What effect did the spread Islam have on the slave trade?

Answer 1

Answer 1

Slave trade diminished gradually because of Islam laws and rules. For example:

• Muslims are encouraged to free slaves to be rewarded by God and to be forgiven from sins.
• If a Muslim get a child from a slave woman the child is set free and his mother.

Answer 2

Slavery was a huge and shameful part of Islamic History. This is not to diminish the Ancient Slavemaking practices nor does it diminish the tragedy of the European Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but as those are not contingent on the Spread of Islam, they are not discussed in full.

There was never an endemic Islamic Abolitionist Movement prior to Western Abolitionism in the 19th century. In fact, Saudi Arabia had legalized slavery until the 1960s and illegal slaves exist in Sudan, Mali, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia among others. While the Qur'an notes that freeing a slave is an honorable thing to do, there is no compulsion to actually do it. In the 640s Caliph Omar issued one of the few Anti-Slavery edicts in Islamic history. It freed all Arab slaves and forbade the taking of new Arab slaves. This resulted in a fundamental change in the history of slavery. Prior to this, slaves were either former prisoners of war or civilians inside the state who were not the dominant ethnicity. Muslims now went abroad, hundreds of miles from the countries under their control to find non-Arabs that could be brought back to the Islamic Empires as slaves in order to skirt Omar's edict. This was what led to three types of slavery that coincided with the rise of the Islamic Caliphates: Slavic Slave Trade, Mamluks, and the Trans-Saharan African Slaves.

There was a very profitable trade with the Byzantine Empire and the Slavic Fiefdoms in the Balkans and the Ukraine that brought Slavs to the Islamic Caliphates. This is actually the genesis of the modern world "Slave", as a derivative of "Slav" which were moved and resold in the Islamic World. Slaves would be purchased in slave-markets in Europe and trekked to the Middle East for resale.

Mamluks were Kipchak Türks and Circassians from what is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They were captured by Arab soldiers, enslaved, and brought to Baghdad in Iraq. They were converted to Islam and then formed into military units as a literal slave army in the service of the Abbassid Caliph. The Mamluks eventually turned their weapons against the Abbassid establishment and declared their own empires several times from the 11th century onwards.

The Trans-Sahran Slave trade in Islamic Empires was incredibly developed. Islamic States pioneered many of the quintessential parts of what would define the European Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 16th-19th centuries. This included long-distance travel between the slave acquisition and the market, the use of large competitive marketplaces in urban centers to auction slaves, the development of legal doctrines about what rights owners had to transfer slaves to other owners, and, contrary to Islamic teachings and modern science, that Blacks had a more beastial nature, making them better-suited to the rigors of hard work and enslavement. It should not be surprising that the Spanish and Portuguese (who had lived under Islamic States for centuries) were the first European States to re-create a complex enslavement system. Unlike the Europeans, though, Arab Muslims saw fit to castrate all of their male African slaves so that they could not form a large Black population in the Arab countries. African female slaves were often sexually abused by their masters.

Islamic Apologists often make that claim that Muslims throughout history opposed slavery, but there was no Caliph (other than Omar) who made a fatwas opposing slavery, the slave trade, or the expansion of slavery within Islamic Empires prior to the 19th centuries. Islam is just as guilty as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in supporting slavery and giving it legal sanction historically. The difference is that while Christian support for slavery in history is well known, as is Christian-based Abolitionism, the history of slavery and the expansion of the slave trade among other religious groups is not often discussed.

Answer 3 (Hints on Answer 2)

• Slavery was a huge and shameful part not only of Islamic History but also of the Christian and European history. Christian views on slavery are varied both regionally and historically. In the early years of Christianity, slavery was a normal feature of the economy and society in the Roman Empire, and well into the Middle Ages and beyond. Most Christian figures in that early period, such as Saint Augustine, supported continuing slavery. However, although Islam religion per Quran revelation to prophet Muhammad started by the seventh century and that slavery was not created during that time but was present long time before prophet Muhammad calling for Islam, Islam was the first God religion that tried by all means to limit the salvation trade as mentioned in Answer 1 while in other countries it continued beyond the 16th century (as in the US).

• Historically, slavery was not just an Old Testament phenomenon. Slavery was practiced in every ancient culture: Egyptians, Babylonians, Roman and Israelite. Slavery was an integral part of ancient commerce, taxation, and temple religion.

• Chattel slavery had been legal and widespread throughout North Africa when the region was controlled by the Roman Empire (47 BC - ca. 500 AD). The Sahel region south of the Sahara provided many of the African slaves held in North Africa during this period and there was a trans-Saharan slave trade in operation.

• Chattel slavery persisted after the fall of the Roman empire in the largely Christian communities of the region. After the Islamic expansion into most of the region, the practices continued and eventually, the chattel form of slavery spread to major societies on the southern end of the Sahara (such as Mali, Songhai, and Ghana).

• The medieval slave trade in Europe was mainly to the East and South: the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim World were the destinations, Central and Eastern Europe an important source of slaves. Slavery in medieval Europe was so widespread that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.

• Because of religious constraints, the slave trade was monopolised in parts of Europe by Iberian Jews (known as Radhanites)

• The Mamluks were slave soldiers who converted to Islam and served the Muslim caliphs and the Ayyubid sultans during the Middle Ages. The first mamluks served the Abbasid caliphs in 9th century Baghdad. Over time they became a powerful military caste, and on more than one occasion they seized power for themselves, for example, ruling Egypt from 1250-1517.

• Karl Marx in his economic history of capitalism, Das Kapital, claimed that '...the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins [that is, the slave trade], signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.' He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the 'primitive accumulation' of European capital, the 'non-capitalist' accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation.

• Eric Williams has written about the contribution of Africans on the basis of profits from the slave trade and slavery, arguing that the employment of those profits were used to help finance Britain's industrialisation. He argues that the enslavement of Africans was an essential element to the Industrial Revolution, and that European wealth was, in part, a result of slavery.

• A similar debate has taken place about other European nations. The French slave trade, it is argued, was more profitable than alternative domestic investments, and probably encouraged capital accumulation before the Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

• Slavery in the United States of America existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British North America from early colonial days, and was firmly established by the time of the United States' Declaration of Independence (1776). Twelve million slaves brought from Africa to the Americas. The great majority of African slaves were transported to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil. As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Since persons with African origins were not English subjects by birth, they were considered foreigners and generally outside English Common Law. The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. Treatment was generally characterized by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Whippings, executions, and rapes were commonplace. To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, slave codes were established. Slave codes were laws established to demonstrate legal sanctions over the black population. Slavery is regarded by economists and historians as a profitable system.

Accordingly, it is incorrect to say that "Slavery was a huge and shameful part of Islamic History". It is the opposite. Islam religion; by God revelation of Qur'an to prophet Muhammad; tried to limit it as explained in Answer 1.