WHICH SLAVES DESERVE EMANCIPATION?

Only a believing slave deserves freedom.  Someone once slapped his maid-slave in anger and then, in contrition, wanted to free her.  When Muhammad was consulted, he said: �Bring her to me.� She was brought.  Muhammad asked her: �Where is Allah?� She replied: �He is in the heaven.� Muhammad asked: �Who am I?� �Thou art the Messenger of Allah,� she answered.  Muhammad gave his verdict: �Grant her freedom, she is a believing woman� (1094).

Thus there is merit in freeing a slave.  �A Muslim who emancipates a Muslim [slave], Allah will save from Fire every limb of his for every limb of the slave, even his private parts for his� (3604).

One could also emancipate a jointly owned slave to the extent of one�s share in him.  For the rest a fair price for the slave was to be fixed, and the slave �will be required to work to pay for his freedom, but must not be overburdened� (3582).

author : ram swarup

EMANCIPATION OF SLAVES

The emancipation of slaves was not unknown in pre-Islamic Arabia.  Slaves could gain their freedom in several ways.  One way, and a very common one, of course, was that they were ransomed by their relatives.  Another was when a master granted his slave a free and unconditional emancipation (�itq).  There were two other forms of emancipation: tadbir and kitabah.  In the first, the master declared that on his death his slaves would be free.  In the second, slaves who were not ransomed by their relatives obtained their master�s permission to earn their ransom by work.

We have already seen how HakIm b. HizAm �freed one hundred slaves� (225) even before he became a Muslim.  We have also observed that it was an old custom among the Arabs of more pious disposition to will that their slaves would be freed at their death, a practice which was opposed in some cases by Muhammad because he did not want such emancipations to take place at the expense of the heirs and relatives of the masters.  On the whole, however, Muhammad�s response to the practice was positive, but this did not make him into a Messiah of the slaves.  On the other hand, he saw the time when the meek and the lowly would inherit the earth as a portent of the approaching end of the world.  �When the slave-girl will give birth to her master, when the naked, barefooted would become the chiefs of the people-these are some of the signs of Doom,� according to him (4).

To Muhammad, the freeing of a slave was an act of charity on the part of the master, not a matter of justice.  In any case, a slave should not seek his emancipation by running away.  �The slave who fled from his master committed an act of infidelity so long as he would not return to him,� says Muhammad (129).

author : ram swarup

EMANCIPATING A SLAVE

For some unexplained reason, a few chapters at the end of the book dealing with marriage and divorce are on slaves.  This may be due to a faulty method of classification, or it may be that emancipating a slave was considered a form of talAq, which literally means �freeing� or �undoing the knot�; or it may be that the subject really belongs to the next book, which is on business transactions-a slave, after all, was no more than a chattel.

Modern Muslim writers trying to boost Islam as a humane ideology make much of the sayings of Muhammad on the emancipation (�itq) of slaves.  But the fact remains that Muhammad, by introducing the concept of religious war and by denying human rights to non-Muslims, sanctioned slavery on an unprecedented scale.  Pre-Islamic Arabs, even in their wildest dreams, never imagined that the institution of slavery could take on such massive proportions.  Zubair, a close companion of the Prophet, owned one thousand slaves when he died.  The Prophet himself possessed at least fifty-nine slaves at one stage or another, besides thirty-eight servants, both male and female.  Mirkhond, the Prophet�s fifteenth-century biographer, names them all in his Rauzat-us-Safa.  The fact is that slavery, tribute, and booty became the main props of the new Arab aristocracy.  Slaves continued to suffer under the same old disabilities.  They were the property of their master (saiyid), who could dispose of them as he liked, selling them, gifting them away, hiring them out, lending them, mortgaging them.  Slaves had no property rights.  Whatever they acquired became the property of their masters.  The master had the right to live in concubinage with his female slaves if they confessed Islam or belonged to the �People of the Book.� The QurAn (SUra 4:3, 4:24, 4:25, 23:6) permitted this.  Slavery was interwoven with the Islamic laws of sale, inheritance, and marriage.  And though the slaves fought for their Muslim masters, they were not entitled to the spoils of war according to Muslim religious law.

author : ram swarup

LI�AN (INVOKING CURSE)

If a man finds his wife in adultery, he cannot kill the adulterous man, for that is forbidden; nor can he make an accusation against his wife, for unless he has four witnesses, he receives eighty stripes for making a false accusation against the chastity of a woman.  But if the witnesses are not always forthcoming, which is most likely in such a case, what should he do?  This was the dilemma confronting the believers.  An ansAr posed the problem to Muhammad: �If a person finds his woman along with a man, and if he speaks about it, you would lash him; and if he kills, you will kill him, and if he keeps quiet, he shall have to consume anger.� Muhammad supplicated God: �Allah, solve this problem� (3564).  And a verse descended on him (QurAn 24:6) which gives us the practice of li�An.  The word literally means �oath,� but technically it stands for that particular form of oath which brings about separation between husband and wife with the help of four oaths and one curse.  A husband�s solitary evidence can be accepted if he bears witness four times with an oath by Allah that he is solemnly telling the truth and then invokes the curse of Allah upon himself if he is lying.  Similarly, the wife can solemnly deny the accusation four times and then invoke the wrath of Allah on herself if her accuser is telling the truth.  One of them must be lying, but this closes the chapter, and they are wife and husband no more (3553-3577).

author : ram swarup