Milk Al-Yamin “What the Right Hand Possesses” in Islamic Jurisprudence

Introduction

This study examines the institution of “milk al-yamin” (concubinage/slave-ownership, literally “what the right hand possesses”) in Islamic jurisprudence, its qur’anic basis, its definition among Muslim scholars, and the detailed legal rulings that followed from it concerning nakedness (awrah), the gaze, and sexual use, drawing on recognized Islamic sources: works of exegesis, the major hadith collections and their compilations, comparative fiqh literature, and contemporary Islamic fatwa sites. The method followed here is the same as in the earlier studies in this series: presenting the texts and rulings as they appear in their sources, then presenting the questions they may raise, then presenting the response Muslim scholars themselves offer, in the interest of scholarly balance.

Defining Milk al-Yamin

The phrase “what your right hands possess” (ma malakat aymanukum) occurs in Surat Al-Nisa: “And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses” (Al-Nisa 4:3), and in Surat Al-Muminun: “And they who guard their private parts, except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they are not to be blamed” (Al-Muminun 23:5-6).

The website IslamWeb defines milk al-yamin as follows: “Milk al-yamin are the slaves owned by whoever holds them in bondage, male or female… What is meant by ‘or what their right hands possess’ is women from among the enslaved, namely the concubines [ima], for their owner has the right to have intercourse with them without a marriage contract, without witnesses, and without a dower, since they are not wives; when he has intercourse with them, they are termed sarari, plural of surriyyah.”

Fatwa no. 18851 on the same site identifies three recognized causes of enslavement (riqq) among Muslim jurists: capture and enslavement of disbelieving enemies in war; a female slave’s child born to someone other than her owner, who follows the mother’s status; and purchase from someone holding valid, religiously recognized title to a slave. The fatwa affirms that “the default state of a human being is freedom, and enslavement is a contingent, exceptional condition,” that a slave “agrees with free persons in most rulings, apart from a few provisions specific to slaves,” and that “sexual enjoyment of a female slave is not lawful except through full ownership, or a valid marriage contract.”

On these definitions, milk al-yamin is an institution permitting an owner (male, or in some jurists’ view female, with respect to a male slave) to hold another human being through capture, purchase, or birth, with sexual use of female slaves permitted without a marriage contract, witnesses, or dower.

The Juristic Distinction Between the Awrah of the Free Woman and the Enslaved Woman

The majority of jurists, Shafii, Maliki, most Hanbali, and Hanafi, distinguished between the nakedness (awrah) of a free woman and that of an enslaved woman (ama), both in prayer and with respect to the gaze. Imam al-Nawawi, as later jurists relate from al-Majmu, states: “A man’s awrah is from his navel to his knee, and likewise the slave woman’s, according to the more correct view, while the free woman’s is everything but her face and hands.” Similarly, in Zad al-Mustaqni by al-Hajjawi and Ibn Uthaymin’s commentary al-Sharh al-Mumti: “The slave woman, even if of age… her awrah is from the navel to the knee… and with respect to the gaze, jurists likewise state that the slave woman’s ‘awrah is from the navel to the knee.” Al-Sarakhsi’s al-Mabsut, Tuhfat al-Ahwadhi, Nayl al-Awtar, and Awn al-Mabud carry the same substance, including the report from Abu Dawud: “If one of you marries his male slave to his female slave, let him not look at what is below the navel and above the knee.”

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, in his Fatawa, holds that the verse on hijab in Surat Al-Ahzab (“O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves [part] of their outer garments”) applies to free women specifically, not to slave women, arguing that the text names wives, daughters, and the women of the believers, without mentioning milk al-yamin, consistent with the report in the Sahih concerning Safiyyah bint Huyayy: “If he veils her, she is among the Mothers of the Believers; if not, she is among what his right hand possesses.” Ibn Taymiyyah also cites the practice under Umar ibn al-Khattab: “Hijab was specific to free women, not slave women, as was the practice of the believers in the time of the Prophet and his successors: the free woman veiled herself, while the slave woman went about uncovered. And ‘Umar, if he saw a veiled slave woman, would strike her and say, ‘Are you imitating free women?’”

