One of the most unsettling realities of Shariah is that it never truly abandons slavery. It regulates it, channels it, and at times encourages it—but it never declares human ownership itself to be sinful. In Islam’s foundational sources, slavery is not a tragic concession to a fallen world; it is a legitimate institution built into the very fabric of the law.

The Quran speaks calmly of slaves as property. Muhammad himself bought, sold, owned, and gifted slaves. Classical jurists codified elaborate rules for acquiring, managing, and inheriting human beings. Even when Muslim-majority states eventually abolished slavery under international pressure, the legal and theological roots remained untouched. Jihadist groups and modern slaveholders have had no difficulty digging those roots back up and claiming that they, not the abolitionists, stand with Muhammad and the Quran.

From a biblical perspective, this exposes another radical difference between Shariah and Jehovah’s revelation. Scripture does describe slavery in the ancient world and regulates aspects of it, but it consistently pushes toward the protection of the vulnerable, forbids man-stealing, and plants seeds that eventually burst into full rejection of chattel slavery among faithful Christians. The Gospel announces a deeper reality: in Christ there is no slave or free, and all believers are one. Islam’s law never arrives at such a destination. Slavery remains theologically permissible, and in some contexts honored, to this day.

Quranic Verses Allowing Human Ownership

The Quran contains numerous references to “those whom your right hands possess.” This phrase is the central label for slaves—men and women acquired through war, purchase, or inheritance. In the logic of the Quran, slaves are an ordinary part of life, a category of property alongside land, houses, and livestock.

Verses dealing with charity and atonement list freeing slaves as one possible good deed among others, but never as a universal command. A believer may free a slave to expiate certain sins or to earn merit, yet at the same time, the text continually assumes that believers will own slaves as a normal condition. There is no blanket statement that all slavery must be abolished. Instead, the Quran describes how to treat slaves, including instructions about marriage to believing slave women, rules for partially freeing them through contracts, and regulations about sexual use of female captives.

The key phrase “your spouses or those whom your right hands possess” appears repeatedly in passages about sexual propriety. It is always presented as the basic boundary: intimate relations are allowed with a lawful wife and with owned slaves. Everyone else is forbidden. This makes slavery structurally central to the Quran’s sexual ethics. It is not a minor footnote.

Other verses sanctify the process by which slaves are acquired. When Muslims wage jihad, the Quran speaks of taking captives and distributing booty. Part of that booty is human. After battles, men, women, and children are divided up or ransomed. The Quran never calls this an evil. On the contrary, it portrays successful raids and the acquisition of captives as signs of Allah’s favor.

From a Christian perspective, the historical-grammatical meaning of these verses is straightforward: according to the Quran, owning other human beings is lawful. Freeing them is a recommended act in some situations, but owning them is not condemned. The text presents slavery as a legitimate, ongoing institution within the life of the ummah.

Jehovah’s Word, by contrast, moves in a different direction. While the Old Testament allows forms of servitude in an ancient agrarian context, it forbids kidnapping and selling persons. Those who steal a man and sell him are to be put to death. The Law also limits the duration of Hebrew servitude, institutes the Year of Jubilee, and commands kindness toward sojourners and servants. The trajectory points away from permanent human ownership, not toward blessing it. Islam’s scripture entrenches slavery as a structural feature; the Bible begins to loosen its grip.

Muhammad’s Slave Trading and Household Slaves

The example of Muhammad is decisive in Shariah. He is held up as the perfect pattern for all humanity, whose words, actions, and approvals shape law. When we examine his relationship to slavery, we do not find a man working steadily to dismantle the institution. We find an owner, trader, and distributor of slaves.

The earliest Muslim sources present Muhammad as someone who both inherited slaves and acquired them through purchase and war. He had male slaves who served in his household, acted as messengers, and carried out tasks. He had female slaves who served as concubines, bearing children who later became prominent figures in Muslim history. Some of his most famous offspring were born to slave women, not free wives, confirming the accepted status of concubinage in his life.

After raids and battles, Muhammad distributed captives among his followers as war booty. He took a share for himself—the “fifth” allotted to the Prophet and the community—and from that share, he selected slaves for his own household or gifted them to others. In some cases, he ransomed captives back to their tribes for payment; in others, he kept or traded them. None of these actions are presented as reluctant concessions. They are portrayed as wise leadership in dividing the spoils granted by Allah.

There are incidents in which Muhammad freed individual slaves, sometimes as acts of kindness, sometimes in response to their conversion to Islam. Apologists highlight these cases as evidence of his sympathy for the enslaved. Yet even here, the pattern is telling: for every slave freed, others were taken. The institution itself is never challenged. Emancipation is portrayed as a generous act by the master, not as a moral duty that must sweep the system away.

