A free man may marry four free women and female slaves, not more, and he may take as many concubines as he wishes from among his female slaves. If a man has four free [wives] and a thousand concubines and wants to buy another [concubine] and a man reproaches him for that, it will be as if [that man] had committed unbelief. And if a man wants to take a concubine and his wife says to him “I will kill myself,” he is not prohibited [from doing so], because it is a lawful act, but if he abstains to save her grief, he will be rewarded, because of the hadith “Whoever sympathizes with my community, God will sympathize with him.”
Muhammad ‘Ala al-Din Haskafi, seventeenth-century Hanafi jurist, Al-Durr al-Mukhtar1
Prior to the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marriage was not the exclusive mode of licit sexual relationship in most Muslim societies. Instead, throughout Islamic history, slave concubinage was practiced by those men who could afford it. Though several features of the finalized regulations governing the possession and use of female slaves were unique to Muslims, the use of female slaves as sexual partners was an accepted practice in most of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world where Islam originated. Indeed, in seeking to establish friendly relations with the Prophet Muhammad, the Byzantine commander of Alexandria sent him two enslaved sisters as a gift, along with a donkey and other goods. Medieval Muslim tradition records that the Prophet took one of these young women, Mariyya, as his concubine, eventually freeing her after she bore him a child.2 The fact that a seventh-century Christian figure saw nothing amiss in sending a female as a gift to a powerful leader demonstrates the general acceptance of women and girls as sexual commodities in the ancient world. In pre-Islamic Arabia, as well, female captives were frequently used as sexual partners, a practice agreed by early Muslim interpreters to be sanctioned in the Qur’an’s repeated references to the permissibility of men’s sexual relations with women “that their/your right hands possess” (ma malakat aymanuhum/kum).
Ownership of slaves in general, and female slaves in particular, was referred to in non-Qur’anic texts as milk al-yamin (“ownership by the right hand”), and the same phrase was used to denote the slaves themselves (“property of the right hand”). Unfree women were also called ama3 (female slave), jariyya (“slave girl;” also sometimes used for a young girl), and suriyya.4 The latter term especially was used for concubines, those slaves with whom their masters maintained special sexual relationships. Concubines often received additional privileges – better quality food and clothing, and usually exemption from duties of household service – and were subject to additional restrictions, usually related to keeping them exclusively available to their masters. The status of concubine was informal, however; law and custom allowed a master to have sex with any of his (unmarried) female slaves. It was also insecure: a concubine could be freed and married by her owner, or she could be sold off, so long as he had not impregnated her.
While the Qur’an accepts the notion of men’s sexual access to some unfree women – whose social, if not legal, status may have been ambiguous, according to Ingrid Mattson5 – it does not explore the possibility of large-scale concubinage, nor was such practiced in the first Muslim community. Some modern authors have argued that only through marriage did sexual access to captive or enslaved women become permissible, but this is not the view that the medieval jurists took, nor, if one accepts the hadith sources as historically accurate, was it the practice of the first Muslim community; records show that the Prophet as well as a number of Companions and Successors had a concubine or two. However, after the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, when the wealth of the Muslim elite increased dramatically, rulers mimicked their non-Muslim Sassanian predecessors, keeping dozens if not hundreds of female slaves, of whom many were used for pleasure.
The widespread availability of female slaves as sexual objects had dramatic implications for the development of Muslim thought on sex and marriage,6 even if, in practice, the “harem” culture of the elite bore little resemblance to the practices of the majority of the populace. Prominent eighth-century jurist al-Shafi‘i voiced the consensus legal view when he stated that a man could take as many concubines as he wished, since God did not restrict this in any way, while God forbade taking more than four wives.7 This sentiment was conventional juristic wisdom for a millennium, as evidenced by the remarks of Hanafi Mufti of Damascus, Muhammad ‘Ala al-Din Haskafi, in the late seventeenth century, to the effect that suggesting that a man with a thousand concubines should not take another was tantamount to unbelief.
