Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam.

• Author: Mir-Hosseini, Ziba
• Position: Book review

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. By KECIA ALI. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. viii + 262. $39.95.

A few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, a free Muslim woman chose one of her younger male slaves as a sexual partner. To stop her, her kinsmen took her to the caliph 'Umar and demanded that she be punished for illicit sex (zina). The woman saw nothing wrong in what she had done and justified her action by invoking the Qur'anic verse that permits sexual relations between a master and his female slaves. "I thought," she said, "that ownership by the right hand [i.e., slavery] made lawful to me what it makes lawful to men." Baffled and disarmed by her implicit claim to have God's permission, 'Umar turned for advice to the Companions of the Prophet, who said: "She has [given] the book of Exalted God an interpretation that is not its interpretation." 'Umar did not punish the woman for illicit sex, but forbade her from marrying any free man, and ordered the male slave not to approach her. The case was settled, but it opened the juristic debates on the nature of marriage and how to determine the legitimate interpretation of Islam's sacred texts.

In Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam Kecia Ali uses this story to lead the reader along a fascinating journey into the minds of jurists of the ninth century C.E.--the formative years of Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh). She has given us a rich and engaging account of how the jurists debated, conceptualized, and devised legal rulings for the regulation of marriage and its termination. How and on what basis did medieval jurists come to the conclusion that the woman's interpretation of a Qur'anic verse in the above story was incorrect? How could an incorrect interpretation give rise to a legal injunction? How did they justify their own interpretations? What were the legal and social assumptions that informed their understandings of Islam's sacred texts? What were the legal techniques they employed to produce their rulings?

These questions are at the heart of the growing body of scholarship today that is bringing a critical feminist analysis to the study of textual sources in Islam. Pioneers among its analysts were such scholars as Riffat Hassan, Fatima Mernissi, and Amina Wadud; they have been followed by many others--including Kecia Ali in her previous work--and they have collectively introduced gender as a category of thought into their interpretations of the texts. Most...