Carolina QuotesFor premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category "rape" doesn't apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant.
Kecia Ali Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Kecia Ali, "The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think", Huffington Post, August 19th, 2016 (archive)
- year
- 2016
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“For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal …” Kecia Ali. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-91B788018A. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/91b788018a
More from Kecia Ali
These questions arise urgently when one considers that classical Islamic law accepts both slavery as an institution and the sexual use of female slaves, whereas the overwhelming majority of Muslims today completely reject all forms of slavery... Yet quite a number of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Muslim authors and laypeople gloss over the existence of slavery, and especially concubinage, in Muslim history and texts... Given that the vast majority of contemporary Muslims reject slavery, many have chosen to ignore the issue. Rather than reiterate the classical religious permission for slavery and slave concubinage, even to oppose it, they seem to believe that a moderate or progressive agenda is better served by emphasizing the contemporary agreement that slavery, and especially concubinage, is forbidden as completely outside the bounds of Muslim sexual morality. Although a few authors deny the validity of slave concubinage outright, asserting that “those jurists of Islamic law who laid down the rule that a master may have [a] sexual relationship with his female slave without marriage are totally mistaken,” most simply ignore what prevailed as the consensus for over a millennium.
The silence of the Hanafis can be explained easily: a wife's sexual refusal is irrelevant if not accompanied by her deartre from the conjugal hime, because the hsband is permitted to have sex with her without her consent. Non-Hanafis do not penalize a husband for forcing sex on his wife, but neither do they explicitly authorize it in the way that al-Khassaf does. For all, marital rape is an oxymoron; rape (ightisab) is a property crime that by definition cannot be committed by a husband.
A man’s intercourse with a female slave might constitute zina¯ only if she belongs to someone else.