The Taliban’s new slave code

In the 21st century, it still shocks many—particularly in the West—that certain Muslims insist on interpreting their sacred texts with absolute literalism, including the stark division of humanity into “free” and “slave.” For those well-versed in Islam’s core sources—the Quran and the prophetic traditions of Muhammad’s conduct—this distinction is neither obscure nor unexpected; it flows directly from the foundational texts themselves. The Taliban in Afghanistan have now made this explicit in practice through a newly issued legal document.

On Jan. 4, Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada signed and approved the “Criminal Procedure Code for Courts” (also known as “Principles of Criminal Procedures”), a framework designed to govern judicial proceedings in Afghanistan strictly according to Islamic Sharia. The code repeatedly employs the classical term ghulam (slave) and explicitly differentiates between “free” persons and “slaves” when assigning discretionary punishments for offenses.

Human rights groups, including the Afghan organization Rawadari, have analyzed the document and condemned it sharply. It institutionalizes slavery by recognizing ghulami (slavery) as a legitimate legal status, entrenches a four-tiered social hierarchy, shields religious elites with mere admonition for crimes, and reserves far harsher penalties—public executions, stoning, flogging, or imprisonment—for ordinary citizens, lower classes, ethnic minorities, and religious dissenters.

This approach is not an innovation. It revives and codifies longstanding patterns from classical Islamic jurisprudence and historical Muslim societies, including those in Afghanistan.

The ghulam tradition historically included various forms of servitude and bondage. A particularly grim example is bacha bazi (“boy play”), the custom of powerful men keeping adolescent boys as entertainers, domestic servants, and subjects of sexual exploitation. Though formally prohibited since the 1990s, the practice endures. The U.S. State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report documents its continuation, noting that boys—often from impoverished, orphaned, or desperate families—are trafficked and commodified for sexual slavery, with credible reports implicating even some high-ranking Taliban-affiliated figures.

Far from a mere cultural holdover, the Taliban’s code mirrors what many Muslims regard as the authentic, unaltered teachings of Islam’s sacred sources. Muhammad owned slaves, bought and sold them, and exchanged them. Reliable hadith traditions describe a black slave attending him at his room, another named Anjasha accompanying him on journeys. We are told Muhammad purchased a strong slave by trading two black slaves, and his daughter Fatima recounted that Muhammad received several slave girls. These accounts establish male and female slaves as an accepted reality within Muhammad’s own household and Muslim community. This establishes and legitimizes current trends among the Taliban and its ilk.

Worse, the Quran further envisions the Muslim paradise as including “eternally youthful servants” (ghulams), beautiful male youths likened to “scattered pearls,” who remain forever young and circulate among the blessed men of paradise, serving them with drinks and pleasures. These beings, specially and specifically created by Allah, embody one of the eternal rewards promised to the faithful men.

Seen in this light, the Taliban’s legislation is not a deviation but an accurate application of Islam’s texts as they stand. In our modern world, where equality, human rights, and the rejection of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or social status are widely embraced, those who demand literal adherence to these “sacred” sources effectively seek to transplant the social norms of 7th-century Arabia into the present day.

This same literalism drives other Taliban policies, such as barring women from education and confining them to the home—policies rooted in Muhammad’s reported declarations that women are “deficient in intellect and religion” and form the majority of Hell’s inhabitants. While some modernist Muslims emphasize interpretations that affirm equality and human dignity for all, those who apply the texts exactly “as written” produce outcomes that degrade women, exploit vulnerable children, and codify hierarchies of free and slave, master and servant, elite and commoner—all justified as obedience to divine command and prophetic precedent.

In striking contrast, the teachings of Jesus Christ call His followers to a radically different path. Christ commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:31), to treat others as we wish to be treated (Matthew 7:12), and to recognize the equal dignity of every human being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27; Galatians 3:28). These principles compel believers to honor every individual, to reject hierarchies of domination, and to work actively for the freedom and flourishing of all.

While slavery was a universal institution across ancient civilizations—including pagan Rome, classical Greece, pre-Islamic Arabia, and many Muslim societies—it was the Christian West, shaped by biblical convictions and the application of the gospel’s ethic, that first abolished the slave trade, outlawed chattel slavery within its borders, and then led global efforts to eradicate it elsewhere. The abolitionist movement drew its moral fire from Scripture, with figures such as William Wilberforce and others arguing that no human being could rightfully be held as property when Christ had declared all to be precious in God’s sight.

The Taliban’s new code serves as a sobering illustration: when Islamic law is implemented without restraint, it delivers precisely the structures and practices endorsed in its original sources.