Classical jurists took careful note of all this. They pointed to Muhammad’s ownership of slaves, his use of concubines, and his distribution of captives as proof that slavery is eternally lawful. If the final Prophet of Allah engaged in these practices without rebuke, they argued, no Muslim may say that slavery is inherently wrong. At best, one might say that conditions have changed and that it is currently unwise to own slaves under particular circumstances, but the underlying right remains valid.

Jehovah’s people must evaluate prophets by their fruits as well as their claims. A man who claims to speak for God yet spends his leadership years owning, trading, and sexually using slaves is not following the pattern of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus took the form of a servant and washed His disciples’ feet. He did not surround Himself with human chattel. He offered Himself as a ransom for many; He did not demand ransom for captives taken by force. Muhammad’s life, as portrayed in Islamic sources, reinforces the Quran’s acceptance of slavery and stands in stark contrast to the way the true Messiah used power.

Islamic Abolition Debates Crushed by Scripture

As the modern world moved toward rejecting slavery, Muslim thinkers faced a profound challenge. International pressure, economic changes, and the moral witness of Christians who opposed the trade together pushed many nations to outlaw slavery. Yet Islamic law, grounded in the Quran and Sunnah, still treated it as legitimate. The question became: can Islam theologically abolish what its own sources so clearly allow?

Some modernist scholars attempted to argue that the spirit of Islam was always moving toward emancipation. They pointed to verses encouraging freeing slaves, to stories of Muhammad manumitting individuals, and to later charitable movements that purchased freedom for captives. They claimed that, taken as a whole, the trajectory pointed to abolition, even if the Quran never said so explicitly.

However, traditional scholars pushed back with equal force. They noted that the Quran not only permits slavery but embeds it deeply in the law of marriage, sexual relations, inheritance, and jihad. They argued that if Allah had intended complete abolition, He could easily have commanded it. Instead, He chose to regulate slavery and present it as a normal part of society. To declare that slavery is inherently unjust, they warned, is to accuse the Quran of endorsing injustice and to insult the Prophet’s example.

Because Shariah treats the Quran as the literal, unchangeable speech of Allah and the Sunnah as the final model, attempts at theological abolition run into a wall. Reformers may persuade governments to pass secular laws banning slavery, but they cannot honestly claim that the foundational texts themselves have changed. As a result, many Islamic abolition efforts have been pragmatic rather than doctrinal. Slavery is abolished because it is politically expedient, economically outdated, or diplomatically necessary—not because the Quran or Muhammad are now understood as morally opposed to it.

This leaves a dangerous gap. When jihadist groups or radical preachers call for reviving slavery, they can easily appeal to scripture and prophetic practice. They can quote verses about captives and spoils of war, cite stories of Muhammad’s concubines and slave-trading, and reference classical legal manuals that describe how to buy, sell, and own human beings. The abolitionists, by contrast, must appeal to vague principles or modern sensibilities without being able to point to a clear textual command.

From a Christian perspective, this illustrates the difference between a religion bound to an unchangeable legal text and the unfolding revelation of Jehovah fulfilled in Christ. The Bible does not hesitate to condemn man-stealing and treats the redemption of slaves as a picture of God’s grace. The New Testament announces liberty to captives and presents spiritual equality of slave and free in Christ. Christians who opposed the transatlantic slave trade and fought for abolition could appeal to these themes, exposing man-stealing and racial slavery as violations of biblical justice. Islam’s defenders lack such scriptural ammunition. Its own texts crush consistent abolitionist theology even as modern consciences recoil from slavery.

Modern Slave Markets: Mauritania, Libya

Despite formal abolition in many states, slavery in Muslim-majority regions has not vanished. It persists in various forms, often with religious justification simmering in the background. Two stark examples are Mauritania and Libya, where forms of human bondage have continued or reemerged in recent decades.

Mauritania, a West African nation with a large Muslim population, has long been notorious for hereditary slavery. Families of darker-skinned ethnic groups have served as slaves for lighter-skinned masters for generations. Though the government has officially abolished slavery multiple times under international pressure, the practice has often continued in hidden or semi-open forms. Slaves may herd animals, work in households, or cultivate fields for their masters, receiving little or no pay and lacking the freedom to leave.

In these contexts, Islam is often invoked as a stabilizing force rather than as an engine for liberation. Some religious authorities have historically defended the existing social order by pointing to Shariah’s rules regulating slavery rather than calling for its abolition. Slaves are encouraged to be obedient and pious; masters are encouraged to be “kind,” not to relinquish ownership. The Quranic language of “those whom your right hands possess” provides a theological vocabulary for a hierarchy that persists beneath the surface of official law.

