Sexual Ethics in Islam (12 page)

“what your right hands possess” 43

not found everywhere in the Muslim world; rather than “Islam” being the cause, there are specific socio-economic and political factors that help to account for their existence. Still, the claiming of religious justification for slaveholding in some of these cases makes them particularly urgent to address. Although the vast majority of contemporary Muslims agree that there is no place for slavery in the modern world, and some nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan opposed the practice, the pressure to abolish slavery generally came from some combination of European colonial powers and economic and demographic shifts.
17
A few Muslim clerics, such as one writing in the mid-nineteenth-century Arabian penin- sula, opposed abolition on the grounds that slavery was accepted in religious texts.
18
Similarly, one scholar argues “that slavery enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy in Ottoman society. That legitimacy derived from Islamic sanction,” among other factors.
19
Although abolition did eventually occur, there was not a strong internally developed critique of slaveholding based in religious principles.

Modern Muslims, especially in the West, have devoted little attention to thinking about or discussing the religious, ethical, and legal issues associated with slavery, resorting instead to apologetic and denial.
20
Yet slavery, in norm and practice, dramatically influenced the development of laws regulating marriage, divorce, and sex that many Muslims consider binding today. The existence of slavery during Islam’s early centuries resulted in a complex set of linkages between marriage and slav- ery in Islamic law, both seen as forms of ownership,
milk
, that legitimized sex (in the case of slavery, only when the owner was male and the owned, female). Classical texts are replete with analogies between dower and purchase price, and divorce and manumission.
21
These seldom acknowledged interrelationships continue to affect regulations and mindsets surrounding marriage, divorce, and sex. The once ubiquitous conceptual vocabulary of ownership or dominion (
milk
) applied to slavery is seldom used today to discuss marriage, and the previously common parallels between husbands and masters as well as wives and slaves have largely disappeared from learned discourse. The

44 sexual ethics and islam

sexual ethics forged in slaveholding contexts, however, continue to be influential in ways that are often not fully understood. Understanding the historical and legal dimensions of Muslim slavery, particularly as regards sexual access, is a necessary pre- cursor to thinking through an ethics of sex. Reconsidering slave concubinage raises larger issues of the universality of revelation as well as substantial theological issues related to theodicy and whether justice can be historically and culturally relative.

Islam and slavery: overview of sources and history

The Qur’an makes numerous references to unfree persons – ser- vants, captives, and slaves. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and frequently overlap.
22
Like numerous passages in the Hebrew bible and the New Testament, the Qur’an assumes the permissibility of some individuals owning or controlling others – “what their/your right hands possess” – which was an established practice in Arabia before its revelation. The Qur’an does not explicitly condemn the practice of slavery or attempt to abolish it. Nonetheless, it does provide a number of regulations designed to ameliorate the situation of those owned. It recom- mends freeing slaves, especially “believing” slaves,
23
a mode of classification that presumes sufficient personhood on the part of those owned to have individual faith. Manumission of a slave is required as expiation for certain misdeeds.
24
Another verse discussing emancipation involves the initiative and qualities of the enslaved person, not merely the piety or expiation of the owner, stating that masters should allow slaves who demon- strate some good to purchase their own freedom.
25
Jurists disagreed over whether this verse obliged a slave’s owner to grant such a request or merely recommended such action, but clearly slavery was not always considered to be a permanent state for an enslaved individual.

The Qur’an also suggests certain means of integrating slaves, some of whom were enslaved after being captured in war, into the Muslim community, with special attention to inter- personal relationships. It allows slaves to marry other slaves or

“what your right hands possess” 45

free persons
26
and prohibits owners from prostituting unwilling female slaves.
27
Despite this protection against one form of sexual exploitation, female slaves were not granted an absolute right to control sexual access to their own bodies. Rather, the text indicates that men may have lawful sexual access to “what their/your right hands possess.”
28
On several occasions, the Qur’an mentions this category alongside “wives” or“spouses” as being those to whom sexual access is licit, thus making clear both the distinction between the two groups, who are men- tioned separately, and their joint status as lawful sexual partners. (Although in some instances these references are gender- neutral, the possibility that such verses permitted women’s, or for that matter men’s, access to male captives or slaves was never seriously countenanced.)

In the first generations of Muslims, there was ambiguity and variability in status among unfree women, with less clear differentiation between the pre-Islamic category of captured wives and the Islamic category of female captives taken as war booty and subject to sexual use.
29
The hazy distinctions among those classified as “what your right hands possess” were subject to refinement over time. The classical jurists elaborated signifi- cantly on the Qur’anic material concerning slavery, drawing on the practice of the Prophet and the first Muslims as well as on the customs of conquered areas, as the Muslim empire expanded and solidified under the Umayyads and subsequently the Abbasids. Legal works from that era regulate the enslavement of war captives along with the purchase and sale of slaves. While it was decidedly forbidden to enslave other Muslims, if a non- Muslim converted to Islam after enslavement, he or she remained a slave and could be lawfully purchased and sold like any other slave. (This rule, justifiable on the basis of the Qur’anic praise of freeing “believing” slaves – meaning, the simple fact of belief does not itself free the slave – closes a poten- tial loophole allowing for slaves to gain their freedom through conversion.) The jurists also prescribed penalties for slave owners who maltreated or abused their slaves, up to and includ- ing forced manumission of the slave without compensation to the owner.