Though large-scale ownership of female slaves for sexual use was an elite-only practice, slavery was a social fact in most of the Muslim world with many slaves employed in domestic service as well as commerce from origins of Islam until abolition was decreed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large-scale agricultural slavery, like the plantation slavery of the U.S. South, was seldom practiced in the Muslim world.8 This was not due to any prohibition against such forms of slave labor, but rather to economic and geographical factors. This does not mean that Islamic slavery was not harsh, as some apologists have argued, or that masters were not sometimes brutal to their slaves. Paradoxically, slavery did not always equal low social status. In medieval Egypt, the Mamluk (literally, “owned”) dynasty ruled for some time, with manumitted military slaves rising to govern others. The conscript slave troops (janissaries) of the Ottomans are another example. Most striking is the case of the royal concubines who wielded tremendous influence and amassed considerable wealth in the later centuries of the Ottoman empire.9
Slavery in Muslim societies was not merely a medieval practice; it has lingering contemporary effects, especially in certain parts of Africa and the Gulf states, regions that were the world’s last to outlaw slavery, with Saudi Arabia becoming the final nation to do so in 1962. Vestigial effects of domestic slavery persist in certain Gulf nations in the failure of police and law-makers to protect immigrant household workers against potential abuses by employers.10 Female “guest workers” employed as maids and nannies have little recourse against sexual coercion or harsh beatings; in some cases, those who have escaped and sought refuge with police have been forcibly returned to their abusive employers.11 Such women are not legally enslaved, and they generally receive compensation for their work that differentiates their situation from that of those in debt bondage.12 However, because of the acceptance of controls on their mobility (employers often take their passports), and the refusal of law enforcement officials to respond to complaints of maltreatment, they are particularly vulnerable to abuse. In some African nations such as Mauritania, actual slavery continues despite repeated declarations of abolition, the last in 1980; according to one recent report, 90,000 black Mauritanians remain essentially enslaved to Arab/Berber owners. In the Sudan, Christian captives in the ongoing civil war are often enslaved, and female prisoners used sexually, with their Muslim captors claiming that Islamic law grants them permission.13
Islamic law is not the only salient frame of reference in these cases, though, even if it is sometimes used as justification for enslavement and slaveholding. Although premodern jurists permitted slavery without qualms, they absolutely forbade the enslavement of other Muslims. Contrary to this principle, Muslim captives, usually from other ethnic groups, are sometimes enslaved in ongoing civil or tribal conflicts; Mende Nazer, a Sudanese Muslim, recounts her own experiences of capture and enslaved domestic labor in the Sudan and the U.K., where she eventually escaped her captors, in a chilling memoir.14 Though most common in Africa, it occurs elsewhere; one scholar has suggested that among the Taliban’s “atrocities” toward Afghani Shi‘a was “the enslavement of Hazara women as concubines.”15
The existence of actual and quasi-slavery is by no means unique to the Muslim world; slavery and slavery-like practices are found in numerous nations world-wide.16 Further, they are 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 peninsula, 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 slavery 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 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 precursor 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.
The Qur’an makes numerous references to unfree persons – servants, 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 recommends 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 demonstrate 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 interpersonal relationships. It allows slaves to marry other slaves or free persons26 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 mentioned 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 significantly 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 potential 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 including forced manumission of the slave without compensation to the owner.
Regulations for slave marriage and concubinage also developed over time, with special emphasis on rules to determine the paternity and/or ownership of children born to a female slave. A man could not simultaneously own and be married 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 children born of a free wife. The slave who bore her master’s child became an umm walad (literally, mother of a child), gaining certain 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 outright 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 fornication 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 definition, 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 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 consumption, by Westerners – Muslim and non-Muslim. Still, it is almost unimaginable today by many Muslims that a sexual relationship 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 morality, the exemplar of uprightness, the question of his actions – both personal and as a leader of Muslims – takes on importance.
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, however, 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 published 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 Proof Safeguard Rights,” which has to do with witnesses to illicit sex; and, my concern here, “Family Planning.” Although ostensibly 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 revolutionary in their original Arabian context, and “continue to represent a real ‘revolution’ against the outmoded and discredited 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 discussion 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 concubines35 [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; 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 conception 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
The issue of female captives and their treatment cannot always be ignored in such a glaringly obvious way. 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.38
This provision of a rationale incompatible with the scenarios represented in the historical sources is one instance of a larger phenomenon of attempting to make sense of instances where Prophetic sunnah, classical jurisprudence, and modern notions clash. Attempting to assess an event such as the capture of women from the Bani Mustaliq (assuming one accepts the historical record as provided by Bukhari’s account) by the standards even of later jurisprudence causes difficulties as “some traditions ascribe to the Prophet actions that appear to be incompatible with the opinion prevalent in later sources.”39 How can one reconcile Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri’s account, for example, with the later insistence of Muslim jurists that any time a man came into possession of a captive or slave, he had to wait until she had a menstrual period before having intercourse with her, in order to determine whether she was already pregnant?40 The Prophet’s reported permission for the Muslim captors to practice withdrawal with their female captives does not take any notice of this point. It has been suggested that the fact that the Prophet’s reported action does not take account of the need for a waiting period is evidence that Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri’s account is wrong; the Prophet could not have allowed the men sexual access to the captives. This apologetic account seeking to deflect the accusation of impropriety makes the error of assuming that later legal doctrine cannot impose a requirement that was not grounded in the Prophet’s actions. As an historical point, just because the jurists required something does not mean that the Prophet did it; likewise, just because the jurists allow something does not mean the Prophet did. Still, another hadith included by Abu Dawud in his Book of Marriage records the purported words of the Prophet in asserting that men must wait to have sex with captive women until they have menstruated once, and still others forbid men to have sex with women pregnant by other men. A similar issue arises regarding the religion of the captive women, who were likely to be from among the pagan Arabs. Later jurists state quite clearly that only Christian and Jewish (and perhaps Sabean or Zoroastrian) captives or slaves were permissible as sexual partners.
