For the vast majority of Muslims world-wide – not only extremists or conservatives, but also those who consider themselves moderate or progressive – determining whether a particular belief or practice is acceptable largely hinges on deciding whether or not it is legitimately “Islamic.” Even many of those who do not base their personal conduct or ideals on normative Islam believe, as a matter of strategy, that in order for social changes to achieve wide acceptance among Muslims they must be convincingly presented as compatible with Islam. This focus on Islamic authenticity is particularly intense on matters relating to women, gender, and the family, where complex issues are often reduced to fodder for charged debates over “women’s status in Islam.” The so-called woman question is central to both anti-Muslim polemic and the apologetic counter-discourse that adopts a terminology of liberation to describe the way “true” or “real” Islam respects and protects women, despite the existence of potentially oppressive “cultural” practices. The limitations of these dichotomous approaches are evident, and a rich and growing body of scholarship by Muslim women and men seeks to deepen and complicate discussions of issues relevant to women’s lives as well as our understanding of the layered and intertwined nature of dominant discourses.
As a precursor to my own foray into these treacherous waters, I want to highlight the importance of questioning women’s status in Islam – a phrase that can be read at least three ways. First, despite its reductionist language, the notion of “women’s status in Islam” can serve as shorthand conveying the point that a number of interrelated inequities constrain the lives of many Muslim women. But this acknowledgement alone will not get us very far. A second approach would question the usefulness of the concept of “women’s status” itself. Muslim women are so diverse in terms of class, geography, ethnicity, age, marital history, and education that generalizations about our “status” are meaningless. Even if one limits the application of the term to the realm of ideals rather than women’s lived experience, the presupposition of an idealized and uniform tradition dramatically oversimplifies a complex and heterogeneous intellectual and textual legacy that spans nearly a millennium and a half. Yet the tendency to cast discussions in terms of women’s status persists, particularly where Muslims want to point out that there is no necessary link between Islam and specific injustices. Several years ago, after the September 11 attacks, I contributed a chapter to an anthology of writings by American Muslims.1 I chose a title, “The Problematic Question of Women’s Status in Islam,” appropriate to my essay’s argument that the formulation of the question was inherently flawed. An editor returned my proofs with the content intact, but a new and improved title: “The True Status of Women in Islam.” Although we did reach agreement on another title (which did not mention “status” at all), the incident made clear to me that even for those with a critical agenda, it requires vigilance to escape reliance on clichéd and defensive modes of presentation.
The phrase “questioning women’s status in Islam” can also be read in a third way, as addressing the status of women who question. Too often, Muslims, especially females, who challenge certain widely accepted views are met with warnings to desist; that way, it is said, lies heresy, blasphemy, apostasy. Those who have appointed themselves the guardians of communal orthodoxy are particularly vigilant on matters concerned with women and gender – in part, because it is in these realms that the construction of Muslim identity in self-conscious opposition to a decadent West takes place.
The terms “Islam” and the “West” are oppositional but also interdependent; their relationship to one another is in a process of constant renegotiation, particularly now that one can speak of “Western Muslims.” The growing Muslim populations in nations that have long exemplified the Other for Muslim thinkers are only one reason that this dichotomy is unsatisfactory. Muslim thinkers as well as their works easily cross borders, through satellite television, Internet sites, and subsidized translations of doctrinally correct materials for distribution in European and North American mosques. Even materials produced for audiences in Muslim societies of the Middle East and South Asia are not unaffected by Western discourses; centuries of give-and-take, built on the unequal socio-economic and geopolitical foundations of European colonialism, have resulted in a palpable enmeshing of concern with the West in all facets of Muslim intellectual life and production, but none more so than women and gender.
To generalize, Western discourse from the colonial era onward portrays the basic condition of the Muslim woman as downtrodden, in contrast to the respected and (sometimes) liberated Western woman.2 By and large, Muslim discussions of women’s place, position, or status – in English and other Western languages, especially – are a reaction to these Western critiques. In quite a number of works, selective quotations from nineteenth and twentieth-century European authorities are used to either praise Islamic norms as superior to Western ones, or to corroborate a view about female nature also held by the Muslim author. In other instances, Muslim authorities may attempt to reverse the values assigned to Muslim and Western treatment of women by criticizing lax moral standards or other elements of Western social life.
