Islamic views on concubinage
Most[2] modern Muslims, both scholars and laypersons,[3] believe that Islam no longer permits concubinage and that sexual relations are religiously permissible only within marriage.
A concubine who gave birth to a child acknowledged by the father was given the special status of an umm al-walad;[6] she could not be sold and was automatically free after her master's death.
Whereas in Islam the children of concubines (if acknowledged by the father) were automatically legitimate this was not necessarily the case in Sassanian Persia or among the Mazdeans.
On the other hand, the Islamic practice of freeing the concubine who had borne a child on the death of the master was also found among Persian Christians.
"[33] In one hadith, God promises to double the reward of a man who educates a concubine, frees her and then marries her as his wife.
After the battle against the Banu Mustaliq, a hadith reports that the sahaba took the female captives as concubines and asked Muhammad whether it was permissible to practice coitus interruptus with them.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, a twelfth century Shafi'i scholar, believed the Quran allows sexual relations only with one's wife.
[52] Some later Islamic scholars, especially during Ottoman times, did not approve of "excessively" large harem, seeing it as contrary to human dignity and violating Quranic verse 7:29.
There were a number of categories of female slaves with whom sexual relations were prohibited: Concubines in Islamic law had a limited set of rights.
[citation needed] The Hanbali school held that separating other levels of family members (e.g. uncles and aunts) was also prohibited, whereas the Hanafis deemed this strongly discouraged.
[70] The rights for a concubine who gave birth to a child were significantly higher (see section on umm al-walad).
[9] However de facto prostitution, by buying and selling concubines, was not prohibited and "Slave girls most probably were a part of the sex trade in the Ottoman Empire.
Salamah ibn al-Muhabbiq reported: A man had intercourse with the servant girl of his wife, so the matter was referred to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.
[76] According to Kecia Ali, the Qurʾanic passages on slavery differ strikingly in terms of their terminology and main preoccupations compared to the jurisprudential texts, that the text of the Qurʾan does not permit sexual access simply by the virtue of her being a milk al-yamīn or concubine and that this can be a defensible theological claim.
However Kecia Ali, has said its questionable if jurists took this stance as she could not recall in any instance of any Maliki, Hanafi, Shafiʿi, or Hanbali text from the 8th to 10th centuries where anyone asserts that an owner must obtain his female slave's consent before having sex with her.
[78] Other scholars have pointed out that the modern conception of sexual consent came about only in the 1970s and so it makes little sense to project it backwards onto classical Islamic law.
[79] Premodern Muslim jurists rather applied the harm principle to judge sexual misconduct, including between a master and concubine.
"[88] In late-1800s and early-1900s Arabia, "In theory, under Islamic law, children of female concubines had a legally recognized status as free descendants of their fathers.
Scholars have pointed out that women's lack of choice in marriage was commonplace in medieval times in the Muslim world and Western Europe.
[96] When a concubine is married, according to Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, she must be paid her dowry as this could bring her gradually equal in status to free-women.
[2] According to Smith "the majority of the faithful eventually accepted abolition as religiously legitimate and an Islamic consensus against slavery became dominant", though this continued to be disputed by some literalists.
[102] A different argument is that the abolition of slavery is implicit in the Quran, but earlier generations of Muslims did not see it, as they were blinded by the social circumstances of their time.
[103] Yet another argument is the slavery is not forbidden, but the specific circumstances that made it permissible in the past have ceased to exist;[103] for example, some argue that Muslim countries must adhere to the anti-slavery treaties that they have signed.
[106] The abolition movement starting in the late 18th century in England and later in other Western countries influenced slavery in Muslim lands both in doctrine and in practice.
Ehud R. Toledano disputes this view, arguing there was no indigenous abolitionist narrative in the Muslim world,[106] and that abolition happened due to European pressure.
[111] The report of the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery (ACE) about Hadhramaut in Yemen in the 1930s described the existence of Chinese girls (Mui tsai) trafficked from Singapore for enslavement as concubines,[112] and the King and Imam of Yemen, Ahmad bin Yahya (r. 1948–1962), were reported to have had a harem of 100 slave women.
[119][120] As mentioned earlier, Verse 33:50 was used by Muslims to take female prisoners as "spoils of war" in history and questions arise whether it could be used today.
[122] But Kecia Ali responds that the argument does not apply to the case of the women from the Banu Mustaliq with whom the Muslims practiced coitus interruptus, as pregnancy would have spoiled the chance of ransom.
[122] Some Muslims then respond by arguing this account cannot be accurate as it contradicts the Islamic legal requirement to wait one menstrual period before having intercourse with slaves.
[123] Mahmoud Abd al-Wahab Fayid argues that concubinage restricted sexual relations to a monogamous relationship between the concubine and her master, therefore preventing the spread of "immorality" in the Muslim community.
