ABSTRACT
A slave, among Muslims, is either a person taken captive in war, or carried off by force, and being at the time of capture an infidel ; or the offspring of a female slave by another slave or by any man who is not her owner, or by her owner if he does not acknowledge himself to be the father but the offspring of a male slave by a free woman is free. A person who embraces the Mohammadan faith after having been made a slave does not by this act become free, unless he flies from a foreign infidel master to a Muslim country and there becomes a Mohammadan. A person cannot have as a slave one whom he acknowledges to be within the prohibited degrees of marriage. The slaves of the Arabs are mostly from Abyssinia and the Negro countries : a few, in the houses of very wealthy individuals, are from Georgia and Circassia.
