Ala-Maududi
(24:33) Let those who cannot afford to marry keep themselves chaste until Allah enriches them out
of His Bounty.[54] And write out a deed of manumission for such of your slaves that
desire their freedom[55] in lieu of payment[56] – if you see any good in
them[57] – and give them out of the wealth that Allah has given you.[58]
And do not compel your slave-girls to prostitution for the sake of the benefits of worldly life
the while they desire to remain chaste.[59] And if anyone compels them to
prostitution, Allah will be Most Pardoning, Much Merciful (to them) after their subjection to
such compulsion.
54. The best commentary on these verses are the traditions which have been reported from the
Prophet (peace be upon him) in this connection. Abdullah bin Masud has related that the Prophet
(peace be upon him) once said: O young men, whoso among you can afford to marry, he should
marry, because this will be a means of restraining the eyes from casting the evil look and of
keeping one pure and chaste, and the one who cannot afford, should fast, because fasting helps
cool down the passions. (Bukhari, Muslim). According to Abu Hurairah, the Prophet (peace be upon
him) said: Allah has taken upon Himself to succor three men: (a) the one who marries with a view
to guarding his chastity, (b) the slave who works to earn his freedom, and (c) the one who goes
out to fight in the way of Allah.” (Tirmizi, Nasai, Ibn Majah, Ahmad) For further explanation,
see (Surah An-Nisa, Ayat 25).
55. Mukatabat as a term means a deed of emancipation between the owner and the slave entitling
the latter to earn his or her freedom after payment of an agreed sum of money in a certain
period. This is one of the methods laid down in Islam for the slaves to attain their freedom. It
is not essential that the slave must always pay in cash; he can also earn his freedom by
rendering some special service to the owner, provided that both the parties agree. Once the
agreement is signed, the owner is not entitled to put any obstacles in the way of the slave’s
freedom. He will have to provide opportunities to enable him to earn for his emancipation and
shall have to free him when the agreed amount has been paid in time. In the time of Umar, a
slave entered into such an agreement with his lady owner, but managed to collect the amount in
advance of the time limit. When the amount was offered to the lady, she refused to accept it on
the ground that she would like to have it in monthly and yearly installments. The slave
complained to Umar who ordered that the amount be deposited in the state treasury and the slave
be set free. The lady was informed that her money lay in the treasury and she had the option to
take it in a lump sum or in yearly or monthly installments. (Daraqutni).
56. A group of jurists have interpreted this as “execute the deed of emancipation with them”,
that it is obligatory for the owner to accept the offer of a slave to earn his emancipation.
This is the view of Ata, Amr bin Dinar Ibn Sirin, Masruq, Dahhak, Ikrimah, the Zahiriyyah and
Ibn Jarir Tabari, and Imam Shafai also favoured it in the beginning. The other group holds that
it is not obligatory but only recommendatory and commendable. This group includes jurists like
Shabi, Muqatil bin Hayyan, Hasan Basri, Abdul Rahman bin Zaid, Sufyan Thauri, Abu Hanifah and
Malik bin Anas and Imam Shafai later on also had adopted this view. The first view is supported
by two things:
(a) The imperative mood of the verb to execute the deed suggests that it is a command front
Allah.
(b) Authentic traditions contain the incident that when Sirin, father of Muhammad bin Sirin, the
great jurist and traditionalist, made a request to his master Anas for a deed of emancipation,
the latter refused to accept it. Sirin took he matter before Umar, who whip in hand turned to
Anas, saying: Allah’s command is that you execute the deed. (Bukhari). From this it has been
argued that it was not a discretionary and personal decision of Umar but it was taken in the
presence of the companions and none expressed any difference of opinion. This therefore should
be taken as an authentic interpretation of the verse.
The other group argues that Allah does not merely say: Execute the deed of emancipation with
them, but adds: Provided that you find some good in them. This condition of finding some good in
them lies entirely on the owner, and there is no fixed standard or means by which the question
of finding good in them could be adjudicated through a court. Legal injunctions are never
couched in such language. As such this injunction can only be regarded as recommendatory and not
as legally mandatory. As regards to the precedent of the case of Sirin, the jurists say that
there was not one slave who asked for a deed of emancipation but thousands of them in the time
of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and the rightly-guided Caliphs, and a large number of them
earned their freedom in that way. But apart from Sirin’s there is no case where an owner was
forced by a judicial verdict to execute a deed of emancipation. Accordingly, this decision of
Umar cannot be taken as a judicial decision. All that can be said is that Umar, apart from his
position of a judge, was like a father to the Muslims and might have used his paternal authority
in a matter where he could not intervene as a judge.
57. Good” implies three things.
(a) The slave must be capable of earning his emancipation money through hard work and labor. The
Prophet (peace be upon him) has said: Execute the deed when you are sure that the slave can earn
the required amount of money; do not let him go about begging the people for it. (Ibn Kathir).
