW ⚖️ (Recognizing Human Limitation)	The Language of CONSCIENCE ✨ (Calling Humanity Beyond It)	The Ultimate Synthesis
Acknowledged the 7th-century reality of slavery as a pre-existing social fact. 🌒	Immediately redefined "righteousness" to include "freeing slaves" (Al-Baqarah 177). 🧠➡️🗝️	The law was a temporary scaffold; the conscience was the eternal building.
Regulated the existing master-enslaved relationship to prevent greater harm (The "Lesser Injustice"). 🛡️	Mandated Iḥsān—active, benevolent kindness—as the non-negotiable ethic governing that relationship (An-Nisā' 36). 🤲❤️	Regulation was the means; moral transformation was the end.
Used the existing term mā malakat aymanukum.	Re-engineered its meaning into "a believing woman you must marry," declaring "You are of one another" (An-Nisā' 25). 💍➡️💖	It accepted the social vocabulary of the time only to rewrite its dictionary.

The Qur'an began where history stood in the 7th century, but its moral compass was always fixed on the ultimate destination: absolute justice.

The Unfolding of the Divine Plan: A Summary

The Qur'an executed a four-phase divine strategy to dismantle the institution:

Phase 1: The Moral Assault (Mecca)

• ⚡ Al-Balad 90: Defined the ultimate "steep path" to God as "freeing a neck." This laid the ideological bomb that would centuries later explode the very foundations of the institution. ⛰️➡️🗝️

Phase 2: The Legal & Social Assault (Medina)

• 🧠 Al-Baqarah 177: Made spending wealth to free slaves a pillar of true righteousness, equal to belief in God.

• ⚖️ Al-Baqarah 178: Granted the slave inviolable legal personhood—a life for a life.

• 💖 Al-Baqarah 221: Overturned the social hierarchy, stating a believing slave is better than a free polytheist.

• 💍 An-Nisā' 24-25: Transformed concubinage into marriage, granting freedom to children and dignity to women.

• 🤲 An-Nisā' 36: Commanded Iḥsān, binding the master to a contract of beneficence with the enslaved.

Phase 3: The Systemic Assault (Building the System)

• 🩸 An-Nisā' 92: Mandated freeing a slave as compulsory atonement for accidental homicide.

• 🤲 Al-Mā'idah 89: Mandated it as the primary penance for broken oaths.

• 🏛️ At-Tawbah 60: Allocated state funds (Zakāh) for freeing slaves, institutionalizing abolition as public policy.

Phase 4: The Historical Test & Betrayal

• ✅ The Prophetic & Companion Era: Reflected the integrative spirit (e.g., names like Salmā, opinions of Ibn Mas'ud).

• ❌ The Imperial Era (Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman): Subverted the divine blueprint. Replaced the Qur'an's liberatory marriage laws with the Umm Walad compromise; turned human beings named Salmā into commodities named Jewel; and defended a system of racialized enslavement that the Prophet's final sermon explicitly condemned.

The Final Synthesis: Revelation Realized

"No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a white over a black, except in piety."

— The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in his Farewell Sermon

The Prophet was not describing his world. He was defining ours.

He was issuing a divine standard against which all subsequent Muslim societies must be judged. The empires that enslaved fellow Muslims based on race failed this test. The jurists who defended a system of brutal, industrial-scale slave trading 1,200 years after the revelation failed this test.

To abolish slavery, therefore, is not to forbid what God allowed. It is to fulfill what God desired.

It is to complete the moral arc that the Qur'an set in motion. It is to answer the call of Surah Al-Balad and finally break through the "difficult pass." It is to recognize that the "permission" was a divine concession to human weakness, while the emancipatory imperative is the eternal command to overcome that weakness.

Abolition is not rebellion against revelation. Abolition is revelation realized. 📜✨➡️🌍🕊️

THE END ✅

Works Cited

-

Primary Sources

al-Baghawi, al-Husayn ibn Mas'ud. Ma'alim al-Tanzil fi Tafsir al-Qur'an (Tafsir al-Baghawi). Edited by 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Mahdi, Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi, 1999.

al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari. Translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, Darussalam Publishers, 1997.

al-Dhahabi, Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad. Siyar A'lam al-Nubala. Edited by Shu'ayb al-Arna'ut, Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 1985.

Ibn Abi Shayba, Abu Bakr 'Abdullah ibn Muhammad. al-Musannaf. Dar al-Fikr, 1994.

Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, Ahmad ibn 'Ali. Fath al-Bari Sharh Sahih al-Bukhari. Dar al-Rayyan lil-Turath, 1986.

Ibn Hisham, 'Abd al-Malik. al-Sira al-Nabawiyya. Edited by Mustafa al-Saqa, Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, 1955.

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Abu Abdullah Muhammad. Zad al-Ma'ad fi Hady Khayr al-'Ibad. Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 1998.

Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, 1990.

Ibn 'Uqbah, Musa. The Maghazi of Sayyiduna Muhammad. Translated by Javed Iqbal et al., Imam Ghazali Publishing, 2024.

al-Maqrizi, Ahmad ibn 'Ali. Imta' al-Asma'. Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, 1999.

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Sahih Muslim. Darussalam Publishers, 2007.

al-Nasa'i, Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb. al-Sunan. Darussalam Publishers, 2007.

al-San'ani, 'Abd al-Razzaq. al-Musannaf. Edited by Habib al-Rahman al-A'zami, al-Maktab al-Islami, 1983.

al-Suyuti, Jalal al-Din. Tarikh al-Khulafa. Edited by Hamdi al-Dimirdash, Maktabat Nizar Mustafa al-Baz, 2004.

al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Jami' al-Bayan fi Tafsir al-Qur'an. Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 2000.

---. Tarikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk. Dar al-Turath, 1967.

Secondary Sources 

-

Ali, Kecia. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Harvard University Press, 2010.

‘Athamina, Khalil. “How Did Islam Contribute to Change the Legal Status of Women: The Case of the Jawār, or the Female Slaves.” Al-Qanṭara, vol. 28, no. 2, July–Dec. 2007, pp. 383–408.

Bradley, Keith, and Paul Cartledge, editors. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Brown, Jonathan A.C. The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon. Brill, 2007.

---. Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oneworld Publications, 2009.

---. Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy. Oneworld Publications, 2014.

---. Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2011.

---. Slavery and Islam. Oneworld Publications, 2019.

Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. Hurst & Company, 2006.

Crone, Patricia. Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity. Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. I.B. Tauris, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023.

De Wet, Chris L., Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto, editors. Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Dirbas, Hekmat. “Naming of Slave-Girls in Arabic: A Survey of Medieval and Modern Sources.” Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik, vol. 69, 2019, pp. 26–38.

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Erdem, Y. Hakan. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Freamon, Bernard K. Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures. Brill, 2019.

al-Ghadban, Munir Muhammad. Fiqh al-Sirah al-Nabawiyya. Jami'at Umm al-Qura, 1992.

Gordon, Matthew S., and Kathryn A. Hain, editors. Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Harper, Kyle. From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harvard University Press, 2013.

Montana, Ismael M. The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia. University Press of Florida, 2013.

Noori, Seyed Masoud, and Zahra Azhar. “Shīʿī Ideas of Slavery: A Study of Iran in the Qājar Era Before and After the Constitutional Revolution.” Journal of Islamic Law, Special Issue, Roya Institute for Global Justice and Shahid Beheshti University, 2022.

Ochsenwald, William. “Muslim–European Conflict in the Hijaz: The Slave Trade Controversy, 1840–1895.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1980, pp. 70–84.

Perry, Craig, David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, and David Richardson, editors. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Volume 2: AD 500–AD 1420. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Reilly, Benjamin. Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula. Ohio University Press, 2015.

Robinson, Majied. Marriage in the Tribe of Muhammad: A Statistical Study of Early Arabic Genealogical Literature. De Gruyter, 2020.

Scheunchen, Tobias. Cosmology, Law, and Elites in Late Antiquity: Marriage and Slavery in Zoroastrianism, Eastern Christianity, and Islam. Ergon Verlag, 2019.

Toledano, Ehud R. As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East. Yale University Press, 2007.

Toledano, Ehud R. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. University of Washington Press, 1998.

Toledano, Ehud R. The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840–1890. Princeton University Press, 1982.