KM Zubair :
Since the Europeans take great pride in claiming that they abolished slavery from the world, though they had the decency to do so only in the middle of the last century, it is necessary to have an idea about the position and nature of slavery in Islam.
The treatment which the Western powers meted out to these unfortunate people has been worse than the treatment given to animals. The books written by the Western people themselves bear testimony to this fact.
The result of the policy of Islam to free slaves was that by the time the period of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs was reached, all the old slaves of Arabia were liberated. The Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) alone liberated as many as 63 slaves. Similarly Companions of the Prophet liberated a large number of slaves, the details of which are given in the Traditions and books of history of that period.
Thus the problem of the slaves of Arabia was solved in a short period of thirty or forty years. After this the only form of slavery, which was left in Islamic society was the prisoners of war, who were captured on the battlefield.
These prisoners of war were retained by the Muslim government until their government agreed to receive them back in exchange for Muslim soldiers captured by them, or arranged the payment of ransom on their behalf.
If the soldiers they captured were not exchanged with Muslim prisoners of war, or their people did not pay their ransom money to purchase their liberty, then the government used to distribute them among the soldiers of the army, which had captured them. This was a more humane and proper way of disposing of them than retaining them like cattle in concentration camps and taking forced labour from them, and, if their women folk were also captured, setting them aside for prostitution.
In place of such a cruel and outrageous way of disposing of the prisoners of war, Islam preferred to spread them in the population and thus brought them in contact with individual human beings.
Over and above, their guardians were ordered to treat them well. The result of this humane policy was that most of the men who were captured on foreign battlefields and brought to the Muslim countries as slaves embraced Islam and their descendants produced great scholars, imams, jurists, commentators, statesmen and Generals of the army. So much so that later on many of them became the rulers of different states in the Muslim world.
The solution of this problem, which has been proposed in the present age, is that after the cessation of hostilities the prisoners of war of the combatant countries should be exchanged. Whereas Muslims have been practicing it from the very beginning and whenever the adversary accepted the exchange of prisoners of war from both sides, it was implemented without the least hesitation or delay.
In modern warfare we also find that if one government is completely routed leaving her in no position of bargaining for the prisoners of war and the winning party gets its prisoners easily, then experience has shown that the prisoners of war of the vanquished army are kept in conditions which are much worse than the conditions of slaves.
Can anyone tell us what has been the fate of the thousands of prisoners of war captured by Russia from the defeated armies of Germany and Japan in the Second World War?
No one knows how many thousands of them have perished due to the hardship of the concentration and labour camps. The forced labour, which has been taken from them, is much worse than the service one can exact from slaves.
Even perhaps in the times of ancient Pharaohs of Egypt such prisoners of war, or their people did not pay their ransom; harsh labour might not have been exacted from the slaves in building the pyramids of Egypt, as has been exacted from the prisoners of war in Russia in developing Siberia and other backward areas of Russia, or working in coal and other mines below zero temperatures, ill-clad, ill-fed and brutally treated by their supervisors.
