Economic slavery
Economic slavery in Islam
Western slavery was motivated by economics - people were enslaved to provide a cheap and disposable workforce on plantations.
Muslims historically did not use slaves as an engine of economic production on the same scale as the West, although some Muslims profited from the actual trading of slaves.
Though Arab and Muslim traders became notorious in the supply of African slaves for the American and Caribbean plantations, there are few examples in the annals of Islam of the collective forced labour found in the Western hemisphere.Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World, 2000
The 9th century slave rebellion in Iraq may have deterred Muslims from the industrial use of slaves by showing the danger of having a very large slave community in any one place. Apart from 9th century Iraq, the largest scale slave use outside the military was on the clove plantations of Zanzibar.
Nonetheless, as William Gervase Clarence-Smith writes, slaves did play a large part in Muslim economies:
...productive slavery was more extensive in Islam than traditional accounts allow for. Even if large estates were rare, they were not absent.
More striking were the numerous slaves on middling and small properties, a phenomenon about which surprisingly little has been written.
Servile labour was also common in workshops, construction, mining, water control, transport by land and sea, and the extraction of marine resources.
Whether a 'Slave Mode of Production' ever existed in Islam is moot, but the economic role of slavery was substantial, at least in certain places and at specific times.
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and Slavery
Slaves were also used for domestic work, military service, sexual slavery and civil administration.
The slave trade
Muslims did play a significant role in the slave trade itself as providers of slaves to others.