Slavery and Concubinage in Islam

The Quran institutionalizes sexual access to female slaves and prisoners of war as a legal category, “those whom your right hands possess” (ma malakat aymanukum). The institution is preserved in classical fiqh across all four madhhabs and was practiced from Muhammad’s lifetime through the formal abolition of slavery in the Muslim world during the 19th and 20th centuries. Saudi Arabia did not formally abolish slavery until 1962; Mauritania passed nominal anti-slavery legislation in 1981 but did not criminalize the practice until 2007, and continued practice has been documented well into the 2010s by Anti-Slavery International and Walk Free Foundation. This page addresses both classical Islamic slavery and the specific institution of concubinage (sexual access to female slaves outside marriage).

The orthodox claim

The classical Sunni position, defended across all four madhhabs and across the entire premodern fiqh tradition, is that slavery, and specifically a male slaveholder’s sexual access to his unmarried female slaves without a marriage contract, is halal (permitted) by direct Quranic command. The Quran lists “those your right hands possess” (ma malakat aymanukum) as a category of women a man may have sex with, parallel to wives but without requiring a marriage contract or the woman’s consent. The institution is regulated (slaves have certain protections, the master cannot prostitute them, cannot separate mother from child, must clothe and feed them, and freeing slaves is meritorious) but not abolished. Slavery exists in Islamic law as a divinely sanctioned permanent legal category, not a temporary historical accommodation.

Standard apologetic responses

Four apologetic moves are deployed:

The regulatory-recognition / maqasid defense (deployed by Yasir Qadhi, Yaqeen Institute contributors, Jonathan Brown in Slavery and Islam 2020, Abdullah bin Bayyah): the Quran does not endorse slavery as an eternal moral good; it regulates an existing universal social institution that could not be abolished immediately in 7th-century conditions, while creating the legal infrastructure (manumission incentives, sale restrictions, umm al-walad protections) that made later abolition possible. The institution’s contemporary cessation is grounded in the maqasid al-shari’ah, particularly hifz al-‘ird (protection of dignity), applied through ijtihad to changed social conditions. Brown specifically concedes that Islamic law did not generate an internal teleological trajectory toward abolition; he defends a maslaha-based forward path that grounds abolition in the maqasid framework rather than in textual prediction.
The “consent through ownership” defense (deployed by various classical jurists and some contemporary apologists): the institution of ma malakat aymanukum establishes a legal framework in which the slave’s ownership status constitutes a form of consent to sexual access, parallel to the way a marriage contract establishes legal consent in marriage.
The “better than the alternative” defense (deployed by Hamza Tzortzis, frequently in popular debate): Islamic slavery was kinder than other historical slavery (Roman, transatlantic), slaves had legal rights, could buy their freedom, were treated as members of the household. The institution as Islam regulated it was a humanitarian advance.
The “concubinage prevented adultery” defense (deployed in classical fiqh): the institution channeled male sexual desire toward owned women rather than toward extramarital affairs with free women, protecting the integrity of the marriage system and reducing fornication.

The rebuttal

The Quran establishes sexual access to slaves as a permanent legal category, not a temporary accommodation. Q 23:5-6 and Q 70:29-30 both list “those whom your right hands possess” alongside wives as the two legitimate categories for male sexual activity. These verses are descriptive of the righteous (Q 23:5: “those who guard their chastity”), not concessive accommodations. If concubinage were a temporary historical accommodation, the Quran would describe it as such; instead, it lists it among the practices of the saved. The verses are not framed in language of phasing out, they are framed in language of permanent moral structure.

Q 4:24 establishes the legal mechanism dissolving existing marriages, this is active endorsement, not mere regulation. The verse prohibits marriage to married women “except those your right hands possess”, i.e., a married woman taken as a slave loses her existing marital protection, and her new owner gains sexual access. The unanimous classical tafsir consensus reads it this way: al-Tabari (Jami al-Bayan), Ibn Kathir (Tafsir al-Quran al-‘Azim), and al-Qurtubi (al-Jami li-Ahkam al-Quran) all confirm that illa ma malakat aymanukum operates as a dissolution clause for captured married women. This is the practical legal framework underlying the events at Khaybar (Bukhari 371, see also khaybar-kinana-safiyya) and at Banu Mustaliq (Bukhari 4138). The regulatory-recognition defense argues that the Quran received an existing institution rather than endorsing it, but Q 4:24 does not regulate; it creates a new legal status. The verse establishes the mechanism by which a previously-protected marital bond is dissolved upon enslavement. This is constructive Quranic legislation, not the passive reception of an existing structure. The defense survives at most for the bare existence of slavery; it does not survive Q 4:24’s specific construction of the marital-dissolution rule.

Bukhari 4138 documents Muhammad’s companions practicing concubinage with captured women and consulting him on the practice. Abu Sa’id al-Khudri reports: “We went out with Allah’s Messenger for the Ghazwa of Banu Al-Mustaliq and we received captives from among the Arab captives and we desired women…” The companions asked Muhammad about coitus interruptus (‘azl) with the female captives. Muhammad’s response was not to forbid sexual access to the captives but to discourage ‘azl on theological grounds. The encounter assumes, and tacitly authorizes, sexual access to recently captured women, including women whose husbands had been killed in the raid hours earlier.

