Sexual Ethics in Islam (3 page)

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 chal- lenge 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

xiv introduction

thinkers are only one reason that this dichotomy is unsatisfac- tory. Muslim thinkers as well as their works easily cross borders, through satellite television, Internet sites, and subsidized trans- lations of doctrinally correct materials for distribution in European and North American mosques. Even materials pro- duced 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 geo- political 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 West- ern 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 fanat- ical 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 per- missibility of polygamy, Muslim authors counter, not without

introduction xv

some justification, that an obsessive focus on polygamy as degrading to women is hypocritical when adultery, serial remar- riage, 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 author- ity within his home but does not act in a dictatorial fashion or abuse his powers of decision-making, and it is his greater ration- ality 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 availabil- ity, 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 per- form considerable household work and were primary providers of care for their children. At the level of ideals, however, Doi’s

xvi introduction

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 dis- courses 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 sen- sibilities 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

introduction xvii

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 some- thing 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, reci- procity, 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 propos- ing 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 soci- eties 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 wide- spread 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 pas- sion” 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

xviii introduction

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 civiliza- tions, 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 “Obedi- ence 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 mar- riage terms or leave abusive spouses; repressive regimes may attempt to demonstrate their “Islamic” credentials by capitulat- ing to demands for “Shari‘a” in family matters or imposing putatively Islamic laws that punish women disproportionately for sexual transgressions. Nonetheless, as Jewish feminist the- ologian Judith Plaskow points out, “writing about sexuality unavoidably re-enacts singling it out as a special issue and prob- lem.”
14
The possible benefits of an exploration of sexual ethics seem to me worth the risks, given the frequent invocation of

introduction xix

Islamic authenticity in those spaces where religion has a norma- tive 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 mis- leading. 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 accur- ately 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 exeget- ical heritage – which is strongly patriarchal and sometimes