Nonetheless, questions about the religious affiliation and menstrual status of the female prisoners pale in comparison to the larger issue at stake: what does it mean for those who view the Prophet’s actions as exemplary to accept that he tacitly allowed the rape of female captives? Is it correct to refer to the actions of the Muslim soldiers as rape, or does that term have connotations that are contextually inappropriate? Does the fact that “marriage” by capture was a common Arab custom at the time make his actions intelligible? Acceptable? Finally, assuming one accepts that the accounts in Bukhari, Muslim, and other hadith compilations are essentially accurate, what are the implications of the Prophet’s action for the contemporary world? Is his precedent binding or is it to be understood as limited to the particular circumstances of his time and place?
There is general silence on these questions and their broader implications in Muslim scholarship. Algosaibi mentions the incident in passing, under the title “Family Planning,” without any analysis or acknowledgement of its significance for matters beyond contraception. Other influential works treat the issues of slavery differently, but no more satisfactorily. For instance, in his 1991 translation of the classic Shafi‘i work Reliance of the Traveller, Nuh Keller excises nearly all mention of slavery from the English text, leaving it, bracketed off, in the parallel Arabic discussions of marriage, divorce, and other social transactions.41 The translation carries no ellipses or notation that something has been removed. As a result of this editorial sleight of hand, the importance of slavery to the medieval Middle Eastern context in which this text originated simply disappears. By way of rationale for these frequent changes, Keller affirms in his introduction that “Not a single omission has been made from it” – that is, the Arabic text – “though rulings about matters now rare or non-existent have been left untranslated unless interesting for some other reason.”42 A specific reference to the missing material on slavery comes in place of a translation of the chapter on manumission: “Like previous references to slaves, the following four sections have been left untranslated because the issue is no longer current.”43 Keller thus suggests that the regulations on slavery, a now obsolete social institution, are somehow separable from the rest of the work; the other rules contained in this “Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law,” as the translation’s subtitle proclaims, are directly relevant to the lives of contemporary Muslims.
A different approach, utilized by the official Saudi fatwa council as well as some other twentieth- and twenty-first-century jurists, has been to reiterate classical doctrines as though slavery had never been abolished by national governments. In their responses to legal queries – which have influence far beyond Saudi boundaries, through online distribution and subsidized translations into European languages – they maintain references to slavery throughout, just as their medieval counter-parts would have. Evaluating the conditions making polygamy permissible, the late Saudi mufti Ibn Baz stated that “If a person fears that he will not do justice [between wives], then he may only marry one wife in addition to having slaves.”44 Though seemingly the opposite of Keller’s strategy of excision, this rote inclusion of material presuming the existence of slavery (even when slavery was not even mentioned in the original question) demonstrates the same unwillingness to engage with the basic problem at hand: how does one reconcile the presumption of slaveholding in Qur’an, hadith, and classical jurisprudence with the contemporary reality of the Muslim world where legal slavery no longer exists? Although the vast majority of Muslims do not consider slavery, especially slave concubinage, to be an acceptable practice for the modern world, the reluctance to confront the juristic, as well as social, legacies of slavery has resulted in blindness to the hierarchical residue of its practice to Islamic gender relations more broadly, and to marriage and sexual relations in particular.
