Thoughts about Slavery...

TL;DR: Slavery is a culture-dependent topic.

---

An episode of an anime I'm watching had the protagonist go to the slave market, and buy a slave. This led to some controversy about the way it was handled in the series. I think they handled the topic well, slavery is a part of that world's economy, and the protagonist was clearly uncomfortable, but he long accepted that he couldn't change it.

One of the criticism I saw about the episode is how casually the topic of slavery is handled, and a counter-argument I saw to that, is that Japan sees slavery differently than the West. It doesn't help that similar plotlines exist a lot in Japanese anime storytelling. It made me think about it.

I think slavery is a culture-dependent topic. While slavery was the norm in most of the world, the west didn't see the same version of slavery as Japan or the middle east did.

I'll talk about the Islamic view in a bit, but the way people became slaves and how they were treated while in slavery was different depending on the culture and where you are in history. Some became slaves via debt, some via war, and in the worst cases, people are kidnapped and became slaves like that.

I read the Wikipedia page about the topic to give an example here, but I decided to stop... Let's say reading it was... painful.

Thoughts as a Muslim

That leads me to my thoughts about this as a Muslim: While Islam didn't abolish slavery, it forced many restrictions upon it. If you abide by all the rules, a slave is almost a family member. A Muslim slave owner has to feed their slaves the same food quality as him. They must be treated with kindness. It's true they have to obey orders, but you can't order anything forbidden in Islam, and you can't be violent with them.

Reading the wikipedia page for examples, I saw many of unislamic acquirement of slaves by Muslims which saddened me. According to scholars, the only way Islam allows slavery is through War, and War is only allowed in Self Defense or Religion Defense.

Over the years, slavery faded away from most Islamic societies. I won't lie, it still exists somewhere or another. I saw dark examples when I researched for this article, though most people in the modern era never saw a slave in the same sense.

Slave Labour

Even in the modern era, slavery still exists... People in many parts of the world are treated like slaves, sometimes without the option to refer to themselves as slaves. I consider workers who work just for food under tyrant working conditions a form of slavery as well...

What do you think?

These are the random thoughts I had about the topic today, please tell me if you agree or disagree with anything I said.

For now, I'll leave you to think, and I see you in another article...

---

<sup>* The image of this post is made using Clip Studio Paint.
* 10% of this post's rewards is divided on @ackza, @master-lamps & @eturnerx as members of my Beneficiary Rotating List</sup>