Imagine the piercing cry of a mother as her six-month-old baby—barely old enough to have two tiny teeth—is torn from her arms and sold in a crowded slave market.
Under Islamic Sharia, this was not an isolated atrocity but a legally permitted practice. Enslaved mothers and their infants could be forcibly separated and traded like commodities once the child reached six to eight months of age. This heartbreaking cruelty, embedded in over 1,400 years of Islamic history, reveals a profound moral failure that no excuse can erase. How could a system claiming divine mercy permit such suffering?
Apologists often argue that Islam could not abolish slavery outright due to the war-based economy and reliance on slave labor in that era. Even granting this point, a painful question remains: Why did Sharia not at least safeguard the sacred mother-child bond? Would prohibiting the separation of infants from their enslaved mothers have collapsed the vast Islamic empire’s economy? The complete silence of Sharia on this issue speaks louder than any defense.
One of Islam’s gravest injustices was “slavery by birth.” Children born to enslaved parents were automatically born into slavery (except when the father was the owner himself).
Imam Abdullah ibn Abi Zayd (known as the “younger Imam Malik”) wrote in his Maliki fiqh text: “A slave mother and her child may not be separated and sold until the child has grown his first pair of molar teeth (approximately 6–8 months).”
Six months. That was the only time granted to a mother before the market’s merciless hands ripped her nursing infant away. The anguish of watching her baby—still dependent on her milk—sold to strangers defies description.
Even mothers of the owner’s own children (umm al-walad—slave concubines who bore children to their master) were not spared this cruelty. They too could be separated from their children and sold in slave markets, leaving a trail of devastation.
Sunan Ibn Majah records: Jabir ibn Abdullah said: “We used to sell our concubines and the mothers of our children while the Prophet was still among us, and we saw nothing wrong with it.”
Shaykh al-Albani graded this hadith as sahih (authentic).
Here again we see the painful separation of parents and children, with the only difference being that in this case it is the mothers who are sold rather than the infants.
This grim reality persisted throughout 1,400 years of Islamic history: countless infants forcibly taken from their enslaved mothers and traded in desolate slave markets.
One of the earliest surviving Christian accounts from the Islamic period in Syria (circa 640 CE) describes the rise of Islam in these words:
“They take the wife away from her husband and slay him like a sheep. They throw the babe from her mother and drive her into slavery; the child calls out from the ground and the mother hears, yet what is she to do?… They separate the children from the mother like the soul from within the body, and she watches as they divide her loved ones from off her lap, two of them go to two owners, herself to another[…] Her children cry out in lament, their eyes hot with tears. She turns to her loved ones, milk pouring forth from her breast: ‘Go in peace, my darlings, and may God accompany you.’”
— Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It
If this suffering does not move you—if it fails to awaken even a flicker of compassion—then what is left of your humanity?
This is not merely history. It is a call to confront a legacy that shattered the most sacred of bonds in the name of profit and power.
