What was the Islamic stance on slavery historically, and how did it move toward abolition?

Islam emerged in a seventh-century world where slavery was a near-universal institution, and its scriptural and legal teachings worked to regulate, restrict, and gradually dismantle the practice rather than presenting a single immediate abolition decree. The Quran repeatedly encourages freeing slaves as an act of righteousness and atonement, listing it among the highest good deeds: 'freeing a slave... that is the difficult path' (90:12-13), and Islamic law made manumission an expiation for numerous sins. The Prophet Muhammad taught, 'Whoever frees a believing slave, Allah will free from Hellfire, limb for limb, a part of his body corresponding to each part of the slave's body freed' (Sahih al-Bukhari 2517), and insisted that enslaved people be fed, clothed, and treated as one would treat one's own family, explicitly forbidding harsh or humiliating treatment. Companions such as Bilal ibn Rabah rose to positions of great honor after manumission. While slavery persisted in Muslim societies for centuries afterward — a historical reality Muslim scholars today generally acknowledge rather than defend — the trajectory of Quranic and prophetic teaching was consistently toward restriction and freedom, and 19th- and 20th-century Muslim reformers cited these same texts in supporting slavery's abolition.

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