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Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. By Kecia Ali. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. viii + 262. $39.95.
A few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, a free Muslim woman chose one of her younger male slaves as a sexual partner. To stop her, her kinsmen took her to the caliph cUmar and demanded that she be punished for illicit sex (zina). The woman saw nothing wrong in what she had done and justified her action by invoking the Qur'anic verse that permits sexual relations between a master and his female slaves. "I thought," she said, "that ownership by the right hand [i.e., slavery] made lawful to me what it makes lawful to men." Baffled and disarmed by her implicit claim to have God's permission, cUmar turned for advice to the Companions of the Prophet, who said: "She has [given] the book of Exalted God an interpretation that is not its interpretation." cUmar did not punish the woman for illicit sex, but forbade her from marrying any free man, and ordered the male slave not to approach her. The case was settled, but it opened the juristic debates on the nature of marriage and how to determine the legitimate interpretation of Islam's sacred texts.
In Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam Kecia Ah uses this story to lead the reader along a fascinating journey into the minds of jurists of the ninth century ce. - the formative years of Muslim jurisprudence ifiqh). She has given us a rich and engaging account of how the jurists debated, conceptualized, and devised legal rulings for the regulation of marriage and its termination. How and on what basis did medieval jurists come to the conclusion that the woman's interpretation of a Qur'anic verse in the above story was incorrect? How could an incorrect interpretation give rise to a legal injunction? How did they justify their own interpretations? What were the legal and social assumptions that informed their understandings of Islam's sacred texts? What were the legal techniques they employed to produce their rulings?
These questions are at the heart of the growing body of scholarship today that is bringing a critical feminist analysis to the study of textual sources in Islam. Pioneers among its analysts...