Although these works are ostensibly concerned with women, the rhetoric on both sides tends to revolve around sex and sexuality. Western media present the Muslim woman as a figure whose oppression is inextricably linked to her sexuality; her oppression is a particularly sexual one, symbolized by fanatical concern with women’s bodies, “the veil,” and female seclusion. Muslim critique, unwittingly echoing certain Western feminist arguments, counters that when it comes to female dress, Western societies oppress women by judging their worth as persons based on physical attractiveness. While non-Muslims judge the lot of the Muslim woman harsh because of the permissibility of polygamy, Muslim authors counter, not without some justification, that an obsessive focus on polygamy as degrading to women is hypocritical when adultery, serial remarriage, and out-of-wedlock births to men who do not take paternal responsibility are rampant in the West. In non-marital liaisons, “The man has no commitment or obligation toward the mistress or girl friend”3 which, the argument goes, stands in contrast to the humane, honest, and realistic nature of polygamy.4
On matters of sexual morality in general, Muslim authors from a variety of perspectives present the Muslim model as better for women than degrading Western norms which, in allowing unrestricted sexual liberty, fail to protect women from male exploitation. A Nigerian scholar whose works on Islamic topics are circulated extensively, ‘Abdul Rahman Doi captures a common sentiment when he declares, “Heart-breaking transference of love and affection, neglected wives, forsaken children, mistresses, and street girls are common features of Western life.”5 In contrast to “Western women [who] are the most unhappy creatures on earth,” Muslim women are protected by breadwinning husbands who provide adequately and consistently for their dependents, a category that includes wives and children.6 A Muslim husband is the ultimate authority within his home but does not act in a dictatorial fashion or abuse his powers of decision-making, and it is his greater rationality that prevents the family from the easy dissolution that would occur if women were given control over divorce.
This idealized portrait of Muslim family life clearly cannot be compared fairly to the worst abuses found in non-Muslim Western society. It is seldom acknowledged or even recognized, however, that the model of family life Doi and others idealize in this way not only does not describe reality for the majority of Muslims, but is also quite distinct from the ideals upheld in authoritative premodern texts, where sexual availability, not child-rearing or homemaking, was a wife’s main duty. Of course, these texts were prescriptive rather than descriptive, and other evidence suggests that many non-elite women did perform considerable household work and were primary providers of care for their children. At the level of ideals, however, Doi’s neo-traditional vision departs considerably from earlier models of Muslim sexual ethics. Although classical and medieval thinkers expressed, like Doi, strong concern for a husband’s economic responsibilities toward his wife as well as his kind treatment of her, they authorized multiple wives and unlimited concubines for men with no stigma attached and accepted restrictions on women’s mobility to ensure their exclusivity and availability to the men with sexual rights over them. Ninth-century jurist al-Shafi‘i spoke for the majority when he declared that a husband was not bound by a stipulation in his marriage contract not to marry additional wives or take any concubines from among his female slaves, justifying his view on the ground that such a condition “would be narrowing what God made wide for [the man].”7
In fact, the matter-of-fact references to concubinage throughout the writings of Muslim scholars highlight the most striking difference between contemporary and classical sexual ethics: the premodern acceptance of a male owner’s sexual access to his female slaves. Classical texts were not describing demographic reality, but rather participating in a discourse of advice and regulation. Nonetheless, their assumption that men would have multiple sexual partners, wives and/or concubines, stands in marked distinction to contemporary Muslim discourses on sexual relationships which, when they discuss polygamy approvingly, generally do so with justifications premised on female needs for protection rather than simple male prerogative. Although generalizations about modern sensibilities are fraught with peril, particularly given the diversity within the billion-strong Muslim populace, it is not a stretch to claim that most Muslims today would view al-Shafi‘i’s doctrine on permissible sexual relationships, particularly concerning slave concubines, as incompatible with fairness and justice (themselves notoriously variable concepts).8 Yet while virtually no one advocates reviving slavery as an institution, slaveholding fundamentally shaped the contours of Islamic ethical and legal thought on sex in ways that have not been fully recognized. And although the clearly unequal model of sexual ethics enshrined in classical texts no longer makes sense to a significant number of Muslims, at least at an intuitive level, nothing new has emerged to replace it. Despite the readiness of some Muslims to discard the model inherited from the classical jurists in favor of something more egalitarian – and the desire, on the part of a subset of these, to be open to new forms of sanctioned relationships – little attention has been paid to themes such as consent, reciprocity, and coercion that are crucial to both an understanding of traditional Islamic sexual ethics and the possibilities for transformations in those ideals. My exploration of these issues in this book is a preliminary contribution to a necessary and far-ranging conversation over all aspects of sexual ethics in Muslim life and thought.