(b) He should be honest, truthful and reliable for the purposes of the agreement. He should make
the best of the opportunities and should not waste his earnings.
(c) The owner should make sure that the slave has no immoral trends and does not harbor feelings
of enmity against Islam or the Muslims, nor should there be any apprehension that his freedom
might prove harmful to the interests of the Muslim society. In other words, he should prove to
be a loyal and faithful member of the Muslim society and not a fifth columnist. It should be
noted that such precautions were absolutely necessary in the case of the prisoners of war taken
as slaves.
58. This command is general and is addressed to the owners, the common Muslims and the Islamic
government.
(a) The owner is instructed that he should remit a part of the emancipation money. There are
traditions to confirm that the companions used to remit a sizable amount of the emancipation
money to their slaves. Ali used to remit a quarter of the amount and exhorted others also to do
the same. (lbn Jarir).
(b) The common Muslim is instructed that he should extend liberal help to all such slaves who
asked for help in this regard. One of the heads of Zakat expenditure as laid down in the Quran
is the ransoming of slaves. (Surah
At-Taubah, Ayat 60). In the sight of Allah freeing of slaves is a great act of virtue.
(Surah Al-Balad, Ayat 13). According
to a tradition, a bedouin came to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and requested him to instruct
him what he should do to earn Paradise. The Prophet (peace be upon him) replied You have asked
about the most important thing in a most concise way. You should free the slaves and help them
to earn their freedom, If you present a cattle to somebody, present such a one as gives plenty
of milk. Treat your relatives kindly even if they treat you unjustly. If you cannot do all this,
you should feed the poor, give water to the thirsty, exhort the people to do good and forbid
them to do evil. If you cannot do even this, you should restrain your tongue: if you have to
speak, speak something good, otherwise keep quiet. (Baihaqi).
(c) The Islamic government is advised to spend a part of the Zakat collections on the
emancipation of slaves.
Here it should be noted that slaves in the ancient times were of three kinds: (i) Prisoners of
war, (ii) Free men who were captured and traded as slaves, (iii) Hereditary slaves who did not
know when their ancestors became slaves and to which of the above categories they originally
belonged. Before the advent of Islam, Arabia as well as the outside world abounded in all kinds
of slaves. The entire social and economic structure of society depended more on slave labor than
on servants and wage-earners. The first question before Islam was to tackle the problem of the
hereditary slaves, and secondly, to find a solution to the entire problem of slavery for all
times to come. In tackling the first problem, Islam did not abruptly abrogate the ownership
rights in respect of the hereditary slaves as it would have completely paralyzed the entire
social and economic system, and involved Arabia in a far more destructive civil war than the one
fought in America. Islam did not follow any such policy of reform. Instead it generated a great
moral movement for the emancipation of slaves and employed inducements, persuasions, religious
injunctions and legal enactments to educate and motivate the people to free the slaves
voluntarily for earning their salvation in the Hereafter, or as expiation of their sins as
enjoined by Islam, or by accepting monetary compensation. To set the pace the Prophet (peace be
upon him) himself freed 63 slaves. One of his wives, Aishah, alone treed 67 slaves. The Holy
Prophet’s (peace be upon him) uncle, Abbas, freed 70 slaves. Among others, Hakim bin Hizam freed
100 slaves, Abdullah bin Umar 1,000, Zulkala Himyari 8,000, and Abdur Rehman bin Auf 30,000. The
other companions among whom Abu Bakr and Uthman were prominent also set a large number of slaves
free. The people, in order to win Allah’s favor, not only emancipated their own slaves, but also
bought them from others and then set them free. The result was that in so far as hereditary
slaves were concerned, almost all of them had been freed even before the righteous Caliphate
came to an end.
As for the future, Islam completely prohibited free men from being kidnapped and traded as
slaves. As for the prisoners of war, it was permitted (not commanded) that they might be kept as
slaves so long as they were not exchanged for Muslim prisoners of war, or freed on payment of
ransom. Then, on the one hand, the slaves were also allowed to earn their freedom through
written agreements with their masters, and on the other, the masters were exhorted to set them
free just like the hereditary slaves, as an act of virtue, to win Allah’s approval, or as
expiation of sins, or by willing that a slave would automatically gain his freedom on the
master’s death, or that a slave girl would be free on the master’s death if she had borne him
children, whether he had left a will or not. This is how Islam solved the problem of slavery.
Ignorant people raise objections without trying to understand this solution, and the apologists
offer all sorts of apologies and have even to deny the fact that Islam had prohibited slavery
absolutely.
59. This does not mean that if the slave girls do not want to lead a chaste and virtuous life
they can be forced into prostitution. It only means this that if a slave girl commits an immoral
act of her own free will, she herself is responsible for it and the law will be applied against
her alone. But if the owner forces her into it, it will be entirely his responsibility, and the
law will proceed against him. Obviously the question of force arises only when someone is
compelled to act against his own will. As for the words for your own worldly gains, these have
not been used in a conditional or restrictive sense that if the owner is not sharing the immoral
earnings of the slave girl, he is not an offender if he forces her into prostitution. The
intention is to declare all such money unlawful as has been earned through illegal and immoral
ways.