46 sexual ethics and islam

Regulations for slave marriage and concubinage also developed over time, with special emphasis on rules to deter- mine the paternity and/or ownership of children born to a female slave. A man could not simultaneously own and be mar- ried to the same female slave.
30
The male owner of a female slave could either marry her off to a different man, thus renouncing his own sexual access to her, or take her as his own concubine, using her sexually himself.
31
Both situations had a specific effect on the status of any children she bore. When female slaves were married off, any children born from the marriage became slaves belonging to the mother’s owner, though her husband was established as their legal father. When a master took his own female slave as a concubine, by contrast, any children she bore would be free and legitimate, with the same status as any chil- dren born of a free wife. The slave who bore her master’s child became an
umm walad
(literally, mother of a child), gaining cer- tain protections. Most importantly, she could not be sold and she was automatically freed upon her master’s death. These guidelines for the
umm walad
were not set forth in the Qur’an; they are frequently attributed to the caliph ‘Umar, though the Prophet’s precedent in freeing Mariyya after she bore him Ibrahim (who died in infancy) was, no doubt, influential.
32

Mariyya al-Qibtiyya, or Maria the Copt, appears in most premodern sources as a slave (
ama
or
jariyya
) owned by the Prophet. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century works authored by Muslims object to this portrayal, implying or out- right declaring that she was his wife. Take Henry Bayman’s emphatic rejection of the view that Muhammad owned a concubine: “[T]he Prophet was
legally married
to all his wives, even to slave girls with whom he was presented. In Islam, not multiple marriages but illicit sex – pre- or extramarital fornica- tion and adultery – is immoral. Islam limited the number of female consorts to four (but recommended one), and with this the proviso that all were brought under the protective umbrella of legal marriage.”
33
Bayman’s statement is circular: by defin- ition, Muhammad was married to his wives; it is only through marriage that a woman becomes a wife. He means, presumably, that Muhammad was married to all the women with whom he

“what your right hands possess” 47

had sex. Bayman thus connects the subject of concubinage to broader questions about sexual morality in Islam: by insisting that Muhammad did not simply have sex with “slave girls,” and associating marriage with both lawfulness (“legal marriage”) and protection (“protective umbrella”), Bayman claims Islamic superiority in matters of sex. His assertion, though, confronts major logical difficulties. He must either ignore the Sunni and Shi‘i legal traditions’ permission for slave concubinage and the hadith evidence showing that the Prophet’s companions (if not the Prophet himself ) had sex with female captives and slaves, or he must deem both legal doctrine and Muslim history to fall outside the scope of “Islam.”

There is less revisionism and apology on the issue of slave concubinage in works not written, or intended for con- sumption, by Westerners – Muslim and non-Muslim. Still, it is almost unimaginable today by many Muslims that a sexual rela- tionship between a man and a female slave bound to him only by the tie of ownership and not matrimony could be legal, much less moral. And yet, since the Prophet is the standard for moral- ity, the exemplar of uprightness, the question of his actions – both personal and as a leader of Muslims – takes on importance.

Women, war captives, and withdrawal

Despite its intrinsic importance, in the absence of agreed upon criteria for approaching the matter of prophetic
sunnah
on the enslavement of war captives and the ownership of slaves, authors usually bypass the troublesome topic in silence. At times, how- ever, such silences scream for attention, as with Ghazi Algosaibi’s presentation of seven hadith with brief commentaries under the title
Revolution in the Sunnah
. Algosaibi – a Saudi who has pub- lished in a variety of literary genres, in addition to serving in various government posts – covers topics ranging from “Integrity in Political Life” to “Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” in this volume, translated into English and published in the U.K. Three of the seven deal in some significant way with women: “Women’s Role in Society (and in the Military!);” “The Rules of

48 sexual ethics and islam

Proof Safeguard Rights,” which has to do with witnesses to illicit sex; and, my concern here, “Family Planning.” Although ostens- ibly concerned with the “revolutionary” words and deeds of the Prophet, in order to focus on these themes Algosaibi ignores other elements in the stories he tells that are deeply troubling for those Muslims committed to a view of Muhammad as inerrantly just and protective of the weak and defenseless.

Revolution in the Sunnah
is a fitting title for his book, Algosaibi explains, because the hadiths he recounts were revolu- tionary in their original Arabian context, and “continue to represent a real ‘revolution’ against the outmoded and discred- ited practices prevailing in these areas of life in some, if not the vast majority of, Muslim countries.” By making a distinction between “Islam” and “culture,” although not in so many words, Algosaibi’s objective is to prove that instead of “need[ing] to import reform from abroad,” Muslims can find the necessary resources for reform within Islam, “provided the opportunistic selectivity with which Islam is practised in Muslim countries is brought to an end.”
34

Algosaibi’s objection to “opportunistic selectivity” is ironic, given that he displays precisely that quality in his discus- sion of the hadith that he chooses to illustrate his point about family planning. Quoting on the authority of “Abu Said al-Kh[u]dri:”

We went out with The Messenger of Allah (pbuh) on the expedition to the Bani al-Mustaliq and captured some con- cubines
35
[as part of the spoils]; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, and we wished to have sexual intercourse with them, observing
‘azl
(
coitus interruptus
[...]). But we said: “We are doing an act before asking the Messenger of Allah who is amongst us?” So we asked the Messenger of Allah, and he said: “It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.”
36

The Prophet’s reported words here are sometimes reported with slight variation in other versions of this story;

“what your right hands possess” 49

sometimes he affirms that no soul that God has decreed to come into existence will be thwarted. Muslim scholars debate back and forth over whether the Prophet’s words mean one may practice withdrawal, but should not, or whether they grant permission without taint of disapproval, serving only as a warning that con- ception may occur despite the measure taken to avoid it. The moral status of withdrawal as an act was of significant enough concern to the victorious Muslim combatants that they asked the Prophet about it. 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 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.
37