Who said slavery was outlawed in the Islamic World?

In my current most interesting read for one of the most respected Western Scholars of Islamic
and Middle-Eastern history professor Bernard Lewis book " The Middle East, a brief history of the last 2000 years", I have encountered one of the most fascinating fact about the way
Islam looked and regulated the trade in humans throughout the middle-ages. Despite the well
publicised myth regarding the outlawed position of slavery in Islam since the seventh century, yet to my surprise I found that not only most Islamic States have allowed the salve trade to
go on without resriction, but most have also encoureged it and some have even resisted the call for ending it. To illustrate this, I will post this excerpt from the book for the readers to enjoy in the hope that some will find this fact as fascinating as I did.

From the book " The Middle East ( A brief history of the last 2000 years ) by Bernard Lewis

"The large -scale, long -range commerce in human beings was, in the main, a development of the Islamic period, and was due, by a sad paradox of history, to the humanizing effect of Islamic legislation. In the ancient empires, even in early Christian times, the vast slave population was for the most part recruited locally. The supply was always replenished in a number of ways: by the enslavement of criminals and debtors, by the 'adoption' as slaves of children abandoned by their parents, and by those who sold their own children or even themselves into bondage. All this was ended in the Islamic conquests and the gradual application of the Islamic law. According to the principle formulated by the Muslim jurists and generally respected by Muslim rulers, the natural condition of humankind is freedom. Freeborn subjects of the Muslim state, whether Muslims of followers of one or other of the permitted religions, counld not be enslaved either ofr debt or for criminal offences other than armed rebellion. Abandoned children must be presumed to be free unless they could be proved to be slaves. The children of slave parents were born and remaind slaves unless and until they were manumitted. Free persons could only be enslaved if they were infidels and capturedd in holy war. In such a case, both they and their families were lawful booty and became the property of their conquerors. The recruitment by natural increase to slave parents within the empire was never sufficient for the insatiable needs of Middle Eastern society, and a vast traffic therefore developed in newly enslaved infidels brought from beyound the imperial frontiers. The price of slaves, especially of young female slaves, was high, and despite the pershable character of this merchandise the trade was well increased by castration to meet the demand for eunuchs to serve in palaces, in the wealthier homes, and in some religious sites. The law of Islam forbids mutilation, and eunuchs were therfore 'manufactured' on teh freontiers before entering Islamic territory.
Slaves came from three main areas: from Europe, from the Eurasian steppe, and from Africa. Occasionally slaves are mentioned from further afield - from Idia, Cina, and elsewhere - but there were few and exceptional. The regular supply of slaves from medival to modern times came from these three main groups. The slavic peoples fo Central and Eastern Europe from whome indeed, the English word 'slave' is derived provided an inportant part of the slave population of Muslim Spain and North Africa. In the Middle Ages they were supplied mainly by West European slave merchants and intermediaries. In Eastern Europe, the Ottomans, advancing into the Balkans, were able to cut out the middlemen and get their Slavic slaves direct from the source. A smaller but not unimportant supply of West European slaves was provided by the activities of the Barbary corsairs, who buy the seventeenth centur extended their raids from teh Mediterranean shores and shipping to Atlantic coasts and sea-lanes. In 1627 they raided Iceland and carried off 242 captives for sale in the slave market of Algiers. on June 1631 Barbary corsais raided the fishing village of Baltimore, in Ireland. A report sent at the time to London lists the Baltimore people 'carried awa' by the raiders, with their wives, children and maidservants - 107 persons in all, to which were added forty-seven 'captured from other sources'. A contemporary witness, a French priest named Father Dan, describes their arrival at their destination:

It was a piteous sight to see them exposed for sale at Algiers, for then they parted the wife from the husband, and the father from the child; then, say I, they sell the husband here, and the wife there, tearing from her arms a daughter whom she cannot hope to see ever again.

In the same period, the Tatar rulers of Eastern Europe raided the villages of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, and each year carried off thousands of young slaves - 'the harvest of the steppes' - who were shipped to Istanbul and sold in the cities of the Ottoman Empire. This traffic continued untill the late eighteenth centur, when it was ended by the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783.

The second majore goup of slaves were the Turks of the Eurasian steppe who from early Islamic times were recruited by capture and purchase in the lands extending from north of the Black Sea to the borders of China and Mongolia. There constituted the main body of white slaves in the eastern Islamic world in the Middle Ages, and were used especially for military purposes. With the Islamization of the Turkish steppe, such recruitment was no longer possible, but a new souce was found in teh Caucasian lands from which Georgian and Circassian slaves, both make and female, were imported in great numbers for a variety of services in the Ottoman and Persian lands. This source too was substantially blocked with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

The third and most lasting slave trade was that which brought black slaves from Africa south of the Sahara. Black slaves appea occasionally in Roman times, especially in Egypt, where they had been known since remote antiquity. But in general they were the exception rathar than the rule. The massive importation of black slaves dates from teh advance of Muslim armies into the African continent. The slaves came by three main routes: from East Africa, by sea, through the Red Sea and the persian Gulf to Arabia and Iran and beyond; from the Sudan by caravan down the Nile valley to Egypt; from West Africa northward accross the Sahara to all the lands of the Mediterrranean littoral from Morocco to Egypt. This source of supply, too, was for a while blocked by the establishment of European colonial rule in the most tropical Africa. These black slaves were used for a variety of purposes- agricultural, industrial, commerical, and above all domestic. Throuh black slaves are encountered in agricultue, for example in drainage projects in Iraq, in mines, notably in the salt and gold mines of Nubia and the Sahara, and in some forms of manufacturing , the medieval Islamic economy, unlike that of the ancient world, was not primarily based on slave labour. "

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