It is, however, not possible to comprehend the full import of this injunction merely from the
words of the text. For this it is necessary to understand the entire background and
circumstances prevalent at the time of its revelation. Prostitution in Arabia existed in two
forms: Domestic prostitution and open prostitution in the brothel.
(a) Domestic prostitution was carried out by freed slave girls who had no guardians, or by free
women who had no family or tribal support. They would take residence in a house and enter into
an agreement with a number of men simultaneously for financial help in return for sexual
gratification. Whenever a child was born, the mother would name whomsoever she liked as its
father and the man was accepted in society as the father of the child. This was an established
custom in the pre-Islamic days, which was considered almost analogous to marriage. When Islam
came, it recognized only that contract as legal marriage where a woman had only one husband.
Thus all other forms of sexual gratification came to be regarded as adultery and punishable
offenses as such. (Abu Daud).
(b) Open prostitution which was carried out entirely through slave girls was of two kinds. First,
the slave girls were obliged to pay a fixed heavy amount every month to the owner, which they
could only earn through prostitution. The owner knew well how the money was earned, and in fact
there was no other object of imposing a heavy demand on the poor slave girl, especially when it
was much higher than the usual wages for work or labor. Secondly, beautiful and young slave
girls were made to stay in the brothel and a flag was put at the door to indicate that a needy
person could satisfy his lust there. Such women were called qaliqiyat and their houses were
known as mawakhir. All prominent men of the day owned and maintained such houses of
prostitution. Abdullah bin Ubayy (the chief of the hypocrites of Madinah, who had been nominated
as king of Madinah before the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) arrival there and who was in the
forefront of the campaign to slander Aishah) himself owned a regular house of prostitution in
Madinah, which had six beautiful slave girls. Not only did he earn money through them but also
used them to entertain his respectable and important guests who came to see him from different
parts of Arabia. He employed the illegitimate children thus born to enhance the splendor and
strength of his army of slaves. When one of these prostitutes, named Muazah, accepted Islam and
wanted to offer repentance for her past sins, Ibn Ubayy subjected her to torture. She complained
of it to Abu Bakr, who brought it to the notice of the Prophet (peace be upon him). The Prophet
(peace be upon him) ordered that the woman be taken away from the cruel man. (Ibn Jarir, Vol.
XVIII, pp. 55 -58, and 103-104; Al Istiab Vol 11, p. 762; p. 762; Ibn Kathir, Vol. III, pp.
288-289). Such were the conditions when this verse was revealed. If these conditions are kept in
view, it will become obvious that the real object was not merely to stop the slave girls from
being forced into prostitution but to ban prostitution itself as illegal within the boundaries
of the Islamic state. Simultaneously, there was a declaration of general pardon for those who
had been forced into this business in the past.
After the revelation of this divine command the Prophet (peace be upon him) declared: There is no
place for prostitution in Islam. (Abu Da’ud). The second command that he gave was that the
earnings made through adultery were unlawful, impure and absolutely forbidden. According to a
tradition reported by Rafi bin Khadij, the Prophet (peace be upon him) described such earnings
as impure, product of the worst profession and most filthy income. (Abu Daud, Tirmizi, Nasai).
According to Abu Huzaifah, he termed the money earned through prostitution as unlawful.
(Bukhari, Muslim, Ahmad). Abu Masud Uqbah bin Amr says that the Prophet (peace be upon him)
forbade the people to take prostitution earnings. (Sihah Sitta and Ahmad). The third command was
that the slave girl could be employed for lawful manual labor, but the owner had no right to
impose or receive any money from her about which he was not sure how it had been earned.
According to Rafi bin Khadij, he prohibited accepting any earnings from the slave girl unless it
was known how she had earned it. (Abu Daud). Rafi bin Rifaah Ansari has reported the same
command in clearer words. He says: The Prophet (peace be upon him) of Allah prohibited us from
accepting anything from the earnings of a slave girl except that which she earned through manual
labor, such as (and he indicated this with his hand) baking bread, spinning cotton or carding
wool or cotton. (Musnad Ahmad, Abu Daud). Another tradition quoted from Abu Hurairah in Abu Daud
and Musnad Ahmad says that taking of money earned by a slave girl through unlawful means is
prohibited. Thus the Prophet (peace be upon him) in accordance with the intention of this verse,
banned by religious injunction and law all kinds of prostitution prevalent in Arabia in those
days. Over and above this, the decision he gave in the case of Muazah, the slave girl of
Abdullah bin Ubayy, shows that an owner who forces his slave girl into prostitution loses his
rights of ownership over her. This is a tradition from Imam Zuhri, which Ibn Kathir has quoted
on the authority of Musnad Abdur Razzaq.
