Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah,Member of the Executive Committee of the Fiqh Council of North America and the Religious Director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, states: “1. There is no categorical statement from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) about the separation of children from their biological slave parents. These are the derivations of various imams by means of looking at the analogy of divorced parents. That is why various schools of thought have different opinions about the age of a child in this case.
2. It must be understood in light of the cultural milieu of the time. Islam came while the institution of slavery was in full practice for centuries. Islam gradually worked towards minimization of its evils and gradually lead to the situation where slaves and their masters were treated equally to the extent that the master was required to eat from the same food given to his slave, dress his slave from the same clothes which he dresses himself and his family with, and even the slightest punishment like slap could have been source of slaves’ emancipation, as historically happened with many of the prophetic companions.
3. The modern critics of Islam should look into their own faith, tradition, law and their history all the way to the modern centuries. The treatment of the slaves so called critics of Islam has been so evil all the way to the 19th century that books after books have been written about the violations of human rights by some very religiously devout Christians, for instance.“