Status Distinctions and Sartorial Difference: Slavery, Sexual Ethics, and the Social Logic of Veiling in Islamic Law

Abstract

This article explores how jurists articulated the distinction between free and enslaved Muslim women through sartorial norms in the formative and early post-formative periods of Islamic law. Drawing on works of fiqh (positive law), tafsīr (Qurʾān commentary) and ḥadīth (Prophetic and non-Prophetic reports), I posit that this distinction attests to the tensions between “proprietary” and “theocentric” sexual ethics, as noted by Hina Azam. Specifically, I track the variant transmissions of a widely-cited report featuring the Caliph ʿUmar (r. 13–23/634–44), and trace how jurists responded to the free-slave binary in their discussion of “modesty zones” (ʿawrāt) and veiling practices. Based on a detailed examination of fiqh sources to the early fifth Islamic century (with some attention to subsequent material), I argue that Islamic modesty norms are best understood in light of the proprietary/theocentric binary, and that the divergence between juristic expectations of free and enslaved women increased in the post-formative period.

Instrumental Jawārī

“…49 More recently, Omar Anchassi has focused on sartorial distinctions between free and unfree women in Islamic law, showing that female slaves' visibility-including the fact that generally they did not have to wear a veilwas linked to their status as property. 50 Jawārī's exposure to the public was described in the most brutal way in the medically oriented genre of slave-buying advice manuals, which provided instructions for the display and inspection of the enslaved at the market. 51 The inspection, a process of profanation known as ibtidāl, worked not only to detect injury or disease but also to humiliate the enslaved and to mark their distinction from the free, whose bodies, unlike the slaves', were protected by the principle of ḥurma or inviolability, as Hannah Barker has noted.…”

Gender Fiqh: Mobilization of Gender-Responsive Movement on Social Media

“…Changing such system is not an instant task and many Islamic scholars have argued that it is more substantial to discuss the process of changing the system based on Islamic texts and contexts. The combination of Islamic texts and contexts has become the basis in the discourse of reconstructing Islamic laws that are s} ālih fi kulli zamān wa makān (responsive to certain period of times and places) (Anchassi, 2021).…”