Daesh, the gangster thugs who intend to destroy Islam with its pretzel logic of employing murder and fear as the cornerstone of its alleged caliphate, has now hijacked our religion to justify raping preteen girls after kidnapping and selling them into slavery.

The stunning Aug. 13 article in the New York Times outlining the practice of sex slavery as a recruitment tool for men to join Daesh should give Muslims pause to consider the ramifications that these barbaric acts will have on our religion.

Daesh military leaders are claiming that it is reviving the Islamic practice of slavery. The Times put it this way: “The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution.”

While the Times should be praised for exposing this obscene practice, it unfortunately provides a clumsy and inadequate explanation of the context of slavery in Islam.

The article does little to support the inflammatory headline “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.” It quotes two very wishy-washy Islamic scholars who provide vague explanations of slavery in Islam.

Daesh may very well believe it’s “reviving the institution of slavery,” but the institution of slavery they are practicing does not exist in Islam. Slave owners in the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him) were forbidden from dishonoring anyone let alone slaves.

According to the article, Daesh soldiers kidnapped more than 5,000 Yazidis for the purpose of enslaving them for sex. The practice is codified through Daesh’s alleged Islamic courts that notarize sales contracts of slaves. They use the practice to recruit men as soldiers “where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.”

The article sheds little light on how Daesh has perverted Islamic jurisprudence. Slavery was a worldwide practice during the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him) 1,400 years ago. The difference between slavery in Muslim communities and that of Europe was that in Islam slavery was a temporary solution during and after wartime and an alternative to imprisonment and killing. It was never a recruitment tool to enlist men into war.

A Muslim army that had won battle or conquered a land was encouraged to take slaves instead of killing them in a war zone or putting them in prison. The goal was to eventually set them free. This was a highly regulated practice that required slave owners to treat slaves with dignity, provide them food from their own tables and dress them as owners would dress their own family. Slaves were taken from the battlefield during war, not their homes during peacetime.

The female slave was protected and was entitled to freedom if, in case, she became pregnant. A slave who is beaten must be set free. Freeing slaves is seen as an act of purification and for the sake of Allah.

While it is difficult today to wrap our heads around the fact that there is any humane version of slavery, this system was seen at the time as preferable to the kind of slavery practiced without those protections in Europe and later in America. To be clear, sex slavery did not exist.

Slavery was eventually phased out in Muslim communities. It didn’t end instantly with legislation, such as in England in 1833 and in the United States in 1865. In Muslim countries, changes in practices do not occur suddenly because they will be resisted in society.

We see this today in the similar reactions to same sex marriage and the banning of the Confederate flag in some parts of the United States and just about every Muslim country that went through the Arab Spring. For example, alcohol in Islam was banned on a gradual basis. First, it was prohibited before prayer, but since Muslims pray five times a day, alcohol consumption was limited until after Isha (night) prayer. Later it was forbidden altogether.

Muslims, as with the rest of the world, have been engaged in many wars since the time of the Prophet, yet they took no slaves and never considered “reviving” the practice of slavery. Yet Daesh implemented a regulated system that sanctions rape and slavery, although the practice has no precedent in Islam. Rape as a weapon is all too common in any war. But we can examine the conduct of Muslim soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war, the uprisings in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and the Saudis’ battle against the Houthis in Yemen and find no instances of government-sanctioned rape or sex slavery.

So, does Daesh possesses some special insight and the divine right to institute sex slavery while no other Muslim state has? No, it doesn’t. Daesh have made it no secret that it wants to strike terror in the West. It wants revenge for the Iraq war and the kidnapping of Muslims worldwide to be held indefinitely and without trial. They say they want the West to have a taste of its own medicine.

The actions of Daesh are the extreme in every sense of the word. But variations of the Daesh mentality are found in other governments. Israel kidnaps Palestinian men, women and children by hundreds and holds them without trial. Israeli government-sanctioned killings have been well documented and supported by anecdotal evidence from Israeli soldiers.

Israeli settlers have claimed Palestinian homes as their birthright without fear of government intrusion. The United States has all but abandoned the constitutional right to due process. The global community, at least in the West, does not ascribe these atrocities as inspired by Judaism or Christianity, although elected officials often make such pronouncements. Yet the global community labels Daesh’s atrocities as inspired by Islam although there is no basis in Islam for its conduct.

Instead of creating a “caliphate,” the Daesh leaders have created a state in which their sole purpose is to inflict terror on the rest of the world.