Buying Slaves

9. A number of our people have narrated from Sahl ibn Ziyad and Ahmad ibn Muhammad all from ibn Mahbub from Rifa’ah al- Nakhkhas who has said the following: “I once asked abu al-Hassan عليه السلام, about Romans who invade al-Saqalibah (a people who lived between Bulgaria and Constantinople (Istanbul)), steal their children, slave-girls and slave-boys, then castrate the slave-boys, then send them to Baghdad for the merchants. What do you say about them and we know they are stolen and they were invaded wrongfully without declared war among them. He (the Imam) said, ‘It is not unlawful to buy them because they have only taken them from paganism to al-Islam.’”