Originally posted by Al Jassas
Hello To You All
TheONLY way to enslave someone in Islam for him to be a prisoner of war legitimately capturedin a legitimate warand the act of enslavement sanctioned by the ruler. If any of these conditions does notexist in a slave he is automatically free. Slave owners are not free to do anything they want with their slaves. If they hurt their slaves the slave has the right to file a suit against his master and punishment can be excited on the owner for hurting his own slave. Also, slaves have the right to own property, marry and even make buy their own freedom and the owner has no right to deny it if I am not mistaken. All that is above is in theory however in practice people deviated from the dictations of Islam like they did in far more important things but non the less, slaves in the Islamic world were in the best conditions slaves ever had through history and that is a fact. All the Mameluke sultan were slaves and they reached the highest offices in that state. All arab countries especially here in Saudi Arabia had significantslave populations up to the 1960's.
Al-Jassas
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That is the law on paper, but remember, the criminal mind always seeks to twist things to their advantage. One thing that this criminal element would do was to arm the enimies of one group so that they would attack the other and then sell the captives as slaves. There are many eye witness accounts of exactly how this was done, but I'm too tired right now to remember the names. The English explorer who searched for the source of the Nile and the lost Dr. Livingston, (God I really am exhausted), wrote about it in his journals. Fatima Mernisi also mentions something about it. In one of her books she tells of a woman in her father's household who was captured as a small child and sold into slavery in Morocco.
Also, most people forget that the Muslims also enslaved eastern Europeans, or anyone else they could get their hands on, not just Africans.
As far as the Ancient Egyptians, most of the Nubians in the kingdome were not slaves. Egypt did not have a slave based economy the way that Greece and Rome did. Prisoners of war were enslaved, as was standard practice in the Ancient world, (The fall of Troy). So they would have enslaved all the peoples they had conflicts with at one point or another, not just Nubians.