Website: www.aaiil.uk
The abolition of
the evils underlying slavery by Islam
Friday
Khutba by Dr Zahid Aziz,
for Lahore
Ahmadiyya UK, 28 July 2023
“And they sold him for a small price, a few pieces of silver, and they showed no desire for him. And the Egyptian who bought him said to his wife: Make his stay honourable. Maybe he will be useful to us, or we may adopt him as a son. And thus We established Joseph in the land, and that We might teach him the interpretation of sayings. And Allah has full control over His affair, but most people do not know.” — ch. 12, v. 20–21 |
وَ شَرَوۡہُ
بِثَمَنٍۭ
بَخۡسٍ
دَرَاہِمَ
مَعۡدُوۡدَۃٍ
ۚ وَ کَانُوۡا
فِیۡہِ مِنَ
الزَّاہِدِیۡنَ
﴿٪۲۰﴾ وَ قَالَ
الَّذِی اشۡتَرٰىہُ
مِنۡ مِّصۡرَ
لِامۡرَاَتِہٖۤ
اَکۡرِمِیۡ
مَثۡوٰىہُ
عَسٰۤی اَنۡ یَّنۡفَعَنَاۤ
اَوۡ
نَتَّخِذَہٗ
وَلَدًا ؕوَ کَذٰلِکَ
مَکَّنَّا
لِیُوۡسُفَ
فِی الۡاَرۡضِ
۫ وَ
لِنُعَلِّمَہٗ
مِنۡ تَاۡوِیۡلِ
الۡاَحَادِیۡثِ
ؕ وَ اللّٰہُ
غَالِبٌ عَلٰۤی
اَمۡرِہٖ وَ
لٰکِنَّ اَکۡثَرَ
النَّاسِ
لَا یَعۡلَمُوۡنَ
﴿۲۱﴾ |
These verses
occur in Surah Yusuf, or chapter ‘Joseph’, of the Quran while relating
the earlier part of the life of Joseph. His father Jacob, Ya‘qūb
(alai-his-salām), was a prophet and had a great liking for Joseph, who
was the eleventh of his twelve sons. The ten sons who were older than Joseph
became jealous of him, and schemed to abandon the boy, who was under seventeen
years of age at the time, at the bottom of a pit in the wilderness and tell the
father that he had been eaten by a wolf, so that Joseph would be lost forever
from the family. Joseph was picked up by some passing travellers who took him
to the neighbouring country of Egypt. The above verses I have recited continue
the story from this point.
They sold Joseph into slavery, as
they had no need to keep him for their use. This was about 3600 years ago,
about 2200 years before the time of the Holy Prophet Muhammad. Buying and
selling of human beings as slaves is a very old institution. It had existed
everywhere in the world since long before Islam came into the world. It was
only abolished by law in Western countries in the 1800s, less than 200 years
ago. That abolition didn’t bring matters to an end, so that it could be said
that slavery has now come to an end and everything related to it is over and finished.
In fact, it has left a toxic legacy of resentment which persists today in full
force. That legacy is due to the cruel and unjust ill-treatment of slaves
during slavery, particularly on the American continent, which to a large extent
continued even after slavery was abolished and its victims were no longer
slaves officially. Islam did not abolish slavery; it was impossible to do so at
that time. But if its teachings on the treatment of slaves were followed, then
a time would come when slavery could be abolished, and without leaving a bitter
legacy.
In the above verse, after purchasing
Joseph, the man who bought him says to his wife: “Make his stay honourable.
Maybe he will be useful to us, or we may adopt him as a son”. He wants the
purchased slave to be treated with dignity and raises the possibility that one
day he may even become a member of the family. If he is to be useful to them,
he should be treated well. Unfortunately, those who purchased slaves in the
American continent two or three centuries ago, had the opposite attitude, that
the slaves should be beaten into submission, and demeaned and dehumanised in
every way, in order to work on the owners’ plantations. All that brutal
maltreatment could not be forgotten by the victims and their descendants. And
even after the abolition of slavery, the former slave owners retained their
mental outlook of scornfully looking down upon the former enslaved races as
inferior beings. Hence the bitter and toxic legacy of that slavery continuing
today, which I mentioned above. The Egyptian owner of Joseph, who lived more
than 3000 years earlier, had a far more advanced and humane attitude than that
displayed in modern Western civilisation.
