What was the connection between Islam and the slave trade?

Answer 1

There is little connection with the slave trade and Islam, because in Islam everyone is equal and having slaves is therefore against Islam. But there ARE connections with Arabian people and slaves, as some Arabians used to travel to Africa, capture some people and return and sell them. This has been around for some time (obviously gotten rid of now) but it was around since before the start of Islam, and has gradually decreased as more people accepted Islam and decided all people are equal.

But in the time of Prophet Muhammad, there were some newly-muslim slaves owned by idol-worshippers. What some used to do was torture the slaves that turned to Islam until they refused Islam. They usually didn't refuse it, and so (i can't remember the name anyone tht does plz help) that was close to Prophet Muhammad bought them from their masters and set them free.

Prioktan918's Expert Answer is getting confused. The question asks about ISLAM (as in the religion itself) and not the ISLAMIC WORLD (Which i did point out in my answer people get confused with. ISLAM says no slaves are to be kept, as noone owns souls apart from Allah, but ISLAMIC PLACES (places where muslims are) actually did keep slaves. But so did every other part of the world. Just pointing it out, since many people get the wrong idea now, e.g. muslims are terrorists, muslim women are forced to wear niqab and that crp, cuz thats what the news seems to portray.

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.

History
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.

Slavic 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.

Türkic Slaves
Mamluks were Kipchak Turks 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.

Black Slaves
The Trans-Saharan 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 bestial 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.

Islam as a Religion
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.

Currently, most Muslims oppose slavery and the Islamic Establishment generally opposes slavery (most of the major Muslim imams would condemn it if asked, but do not talk about it much, just as most Christian priests). However, illegal slavery in African Islamic countries is growing and major Imams are not speaking out against this injustice. Compare how often the repression of the Palestinians is discussed when there are just over 4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to how often Imams talk about the 200,000 slaves in Mauritania (one-fifth of the Mauritanian population), the 200,000 slaves in Sudan, the 800,000 slaves in Niger, the 200,000 slaves in Mali - including some which had been emancipated and then re-enslaved during the Azawad War, and the innumerable hundreds of thousands in the Chukri slave trade system in Bangladesh and Pakistan.