THINK-ISRAEL

BOSTON UNIVERSITY PROF BLAMES U.S. FOR ISLAMIC STATE SEX SLAVERY

by Robert Spencer

Kecia Ali, a professor at Boston University recently wrote[1]:

kecia ali

"In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq."

[...] Other scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn't mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.

The disingenuous reasoning here is appalling. Can't anyone in academia deal with a topic honestly anymore? I know Kecia Ali is a university professor, and university professors today are mostly muddle-headed ideologues more interested in pushing their far-Left agenda than having rational discussion or searching for the truth, but this is ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it is a breathtakingly compact example of how contemporary academics obscure, rather than expose, the truth. Here are a few of the ways Kecia Ali outrages the truth in that paragraph:

"Other scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn't mean Muslims must always do so."

Actually, the Qur'an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an "excellent example" (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that "the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it" actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, because of the absolute prohibition on declaring something to be wrong that Muhammad considered to be right.

"...indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point."

Actually, it would settle the point if those majority-Muslim societies had outlawed slavery on the basis of Islamic principles, but they didn't. They abolished slavery under pressure from the West. There was never an indigenous Muslim abolitionist movement, and to this day, slavery is practiced sub rosa in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, etc., and justified precisely on the contention that if the Qur'an assumes it and Muhammad practiced it, it cannot be wrong.

"It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so."

Here again, this point is only valid if there were some mainstream Qur'anic case against slavery, reinterpreting the pro-slavery passages in a different way. But there isn't. "Objective scholars" — as if Kecia Ali were one — may not find slavery in the Qur'an or Islamic law, but note that Kecia Ali is writing for an audience of Leftist non-Muslims in the Huffington Post: she is not trying to convince Islamic State slave owners that slavery is wrong on Islamic grounds. It is, in other words, far easier to lull non-Muslims into complacency about a human rights abuse that Muslims justify on Islamic grounds than it is to convince the Muslims who are perpetrating it to stop doing so.

"Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed."

Kecia Ali here assumes that the Bible and Qur'an are equivalent in their teachings and mainstream interpretation. In reality, the abolitionist movement arose in the UK and US among Christian clergymen who argued against the ongoing applicability of the Biblical passages justifying slavery on the basis of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and equal in dignity on that basis. The Qur'an and Islam, by contrast, make a sharp dichotomy between believers ("the best of people," Qur'an 3:110) and unbelievers ("the most vile of created beings," Qur'an 98:6), and consequently there was no teaching of the equal dignity of all human beings upon which an abolitionist movement could be based.

Kecia Ali probably knows all this, or should if she doesn't. But she doesn't tell her hapless HuffPo marks, that is, her readers.

Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet's normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad's life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use.

What she leaves out (again) of all this is the normative character of the Qur'an and Muhammad's example for Muslims. That normative character is not some crazy literalist subsect of Islam. It is mainstream Islamic theology among all sects and madhahib.

Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage.

Yet again: Kecia Ali doesn't tell her unfortunate readers that Islamic law is not considered to be some man-made document like the U.S. Constitution; on the contrary, in Islamic theology Sharia is considered to be the unchangeable and perfect law of Allah himself. As such, its allowance for slavery is considered to be as divinely inspired and unalterable as the rest of it.

Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn't particularly a religious institution, and jurists' ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.

"Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn't particularly a religious institution" — an unsupported and false claim. "Jurists' ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries" — everyone did it, you see, so it must be OK. This tu quoque argument might hold water if theologically-justified slavery persisted in religious contexts other than Islam today, but it doesn't.

To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam;

Don't kid yourself, professor.

to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex.

Honesty and transparency on this issue would be refreshing, but it isn't forthcoming in this article.

However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of "authentic" Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.

The Islamic State's attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon.

Once again, an assertion without evidence. How is the Islamic State being superficial and selective in its interpretation of the Qur'an and Sharia? Kecia Ali doesn't tell us. She just wants us to take her word for it.

Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines.

I'm all for that.

What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn't do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth.

And why mustn't one do this? Because above all, Kecia Ali and the Huffington Post don't want you to have a negative view of Islam. But why should one not think that the Islamic State's practices are the "legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth"? Yet again, we just have to take Kecia Ali's word for it.

In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points.

Note that Kecia Ali doesn't actually offer an alternative interpretation of the Qur'an passages that the Islamic State adduces in order to justify slavery. She just tells us that some unnamed "Muslim opponents" of the Islamic State have offered this. Who? When? Where? She doesn't tell us. Why not? Could it be that this Muslim challenge to the Islamic State hasn't actually happened at all?

...In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world.

