This book provides a detailed analysis of Islamic juristic writings on the topic of rape and argues that classical Islamic jurisprudence contained nuanced, substantially divergent doctrines of sexual violation as a punishable crime. The work centers on legal discourses of the first six centuries of Islam, the period during which these discourses reached their classical forms, and chronicles the juristic conflict over whether or not to provide monetary compensation to victims. Along with tracing the emergence and development of this conflict over time, Hina Azam explains evidentiary ramifications of each of the two competing positions, which are examined through debates between the Ḥanafī and Mālikī schools of law. This study examines several critical themes in Islamic law, such as the relationship between sexuality and property, the tension between divine rights and personal rights in sex crimes, and justifications of victim's rights afforded by the two competing doctrines.
The American Muslim landscape is suffused with mosque bookstores, independent book distributors, online retailers, and convention stalls offering English-speaking Muslims Islamic advice texts on a wide array of topics. Common among these popularly oriented writings are titles pertaining to veiling, gender relations, marriage, and sexuality. This paper examines this particular segment of titles in order to determine how they present a set of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that we would recognize as erotic in nature—that is, pertaining to sexual desire and its expression, romantic attachment, and bodily pleasure. I seek to show that, despite their varied geographical and linguistic provenance, these advice tracts share a number of themes that coalesce to form an overarching discourse on eroticism. I argue that this prevailing discourse presents erotic desire, expression, and pleasure in a manner that is overwhelmingly negative. This overarching negativity is dissonant with the erotic conjugality that is frequently forwarded in this same literature as a pious ideal. This dissonance suggests a theoretical gap between more traditional notions of sexuality, marriage, and gender relations, and contemporary ideals of companionate marriage and conjugal intimacy.
An examination of popular advice literature geared toward Muslims living in the West, such as the type commonly available in U.S. mosques and at online Islamic bookstores, indicates that there exist at least two potentially conflicting narratives regarding the ḥijāb (the veil or headcovering) as a pious practice. The first narrative presents female sexuality as a natural and positive force, as long as it is properly channeled. The ḥijāb, in this narrative, is not meant to categorically repress women's erotic nature, but is a pragmatic social practice meant to avoid eroticism in the public sphere, where it would be a source of temptation and disorder. Often corresponding to this narrative is a notion of (female) sexuality as static, and a gender ideology that deemphasizes difference. A second narrative presents erotic desire and fulfillment as a marker of attachment to the world and an assertion of the ego (nafs), and therefore negative. In this view, the ḥijāb is an ascetic practice, a means by which a woman may discipline her self and develop a greater spiritual-moral faculty. This narrative frames sexuality as malleable, and also tends to emphasize gender difference. This paper seeks to tease out the conflicting models of the erotic that emerge in this genre of writing. It further demonstrates how authorial deviations from a text's core argument regarding veiling and eroticism can reflect an instrumental use of these narratives and models in favor of the predetermined conclusion, which is the obligation to veil, and to which end both models of eroticism and both narratives of veiling are bent.
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