Islamic and Atlantic slavery compared

Slavery is a painful subject, and the authors note that it is often discussed either defensively or accusingly. Their question is narrower: was slavery as regulated by Islamic law the same kind of system as the slavery European colonial powers built across the Atlantic? They state openly that they approach the question from an Islamic and rational standpoint rather than treating modern secular human-rights theory as the final authority, and that Islam should be judged by what its law commands and forbids, not by Muslims who broke it.

On the Atlantic side, the paper draws on Britannica, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the sociologist Orlando Patterson. It describes a racialised, hereditary, commercial system: around 12.5 million Africans forced onto slave ships, an estimated 15 to 25 percent dying on the Middle Passage, slave codes that defined enslaved people as property and passed slave status down through the mother, and the Zong massacre of 1781, when more than 130 Africans were thrown overboard and the owners later pursued an insurance claim.

On the Islamic side, the authors argue that Islam did not create slavery but regulated an institution that already existed worldwide. They cite the Qur'an's praise of freeing a slave (90:13), the mukatabah contract by which an enslaved person could seek freedom, with owners told to help them financially (24:33), and verses on the marriage of enslaved people (24:32, 4:25). From hadith they cite the Prophet calling enslaved people brothers who must be fed and clothed as their masters are (Bukhari 2545), and condemning anyone who sells a free person (Bukhari 2227). Drawing on Kecia Ali and Dror Ze'evi, they note that mistreatment could lead to forced manumission, that the legal starting point was freedom, and that enslaved people came from many ethnic backgrounds, some later rising to rule, as in the Mamluk Sultanate.

The authors acknowledge that Muslims did abuse enslaved people, that racism existed among some Muslims, and that some rulers and courts failed to uphold the law. They conclude that these were failures of Muslims, not of Islam, and that Islamic law created a regulated, accountable and emancipation-oriented framework, while Atlantic slavery was built on racial hierarchy, hereditary bondage and commercial exploitation.