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Sexual Ethics and Islam pdf download

Sexual Ethics and Islam
Book Title Sexual Ethics And Islam
Book AuthorKecia Ali,
Total Pages246
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Sexual Ethics and Islam, Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, by Kecia Ali

Book introduction

For the vast majority of Muslims worldwide – 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.”

SEXUAL ETHICS AND ISLAM, FEMINIST REFLECTIONS ON QUR’AN, HADITH, AND JURISPRUDENCE

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 ideas 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

 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 an 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 introduction xiii-xiv introduction 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 is 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 Western languages, especially – are a reaction to these Western critiques. In quite a number of works, selective quotations from the 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 introduction xv 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 girlfriend” which, the argument goes, stands in contrast to the humane, honest, and realistic nature of polygamy.

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.”

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.

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 per- form 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].”

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

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