If any of you cannot afford to marry free, believing women, (let them marry) believing maidens from among those whom your right hands possess. (Do not regard marriage to such believing maidens as a degradation. Rather, degradation is deviating into licentiousness without marrying.) God knows well all about your faith (and measures you by it); and (whether you be free or slaves) you are one from another (belonging, as believers, to the same faith and community). Marry them, then, with the leave of their guardians, and give them their bridal-due according to religiously lawful and customary good practice, they being women who give themselves in honest chastity, not in licentiousness, nor having secret love-companions. Then if they commit indecency after they have entered into wedlock, they shall be liable to half the penalty to which free (unmarried) women are liable. That (permission to marry slave-girls) is for those of you who fear to fall into sin (by remaining unmarried). But if you persevere (in self-restraint with no fear of falling into sin), that is better for you. And God is All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate.