Debates regarding slavery and Islam have resurfaced in modern times, partly due to the re-emergence of slavery through the actions of groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram.[1] The revival of slave markets and slavery, justified in part through the citation of Islamic legal codes, sits near the top of the list of the group’s iniquities. In response to these acts, Muslim scholars and organizations banded together to refute and castigate ISIS as vicious, malevolent, and un-Islamic.
One of the most widely circulated works of this genre can be found with the Syrian scholar Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi’s Refuting ISIS. Within his work, Yaqoubi directly critiques ISIS’s revival of slavery and their usage of Islamic law to justify their actions. He writes, “The jurists in recent times have unanimously agreed that slavery is invalid and impermissible….The impermissibility of slavery in Islam has been established as a result of Muslims adhering to international agreements of mutual benefit for humanity.”[2]
Yaqoubi’s condemnation of ISIS and its practice of slavery is unambiguous, and he clearly laments the treatment of the Yazidi families that have been persecuted.[3] However, it is interesting to note that Yaqoubi bases his denunciation of slavery on Muslims’ adherence to political pacts that currently render the practice impermissible.[4]
He does not claim, for example, that slavery is inherently antithetical to Islam. Rather, “eradicating slavery through such agreements does not nullify the rulings of slavery in Islam as transmitted through the Qur’ān and Sunnah, but rather such an arrangement is based upon acting equitably in the best interests of humanity.”[5] For Yaqoubi, it is contemporary international treaties and accords that circumscribe slavery.[6] If other nations were to break these pacts, “it would be permissible for Muslims to retaliate accordingly.”[7] In this vein, Yaqoubi declares that “Yazidis have not enslaved any Muslims to warrant such retaliatory measures,” demonstrating that, in certain circumstances, enslavement of captives could be justified.[8]
Another prominent scholar, the renowned Mufti Taqi Usmani, similarly argues that it is completely impermissible to practice slavery in the modern world.[9] However, like Yaqoubi, he acknowledges its theoretical legitimacy within Islamic law. Usmani states,
The clear manifest truth is that taking slaves is permissible in Islam, with its laws and its limits which have preceded, and nothing has abrogated it, and there are wisdoms in this which we have explained, and the opinion of its abrogation is rejected and is against consensus, and has no proof from the proofs of the Sharī‘ah.[10]
Usmani clarifies that it is currently not legitimate for Muslim countries to take slaves due to the “United Nations pact” prohibiting slavery across the world.[11] Equally important, however, is his argument that one should reject any claim that the rulings permitting slavery have been abrogated. The consensus of scholarship, according to Usmani, holds that enslavement remains a permissible act under certain conditions.[12]
To justify his argument, Usmani claims that Islam did not need to abolish slavery, as the rules and regulations pertaining to slavery within Islamic law are “superior” and not analogous to slavery in other forms.[13] For example, Usmani notes that prior to Islam, slaves “would live in the utmost debasement, difficulty and desolation. Their humanity was not recognised and no rights were afforded them”; however, “Islam has afforded slaves rights that have no precedent in any other religion.”[14] Underpinning Usmani’s approach is his attempt to preserve continuity with the past: “Slavery remained an institution practiced by the ummah in the time of the Sahabah and those after them, and no one condemned it. Was there none amongst them who understood the Qur’an?”[15] For both Yaqoubi and Usmani, then, the classical Islamic tradition permitted slavery, and therefore these rulings cannot be dismissed; however, it is currently not practiced due to procedural suspension.
While Yaqoubi and Usmani argue for a current procedural suspension of slavery, others have elected to condemn slavery based on the claim that enslavement is fundamentally immoral and in clear violation of the values of Islam. For example, the “Open Letter to al-Baghdadi,” a refutation of ISIS signed by hundreds of prominent Muslim scholars globally, condemns the practice of slavery on the grounds that the “re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam.”[16] Interestingly, the letter makes the bold claim that “no scholar of Islam disputes that one of Islam’s aims is to abolish slavery.”[17]
Unlike Yaqoubi and Usmani, the letter promotes the abolitionist position initially articulated by Muhammad Abduh (see my earlier essay in this series), advancing a teleological reading of Islamic law in which the eradication of slavery is an inherent objective of the Islamic tradition. A similar position can be found in the work of Abdul Malik Mujahid. In his booklet An Islamic Response to ISIS Slavery, he argues that early Islam comprised an “anti-slavery movement led by Prophet Muḥammad,” and Islam had always aimed to abolish slavery completely.[18] He further argues that Islam received so much support from the downtrodden and dispossessed due to the “Prophet’s movement for the liberation of slaves.”[19] As a continuation of that abolitionist movement, “Muslims must be at the forefront of a movement to fight rape and slavery today. Our voices must be louder than ISIS and Boko Haram.”[20] Following this line of argument, the prominent academic Khaled Abou El Fadl similarly states that ISIS has betrayed Islam, as “the Qur’ān teaches that slavery is an evil and has always been an evil,” and slavery should be considered a type of paganism.[21]
In the view of the authors and signatories of the “Open Letter,” as well as Abou El Fadl and Mujahid, Islam fundamentally opposes slavery and does not restrict its practice solely on pragmatic terms, as suggested by Yaqoubi and Usmani. Rather, the reintroduction of slavery into the world constitutes a profound violation of the moral trajectory of the Islamic tradition.
While these positions arrive at the same destination (slavery should not be practiced), the journey takes two vastly different roadmaps—each with serious implications for understandings of the Islamic tradition more broadly. Simply put, there is a chasm of difference between promoting abolition as a moral virtue, and the procedural suspension of slavery due to political pacts.
The fundamental distinction between the two differing approaches centers on their underlying conceptions of Islamic law and moral change. For those supportive of the abolitionist position, change is understood as the fulfillment of the divine will rather than a rupture with tradition. The eradication of slavery is framed as the instantiation of Islam’s moral trajectory rather than a departure from it. Abolition, therefore, is not an external imposition upon the tradition, but the culmination of an internal moral logic.
Advocates of a more conservative ‘preservationist’ approach to the law view the above position with skepticism. To argue that Islam ‘aimed’ at abolition risks projecting a trajectory onto revelation that is not explicitly articulated in the Qur’ān, ḥadīth, or the sharīʿa. For scholars such as Yaqoubi and Usmani, the principal concern with claims of moral change is that they risk diluting the divine with human interpolations, and therefore, any change must remain fundamentally bounded within the parameters of established doctrine—or it could lead to innovations in belief and practice.[22] Thus, while slavery is currently restricted in practice due to particular historical conditions, it remains permissible in theory—a position these scholars arrive at through their conscious attempt to preserve continuity with the past and classical legal frameworks.[23]
What emerges from these positions, then, is a fundamental tension in theological reasoning. One approach situates divine truth in preservation, and the other locates it in moral unfolding and ethical transformation. Both agree slavery should not be practiced in the modern world, but their legal justifications reveal clear divergence on how to conceptualize the law. This divergence reveals a deeper disagreement over the purpose of the sharīʿa itself—whether it functions as a divinely instituted order to be conserved or a framework that guides humanity towards ever more expansive manifestations of justice.
Within this essay, as well as the previous three essays that form this series, I have sought to demonstrate that Islamic law does not speak with a single voice on the question of slavery, emancipation, and abolition.[24] Rather, it contains multiple, and at times competing, juridical logics that Muslim religious scholars activate depending on context, interpretation, and moral orientation.
Across classical law, abolitionist rereading, traditionalist defenses, and contemporary responses to geopolitical actors like ISIS and Boko Haram, the same legal tradition has generated strikingly divergent positions. Spanning over a millennium, the Islamic legal tradition contains resources for both continuity and transformation, hierarchy and emancipation. Its future will not be determined by a single inherited trajectory, but by the interpretive choices of those who authorize and deploy the Islamic legal tradition in the contemporary world.
Notes:
[1] Bashir, Slavery, Abolition and Islam (Oxford University Press, 2025), 5.
[2] Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS: A Rebuttal of its Religious and Ideological Foundations (Sacred Knowledge Press, 2015), 15.
[3] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 15.
[4] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 15.
[5] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 15.
[6] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 15.
[7] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 16.
[8] Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS, 16. Emphasis added.
[9] Mufti Taqi Usmani, “Slavery in Islam,” Deoband.Org, January 2013, https://www.deoband.org/2013/01//Hadith-commentary/slavery-in-islam.
[10] Usmani, “Slavery in Islam.”
[11] The “United Nations pact” commonly cited refers to the 1926 and 1956 conventions on the abolition of slavery. See: United Nations Economic and Social Council, Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, adopted September 7, 1956, entered into force April 30, 1957, 266 U.N.T.S. 3.
[12] Usmani, “Slavery in Islam.”
[13] Usmani, “Slavery in Islam.”
[14] Usmani, “Slavery in Islam.”
[15] Usmani, “Slavery in Islam.”
[16] “Open Letter to ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,’ and to the Fighters and Followers of the Self-Declared ‘Islamic State,’” September 24, 2014, http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com, 1.
[17] “Open Letter,” 18.
[18] Abdul Malik Mujahid, An Islamic Response to ISIS Slavery (Sound Vision Foundation, 2015), 3.
[19] Mujahid, An Islamic Response to ISIS Slavery, 3.
[20] Mujahid, An Islamic Response to ISIS Slavery, 5.
[21] Khaled Abou El Fadl, “On Slavery and a Moral Reading of the Qur’ān,” Usuli.org, August 30, 2019, https://www.usuli.org/2019/08/30/on-ethics-and-the-issue-of-slavery.
[22] Bashir, Slavery, Abolition and Islam, 147–54.
[23] Bashir, Slavery, Abolition and Islam, 147–54.
[24] Haroon Bashir, “The Emancipatory Ethic? Freedom in Classical Islamic Law,” Islamic Law Blog, May 7, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/05/07/the-emancipatory-ethic-freedom-in-classical-islamic-law/; Haroon Bashir, “Abolitionist Trajectories? Modern Rereadings of Emancipation” Islamic Law Blog, May 14, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/05/14/abolitionist-trajectories-modern-rereadings-of-emancipation/; Haroon Bashir, “Preserving the Past: Slavery, Tradition and Legal Authority” Islamic Law Blog, May 21, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/05/21/preserving-the-past-slavery-tradition-and-legal-authority/.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Haroon Bashir, Competing Moral Logics: Islamic Law, Slavery, and Abolition in the Contemporary World, Islamic Law Blog (May 28, 2026), https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/05/28/competing-moral-logics-islamic-law-slavery-and-abolition-in-the-contemporary-world/.
Suggested Chicago citation: Haroon Bashir, “Competing Moral Logics: Islamic Law, Slavery, and Abolition in the Contemporary World,” Islamic Law Blog, May 28, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/05/28/competing-moral-logics-islamic-law-slavery-and-abolition-in-the-contemporary-world/.