Sex-Slavery in Islamic Jurisprudence

©2013. Secular African Society. All Rights Reserved.

Ever heard the saying: “Islam is a perfect religion, it’s Muslims who aren’t perfect”?

Well that is a thoughtfully concocted and sinister deflective tactic designed to acquit Islam of its inherent fascism, while fermenting a discontent for Muslims in academia.

Far from perfect, Islam is fundamentally flawed down to its prophetic traditions. Slavery is one of the most revered divine privileges in Islam. It is not illegal in Islam, rather it is an Islamic right. Muhammad inaugrated a tripartite model of slavery into Islam, encompassing enslavement, slave trade and sex-slavery. It was an enslavement model that thrived unquestioned until the dismantling of the Ottoman empire.

Pro Sharia advocates in the West often castigate the West for its decadence, arguing that adolescents partying out drunk till late hours; and teenage girls posing suggestively on magazine covers, are perfect of examples of just how rife Western society is with alcoholism and prostitution. As a remedy for this rot, such activists proffer the divine solution of introducing sharia regulations, such as alcohol ban, segregation of the sexes and imposed veils. In truth, alcohol, dressing suggestively, and not wearing a veil are in no way the greatest threats to a civilised way of life, Islamofascism is. It is a wry fact that Islam disparages suggestively-clad women, while sanctioning sex-slavery. Sex-slavery in actual fact, is inarguably a form of prostitution in itself. It is clear that civilisation is in need of salvation when one of the first things the Muslim Brotherhood does upon acquiring state power and writing a new constitution – a sharia-based constitution –, is lift a national ban on slavery. Through the imperfect lens of Islam, Allah’s form of prostitution is to be lauded while all other forms of prostitution are to be denigrated.

Slave concubinage is not illegal in Islam.

While Muslim women are allowed slave helpers to help with domestic chores and the likes, they are prohibited from having sexual relations with anyone but their husband. In addition to marrying as many as four wives, a Muslim man on the other hand, is awarded the divine blessing of having sexual intercourse with his slave girls. Thus, Islamic sex-slavery is a Muslim male right, bequeathed to him by Allah.

“And those (among muslim men) who guard their private parts, Except in the case of their wives or those whom their right hands possess—for these surely are not to be blamed” [Quran 70:29–30]

‘We have made lawful to you your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and war captives whom your right hand possesses’ [Quran 33:50].

It is important to note that anywhere “right hand possesses” appears in the Quran, it refers specifically to slaves. It appears some fourteen times in the Quran. Muhammad also instructed his followers to ejaculate inside slave-girls when having sex with them. He said: “It is better for you not to do it [pull out when ejaculating]. No soul that which Allah has destined to exist, but will surely come into existence.”

Thus for the Muslim male, having sex with his female slaves is as legal as having sex with his married wives. Ejaculating in slave-girls is a much preferred ethic than not ejaculating in slave girls.

Muhammad himself took at least 3 slave girls for concubines: Juwairiya of Banu Mustaliq (Bukhari 3:46:717), Rayhana of Banu Qurayza, and Maria. Maria was sent to him by an infidel Egyptian governor, to pacify him, after receiving his threatening warmongering letter asking him to convert to Islam, pay jizyah or face Muhammad’s encroaching jihadi army. There was also the Jewish girl Safiyah who was the wife of Kinana. Upon torturing Kinana to death and confiscating the wealth of the Jews from him, Muhammad and his companions cast a lot to divide the looted wealth. The women were reduced to slaves and Safiyah fell to the lot of one of Muhammad’s companion. Upon seeing that she was very beautiful, too beautiful to be possessed by a mere jihadi companion, it was suggested that she should be handed over to the lot of the leader. She was then handed over to Muhammad. The Muslim warrior upon whose lot she first fell, was compensated with two other concubines for the price of one.

On several other instances, Muhammad personally gifted, rather generously, from his large share of jihadi war captives, slave concubines to his jihadi comrades. He gifted a slave concubine each to Omar ibn Khattab (his father-in-law and the second caliph), Ali (his son-in-law and fourth caliph) and Uthman b. Affan (his son-in-law and the third caliph). These men kept these possessions, in addition to the other slave concubines that was their rightful lot out of the share of conquest loot.

