Sexual Ethics in Islam (6 page)

Not only are most discourses on dower irrelevant to Muslim practice in the U.S., they are also detached from the logic governing dower in Islamic jurisprudence, where dower constitutes compensation paid by the husband for exclusive legitimate sexual access to his wife. (Al-Shafi‘i, among others, graphically refers to dower as “the vulva’s price,”
thaman al-bud‘a
.
13
) Dower has a very specific purpose and is linked inextricably to other rules, such as male-initiated divorce, that are incompatible with the forms of civil marriage and divorce

marriage, money, and sex 5

utilized by the majority of American Muslims.The Qur’an refers in general terms to a man’s financial obligations toward his wife.
14
The hadith texts discuss a range of dower possibilities from symbolic (an iron ring) to minimal (a quarter dinar or three dirhams) to ideal (the dower paid by the Prophet to his wives or that received by his daughters) to maximum (none fixed). For the most part, these texts are silent on rationales, although the Qur’an does refer to the
ajr
(reward, compensa- tion) paid by a man for “what he enjoys from her.”
15
In the developed logic of the jurists, however, dower came to be understood as compensation in exchange for
milk al-nikah
, the husband’s exclusive dominion over the wife’s sexual and repro- ductive capacity, which also conveys his sole right to dissolve the marriage tie by unilateral divorce.

The linkage of divorce with dower may seem odd, but the husband, in the jurists’ logic, is paying for a type of control. It is this control that makes sex lawful. The wife may not dissolve the marriage without a judge’s approval unless specific condi- tions to the contrary, escape clauses of a sort, were included in the contract.
16
Given that the full dower becomes obligatory after consummation, and could represent a significant sum of money, it makes a certain kind of sense that only the husband would be able to release the wife from the marriage. Otherwise, a woman could simply marry, consummate the marriage (or rather, allow it to be consummated), and then divorce her husband while claiming the full dower amount to which she was entitled. This linkage between dower and divorce rights illustrates the interconnectedness of each element of classical legal tradition, and its attempt to achieve conceptual consist- ency; any attempt to modify the rules surrounding divorce but not those governing dower, as some advocates for women’s rights have proposed, would alter the marital dynamic signifi- cantly.

Dower is not alone among the financial obligations associated with marriage that have been given new rationales by modern Muslim authors. Contemporary Muslim thought gen- erally links male provision of
nafaqa
, or support, with a wife’s household service: the husband/father earns a living and a

6 sexual ethics and islam

wife/mother stays home and keeps the house and raises the children.
17
Yet this provider-homemaker division of labor does not reflect the actual experience of most Muslim families, where women contribute to their own support and/or that of their households and children, nor does it resonate with classical texts. Those texts, while sometimes suggesting that women have a religious obligation to manage the household, generally stress that the husband maintains his wife in exchange not for house- hold services but for her sexual availability to him.

Sex

Current conventional wisdom among Muslims and non- Muslims alike holds that Islam is a religion with a positive view of human sexuality.
18
Medieval Christian polemics against Islam viewed its sensualism as barbaric in comparison to the purity of Christianity, but many modern commentators see Islam’s world-affirming perspective as more realistic than the suppos- edly ascetic and world-denying stance of Christianity.
19
The comparison relies on an oversimplified view of Christianity, but the claims with regard to Islam have a basis in Muslim tradition. Key Islamic texts present marriage, and sex within it, as a nat- ural and desirable part of human life. The Prophet Muhammad reportedly objected to religious celibacy (“No monkery in Islam”)
20
and specifically claimed marriage as part of his
sunnah
, or authoritative practice. Premodern biographical treatments of his life celebrate his virility as part of his sound human nature.

Both classical and contemporary authors likewise rec- ognize women’s sexual needs and appetites, but with different emphases.
21
Classical texts note the importance of female fulfill- ment, but usually focus on the discord-producing effects of female dissatisfaction (the potential for social
fitna
) while stressing the wives’ duty to remain sexually available to their husbands. Contemporary authors, often quoting selectively from this corpus, pay less attention to these themes.
22
Instead, they focus on women’s sexual rights within marriage, attempting to prove the importance of female pleasure by highlighting

marriage, money, and sex 7

the dissociation of sex from reproduction and the importance of female orgasm.

