Islam and Slavery — Page 71
71 retaliatory actions in wars, and this is why military law is alway different from civil law. The taking of women as war prisoners was similarly an unavoidable sequence of the then prevailing conditions and there was no helping it; and when women began to be taken captives and when the enemies of Islam considered it lawful to treat Muslim women in any way they pleased, it was necessary that some extraordinary law should have been promulgated in order to restrain the enemy from his excesses. Now, however, the non-Muslims do not treat the Muslimgs in the way in which their predecessors did, and if a woman is ever taken captive, she is treated by them as a State prisoner, hence according to the fundamental rule laid down in the Quran, it is no longer lawful for the Muslim to take non-Muslim women of a belligerent nation as prisoners or if they are at all captured, to put them under the custody of individuals, thus giving the practice a semblance of slavery. (¹). If there should arise in anybody's "mind the doubt as to why the Law of Islam gives with regard to one and the same matter one commandment for one time and another commandment for another the answer is that it is a merit rather than a demerit, for if we carefully consider this matter, we shall find that this very circumstance is an evidence of the Law of Islam being a perfect and universal one, for it shows that in the Islamic law, the change of circumstances has been fully taken into consideration. This is why that while some laws which form the basis of the Islamic code have been laid down in a rigid form which admits of no alteration, there are other (1) Chashma-i-Ma'reft, p. 245.