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When directly confronted, in a polemical context, with historical and textual permission for the sexual use of unfree women, Muslim authors sometimes… - Kecia Ali
" "When directly confronted, in a polemical context, with historical and textual permission for the sexual use of unfree women, Muslim authors sometimes respond defensively, seeking to protect Islam’s reputation. It may be argued, for instance, that Islamic “slavery” bore no resemblance to harsh American chattel slavery. In this view, the Qur’anic permission for men to have sex with “what their right hands possess” was merely a way of integrating war captives into society. Sometimes, it is added that the captives would be “integrated” into the Muslim community through becoming the property of a specific man who would be responsible for them and their offspring. Whatever merit these arguments have in the context of inter-communal polemics and apologetics, however, they are insufficient for internal Muslim reflection. In particular, the notion that women would be integrated into society by bearing offspring to their owners or captors does not apply to the case of the Bani Mustaliq: the rationale for the captors to practice withdrawal, according to other accounts, is that they did not want to impregnate the women lest they spoil their chances to ransom them.
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About Kecia Ali
Kecia Ali is an American scholar of Islam who focuses on the study of Islamic jurisprudence, ethics, women and gender, and biography. She is currently a professor of religion at Boston University.
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Additional quotes by Kecia Ali
Though seldom discussed, forced sex with one’s wife might (or, depending on the circumstances, might not) be an ethical infraction, and conceivably even a legal one like assault if physical violence is involved...This scenario is never, however, illicit in the jurists’ conceptual world. Nonconsensual sex—what contemporary Westerners would term rape—might be either a coercive subset of zina, with blame lifted from the coerced participant, or a at type of usurpation (ightisab ), a property crime that by definition cannot be committed by a husband or owner, who possesses an entitlement to, or ownership over, his wife’s or slave’s sexual capacity.
Even if he marries off his own slave and no longer has lawful access to her, his having sex with her is a lesser transgression than zina¯. The jurists’ occasional affirmations that a married female slave whose owner nonetheless has sex with her is not to be punished is the closest any of these texts comes to considering the relevance of an enslaved woman’s consent. Notably, the issue emerges only because she is married to another man, a marriage for which jurists uniformly agree that her consent would have been unnecessary
The permissibility of sex with the captive women was taken for granted by all the men involved, including the Prophet himself. (There is no indication of what the captured women thought, or the wives of the men involved.) Not only do the Prophet and the soldiers ignore the question of the women’s consent or lack thereof, but so does Algosaibi, focusing solely on contraception in his discussion of this hadith.
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