Libya, shattered by conflict and power vacuums, has seen a different but related horror: migrant workers and refugees sold at auction by traffickers. Reports and testimonies have described scenes of men being offered for sale in markets, treated as property by those who hold control over their movements. While not always framed explicitly as Shariah-based slavery, these abuses occur in a cultural and legal environment where the concept of owning people is far from unthinkable.

In both cases, the lingering permissibility of slavery in Islamic tradition creates fertile soil for exploitation. When a religion’s foundational texts normalized human ownership, abolishing it requires more than legal decrees; it requires theological repentance. Without that, old patterns reassert themselves whenever social order breaks down or when corrupt people see a chance to profit from captive labor.

Jehovah’s Word offers a different foundation. It insists that every human being bears God’s image. Christ died to redeem people from every tribe and tongue, not to make them commodities. Christians who resist trafficking and modern slavery can point to their Scriptures and say with confidence that buying and selling people is evil in itself, not merely an abuse of a neutral institution. Shariah’s defenders cannot say the same without contradicting their own sources.

Sexual Slavery Through “Right-Hand Possessions”

Perhaps the darkest aspect of Islam’s ongoing theological permission for slavery is its treatment of sexual relations with female slaves. As earlier articles discussed, the Quran repeatedly permits men to have intercourse with “those whom their right hands possess.” Shariah interprets this as granting masters sexual access to their female slaves without the need for marriage or consent. This is not an incidental abuse; it is part of the legal structure.

Under classical law, a female slave is considered her master’s sexual property. He may sleep with her as he wishes, provided basic rules about menstruation and certain forms of intercourse are respected. If she bears him a child, her status improves in some schools—she may not be sold and gains freedom upon his death—but this change does not erase the fact that the relationship began with ownership, not mutual covenant.

Because slavery is still theoretically permissible, this doctrine cannot simply vanish. When groups like ISIS captured non-Muslim women, especially Yazidis, they openly cited the rules of “right-hand possessions” to justify rape. They published question-and-answer documents explaining that it is lawful to have intercourse with a captured woman, even if she is married, because her previous marriage is annulled by her enslavement. They described how a master may buy, sell, or gift his slave and how he may use her sexually.

These publications did not emerge from nowhere. They quoted classical jurists and referenced Quranic verses. Their authors saw themselves as restoring a neglected Sunnah, not inventing a new atrocity. When confronted by Muslims who were horrified by their actions, they replied that judgment should be based on scripture and prophetic example, not Western human-rights norms. Given Islam’s sources, their argument was hard to refute on purely Islamic grounds.

From a Christian standpoint, sexual slavery is one of the clearest signs that Shariah is not from the true God. Jehovah condemns sexual exploitation. The Law forbids uncovering the nakedness of those who are under one’s authority in exploitative ways. The New Testament commands believers to flee sexual immorality and honors marriage as a covenant of mutual giving. A system that allows men to own women as “right-hand possessions” and use them sexually is fundamentally opposed to the holiness Scripture demands.

The theological problem is acute. If the Quran and Muhammad permit sexual slavery, and if they are infallible, then no Muslim can say that owning and using a slave sexually is always wrong. They can say it is not advisable in the modern world. They can say it leads to abuses and should be avoided. But they cannot condemn it as inherently sinful without saying that the Quran and the Prophet of Islam endorsed sin.

This is why modern Islamic reformers often stop short of full denunciation. They may call for better treatment of workers, oppose trafficking on humanitarian grounds, or argue that slavery is impractical today. Yet they rarely state that the doctrine of “those whom your right hands possess” was always morally wrong. To do so would be to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

The Gospel gives a better answer. It says that every form of sexual exploitation is sinful, whether committed by a master against a slave, a husband against a wife, or anyone against anyone else. It announces that Jesus came “to proclaim liberty to captives” and that in Him, there is neither slave nor free. When Christians have failed to live this out, they have betrayed their own Scriptures. But when they repent and fight against slavery and abuse, they do so in harmony with the heart of their Lord.

Slavery’s continued theological permissibility in Shariah is not a minor quirk, easily fixed with a new interpretation. It flows from the core texts and the life of Islam’s prophet. As long as those are treated as unquestionable, slavery will remain a door that can be reopened whenever circumstances allow. For Muslims who feel the moral weight of this, the only true escape is to turn to the One who never owned a slave, never traded in human beings, and came instead “to give His life as a ransom for many.”

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