Of course, the sexual subordination of women is by no means exclusive to Muslim societies or Islamic thought. Until the very recent past there was a near universality of laws proposing a system of allocating marital rights based on an exchange of male support and protection for female “sexual, reproductive, and housekeeping services.”9 (The exact contours of such exchanges varied dramatically between and even within societies due to variables including class status and religious doctrine; in Muslim societies, the requirement of housekeeping was usually absent in theory, however prevalent in practice.) Slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, which was both widespread and legal, illustrates that the sexual use of owned persons is not unique to Islamic texts or practice; likewise, biblical texts also permit, or at least tacitly condone, the sexual use of female slaves as well as polygamy.10 Nor are sexual slavery and sexual abuse (of both males and females) limited to ancient societies, as contemporary debates over human trafficking and sex work indicate. Specifically sexual abuse exists within a larger climate of widespread intimate violence against women and girls, from bride-burnings or “dowry deaths” in India, to “crimes of passion” in the United States and Latin America, where jealous men murder (ex-)wives or (ex-)girlfriends.
Systemic injustices call for comparative treatment of hierarchical and gendered domination across geographic, chronological, and cultural boundaries.11 Yet although such study is necessary and fruitful, calls for comparison by those working on Islam-related topics are too often motivated not by a sincere wish to understand deeper structures of oppression but by the desire to divert attention and criticism from Islam and Muslims. It is true that Muslim norms and practices are historically consonant with those of other religions and civilizations, and that the criticisms frequently levied against Islam by non-Muslim Westerners reflect both cultural ignorance and historical amnesia. To take just one example, Americans and Europeans who decry the normative requirement of marital subordination for Muslim women seem to forget that “Obedience was so fundamental to the biblical idea of a wife that it remained in Jewish and Christian wedding vows until the late twentieth century.”12 This work takes the existence of these parallels as a given, using comparative examples primarily to highlight significant variations – as, for example, between ancient Near Eastern and biblical views on illicit sex and those of classical Muslim authors. In restricting myself largely to Islamic texts and, to a lesser extent, Muslim experiences, I am aware that I run the risk of contributing to the common impression that Islam is uniquely oppressive toward women or that the problems of sexual ethics Muslims face are somehow more intractable than those confronted by adherents of other faiths. Some may view my focus on sexual matters as playing into the Western obsession with Muslim sexuality at the expense of other, more vital, areas of concern. Poverty, political repression, war, and global power dynamics are, indeed, crucial to Muslim women’s lives.13 However, even these issues cannot be entirely divorced from sex and sexuality: poverty matters differently for women, when it constrains women’s inability to negotiate marriage terms or leave abusive spouses; repressive regimes may attempt to demonstrate their “Islamic” credentials by capitulating to demands for “Shari‘a” in family matters or imposing putatively Islamic laws that punish women disproportionately for sexual transgressions. Nonetheless, as Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow points out, “writing about sexuality unavoidably re-enacts singling it out as a special issue and problem.”14 The possible benefits of an exploration of sexual ethics seem to me worth the risks, given the frequent invocation of Islamic authenticity in those spaces where religion has a normative impact – that is, nearly everywhere.
Why, though, focus on texts when Islamic normative doctrine has never been entirely reliable as an indicator of Muslim practice? Notwithstanding British colonial official F.X. Ruxton’s claim, in the preface to his translation of a fourteenth-century Maliki legal manual, that “in the case of Muhammadan countries, it is the Law that has moulded the people, and not the people the Law,” in reality the effects of social circumstances on both the formulation and the implementation of the law has always been of central importance.15 Real women’s (and men’s) lives do not neatly follow the patterns set out in legal manuals, and have never done so.16 As noted above, differences between and within Muslim populations are so significant that any attempts to discuss “the Muslim woman” or “sex in Islam” must be suspect; variables of class, geography, and time period, not to mention individual characteristics which are impossible to account for in statistics, make generalizations frequently misleading. Additionally, for the sensitive subjects under discussion here, empirical evidence concerning practice is difficult to obtain. But there is a relationship between ideal and reality and there is a certain coherence to premodern prescriptive models of Muslim womanhood and sexual relations.17 It is precisely in the arena of sexual ethics where normative Islamic texts and thought have been, and continue to be, most influential.