Documented Historical Instances of This Distinction

Anas ibn Malik relates, in a report carried by al-Bayhaqi in al-Sunan al-Kubra (2:227) with a chain al-Albani describes as “good” (jayyid) in Irwa al-Ghalil (6:204) and which al-Bayhaqi himself graded sound, that Umar ibn al-Khattab’s slave women served in his household with their hair uncovered — consistent with the juristic rule above that hijab was specific to free women.

Likewise, several closely related reports in the Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani, al-Bayhaqi’s al-Sunan al-Kubra, and al-Albani’s Irwa al-Ghalil (6:201, with a chain al-Albani describes as sound) state, on the authority of Nafi, the client of Ibn Umar, that Ibn Umar, when intending to purchase a slave woman, would physically examine her body with his hand, placing his hand on her buttocks, between her breasts, and on her legs and abdomen, before completing the transaction, and that he did so openly in the marketplace without objection from the Companions; Ali ibn Abi Talib is reported to have remarked in this connection, “She has no inviolability [hurmah]; I have only stopped to bargain over her” (Musannaf Abd al-Razzaq, Kitab al-Manasik, 7:285).

The Historical Scale of Enslavement

Ibn Kathir states in al-Bidayah wal-Nihayah (10:222) that Harun al-Rashid kept a very large number of concubines (jawari), such that some said his household held four thousand slave women. The same source records that captive-taking campaigns under al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik reached hundreds of thousands of individuals, the fifth share of the spoils from Musa ibn Nusayr’s captives alone reportedly totaled forty thousand, which Ibn Kathir describes as “unheard of in Islam before or since.”

Sahih al-Bukhari (Kitab al-Nikah, chapter on what women are lawful and what are forbidden) also records Anas ibn Malik’s comment on the verse in Surat Al-Nisa: “He saw no harm in a man taking his slave woman away from his male slave,” that is, an owner had the right to end the relationship between his male slave and a female slave if he wished to have intercourse with her himself, after a waiting period to establish she was not pregnant.

The Question of Enslaved Relatives

Ibn Hazm, in al-Muhalla bil-Athar (Kitab al-Hudud, on the penalty for zina), records a juristic dispute among Malik, Abu Hanifah, and al-Thawri concerning a man who has intercourse with a female relative who comes into his possession as a slave (such as his brother’s or sister’s daughter, his father’s or son’s wife, or his milk-sister or milk-daughter), knowing both the relationship and its prohibition: Malik held that the resulting child’s lineage is established and no hadd penalty applies, though discretionary punishment (tazir) does; Abu Hanifah and al-Thawri held no hadd applies at all in such cases, even in some formulations where he had married her, so long as he acted in ignorance or under certain other conditions; Ibn Hazm himself held that the full hadd penalty for zina should apply. This shows that the question was a matter of sharp juristic disagreement among the schools, not a settled, unanimous ruling.

An Instance of Racial Bias in Some Exegetical Literature

One striking text in this connection is found in al-Alusi’s (d. 1270 AH/1854 CE) tafsir Ruh al-Maani, commenting on the verse in Surat Al-Muminun, “except from their wives or those their right hands possess.” He writes: “…they are referred to with the [inanimate] relative pronoun ma… because they resemble merchandise bought and sold, or because their femininity, indicative of their diminished reason, assimilates them to non-rational beings, this is evident where they are Circassian or Byzantine [European] or the like, so how much more so when they are of the Zanj, the Abyssinians, and other Black peoples; by my life, if they are not, in that case, of the animal kind, the animal kind is not far removed from them.”

This text, in its explicit wording, compares Black enslaved women to animals, and merits separate critical treatment.

Summary of the Argument

On the basis of the foregoing, this line of argument concludes that classical Islamic jurisprudence permitted an owner to hold another human being, through capture or purchase, and to make sexual use of that person without contract, witnesses, or dower; that it drew a clear distinction between free and enslaved women in the rules of hijab, awrah, and the gaze, extending even to direct physical examination before purchase, as in Ibn Umar’s case; that this system reached a very large scale in certain periods (as with Harun al-Rashid and the Umayyad campaigns of capture); and that some recognized exegetes combined these rulings with explicit racial bias against Black Africans, all of which, in the view of proponents of this argument, raises serious questions about the compatibility of this system with the claim of a universal moral message.

