In a recent publication, Ehud Toledano challenges Patterson’s notion of the “socially dead” in the context of Islamic slavery. Furthermore, he challenges the fictiveness of kinship that defined the relationship between masters and their slaves. In this paper, I track the jurisprudential opinions of Muslim jurists from medieval Transoxiana to the 19th-century Ottoman Empire in order to ascertain the relationship between kinship formation and manumission. Legal forms of kinship could be created between masters and female slaves through matrimony, reproduction, and wet-nursing. Yet, there are other forms of kinship that would include both male and female slaves without their functions as concubines, mothers of children (umm walad), or wet nursing. Based on my preliminary research, 17th-century jurists unanimously believed that calling a slave as one’s son or daughter would result in the immediate manumission of the slave. In this paper, I will expand my research to include the opinions of jurists from different times and spaces. I will use fatwas both as legal and social sources. Legally, I am interested to find the justification for the link between manumission and kinship formation. Socially, I intend to examine the change and continuity in the practices of slavery in various Muslim societies. Some of the questions I try to answer include the following: Why were these slaves called one’s children? Why did a simple utterance of affection have such a grave legal consequence? How did the jurists and the solicitors of their opinions view the relationship between slaves and their masters? Based on my ongoing research, I argue that while the kinship formation occurred even before the formal manumission, the jurists viewed manumission as a necessary and critical step before slaves were formally recognized as independent members of the society in general and members of their masters’ households in particular.