MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY IN EARLY ISLAM pdf download

MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY IN EARLY ISLAM 

Kecia Ali

The author says

While writing this book, I have had numerous opportunities to explain its subject. 

MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY IN EARLY ISLAM 

One of my less successful attempts occurred several years ago, when an Algerian acquaintance enquired politely about my prog-ress, adding, “Remind me what it’s about.”

 I answered that I was writing about marriage, divorce, and the reciprocal but gender-differentiated obligations of husbands and wives in ninth-century Islamic jurisprudence. 

I was focusing, I added, on three major issues: first, diversity of opinion in early legal thought; 

second, the influence of hierarchical social 

structures, including slave ownership, on the jurists’ visions of marriage; 

and third, the vital role of polemical exchange in the refinement of legal doctrine. 

As I finished this summary, we were joined by a colleague of his, another North African Muslim. 

“Guess what?” said the first man enthusiastically, drawing the new arrival into the conversation. 

“She’s writing a book on women’s rights in Islam.” 

This exchange — funny only in retrospect — involved a series of miscommunications.

 My own inept, jargon-filled explanation deserves most of the blame. Incomprehensibility plagues academics.

 We have specialized knowledge that bears on contemporary topics but tend to be lousy 

at communicating it to people not initiated into our disciplinary mysteries. 

Although the time period with which this book is concerned is remote, its subject matter is of vital interest today, when women, gender, 

and Islamic law occupy center stage in debates about modernity and religious authenticity across the globe.

 I failed to show how my treatment of