Ghulam Kab Banaya Jaye

The first sentence is the whole of the first half: not every person is made a captive. Only a man taken while fighting on the field may be. A man in his own home, a man out hunting, a man doing some work of his own, anyone who was not a formal participant in the war: making him a slave is ḥarām, and such people are free.

The second half is the four things that can be done with a prisoner taken on the field, and he weighs each one.

1. Kill them. Many people, he says, consider this not good, because killing helpless prisoners is not a good thing and is against mercy.
2. Release them. Also not right: after risking your life to capture an enemy, releasing him is not a matter of good sense, because there is a strong danger that those people will gather again and take the field against the Muslims.
3. Imprison them for life. Worse than the two above, and he gives four reasons: the prisoner stays behind a wall for life with no chance to be of any use, unmarried, never breathing open air; the whole cost of him falls on the nation, and twenty thousand prisoners could beggar it; building the long, wide premises a jail needs is not an easy thing; and in older times there was no system of jails at all.
4. Divide them among the fighters: take work from them, feed them, give them drink and clothes, keep them in a very easy manner, not burden them beyond their strength, not take more work than they can do, not stint their food and drink, and rather try to get them married and to settle their family too.

The fourth, he says, was adopted in the degree of necessity, because there is no road better than it for the prisoners themselves. And the closing point is the historical one: this arrangement existed before Islam and Islam kept it, but made it very easy, and it added the condition that stands at the top of the page, that only a participant in the fighting may be taken, and never anybody outside the battlefield.