The “consent through ownership” framing exposes the structural problem. What classical fiqh describes as legal entitlement is structurally identical to what modern moral frameworks classify as rape, not because modern frameworks are automatically correct, but because the classical tradition itself does not require the woman’s independent consent and operates entirely within an ownership-entitlement framework. The orthodox apologist who defends this institution as morally permissible as such is defending a category that modern moral consensus uniformly condemns; the apologist who concedes that meaningful consent is morally required after all has rejected the classical fiqh position and is engaging in modernist reinterpretation. The maqasid-based defense (Brown, bin Bayyah) takes this exit, and the exit is the second horn of the trilemma below.

The maqasid-retrospective argument is unconvincing because the maqasid framework was available for eight centuries without producing abolition. Al-Ghazali’s al-Mustasfa (d. 1111 CE) systematized maslaha; al-Shatibi’s al-Muwafaqat (d. 1388 CE) systematized maqasid; the Maliki, Hanbali, and Hanafi traditions all had developed maqasid reasoning by the 14th century. For approximately 800 years thereafter, no Muslim scholar deployed the maqasid framework to argue for the abolition of slavery. The maqasid abolitionist argument emerges in the late 19th and 20th centuries, after external pressure had already made the institution practically untenable. This is strong evidence that the maqasid argument is being deployed retrospectively to rescue Islamic moral authority from a conclusion the tradition itself did not generate, rather than being the actual internal trajectory of Islamic moral reasoning. Brown’s Slavery and Islam (2020) acknowledges this directly: Islamic law did not produce an internal teleological trajectory toward abolition; it produced resources for abolition once external conditions changed, which is a different and weaker claim.

The empirical historical record confirms abolition came from outside Islamic theology. Slavery in the Islamic world was abolished under direct British and French diplomatic and economic pressure during the 19th and 20th centuries, Tunisia in 1846, Egypt in 1877, the Ottoman Empire’s series of partial reforms culminating in 1909, Saudi Arabia in 1962 (under U.S. and U.N. pressure), Mauritania’s nominal 1981 law and 2007 criminalization (under E.U. and international pressure). The trajectory toward abolition is observed first in Western European moral history (driven by Quaker abolitionism, evangelical Christianity, and Enlightenment liberalism, with the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in 1787); Islamic societies adopted abolition only when external pressure made the institution untenable. The historical record does not show an internal Islamic trajectory toward abolition; it shows the opposite.

Follow-up question

“If ‘those whom your right hands possess’ is a permanent legal category permitting sexual access to enslaved women without a marriage contract, then by what authority can a contemporary Muslim say that such access is morally wrong? And if the answer is ‘it’s no longer practiced,’ on what Quranic basis was the practice abolished, given that the Quran’s text endorses it without qualification?”

This question forces the orthodox interlocutor to commit either to:

Defending the institution of concubinage with female slaves as morally permissible (which collapses on modern consent norms), or
Acknowledging that the Quran’s permission was a historical accommodation no longer applicable (which requires identifying which other Quranic permissions are also historically contingent, unraveling the doctrine of timeless Quranic moral authority), or
Accepting that the moral progress reflected in abolition came from outside Islamic theology rather than from within it (which collapses the claim that Islam is the source of the highest moral guidance).

Primary sources (corpus citations)

Q 4:24 (Sahih International, partial)

And [also prohibited to you are all] married women except those your right hands possess. [This is] the decree of Allah upon you. And lawful to you are [all others] beyond these…

Q 23:5-6 (Sahih International)

And those who guard their private parts. Except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed.

Q 33:50 (Sahih International, partial)

O Prophet, indeed We have made lawful to you your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hand possesses from what Allah has returned to you [of captives]…

Q 70:29-30 (Sahih International)

And those who guard their private parts. Except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they are not to be blamed.

Bukhari 371 (partial)

…We conquered Khaibar, took the captives, and the booty was collected. Dihya came and said, “O Allah’s Prophet! Give me a slave girl from the captives.” The Prophet said, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took Safiya bint Huyai…

Bukhari 2229

Narrated Abu Sa`id Al-Khudri: that while he was sitting with Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) he said, “O Allah’s Messenger! We get female captives as our share of booty, and we are interested in their prices, what is your opinion about coitus interruptus?” The Prophet said, “Do you really do that? It is better for you not to do it. No soul that which Allah has destined to exist, but will surely come into existence.”

Bukhari 4138

Narrated Ibn Muhairiz: I entered the Mosque and saw Abu Said Al-Khudri and sat beside him and asked him about Al-Azl (i.e. coitus interruptus). Abu Said said, “We went out with Allah’s Messenger for the Ghazwa of Banu Al-Mustaliq and we received captives from among the Arab captives and we desired women and celibacy became hard on us and we loved to do coitus interruptus. So when we intended to do coitus interruptus, we said, ‘How can we do coitus interruptus before asking Allah’s Messenger who is present among us?’ We asked (him) about it and he said, ‘It is better for you not to do so, for if any soul (till the Day of Resurrection) is predestined to exist, it will exist.’”

Bukhari 5210

Narrated Abu Sa`id Al-Khudri: We got female captives in the war booty and we used to do coitus interruptus with them. So we asked Allah’s Messenger about it and he said, “Do you really do that?” repeating the question thrice, “There is no soul that is destined to exist but will come into existence, till the Day of Resurrection.”