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A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Quran … - Kecia Ali
" "A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Quran forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relations may become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master’s nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime of zina [illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.
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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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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
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These questions arise urgently when one considers that classical Islamic law accepts both slavery as an institution and the sexual use of female slaves, whereas the overwhelming majority of Muslims today completely reject all forms of slavery... Yet quite a number of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Muslim authors and laypeople gloss over the existence of slavery, and especially concubinage, in Muslim history and texts... Given that the vast majority of contemporary Muslims reject slavery, many have chosen to ignore the issue. Rather than reiterate the classical religious permission for slavery and slave concubinage, even to oppose it, they seem to believe that a moderate or progressive agenda is better served by emphasizing the contemporary agreement that slavery, and especially concubinage, is forbidden as completely outside the bounds of Muslim sexual morality. Although a few authors deny the validity of slave concubinage outright, asserting that “those jurists of Islamic law who laid down the rule that a master may have [a] sexual relationship with his female slave without marriage are totally mistaken,” most simply ignore what prevailed as the consensus for over a millennium.
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