I doubt that even the Islamic State jihadis would deny that these are old terms and rules that have fallen into desuetude. But they would argue that they are part of the law of Allah; the fact that they're old and long unused doesn't change that, and actually only increases the urgency of reviving them, so as to bring the practice of Muslims back in line with the commands of Allah. Here yet again, Kecia Ali is attempting a sleight-of-hand, pretending that this issue is all about human law, not about the law that Muslims consider to be that of Allah himself.

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and in Assad's Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

The idea that the New York Times is interesting in retailing "familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity" is beyond ludicrous. For years, the Times has again and again obscured and whitewashed numerous incidents of barbarity committed by Muslims and justified by their perpetrators by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Rukmini Callimachi's piece was highly anomalous in acknowledging, even in a slight and incomplete manner, that the Islamic State justifies its practices by referring to teachings of the Qur'an and Sunnah. But to admit that fact would be to expose as false and manipulative the ever-present narrative of Muslim victimhood, and Kecia Ali is not going to do that.

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

"Moral high ground is in short supply." Because the U.S. Constitution "continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime" (the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"), we shouldn't judge the Islamic State's barbaric practice of sex slavery.

Kecia Ali's moral equivalence here is nothing short of monstrous. But for her efforts, she will no doubt be hailed in Leftist circles and laden with honors, while the Islamic State's sex slaves, for whose rights and human dignity she could have and should have spok out instead of engaging in this gruesome apologetic for their enslavement, continue to suffer daily torture.

This is American academia today.

Footnote

[1]  Kecia Ali, "The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think," August 19, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kecia-ali/islam-sex-slavery_b_8004824.html.


EDITOR'S NOTE:
These are some of the comments that added useful information.

Larry A. Singleton

"Slavery was not entirely racialized, however, and slaves were captured or bought from Europe, Asia and the Caucasus as well as Africa"

Huh? Arabs are the most racist people on the planet. Read Hugh Fitzgerald's article Islam as a Vehicle for Arab Supremacism.

"Muslim history reflects a wide variety of historically specific patterns of enslavement, slave holding, manumission and abolition."

Just out of curiosity, where are William Wilberforce, John Newton, William Carey, David Livingstone (I presume), Lord Shaftesbury and General Charles (Khartoum) Gordan in Islamic history?

" there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity"

There's a reason you're reading about beheadings, crusifixions, rape and other barbarities related to Islam as opposed to stories about them dancing through the airports annoying people by banging tambourines and tossing rose petals in the air. Read Andrew Bostom's Legacy books. Particularly The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Read about the mass murder, pogroms, rape, looting (a common theme) and dhimmitude of Jewish communities that have existed as long as Muslims have been around to this day. And still happening via Imams inciting mobs to go out and kill unbelievers. Academic frauds like Kecia Ali "Associate professor of religion" at Boston University, depend on the fact that the average reader won't go any further than the bilge from these apologists for Islam.

"singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of "authentic" Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity."

Really? A "distorted" view of Muslim polity? I wish I had room to put what this dumb-ass construction worker has learned about jihad alone. If you can find it, read Jihad in the Qur'an and Sunnah by Sheikh Abdullâh bin Muhammad bin Humaid. I found this article, almost as an Introduction, in a Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari published by Dar-Us-Salam and plugged by the sinister gen. Manager of Sound Vision Abdul Malik Mujahid.

You might want to ask the good "professor" to consider this: Explain this articles prominence, and significance almost as an "Introduction", in a book, my Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari, and tell me....

....WHY, out of all the articles, out of all the words of pearly Muslim poetry and wisdom the publishers could have put in this, "the most authentic and true among the books of the Prophet", this article on JIHAD is the one they chose?

Also

If Islam is the "religion of peace", where in Sheikh Abdullah bin Humaid's article on jihad can I find the equivalent of "Love Thy Neighbor" and "good will toward men"?

Compare Humaid's "jihad" and Emmet Fox' Sermon on the Mount and tell me which one best represents a spirit of Love and "compassion"

Also address "jihad" as it's defined in Reliance of the Traveller and answer the same question. Chapter O-9.0: Jihad O: "Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada signifying warfare to establish the religion." And explain why the "greater" jihad is only mentioned once here and never seen again in this "Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law".

I've posted this hundreds of times to many Muslims and have yet to get a single response. Well, I did receive a response from some goofball named "Dr." Mohsen El-Guindy asking me to read his books. Instead I downloaded a bunch of his articles. Which were pure rants. An Imam, sidestepped it by telling me I had to "study Islam" to gain a greater understanding.

