Kecia Ali

Kecia Ali is an American scholar of Islam who focuses on the study of Islamic jurisprudence, ethics, women and gender, and biography. She is currently a professor of religion at Boston University.

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• For 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, "The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think", Huffington Post, August 19th, 2016 (archive) [1]

• 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 of 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.
  • — Kecia Ali . Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence. 2016. p. 60

• 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.
  • — Kecia Ali . Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith and Jurisprudence. 2016. p. 61

• They agreed unanimously that an enslaved female’s consent was never required for a marriage contracted by her owner. Al Shafii (d. 820) is typical: “He may marry off his female slave without her permission whether she is a virgin or non-virgin.”7 It strains logic to suggest that an enslaved woman is subject to being married off without her consent or against her will to whomever her owner chooses but that he cannot have sex with her himself without her consent... All accepted—sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly—that a man could practice withdrawal with his own female slave without seeking her permission
  • — Ali, Kecia (2017). "Concubinage and Consent". International Journal of Media Studies. 49. doi:10.1017/S0020743816001203

• A man’s intercourse with a female slave might constitute zina¯ only if she belongs to someone else.
  • — Ali, Kecia (2017). "Concubinage and Consent". International Journal of Media Studies. 49. doi:10.1017/S0020743816001203

• Even if he marries off his own slave and no longer has lawful access to her, his having sex with her is a lesser transgression than zina¯. The jurists’ occasional affirmations that a married female slave whose owner nonetheless has sex with her is not to be punished is the closest any of these texts comes to considering the relevance of an enslaved woman’s consent. Notably, the issue emerges only because she is married to another man, a marriage for which jurists uniformly agree that her consent would have been unnecessary
  • — Ali, Kecia (2017). "Concubinage and Consent". International Journal of Media Studies. 49. doi:10.1017/S0020743816001203

• A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Quran forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relations may become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master’s nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime of zina [illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.
  • — Kecia Ali(2017). "Concubinage and Consent". International Journal of Media Studies. 49. doi:10.1017/S0020743816001203

• 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.
  • — Kecia Ali, Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Islam in Jacqueline L. Hazelton (25 October 2010). Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Springer. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-230-11389-3.

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