While Judaism and Christianity’s religious systems had their own shortcomings in handling captive women, Islam not only adopted those injustices but pushed them to a much darker extreme. The comparison below painfully illustrates how the treatment of enslaved women deteriorated further under Islamic rulings:
| Judaism / Christianity | Islam |
|---|---|
| Captive women were enslaved. | Islam also enslaved captive women. |
| Even as slaves, women were protected from being shared with other men. | Islam allowed the owner to pass her to brothers, slaves, or guests for temporary sexual use—without her consent. |
| The Bible granted a captive woman a full month to grieve her family before any intimacy. | Islam allowed no mourning period. A Muslim could have sex with her the same night her father, husband, or brother was killed in battle. Muhammad had intercourse with Safiyyah (a Jewish captive) the very night her father, brother, and husband were slain, after her menstrual period ended that day (Sahih Muslim, Book of Marriage). |
| The Bible required marriage before intimacy. | Islam required no marriage—sexual use of a slave woman was permitted without it. |
| Once married, the owner could not resell her. | In Islam, once the owner tired of her, he could pass her around and then sell her, restarting the cycle of abuse. |
| If the owner no longer wanted her, he had to free her. | In Islam, the owner simply sold her for profit and bought a new slave woman. |
| The Bible prohibited taking a male slave’s wife. | Islam permitted the master to seize and sexually use his male slave’s wife, shattering the slave family. |
This comparison is not meant to praise one scripture over another. It is to highlight how “religious morality,” instead of advancing, regressed even further in Islam—leaving countless women silenced, powerless, and erased under its laws.