Also read The 4th Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research: Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel. Sept. 1968. Translated by D.F. Green/David G. Littman (Support Secure Freedom)
http://supportsecurefreedom.org/.../Arab-Theologians-on... I use Humaid's article as "Exhibit A" when it comes to refuting the "religion of peace" claim. "The 4th Conference..." could easily be Exhibit B. "Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime"

Where in the hell is this?

They ALWAYS bring up "Slavery in America" when the Islamic slavery is mentioned. The ONLY reason Muslim countries still don't have slavery is pressure from Christian countries America and Britain otherwise, like Mauritania, slavery and rape, (what your right hand possesses), would still be an institution in every Muslim country in the world.

Cut all this academic crap and Muslim whitewash and get yourself a copy of Peter Hammond's book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam and learn the real story about slavery.

Learn that a "comparison of the Islamic slave trade reveals some interesting contrasts. While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic slave trade. Two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims. While the mortality rate for slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Trans Sahara East African slave trade was between 80 and 90%". "At least 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. At least 80% of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets. It is believed that the death toll from the 14 centuries of Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been over 112 million. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the Trans Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 million people."

"While Christian Reformers spearheaded the anti-slavery abolitionist movements in Europe and North America, and Great Britain mobilized her Navy, throughout most of the 19th Century to intercept slave ships and set the captives free, there was no comparable opposition to slavery within the Muslim world. Even after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and Europe abolished the slave trade in 1815, Muslim slave traders enslaved a further 2 million Africans. This despite vigorous British Naval activity and military intervention to limit the Islamic slave trade."

Contrary to the myth that whites went into the African interior and captured slaves, America wouldn't have even HAD slavery were it not for the blacks in Africa who enslaved and sold their own people and Islam.

And again; slavery has never been abrogated in Islam. Just ask Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.

Mortimer

MORAL EQUIVALENCY ARGUMENT GONE WILD!

Kecia Ali uses the 'tu quoque' defense to deflect modern criticism of backward, Sharia-based enslavement. But it is a red herring. Her fallacious argument is this: "If you reject Sharia-based enslavement, you must reject the US constitution whose 13th Amendment permits 'involuntary servitude'." In fact, America DID remove 'involuntary servitude' as a punishment in 1928, 1933 and 1942.

Convict leasing or peonage began in 1846 and lasted until July 1, 1928, when Herbert Hoover was vying for the White House. Alabama was the last state to use convict leasing in 1928, but North Carolina was the last state to legislate it out of existence in 1933. When the U.S. entered World War II, the Franklin Roosevelt administration realized that the continued existence of involuntary servitude in the South undermined war propaganda against the Axis. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor, Circular N0. 3591 was issued to all federal prosecutors instructing them to prosecute cases of "involuntary servitude and slavery". It took several months after Pearl Harbor for convict leasing to be officially abolished in the United States. Finally, the Thirteenth Amendment would be enforced.

Sharia law is 'perfect, eternal and complete' and therefore may not be changed. Shari maintains and protects slavery 'forever' as a normative part of Islam. Over 70,000 slaves are promised to Muslims in paradise. Islam is a word that means 'submission'. No one is as submitted as a slave. The word 'Islam' is a euphemism for slavery. Nothing could be more Islamic than slavery.

(Oh, one small detail...tens of thousands of American soldiers died fighting in the Union Army for the abolition of slavery, and tens of thousands of others against the enslavement of entire nations in Europe and Asia. MUSLSIM SOLDIERS ALWAYS FIGHT FOR slavery. Thank you.)

Linde Barrera

To Edward- Thank you for your 2:32 pm post of Aug 21, 2015. I am in total agreement with you. Her article is rubbish. And just to keep you up to date, I never got a call back from Harvard Univ. Prof. Noah Feldman's assistant Shannon, to answer my questions on his article (which was given here at JW several days ago) as to why he paralleled sex slavery in the Islamic State with slavery in the US prior to 1866. I also never got a response to my email to the Nat. Organiz. of Women (NOW) as to why they don't speak up for voiceless girls in Islamic countries who are victims of FGM. Very coincidental.

Angemon

"Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet's normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery."

It should be a surprise. According to islamic orthodoxy, islam is supposed to be a divine revelation with instructions on how to act in any and every aspects of life. Muslims proudly say how terrible the pagan arabs were and how islam improved their lives. If pre-islamic arabs had slaves and is islam allows slavery there's not much of an improvement.



Robert Bruce Spencer is an author, Director of Jihad Watch, and blogger best known for his criticism of Islam and jihad. As of 2014, he has published twelve books, including two New York Times best-selling books. This article appeared August 21, 2014 in Jihad Watch and is archived at
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/08/boston-university-prof-blames-u-s-for-islamic-state-sex-slavery. Thanks are due Dr. Rich Swier for sending this article to Think-Israel.



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