Opinion: The Boulder on Bilal’s Chest: Islam and the Abolition of Slavery

By Asad Pervez, Center for Peace & Spirituality USA
BOSTON- Juneteenth — June 19th — marks the day in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the last enslaved people in the nation that they were free, more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As we celebrate this milestone in American history, we should also sit with some deeper questions: Who were the first people to be enslaved? How far back does this darkness go? And how did God guide humanity out of it?

The short answer is that slavery predates all human records. It is woven into the earliest fabric of civilization. Wars were among its primary engines — the victor would claim soldiers, servants, and resources as spoils. All ties to home and family would be severed. By today’s standards these realities are unthinkable. But for most of human history, this was simply understood as the way things were.

Perhaps no example illustrates this more strikingly than Sir Isaac Newton. One of the most towering intellects in human history — the man who unified the mechanics of the heavens and the earth — Newton invested in the South Sea Company, a British trading firm that held a monopoly contract to ship enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas. When the company collapsed in 1720, Newton lost a substantial sum. Yet he lost more sleep over the collapse of the stock price than over the nature of the enterprise itself. This is how thoroughly slavery had been normalized. When something is so deeply woven into the economic and social fabric of a civilization, it takes more than one person’s conscience to unravel it.

Even liberation, when it came, was not always straightforward. An enslaved person had no money, property, or education to serve as the foundation of their freedom. The painful truth is that even after the Civil War, many freed individuals continued living on the very plantations from which they had been freed — often out of basic economic necessity. This is part of why abolition could not simply be proclaimed. It had to be systematically built.

Throughout history, God has sent His prophets into the heart of this problem. The Prophet Joseph, for instance, was enslaved as a young boy by a passing caravan and sold into bondage in Egypt. Yet the Quran tells us that God was with Joseph through every trial, and that he eventually rose to become one of the most trusted figures in the Egyptian king’s court. Then there is the Prophet Moses, born into a community that Pharaoh had reduced to forced labor. Moses called on Pharaoh to change his ways, and when Pharaoh refused, Moses led his people across the Red Sea to freedom and safety.

During the time of the Prophet Muhammad, slavery was entrenched in the economic, legal, and social structures of Arabia. An outright ban, proclaimed overnight, would have created chaos — and would have left hundreds of thousands of freed people with nothing: no shelter, no income, no social protection. Instead, God, through the Quran, launched a systematic, multi-directional campaign to dismantle slavery from within.

The first step was cutting off its sources. No free person could be enslaved. Even prisoners of war were released — the Prophet Muhammad ensured their freedom and safe return home. He declared that liberating a slave was among the supreme acts of worship, and the Quran built legal pathways that gave enslaved people rights and routes to freedom that no society had recognized before.

At the center of this change stood real human beings. For example, Bilal ibn Rabah, was an Abyssinian slave owned by Umayyah ibn Khalaf, one of the most powerful men in Mecca. When Bilal accepted Islam, Umayyah dragged him into the desert at the hottest hours of the day, laid him on the burning sand, and placed a heavy boulder on his chest — commanding him to renounce his faith or die. Still, Bilal would not break.

When Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s closest companions, learned of Bilal’s torture, he went to Umayyah and offered to buy him. Umayyah named his price, and Abu Bakr paid it without negotiation. Umayyah laughed, saying that had Abu Bakr pushed back, he would have sold Bilal for even a single dinar. Abu Bakr replied: “By God, if you had asked for a hundred, I still would have paid.” God honored this act in the Quran (92:18–20).
Bilal had a beautiful voice. He became the first person to deliver the Adhan — the call to prayer. Once regarded as mere property, his name is now immortalized in history.

Then there is Zayd ibn Haritha, who was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. He eventually came into the Prophet’s household, and the Prophet not only freed him but adopted him as his own son.

These were not merely individual acts of kindness. The Prophet also intervened whenever he witnessed the mistreatment of enslaved people. In a famous narration recorded in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet came upon a man named Abu Masud striking a servant boy. Approaching from behind, he said: “You should know, Abu Masud, that God has more power over you than you have over this boy.” Abu Masud, stunned, turned around and said: “For the sake of God, I free this boy.”

There are many such incidents from the Prophet’s life. The Quran pressed this transformation through every available channel. Freeing a slave was listed among the defining virtues of the truly righteous (2:177). The obligatory annual almsgiving — Zakat — was explicitly designated, in part, for the liberation of enslaved people (9:60). The Quran also made freeing a captive slave an expiation for major sins (4:92; 5:89).

For the enslaved who sought their own freedom, the Quran mandated that their masters offer a formal contract of manumission, giving them a legal path to buy their freedom (24:33). And in one of its most direct declarations, the Quran names the freeing of a person as among the highest acts a human being can perform (90:12–13).

The Quran also forbade forcing enslaved women into prostitution — a practice in pre-Islamic Arabia — explicitly protecting their dignity (24:33). And it encouraged the integration of freed people into society through marriage, removing the stigma that kept them in permanent social exile (4:25).
Taken together, these commands cut off the sources of slavery, elevated liberation as an act of supreme worship, and laid the moral, legal, and spiritual architecture of a world without it.

The Prophet Muhammad closed his life with a sermon, delivered before more than one hundred thousand companions. In his sermon, he said “An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab. A white has no superiority over a black, nor a black over a white — except through piety and good action.” It was a statement that the world would take more than a thousand years to begin to live by.

As we mark Juneteenth in 2026, it is worth reflecting on how humanity can blind itself to universal truths and commit acts that later generations will find unconscionable. It is, perhaps, a useful exercise to ask ourselves: what practices have we normalized today that we have not paused to examine? There must be things we do — or permit — that people centuries from now will look back on and ask, with bewilderment: How could they do something like this?