Before proceeding to consider these texts, it is worth asking why a Muslim who considers herself progressive (with all the caveats about the inadequacy of that term) should bother with engaging the Islamic intellectual tradition at all. Doing so, it is true, bolsters the authority of “written Islam, textual, ‘men’s’ Islam (an Islam essentially not of the Book but of the Texts, the medieval texts)” at the expense “of the oral and ethical traditions of lived Islam.”18 As Leila Ahmed points out, “textual Islam” has historically been the province of a male elite, and does not accurately represent the understandings of Islam embedded in the experiences of many Muslims, especially women. If I do not accept the sole interpretive authority of the juristic and exegetical heritage – which is strongly patriarchal and sometimes misogynist – why not bypass it entirely, and turn to the Qur’an alone as a guide? What is to be gained from focusing energy on analysis and critique of texts that I do not consider authoritative?19 There are several possible answers to these questions. In part, the scholars are worth studying because of their methodological sophistication, acceptance of divergent perspectives, and their diligence in the pursuit of understanding of the divine will. More obviously, they are worth analyzing because their frameworks and assumptions often undergird modern views in ways that are not fully recognized or understood.
For all of its flaws and insufficiencies, the Muslim intellectual and, especially, legal tradition provides significant ground for engagement on matters of ethics. Conventional wisdom in some circles has come to view “oral” Islam (which Ahmed equates to “women’s” Islam) as more compassionate and ethical than “textual” or “official” (“men’s”) Islam but this is an oversimplification. As Ahmed and others show, “official” or “textual” Islam is sometimes more protective of women’s rights than cultural practices that depart from the jurists’ rules. It is impossible to generalize about whether popular practices are more favorable to women than strict observance of doctrine, because so much depends on which women and which doctrine. In any case, the premodern legal texts dismissed by many contemporary thinkers as hopelessly patriarchal or narrowly legalistic are attuned to ethical considerations to a considerable extent, even though, on many matters of gender and sex, their authors’ ethical visions depart from those that I see as being in accordance with highest aspirations of the Qur’an. In part, this book is an attempt to demonstrate that constructive and critical engagement with the Islamic intellectual heritage can be important in providing a framework for renewed and invigorated Muslim ethical thought.
The scholarly tradition is one significant source of knowledge and wisdom; much is lost when Muslims – Qur’an-only feminists or pro-hadith Salafis – choose to bypass it for a literalist approach to source texts.20 Careful investigation of the legal tradition, for instance, demonstrates the ways in which authorities have, from the earliest years of Islam, used their own judgment and the customs of their societies to adapt Qur’anic and prophetic dictates to changed circumstances. It illustrates that some of the doctrines taken for granted as “Islamic” emerged at a particular time and place as the result of human interpretive endeavor and need not be binding for all time. Furthermore, the precedent of earlier jurists can authorize a similar interpretive and adaptive process for Muslims today, including bypassing (through a variety of interpretive devices) even seemingly clear Qur’anic statements. A legal methodology offers legitimacy for a flexible approach to the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sunnah as revelation that emerged in an historical context.21
How does this discussion of jurisprudence and law relate to the issue of ethics? The word ethics does not have a precise equivalent in Arabic; akhlaq, the usual term, is better rendered as morals or character, and adab, a less frequently used alternative, is more appropriately translated as comportment.22 Most of what falls under the rubric of ethics as understood in the modern West was the purview of the Muslim jurists, who addressed issues well beyond the scope of what is usually understood by “law.” As Jonathan Brockopp states, “Islamic ‘law’ is better characterized as an ethical system than a legal one. It does not merely separate action into categories of required and forbidden, but also includes intermediate categories of recommended, reprehensible, and indifferent.”23 This five-fold classification scheme (al-ahkam al-khamsa) became standard among Muslim thinkers, although they often disagreed about where particular acts fell on the scale.24 It allows for more nuanced categorizations than the simple “lawful/forbidden” (halal/haram) dichotomy – often equated to Islamic/un-Islamic – that informs contemporary Muslim discourses.25 The lawful/forbidden dyad was, of course, relevant for premodern Muslim scholars, who warned against “making lawful what is forbidden and forbidding what is lawful,” but they generally engaged in a less categorical and more nuanced analysis of moral and immoral behavior.