Significant texts in the Qur’an and hadith allude to the importance of female gratification and satisfaction in the sexual act. These sources, drawn on by al-Ghazali in his frequently- cited writings, stress men’s responsibility for making their wives’ experiences pleasurable.
23
Al-Ghazali frames his discussion of the sexual act in terms of a husband’s responsibility for keeping his wife satisifed; it is a matter of the husband’s duty, rather than the wife’s right.
24
This duty has social, as well as intimate, dimen- sions: a man is obligated to keep his wife satisfied in part to keep her from wreaking social havoc. Given women’s generally slower trajectory of arousal and orgasm, both foreplay and prolonged stimulation are required, the former to ensure readiness for penetration, the latter to ensure attainment of climax. Foreplay, in his view, is the subject of the Qur’anic command “do some good act for your souls beforehand.”
25
He also cites a statement attributed to the Prophet, counseling men not to fall upon their wives like beasts, but rather to send “a messenger” prior to the sexual act. When questioned, Muhammad is said to have clarified that this “messenger” was kisses and caresses.

Al-Ghazali insists that it is the husband’s responsibility, having aroused his wife sufficiently for penetration, to see to it that she also reaches orgasm. It is likely that she will only climax after “the husband has attained his desired end;” nonetheless, “mutual estrangement” may occur “whenever the husband is too quick to ejaculate; simultaneity in the moment of orgasm is more delightful to her.” This is part of his rationale for foreplay; if the wife is sufficiently close to orgasm before penetration, mutual climax is more likely. Al-Ghazali insists that the wife’s dissatisfaction can damage the intimate relationship between the couple. Again, the husband is charged with ensuring this does not occur: “The husband should not be preoccupied with his own satisfaction, because the woman will often be shy.”
26

Al-Ghazali’s explicit discussion of female orgasm high- lights one of the drawbacks of coitus interruptus (
‘azl
), the method of birth control best known to early Muslims: a man

8 sexual ethics and islam

must withdraw prior to his ejaculation to prevent conception, but “coitus interruptus may diminish her pleasure.” As Sa’diyya Shaikh points out, a wife is “entitled to full sexual pleasure” and has “the right to offspring if she so desires.” Shaikh views this doctrine as evidence of “the priority given in Islam to mutual sexual fulfillment as well as consultative decision making between a married couple in terms of family planning.”
27
Sex for non-procreative purposes was clearly permissible: with very few exceptions, Muslim authorities accepted contraceptive meas- ures and approved of sex with pregnant women and nursing mothers, making clear that sexual pleasure was a worthwhile aim even where pregnancy was an impossible, unlikely, or undesir- able outcome of intercourse. Shaikh is thus largely correct in her broad claim that “Within the Islamic view of marriage, an individual has the right to sexual pleasure within marriage, which is independent of one’s choice to have children.”
28
Yet the mention of an ungendered “individual” who has this right ignores the context within which classical thinkers discuss mar- ital sex. Although Hanbalis, Malikis, and Hanafis viewed the wife’s permission for withdrawal as necessary, most Shafi‘is dis- agreed, and the reasons behind their disagreement are instruct- ive.
29
According to one rationale, since a wife didn’t have the right to demand intercourse at any given time (a point on which the jurists largely agreed across the legal schools), her husband could prevent her from conceiving or attaining sexual pleasure by abstaining from intercourse with her entirely. Given that she therefore had no independent right to orgasm or to conception, her consent regarding withdrawal was irrelevant. This doctrine, a minority view, complicates the simple view of an “Islamic right” to female sexual pleasure.

Muslim acknowledgement of the positive aspects of female sexuality has historically coexisted with two views that challenge it in different ways. First, certain elements of the clas- sical Muslim tradition treat female sexuality as dangerous, with potentially disruptive and chaotic effects on society.
30
Histor- ians have demonstrated how anxieties about temptation and female sexuality translated into insistence (never fully achieved in reality) on restricting the appearance of women in public

marriage, money, and sex 9

spaces.
31
Muslim worry over
fitna
– chaos and disorder – has often focused on the sexual temptation caused both by women’s unregulated desires and the troublesome desire that women provoke in men. Second, and in a paradoxical relationship to this view of women as sexually insatiable and thus prone to create social chaos, Muslim authorities have stressed the importance of the fulfillment of male sexual needs, especially in the context of marriage. Drawing particularly on several hadith delineating dire consequences for women who refuse their hus- bands’ sexual overtures, the insistence on men’s sexual needs and wives’ responsibility to fulfill them has competed for prom- inence in modern intra-Muslim discourses on sex with the recognition of female sexual needs.

Despite the scholars’ acknowledgement of the import- ance of female satisfaction in the sexual act, the overwhelming weight of the Muslim legal and exegetical tradition is on women’s obligations to make themselves sexually available to their husbands, rather than the reverse. This bias in the sources emerges even in contemporary discussions that attempt to dis- cuss male and female sexual rights in parallel, highlighting the immensity of the task for those who would redefine sex within marriage as a fully mutual endeavor. A fatwa by conservative Saudi mufti Ibn Jibreen
32
exemplifies the extent to which con- cepts of reciprocity and mutuality permeate even conservative Muslim discourses. At the same time, his strongly gendered understanding of male and female sexuality is broadly represen- tative of much contemporary Muslim discourse, including that produced in Western contexts.

Ibn Jibreen’s fatwa, entitled “The Ruling on Either of the Two Spouses Denying the Other Their Lawful Rights,” responds to the query, “Is it permissible for either of the two spouses to deny the natural rights of the other for a long period of time, without any acceptable excuse?”
33
The mufti’s response exem- plifies the tension between moral exhortations surrounding wives’ sexual rights in marriage, and the legal logic governing sex as part of the structure of gender-differentiated marital claims beginning with dower and carried through to divorce. Though the questioner posed the problem of “either of the two spouses

10 sexual ethics and islam

[denying] the natural rights of the other” as a gender-neutral one, sex in marriage is not a gender-neutral question. Ibn Jibreen opens by accepting his questioner’s premise of parity, declaring that “sexual relations” are among the “needs” of both husband and wife, but proceeds very quickly to discuss men and women in parallel, and then to differentiate them. Eschewing the view that women’s desires are unmanageable, he opines that men generally have “a stronger desire” for sex than women. The rest of the fatwa considers men’s sexual claims in marriage, then women’s sexual claims in marriage, lastly returning to universal statements about sex in marriage.

The limited and contingent sexual rights of a wife stand in contrast to the unrestricted right of a husband to sex “when- ever he desires it.” With the caveat that a man may not harm her or prevent her from performing any of her religious duties, Ibn Jibreen declares that a wife has“an obligation ... to allow her hus- band to have sexual intercourse with her whenever he desires it.” (Note the passivity here: she is to “allow” him “to have sexual intercourse with her,” rather than actively having sex with him.) Ibn Jibreen accurately categorizes this as the dominant, virtu- ally unanimous, view of the Muslim jurisprudential tradition. Like al-Ghazali, who supports the wifely obligation to be avail- able to her husband in a passage less often quoted by modern Muslim authors,
34
Ibn Jibreen recognizes that a wife also “has rights to have her intimate needs fulfilled.” However, a husband is not obligated to satisfy her “whenever”
she
“desires it;” rather the husband must “have sexual intercourse with his wife (at least) once in each third of the year, if he is able to do so.”
35

A number of hadith that make assertions about wives’ sexual obligations serve as proof for this husbandly right; although Ibn Jibreen does not cite them in this fatwa, they appear in other opinions issued by the Saudi fatwa council with which he is affiliated, as well as the writings of other thinkers. Abu Huraira is the authority for five closely related narrations in the two
Sahih
s of Muslim and Bukhari. Muslim reports three statements by the Prophet associating the husband’s displeasure with divine displeasure in a chapter entitled “It is not permis- sible for a woman to abandon the bed of her husband:”