Event

The historical development and application of Islamic law and legal theory concerning slavery pervades the legacy of Islamic marriage contracts and divorce in Shīʿī and Sunnī jurisprudence. This talk examines the role of gender as both an explicit and implicit category in the production, reproduction, and application of Islamic law within the realm of social transactions as it appears in the works of Shī’ī and Sunnī jurists. The continued resistance to the banning of slavery within present-day Islamic jurisprudence is theoretically and methodologically connected to its shared heritage with surviving legal precepts governing sexual rights and behaviors in marriage between free persons. These intersections between legal presuppositions concerning slavery and legal presuppositions concerning marriage and divorce remain difficult for traditional Islamic jurists to untangle. For example, the husband’s inherent right of ownership of the wife’s sexual organs within the marriage mirrors the slave master’s right over the sexual organs of slaves. The formal formula for manumission of slaves often contains specific references to the sexual organs of slaves: “your sexual organs are free (farjuki ḥurrun).” The slave status of “mother of the master’s children” or umm walad inhabits a theoretical liminality between spouse and property. Although the issue of slave law is essentially dead in forms of “Western” jurisprudence, it remains alive in Islamic jurisprudence due to the general legal perception of Qur’ānic barriers to the absolute abrogation of slavery. This talk explores the embeddedness of slavery-based legal reasoning in marriage and divorce contracts that complicates the movement toward more egalitarian gender possibilities in Islamic jurisprudence regulating marriage among free persons.