What does it mean to say that something is lawful or forbidden according to Islam (or Islamic law or shari‘a) today? The relationship between enforceable duties and ethical obligations has become increasingly blurred in a world where Islamic legal institutions no longer function in anything like the manner they did in the classical and medieval periods.26 Even in the premodern Muslim world, the jurists’ doctrines did not find direct expression in the courts. Given these shifts, is Islamic jurisprudence the necessary framework for resolving how to address issues of marriage, family, and sex? While some insist that the legal framework developed by Muslim jurists from approximately 900–1400 CE must govern all Muslim behavior, the reality in the contemporary world is that the vast majority of social and economic transactions engaged in by Muslims, even in majority-Muslim societies, do not strictly follow these legal precepts. Only on some matters of personal status do some majority-Muslim nations retain religiously based laws, and these differ widely from one country to another. In many cases, these post-colonial family laws also diverge sharply from the classical Islamic jurisprudence on which they are purportedly based. Among Muslim-minority populations in the nations of North America and Europe, moreover, Muslims are free to apply only those regulations that they choose, either writing them into contracts drafted to comply with applicable civil laws or entrusting compliance out of belief and conscience, just as in matters of religious practice.
As an American, I am particularly concerned with the issues facing what British scholar Abdal-Hakim Murad refers to as “Muslims living in post-traditional contexts in the West.”27 Living in a nation where Islamic law has no coercive power, regardless of its moral weight for individual believers, I write as one with the luxury of deciding whether and how to apply religious doctrine in my own life – whether to arrange my affairs to follow the dictates of one or another school of jurisprudence, or the regulations in the Qur’an, or to follow civil law. The entirely voluntary nature of all types of religious observance means that the urgent questions for Muslims living under civil laws in North America and Europe in particular are ethical or moral rather than narrowly legal. At the same time, the fact that there are no putatively Islamic civil statutes involved means that those Muslims concerned with Islamic law tend to focus on “authentic” texts, rather than national legal codes, making engagement with the tradition necessary.28
Even in majority-Muslim societies, there has been a dramatic shift over the past century in the role of the ‘ulama, who once held a monopoly on many forms of religious authority. Although the ‘ulama retain prominence in a variety of contexts, some of the most influential thinkers of the late nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries have come from outside this class, a tendency which seems likely to continue unabated in the twenty-first century. Basheer Nafi and Suha Taji-Farouki argue that reformist (salafi) insistence on “the primacy of the foundational Islamic texts, the Qur’an and Sunna,” has been one important factor in “the rupturing of traditional Islamic authority.” They suggest that “As the salafi idea of returning directly to the founding texts gradually displaced the assumption of the ulamatic traditions of learning as the necessary credentials for speaking on behalf of Islam, the Islamic cultural arena became wide open to an assortment of voices, reflecting new notions of authority.”29 In theory, the processes Taji-Farouki and Nafi identify could lead to inclusiveness. Yet as Khaled Abou El Fadl has shown, the “new notions of authority,” far from opening up a democratic intellectual space, have tended toward authoritarianism, and a rigidification of debates.
Four interconnected issues recur throughout this study. First, the discourse of Islamic authenticity has had a stifling effect on intra-Muslim debates about sex and sexuality. Second, the increasing gap between classical doctrines, present-day “values,” and actual sexual practices has led to questioning by some of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” model embedded in Islamic norms that allows for deviation in practice, provided certain ideals aren’t questioned. Third, the shift in values surrounding sex brings into relief the legal tradition’s systematic, though not necessarily intentional, devaluation of mutual consent as an ethico-religious value for sexual relationships and sexual acts. This classical model exists in tension with the stress on consent and mutuality in contemporary Muslim discourses on marriage and gender relations. Finally, and cutting across the previous three items, I am concerned with structures of authority and the shifting and competing models of authoritativeness invoked by participants in contemporary debates over sexual ethics. I will address the first three items in a bit more detail, returning to questions of authority throughout the study.