The Counter-Position: A Scholarly and Historical Reading of Slavery in Islam

Scholarly integrity requires presenting what Muslim researchers and jurists themselves, past and present, say about this matter, from several angles. Muslim researchers and jurists, past and present, sum up their response to this argument in five points.

First, slavery predates Islam and was not created by it, it was entrenched across Arabia and the ancient world centuries before Islam (as documented by Bernard Lewis in Race and Slavery in the Middle East and Kecia Ali in Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam), and early jurisprudence engaged it as an existing reality requiring regulation, not creation.

Second, the legislative trajectory was gradually toward manumission and restriction, as shown by texts making manumission an expiation for sin and the hadith, “Whoever frees a believing slave, God frees, limb for limb, a limb of his from the Fire.”

Third, al-Alusi’s racist passage meets sharp internal criticism from the tradition’s own central texts, such as the Farewell Sermon, “No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab… nor a white person over a Black person, except by piety,” and the hadith of the Prophet rebuking Abu Dharr for insulting Bilal over his race, making the passage a reflection of its author’s own social bias (nineteenth-century Baghdad and Syria) rather than the verse’s actual content.

Fourth, permitting physical examination of a slave woman at sale was not a matter of full juristic agreement; some jurists tied it to identifying defects affecting the contract’s validity.

Fifth, contemporary official juristic bodies (al-Azhar, the Muslim World League, the International Islamic Fiqh Academy) have agreed that slavery in all its forms is forbidden today, since its recognized legal causes no longer obtain and an international consensus prohibits it.

That official consensus, however, has not prevented these very rulings from being revived in documented cases. In 2014, the Islamic State enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, explicitly citing classical fiqh sources nearly identical to those catalogued in this study, as set out in its essay “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” published in Dabiq magazine. International and local reports likewise document the persistence of forms of hereditary slavery in Mauritania and parts of the Sahel to this day. The majority of scholars and official religious institutions, including Mauritanian scholars themselves, have described these cases as violations of contemporary juristic consensus and crimes under international law, not as a recognized application of a still-operative religious ruling.

Conclusion

The foregoing shows that the juristic and historical texts cited in this study are, for the most part, soundly attested and documented in their sources, and that the real dispute between the two positions is not over whether these rulings and practices occurred historically, but over how to assess them. While proponents of the argument hold that they reveal a fundamental contradiction between historical Islamic jurisprudence and the claim of a universal moral message, Muslim researchers and jurists hold that these rulings should be read in their historical context as a gradual regulation of a pre-existing institution rather than its creation, that they are governed by an overall trajectory toward emancipation, that certain elements (such as al-Alusi’s racial passage) represent an aberration subject to internal criticism rather than an extension of the qur’anic text’s own content, and that the official contemporary juristic position has settled on the prohibition of slavery in all its forms. The reader is invited, as throughout this series, to weigh the evidence from its primary sources before adopting either position.

Sources

1. IslamWeb, Fatwa Center, Fatwa no. 18851, and the site’s tafsir encyclopedia.
2. Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Nikah.
3. Sunan Abi Dawud.
4. Al-Sunan al-Kubra, by al-Bayhaqi.
5. Musannaf Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani.
6. Irwa al-Ghalil, by al-Albani.
7. Majmu Fatawa Ibn Taymiyyah.
8. Al-Sharh al-Mumti ala Zad al-Mustaqni, by Ibn Uthaymin.
9. Al-Majmu Sharh al-Muhadhdhab, by al-Nawawi.
10. Al-Mabsut, by al-Sarakhsi.
11. Al-Muhalla bil-Athar, by Ibn Hazm.
12. Al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah, by Ibn Kathir.
13. Ruh al-Maani fi Tafsir al-Qur’an al-Azim wal-Sab al-Mathani, by al-Alusi.
14. Musnad al-Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal.