As in many other pre-modern societies, slavery was ubiquitous in the Islamicate world. It is therefore not surprising that it was discussed at great length by Muslim jurists. However, their understanding of slavery as a legal institution goes far beyond a simple binary distinction between freedom and slavery. This is particularly evident in their debates over forms of scheduled manumission such as the kitāba, a contract that allowed an enslaved person to fulfill certain contractual obligations over a period of time in exchange for manumission. While an unqualified declaration of manumission (Ar. ʿitq) terminates the ownership relationship between master and enslaved person instantaneously, the legal status of a mukātab or mukātaba is characterized by a gradual transfer of property rights over time. The enslaved person enters a process in which they become the owner themselves until completely ceasing to be the property of their former owner after the fulfillment of the contract. I examine how this process is reflected in model deeds for kitāba composed by the Egyptian al-Asyūṭī (d. 880/1475) in his notarial manual Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd wa-muʿīn al-quḍā wa-l-muwaqqiʿīn wa-l-shuhūd written at the end of the 9th/15th century. In this period, shortly before Ottoman conquest of Egypt, notarial deeds in combination with oral testimony served as an important means to establish property claims. The study of these model contracts thus allows us to obtain a deeper understanding of jurists’ rendering of the gradual transfer of property rights from the master to the enslaved person within a kitāba contract. Moreover, it affords us insights into legal practice that is otherwise obscured by the nearly absolute lack of documentary and archival sources concerning this type of manumission in the pre-Ottoman period.