The continual framing of discussions over sex in terms of “Islamic-ness” is part of a broader flattening of moral argument and thoughtful debate among Muslims. Kevin Reinhart has noted the shift among Muslims to talking about “Islam” as a source of authority rather than the Qur’an, God, the Prophet, or the scholars.30 On the one hand, this shift may facilitate attention to principles; on the other hand, it allows for the emergence of doctrinal authoritarianism. Abou El Fadl has presented a painstaking portrait of this authoritarianism, which he views as pervasive in contemporary Muslim discourse. While the primary targets of his critique are the numerous conservative authorities who presume to speak for Islam – or rather, for God – his arguments are equally relevant to those who advocate change. According to Abou El Fadl, those who would argue against the weight of inherited tradition have an obligation to make clear that they are doing so, even as they present their case for why an alternate position has more merit.31 This requires acknowledging the extensive and diverse views of previous generations of thinkers, not just citation of isolated hadith or Qur’anic verses as if those texts were entirely dispositive of a particular point.
The issue of full disclosure is particularly relevant given the fundamental shift in conventional wisdom among many Muslims on issues of sexual morality and gender equality, manifested in particular in an emphasis on individual consent. Just to take one example, while the classical Muslim legal tradition uniformly accepted a father’s right to marry off his minor daughters (and sons) without consulting them, modern statements, including a recent Saudi fatwa, gloss over this consensus in favor of prophetic statements commanding that they be consulted.32 For many Muslims born and raised in Western nations, the issue of consent emerges as well in discussions of sex outside marriage. The widespread acceptance of sex between consenting adults in the broader culture has led some Muslims to question the rationale behind Qur’anic, hadith, and legal prohibitions of such liaisons. The confusion over the issue arises in part because of the unfamiliarity of lay Muslims with the basic concepts structuring Islamic notions of lawful sex – my third point.
There is a mismatch between views of marriage and sexual intimacy as based in mutual consent and reciprocal desire and the entire structure of classical jurisprudential doctrines surrounding lawful sexuality. These doctrines viewed milk – that is, ownership, dominion, or control – as the basis for licit sex, whether it was within marriage, milk al-nikah, or slavery, milk al-yamin. The general disappearance of slavery in Muslim nations has meant, of course, that only sex within marriage is now considered lawful, to the point that some Muslim apologists refuse to acknowledge that slave concubinage was considered a perfectly lawful and normal institution for well over a millennium. Because slavery is no longer legally practiced in the Muslim world, many have assumed that the regulations surrounding slavery are irrelevant to contemporary discussions of Muslim marriage and family law; thus, discussions of legal texts make little reference to the jurists’ frequent treatment of questions involving slaves. Nonetheless, slavery remains conceptually central to the legal regulations surrounding marriage. The basic understanding of marriage as a relationship of ownership or control is predicated on an analogy to slavery at a fundamental level, and the discussion of wives and concubines together strengthens the conceptual relationship. These connections tend to pass unremarked, however, and the lack of active grappling with the implications of abolition can lead to irony or even absurdity. For instance, an English translator of Sahih Muslim, one of the two most important Sunni hadith collections, asserts that one finds “In Islam ... the absolute prohibition of every kind of extra-matrimonial connection” in his preface to a chapter (Marriage) containing several matter-of-fact references to Muslim men having sex with their female slaves.33 His impassioned declaration seems to me less an apologetic remark tailored for Western or non-Muslim consumption than a reflection of the extent to which the entire edifice of classical thought on sex and sexuality clashes with modern expectations, including those of Muslims who are deeply committed to the relevance of the classical tradition.
It is an obvious point, but it bears stating directly: in making value judgments, people are influenced not only by religious texts and teachings but also by their own social, cultural, and religious backgrounds. The early jurists were no exception to this rule; like contemporary Muslim thinkers, they could not help but be influenced by their own sense of what was right and wrong, natural and unnatural. In engaging with Muslim texts of the past, it is important to consider the ways in which their authors’ base assumptions differ from those of the present. One useful indicator of the distance separating a contemporary reader from a past audience is the hierarchy of sexual acts that twelfth-century scholar al-Ghazali, whose writings on sexuality have been frequently quoted by modern authors, presents in his magisterial work The Revivification of the Religious Sciences. Al-Ghazali counsels a man who cannot afford to marry a free woman that if he feels sexual urges that he needs to satisfy, marrying another’s female slave is a lesser evil than masturbation, even though children born of the union will be enslaved. Neither is as bad as zina – in this context, fornication. Although marriage to someone else’s slave is problematic, al-Ghazali simply assumes the permissibility of a man’s sexual use of his own female slaves. Intercourse with a slave who has no opportunity to grant or withhold consent is morally better than masturbation, which cannot involve coercion, or illicit sex with a willing woman. Many Muslims today find it simply unintelligible that sex with a slave acquired for that purpose would be preferable to sex with a consenting partner to whom one had no legal tie.
