Likewise, if someone comes to own a close blood relative who is permanently unmarriageable to him, that relative is freed automatically, for the Prophet ﷺ said, “Whoever comes to own a forbidden blood relative is free.” [Abu Dawud 3949; Tirmidhi 1365]

These, then, are compulsory factors that strip a master of his ownership in this matter; they possess a legal force that spreads and prevails, leaving no room for choice or reversal once emancipation takes effect.

Moreover, while the Lawgiver repeatedly urges manumission, He has also made it the first avenue of expiation for major transgressions and the dissolution of oaths. Emancipation is therefore the foremost expiation for: (1) intercourse in the daytime during Ramadan, (2) the penalty of ẓihār (declaring one’s wife unlawful like one’s mother), (3) broken oaths, and (4) accidental homicide.

The religion of honor, dignity, and equality:

After all this, how can Westerners—and those mesmerized by the West—find fault with Islam for acknowledging slavery, while they trumpet “freedom” and “human rights,” even though they are the very people who enslaved nations, humbled peoples, reduced them to servitude in their own homelands, consumed their wealth, and seized their dwellings?!

Do they really raise their heads high while they treat certain classes within their own countries worse than slaves?

Where is their vaunted equality beside Islam’s, when America treats its Negroes so that they are barred from schools, denied employment, and placed on the same footing as animals?

Where is the gentleness and benevolence of Islam compared with what the West does to prisoners of war who still languish in remote jungles, wastelands, and dark, oppressive prisons?

And where is the compassionate Islamic polity—which made all people of every class, faith, and race one community with equal rights and duties—when set against what “France” did to the free people of Algeria in their own land and among their own kin?