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SEX AND SEXUALITY: DEALING EFFECTIVELY WITH ISLAMIC DOUBLE STANDARDS
By Kecia Ali 
Popular discussions of women in Islam, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, often focus on the not very precise concept of “women’s status,” while more scholarly discussions usually revolve around “gender.” The latter is useful for analytic purposes, since it allows for the idea that appropriate male and female roles are socially constructed and not the result of an unchanging nature. Really, though, “women” and “gender” often serve as proxies for the real subject of debate: sex and sexuality.
Of course, sexuality figures in the exoticized, fetishized Muslim Woman as she is stereotypically presented in Western media. But seldom recognized, or at least rarely admitted, is most of the big controversies among Muslims—over hijab, female seclusion à la Taliban, hadd punishments for zina, polygyny, honor killings, and so-called female circumcision—are at base about sex and sexuality. In one way or another, these practices are about keeping women from, or punishing women for, making themselves available to men who do not have sexual rights to them.
Those Muslims who push for strict observance by women of customs and rules designed to ensure social chastity frequently reject any attempt to impose comparable restrictions on men. Even when parallel restrictions are accepted in theory, there is no push for accountability for male transgressions: When was the last time a man was sentenced to stoning for adultery? The application of different rules and consequences to the same cases is the classic definition of a double standard. Now, double standards are by no means unique to Islam, and the simple fact of their presence among Muslims is therefore not surprising. Many contemporary Muslims, though, are unwilling to acknowledge either the existence of the double standard or, even more troublesome, its roots in the key source texts of Islam.
It is fashionable to declare that the Qur’an provides for the full equality of men and women, and it undeniably does so when it comes to status of all human beings as individually sovereign and accountable before God for their beliefs and actions. However, on certain matters related to sex, Qur’anic verses apply clearly different rules of propriety and conduct to men and women. While both men and women are commanded to cast down their gazes, only women’s dress is specifically regulated. Men alone are granted permission to have more than one spouse concurrently. Further, and most problematic from a modern perspective, male owners are explicitly allowed to have sexual access to their female slaves (“what their right hands possess”). (While few Muslims today advocate slavery of any sort, let alone the sexual use of female slaves by their masters, this was a feature of the first Muslim community. The Prophet himself had at least one concubine, and the practice continued lawfully by elites in various regions of the Muslim world until the twentieth century.)
Now, these Qur’anic statements, along with precedents from the early Muslims, were elaborated by scriptural commentators and jurists over the course of several centuries into an authoritative discourse of gender and sexuality that viewed male desires as praiseworthy, provided fulfillment was sought within lawful channels, which included polygynous marriage and slave concubinage. Female desire, on the other hand, was largely ignored as a positive force and treated instead as something to be contained. The vague Qur’anic prescriptions on female dress and modesty solidified into rules prescribing total concealment and segregation. Some jurists even classified women’s voices as shameful when heard by unrelated men. While scholars occasionally mentioned the moral duty of a husband to satisfy his wife sexually, the overwhelming emphasis of the classical tradition was on ensuring female chastity outside of marriage and sexual availability and exclusivity within it. This pertained, of course, to free Muslim women. Enslaved women, even Muslims, were subject to looser controls on their dress and movements; they also had fewer legal rights and protections.
In addition to being strongly class and gender-differentiated, Islamic jurisprudence has historically been very explicit that most of its regulations concerning the interaction of unrelated men and women were based on preventing powerful desires from giving rise to unlawful actions. Additionally, the regulations governing the rights and duties of the parties in marriage largely revolved around sex. Marriage, the jurists declared straightforwardly, was a contract for exclusive sexual enjoyment of the wife. This exclusivity was not reciprocal; any attempt by a woman to contractually stipulate at the time of marriage that her husband could not marry additional wives or take any slave-concubines was rejected by the majority of Sunni jurists because, in the words of master-jurist al-Shafi’i, it would be “narrowing what God made wide for him.”
Mainstream Muslim discourse today, as represented in the pamphlets and booklets that circulate at ISNA conferences and local mosques across North America, attempts to present an Islamic sexual morality that stands in sharp opposition to loose Western mores. Family values Muslim-style upholds modesty, chastity, and monogamy—except, that is, when polygyny is presented as a solution to a perceived social or personal need, and celebrated as a more humane alternative to extra-marital affairs. Lois Lamya' Al-Faruqi lays out these ideas in Women, Muslim Society, and Islam. She argues that the "Islamic gender system" avoids the pitfalls of Western promiscuity. She suggests that the breakdown in Western families is due to “the increased sexual dispensability of the wife,” in contrast to the Islamic norm of limiting sex to marriage. One possible critique of her work, and indeed the voluminous apologetic literature on "women's rights in Islam" in general, is that it contrasts an Islamic ideal to a Western reality - hardly a fair basis for comparison. Here, however, we can evaluate what she claims to be the Islamic norm against the traditional sexual ethics formulated by medieval Muslim jurists.
The supposedly Islamic ideal of monogamous, two-parent families with a father-breadwinner-husband and childbearer-homemaker-wife is a fiction, a radical reenvisioning of sexual ethics that cloaks itself in the garb of classical authenticity. That is not to say that such a family structure is incompatible with any basic principles or specific rulings of the Qur’an, sunnah, or even traditional jurisprudence. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that this norm is not merely a reproduction of a classical ideal but rather itself an interpretation, and a distinctively modern one at that. It has gained widespread acceptance in many segments of the community despite its lack of continuity with traditional laws because many contemporary Muslims, including intellectuals who inform other Muslims about what is Islamic, are uncomfortable with the classical double standard authorizing multiple partners for men with no stigma attached while accepting restrictions on female mobility to ensure sexual exclusivity and availability of women—wives and concubines—to the men with sexual rights over them. Such views are simply incompatible with the notions of fairness and justice held by many Muslims.
The endless apologetics and polemics over women’s status and rights reflect Muslims’ failure to engage with a contemporary crisis of sexual ethics. There are very real problems faced by Muslims, especially but not exclusively those living in the West, who are attempting to regulate their intimate lives in ways that correspond to both their faith convictions and their twenty-first century contexts. It is only by direct engagement with issues of sex and sexuality that Muslims can make progress in thinking about appropriate ways to respond to the current predicament. For many reasons, Muslims today should not simply adopt the viewpoint of the classical jurists. However, Muslims can certainly learn from their frank approach to discussing sex and sexuality as an integral part of life for Muslim individuals and communities.
Dr. Kecia Ali is a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University Divinity School, where she is completing a manuscript on marriage in early Islamic jurisprudence. Ali has contributed articles to the recent anthologies Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism and Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith. From 2001-2003, she wrote about Islam for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project at Brandeis University. Her current study, Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, is due to be published by Oneworld in 2005. This article is based on a presentation given during March 2004 at New York University, at a panel entitled “On Authority: Revisiting Tradition in Islam through the Discourse of Gender.”
This article was originally published at:
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/04/sex_and_sexuali.php
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