I will return to the complicated subject of consent in chapter 9, but want to stress at this point that while I do not believe consent and mutuality are fundamentally incompatible with an Islamic ethics of sex, these values were not prefigured in premodern Muslim texts in a way satisfactory for the twenty-first century. Although there are important lessons to be learned from the writings of premodern Muslim scholars, a great psychic distance separates Muslims today from the circumstances of past centuries when authoritative doctrines were formulated. Given this very real dissonance34 between the cultural assumptions undergirding the classical edifices of jurisprudence and exegesis and the modern notions influencing Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people everywhere, even those who consider themselves conservative or traditional, there is an acute need to explore vital themes and connections through a variety of texts.
One “modern” value that is criticized in some discussions of the Muslim heritage concerning sex is prudery. Muslims have often been self-congratulatory about the heritage of explicit discussions of sex in legal and literary works, without recognizing the pervasive nature of androcentric and even misogynist assumptions in those texts. The presence of erotica in Muslim literature, as well as the positive valuation of sexual pleasure in authoritative sources, does not resolve the problem of the double-standard inherent in this literature; texts focus on men’s needs and desires.35 Even sensitive scholars can overlook these dynamics, which are deeply ingrained in the tradition. When the “Sex and the Umma” section of the website Muslim WakeUp was launched in early 2004, the site editor solicited articles from Muslim scholars in support of the endeavor.36 One essay quoted a ribald joke attributed by Ahmed al-Tifashi to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, the fourth Sunni caliph and first Shi‘i Imam, ‘Ali b.Abi Talib in a work containing “the amusing stories, entertaining poems and flagrant incidents involving sexual pleasure he had witnessed or heard from colleagues.”37 The joke was intended to demonstrate the “raunchy and delightful” nature of medieval Islamic discourse in contrast to the prudery that characterizes contemporary Muslim discussions of sex and sexuality. In it, a woman approached ‘Ali to complain “that she had given away her daughter in marriage, but the husband divorced her because she was only three feet tall. ‘Three feet!’ declared Ali, ‘that ought to have been enough – at most she needs to able to take nine inches!’” The article immediately garnered comments from readers when it was posted, with the majority aghast at the intimation that ‘Ali could have possibly said such a thing. Did these replies express outrage, disgust, or even mild concern at the idea that ‘Ali could have referred to a woman in such an objectified manner, reducing her to a sexual receptacle? Hardly: what shocked readers was the scandalous assertion that ‘Ali could have joked in such a familiar manner with a woman who was not a close relation to himself! My point is that it is not merely contemporary prudery that Muslims concerned with sexuality have to combat; despite valuable elements in premodern texts, including a willingness to be explicit and have a sense of humor about sexual matters, there are deeply troubling elements that must not be ignored.
Before proceeding, I want to delineate what I am and am not attempting to accomplish in this volume. I am not a jurist, a Qur’an scholar, or an ethicist, and I certainly do not “do” jurisprudence here. Yet although this work is primarily concerned with analyzing current debates, I have tried to be forthright in stating my opinions, even when I was inclined to be more circumspect, in an effort to move discussion of issues in sexual ethics beyond critique and toward possible resolutions of difficult problems. Where I have indicated possible directions for further thought, my suggestions should be taken as tentative steps in the direction of a just ethics of sex, not as an attempt to formulate a comprehensive program of religio-legal doctrine or to have the definitive word on any of the matters under discussion here. Sherwin Bailey, writing about Christian sexual ethics, noted several decades ago that “even among those who are concerned to think and act responsibly, and to maintain high standards, there are differences of opinion as to what is right and wrong in given circumstances.”38 It is my sincere hope that this book will be taken as an invitation to conversation and fruitful debate.