The Quran and the Holy Prophet
Muhammad adopted many measures for obtaining freedom of slaves, and in addition
for their good treatment while they remained in slavery. In a very early
revelation, the Quran declared the freeing of slaves to be one of the acts of
goodness which a person must strive hard to undertake, and it calls these acts
of goodness as “the uphill road” because it says that people are reluctant to
attempt that road (90:11–13). There is a later revelation, of the middle period
of the Holy Prophet’s mission, in which the fundamentals of Islam are listed as
regards the beliefs, good deeds, and good qualities required for a person in
order to become righteous (2:177). It is a well known verse beginning with the
words: “It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards the East and
the West, but righteous is the one who …”. Here the verse first mentions the
beliefs that are required of a righteous person, and then the next requirement
in the verse is that the righteous should spend wealth on good causes. One of
these good causes given in the verse is the freeing of slaves. This verse
places the spending of money to obtain freedom of slaves among the fundamentals
of Islam, such as belief in Allah and the Quran and the prophets, saying
prayers and giving zakāt.
Then there is a very late revelation,
which the Holy Prophet received towards the end of his life, about the
deserving people on whom the government of Islam should spend the zakāt
that it collects (9:60). In that list of deserving people, beginning with the
poor and the needy, it mentions the freeing of slaves. These three revelations,
ranging from the beginning to the end of the Holy Prophet Muhammad’s mission,
make it a moral and a legal requirement, on Muslim individuals as well as the
Muslim state, to set slaves free by purchasing their freedom.
The Quran also gave the instruction
to those who owned slaves that a slave had the right to enter into a contract
of freedom with the owner, and the owner could not refuse to enter into the
contract if the slave was capable of earning his livelihood independently. In
that verse the Quran also recommended that the owner should give money to the
slave, that is to say, to set him up for his life of freedom.
The Holy Prophet Muhammad never kept
a slave. In those days, people used to give slaves as gifts to others. Any such
slave given to the Holy Prophet was freed by him. One of them was Zaid ibn
Haritha. When he was a boy, living with his family far from Makkah, he was
kidnapped by robbers and was lost to his family. The kidnappers sold him to
someone in Makkah as a slave. That person gave him as a gift to Hazrat
Khadijah. When she married the Holy Prophet, she gave him Zaid as a gift. The
Holy Prophet liberated Zaid and he became so attached to Zaid that he called
him the beloved. Some years later Zaid’s family discovered that he was living
in Makkah. His father and uncle came to fetch him and told the Holy Prophet
that they would pay him anything to get him back. The Holy Prophet told them
that Zaid should decide whether to go with his family or not, and that if he
chose to go with them, the Holy Prophet would not take any payment from them.
Zaid was called and he told his father and uncle that he could not leave the
Holy Prophet because of love for him. At this, the Holy Prophet declared Zaid
as his adopted son. This was in the pre-prophethood days of the Holy Prophet.
Later on, when the Holy Prophet was
appointed by Allah as His Messenger, Zaid was one of the first persons to
accept Islam. From being a slave, Zaid became known as “son of Muhammad”, and
some years later the Holy Prophet married him to his cousin Zainab (although
the marriage ended in divorce after a year). As we can see, when this slave was
freed he chose to remain with his former owner because he loved him due to the
way he had treated him. There was no legacy of bitterness. Zaid’s son Usama was
also close to the Holy Prophet, who appointed him as commander of a military
expedition to Syria. That expedition took place shortly after the Holy
Prophet’s death at the beginning of the khilafat of Hazrat Abu Bakr and
was successful. Muslims have always been, since then till the present day, been
grateful for the services of this slave and his son.
I will now quote from a well known
and fundamental hadith report. It is in Sahih Bukhari, near the beginning in
the section dealing with the basic beliefs of Islam (hadith 30). A man says
that he came across Abu Dharr, who was a Companion of the Holy Prophet. He
noticed that Abu Dharr had a slave with him who was wearing the same clothes as
Abu Dharr. The man was surprised at this equality, and asked Abu Dharr how that
came to be the situation. Abu Dharr gave this explanation:
“I
once abused a man, calling him by a bad name because of his mother. The
Prophet ﷺ said to
me: Abu Dharr! You called him by a bad name because of his mother. Surely you
are a man in whom is ignorance (jāhiliyyah). Your slaves are your
brothers. Allah has placed them in your charge. So whoever has his brother in
his charge, he should feed him with what he himself eats, clothe him with what
he himself wears. And do not burden them with work which overwhelms them. If
you burden them (with such work), then help them in doing it.”
It
is said that the man whom Abu Dharr abused was Bilal and he had called him the
son of a black woman. The Holy Prophet told Abu Dharr that he was behaving as
the pre-Islamic Arabs did. The word jāhiliyyah not only means
ignorance in a general sense but in Islamic terminology it refers to the period
in Arabia before Islam.
It
is true that Islam did not abolish slavery in the legal sense and Western
countries abolished it in the 1800s in the legal sense. But Islam abolished it
in the moral and underlying sense, so that when it would be legally abolished
there would be no legacy of bitter resentment lasting for generations.
So
may Allah enable us to see the deep wisdom of the religion of Islam which is
above just superficial tinkering, ameen.
Website: www.aaiil.uk