There isn’t a more dehumanising/degrading form of prostitution than slave concubinage, yet it was the norm all through Islam’s history. It only ceased to exist in the Islamic world, officially, following the neutering of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the West. If an institution of sex slavery is regarded despicably by today’s standards, then it begs the question: can Muhammad still be considered a suitable role model by today’s standards?

When it comes to fascist doctrines within Islam, the blame is usually thrust at the “extremists”: those people who allegedly ‘take Islam’s message of peace out of context’ and sully it with their ‘ignorant’ ‘heretical’ mis-interpretations. Islamists specifically are often blamed for trying to corrupt Islam from the message of ‘personal application’ that it originally was intended as, into a message of state laws, domination, conquests, enslavement, terrorism, and colonialist conquest. While it is true that many Muslims are quite content with Islam being a personal affair, and are not interested in trying to pass Islamic laws on anyone else – Muslim or disbeliever; it is also true that there is no greater Muslim than Muhammad himself.

It was Muhammad, the founder of Islam, who inaugrated a tripartite model of slavery into Islam (as already stated), one encompassing enslavement, chattel slavery and sex-slavery. Generations of Muslim men all through history kept sex-slaves because Muhammad had authorised them to. Muhammad’s companions kept many more slave concubines than he did, without him ever condemning their actions. There were nation leaders and religious figures before Muhammad’s era who were averse to slavery. All Muhammad had to do was learn from them to expand on their progressive ideals, in such a way that such jahiliya principles could be preserved to benefit all of humanity, not reverse such principles. Prophet Muhammad had no business reducing innocent infidel women to slavery status. He also had no business teaching his followers to do the same. Upon entering Sindh with only 6000 Arab jihadi soldiers, Qasim slaughtered able-bodied men and enslaved approximately 300,000 Indian infidels in just three years.

Jauhar: The practice of jauhar was unknown in pre-islamic India. The advent of Islamic invasions into India created it. It was a custom amongst Hindu women of committing murder by jumping into fire, to avoid capture for sexual enslavement or violations by Muslim invaders. Women at the palace in Sindh committed jauhar in large numbers, to avoid capture and sexual violation, when Qasim finally captured Sindh at the end of his three year stint. This was a trend that continued even ingot he reign of enlightened Akbar. In capturing Sindh (under the instructions of Governor Hajjaj ibn Yusuf of Baghdad and Caliph al-Walid of Damascus), Qasim brought to India, the prophetic tradition of killing able-bodied defenders while kidnapping and enslaving the womenfolk and children of the vanquished for keeping as slave-concubines and domestic servants. All in the name of expanding the political frontiers of Islamdom. Akbar, in his conquest of Chittor (1568), ordered the enslavement of the women of already slain 8,000 Rajput soldiers. Some 8,000 of these women committed jauhar to save themselves from the dishonour and sex-slavery that was to come. Chittor is reported to have witnessed three major occurrences of jauhar when it was attacked by Alauddin Khilji (1303), Bahadur Shah of Gujarat (1535) and Akbar (1568). It was Islamic invasions who brought to India proper, the prophetic tradition of sexually exploiting Polytheist women. Sultan Mahmud had carried away 500,000 captives from India in 1001–02 and large numbers of them on other occasions, after having slain the able-bodied male defenders. Jauhar thrived in India for centuries, following the coming of Islamofascism to the subcontinent. In the days of the 1947 partition of the Subcontinent (initiated by the Muslim League to create the Land of the Pure), many Hindu and Sikh women pre-empted being condemned to a life of slave-concubinage and chose to save their honour by setting themselves on fire and jumping into wells.

There isn’t a more ideal Islamist than Muhammad, nor is there a more staunch advocate of Islamic fascism than him. He created the nascent state of Medina by slaughtering disbelieving natives. He confiscated the Kaaba, which initially represented 360 religions, for Muslims’ exclusive use. He mercilessly annihilated all opposition, while transferring the women of the vanquished to Muslim harems – a divine protocol approved by Allah [Quran 33:26–27]. Slave concubinage is clearly sanctioned in the Quran, Sunnah and Sharia. Islam puts no limit to the number of sex slaves Muslim men can keep.

As far as legal marriage is concerned, there is a limitation of four wives for a man at one time [Quran 4:3], but no such limitation on the number of sex-slaves.

Also (prohibited are) women already married, except those whom your right hands possess… [Quran 4:24].