I have repeatedly referred to the scriptural and legal acceptance of slavery as something troublesome to the vast majority of contemporary Muslims, when it is thought about at all. Because of the repugnance with which slavery is viewed, arguing that other matters are linked with, or analogous to, slavery creates an opening for Muslims to think differently about them. I claim no originality for this tactic; Fazlur Rahman applied it to good effect at least two decades prior to this writing, when he compared slavery to polygamy.45 Both, he argued, were institutions that it was impossible to eradicate at once but which were harmful and which God intended to abolish, even if one had to follow indications of a trajectory toward abolition in the Qur’an rather than its literal words. Treating the Qur’an as a document with some verses bound by context, but others containing broad principles of justice that should take precedence over specific, time-bound commands, is one essential element of feminist and other reformist interpretation of scripture. For many ordinary Muslims, particularly those for whom slavery is distant history, it is simple common sense. This should not, however, be mistaken for the view that it is “obvious” that Islam disallows slavery, and that it was always meant to be abolished.46 The insight is more powerful if one acknowledges that abolition was not a forgone conclusion, but rather the result of both non-religious historical processes and interpretive choices by individuals. Indeed, even today some scholars insist that although the specific circumstances making slavery permissible may have ceased to exist – i.e., there is no legitimate caliph to declare jihad and divide the spoils of war, or that Muslim nations have signed international treaties agreeing to prohibit slavery – that it is nonetheless unacceptable to declare slavery forbidden. To do so, they argue, constitutes a sin, because one is declaring unlawful something permitted by God.
Muslim thinkers who reject slavery as unjust have applied two main methods to argue that this rejection of slavery is based in the Qur’an. First, some suggest that the abolition of slavery is implicit in the Qur’anic message, and Muslims simply did not see it before, being blinded by their social circumstances. Mohamed Syed’s stance that sex with captive or unfree women was always forbidden without marriage, and that legal permission for sex with milk al-yamin was the result of the jurists’ misinterpretation, applies this perspective on a smaller scale.47 Second, developing Rahman’s methodology, others have argued for a trajectory from hierarchical institutions to more egalitarian ones, from acceptance of slavery to its abolition: the practical limitations of the Prophet’s mission meant that acquiescence to slave ownership was necessary, though distasteful, but meant to be temporary. Fatima Mernissi makes a parallel argument that the Prophet’s compromises regarding husbands’ rights to control their wives were similarly necessary accommodations with patriarchal power in the interests of ensuring the success of Islam.48 Both perspectives contain valid points: the presuppositions of interpreters matter a great deal in implementation (or lack thereof) of the Qur’an’s precepts; and there is evidence that in some instances the Qur’an accommodates or gradually prohibits certain practices that God and/or Muhammad might have preferred to abolish immediately (e.g., consumption of alcohol). However, neither of these approaches is sufficient if one does not take the responsibility of individual interpreters seriously.
An approach to revelation that takes both propositions seriously allows one to interpret scripture without being bound by the assumptions of previous generations of exegetes who accepted male superiority and other social hierarchies, including slavery, without question. Additionally, one can see certain passages and Prophetic sunnahs as gestures in the direction of egalitarianism, capable of full realization only in a world where equality and freedom are common shared values. Yet neither of these approaches engages the critical, and critically difficult, question: where is God’s justice in permitting slavery in the first place, if slavery constituted an injustice and a wrong in the seventh century, just as it would and does in the twenty-first century? And if it did not constitute an injustice and a wrong in the seventh century in God’s eyes, then on what basis may anyone subsequently declare it unjust without rendering divine justice subordinate to the vagaries of human, and therefore inherently flawed, moral sensibilities?
A full consideration of questions about God, history, and justice would require delving further into philosophy and theodicy than I dare attempt; these issues have preoccupied many generations of theologians and I make no pretense of resolving them here. I raise them, though, because although generally omitted from feminist reflections on Qur’an, sunnah, and law, these theological questions are deeply relevant to larger issues of ethical definition.49 How can one reconcile God’s justice and goodness with the injustice of slavery, or does viewing God as just and good necessitate acceptance of slavery as part of the divine plan for humanity? To my mind, a proper response involves two propositions, each of which places a great deal of responsibility on individual Muslims. First is the view that while God is responsible for the just and the good, and guides human beings accordingly, injustice and oppression (zulm) come from human beings; imperfection is inevitable once one accepts the complicated possibility of human free will.50 Second is the distinction noted by theologians between legal justice, where human beings are “commanded to observe a minimum standard of duties,” and ethical justice, which “is justice in accordance with the highest virtues which establish a standard of human conduct.”51 Combined with the view that historical developments render certain specific regulations irrelevant, these notions make reform more attainable at the same time as they place a greater burden on human beings to achieve it. God clearly orders Muslims in the Qur’an to combat injustice and oppression yet simultaneously permits institutions such as slavery. Outside of accepting that slavery is a just and therefore not problematic practice (or insisting, against the clear sense of the text, that the Qur’an never actually allowed it), the only possible response is to suggest that the Qur’anic text itself requires Muslims to sometimes depart from its literal provisions in order to establish justice.