Have you ever questioned your belief?

[PyariCgudia]

Re: Have you ever questioned your belief?

@eastern11

I am kind of going through such a phase right now. It’s allowed in Islam to keep non believing female prisoners of war as loundis. I know Christianity allowed slavery too but I found it hard esp knowing the Shaba had them too. I had a hard few days but kept my Iman thinking that it was the seventh century and times were different then. But it’s hard. Wishing people could shed more light on this in a positive way.

I don’t think they viewed them as “loundis”. If our landlord feudal families implement these ideas in that way, doesn’t mean this was how it was intended.

Interestingly, Rasulullah treated slaves with kindness and encouraged the freeing of slaves. If all of them were mandated to be freed at once, the economy would not have been able to handle thousands of indigent people in the economy. No one would give them jobs, and many of them were grown adults and elderly with no skills except housekeeping, farming, etc.

Freeing them all at once would have led to Jim Crow type laws. If you free 1000 slaves, that’s nice and dandy, but someone needs to invest education and capital in them to generate economic activity for them. But if there are only 10 extra jobs on the market in one town, then freeing 1000 slaves will be detrimental for the whole town. These people will be forced into prostitution and into crime. Which is what happened when slavery was abolished in the US and the social effects of that we see until this day.

Now yes, I think the Sahabah could have done better in hastening the end to slavery since the economy in the first century of the Islamic empire grew like crazy, but that was then, and this is now. I’m not sure if we can apply the same economic principles to that time period. Empire grew but with it’s citizens also grew too.

One thing to keep in mind is if the slave asks for freedom, for you to NOT give it, probably goes against the basics of the Quran. But I think probably what happened at the time was prisoners were commonly taken in war, and commonly raped, and so by comparison, Islamic treatment of prisoners was superbly humane. Slavery was common and mistreatment of slaves common, and that too was abolished; if you kept a slave, you had to treat them like family. So in that scenario you can imagine plenty of people wanting to stay on as servants. They probably did not see slavery the way we see it today, that is the slaves themselves. Free room/board, free meals, no trudging around to find work, small skillset - sounds like a good deal to me.

As for sleeping with them, again, there are clear verses you can’t take any woman against her will. So if there was any sex going on, it was theoretically consentual. If it wasn’t, we will never hear that side of the story anyway, but I’m sure if enough people were being raped by the sahabah, they wouldn’t have been sahabah for long, right?