Thus in Islamic jurisprudence, the Muslim male can engage in sex with the captured slave women even if they were already married prior to their enslavement, but not with the married free Muslim women.

Multiple verses in the Quran talk approvingly of slaves and capturing them in wars. Muhammad himself, armed with these sanctions, inaugurated slavery, slave-trade and sex-slavery into Islam by enslaving women and children of the vanquished disbelievers.

“And who guard their private parts, except before their mates or those whom their right hands possess, for they surely are not blameable” [Quran 23:5–6].

Allah tells muslim men to select kaffir vaginas for fucking, out of the bountiful “prisoners of war” whom muslims had offensively fallen upon. [Quran 33:50]

Therefore, according to the divine commands of the Islamic God as enshrined in the holy Quran, Muslims are allowed to amass sex slaves. It goes without saying that rape itself is a divine sanction of the Islamic God as enshrined in the Quran. The glorified version of Islam’s history would have us believe that the women of the vanquished able-bodied infidel men, were all eager to end up in the harems of Muslim men, to be ejaculated in as and when the conquerors desired. Allah’s commands and prophetic tradition justify and glorify sexual assault. When soldiers in secular-democratic societies use rape as a weapon of war, they are punished by the same system of laws. There is nothing in Islamic jurisprudence that sanctions the punishment of a jihad soldier for amassing disbelieving women as war captives, throwing them into his harem and having forceful sex with them. They become his property to do as he wishes. This was the Islam that Muhammad practiced and taught to his followers!

In addition to acquiring lands for the expansion of Islamic territories, it is apparent that the greed for using kafir women as sex slaves, was a motivating factor for Muslim jihadis to engage in holy wars throughout Islam’s history. The objects of Islamic sex slavery is cohabitation (on the basis of possession, not marriage), and the generation of children for swelling the Muslim population. Slave children born in the master’s house were by right of Islamic law, automatically Muslim. Their (slave) mothers are prohibited from baptising them into any other religion. This is an ordinance that thrived during Islam’s early days and is duly observed in islamic jurisprudence today.

The early Muslim community grew rather rapidly and much of its growth is owed to the Islamic rite of slave concubinage. islamic rulers, all blazing the torch of Islam, kept slave concubines in stupendous numbers as it became synonymous with success, power and status. In India, enlightened Akbar kept 5,000 women in his harem, while Jahangir and Shah Jahan kept 5,000 to 6,000 each. In the 18th century, Sultan Moulay Ismail had 4,000 concubines in his harem. The harem in the Fatimid palace in Cairo had roughly 12,000. Abd al-Rahman III’s harem (d. 961) in Cordoba contained over 6,000 concubines, and in under just four years of capturing Spain (698-712), Musa captured 30,000 virgin girls from the families of Gothic nobility alone. Also, the last Nawab, who ruled Bahawalpur until 1954 had more than three hundred and ninety women in his harem.

All Islamic rulers throughout history institutionalised sex-slavery. All of them. If they were all mistaken about Islam, then it is safe to say that Islam cannot be understood.

Why is it needful to study both Islamic ideology, and Islam’s history prior to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire? Such an endeavour is useful because one will never know whether to oppose Sharia laws or not, until one understands precisely why one should and must oppose both Sharia laws and Islamic rule!

Conclusion

Islamic sex-slavery was founded by Allah, as an exclusive Muslim male privilege. It didn’t merely ‘seep’ into Islamdom from the jahiliya cultures. It is rich of pro sharia activists in the West to ardently fault Western society as being decadent, when Islamic jurisprudence, as a matter of fact, is guilty of institutionalizing decadent norms that the rest of the world have long ago moved on from glorifying. Suffice to say, Allah hates it when prostitution occurs in the ‘filthy’ West, because he desires prostitution to be the exclusive monopoly of the Muslim male. A sharia constitution is not compatible with modern day secular-democratic notions of organising public life and State. It is a rather outdated and morally inferior model for building any kind of civilisation. It is not only unabashedly colonialist, but it is misogynistic against the Muslim woman, and is hateful towards the Kafir woman, her community and her offspring.

It is not secularists who need to quit opposing Islam. It is Islam who needs to abolish Islamism, and learn to respect everyone else!

©2013. Secular African Society. All Rights Reserved.