History of concubinage in the Muslim world

[4][5][6] It was a common practice in the Ancient Near East for the owners of slaves to have intimate relations with individuals considered their property,[a] and Mediterranean societies, and had persisted among the three major Abrahamic religions, with distinct legal differences, since antiquity.

The prevalence within royal courts also resulted in many Muslim rulers over the centuries being the children of concubines, including the great majority of early Abbasid caliphs and several Shia imams.

[17] While Muslim soldiers in the early Islamic conquests were given female captives as a reward for military participation, they were later frequently purchased and men were permitted to have as many concubines as they could afford.

[17] The consorts of Ottoman sultans were often neither Turkish, nor Muslim by birth, and it has been argued that this was intentional so as to limit the political leverage a concubine might possess as compared to a princess or a daughter of the local elite.

[27] In the 12th century, amid internecine war in Al-Andalus, the Umayyad caliph Muhammad II of Córdoba ordered that Berber women in Cordoba be captured and sold.

[51] Medieval Muslim literature and legal documents show that those female slaves whose main use was for sexual purposes were distinguished in markets from those whose primary use was for domestic duties.

[61] This is decidedly different from the case of enslaved women who bore children to their masters in Mediterranean Christian cultures: there the child retained the same slave status as his mother.

Though seldom discussed, forced sex with one's wife might (or, depending on the circumstances, might not) be an ethical infraction, and conceivably even a legal one like assault if physical violence is involved.

Brown notes that premodern Muslim jurists rather applied the harm principle to judge sexual misconduct, including between a master and concubine.

[75] Hasan al-Basri recalled that Muslims achieved this objective through various methods, including pointing a pagan slave-girl towards the Kaaba, ordering them to recite the shahada and perform an ablution.

Jābir ibn Ḥayyān wrote in the 9th-century: In Al-Andalus, the concubines of the Almoravid and Almohad Muslim elite were usually non-Muslim women from the Christian areas of the Iberian peninsula.

[107] Several concubines were known to have had great influence through their masters or their sons, notably Subh during the Caliphate of Cordoba, and Isabel de Solís during the Emirate of Granada.

[108] The concubines of Abu Marwan al-Tubni (d. 1065) were reportedly so badly treated that they conspired to murder him; women of the harem were also known to have been subjected to rape when rivaling factions conquered different palaces.

[110] The concubines in the Fatimid harem were in most cases of Christian origin, described as beautiful singers, dancers and musicians; they were often the subject of love poems, but also frequently accused of manipulating the Caliph.

[50] Writing in the early 18th century, one visitor noted that from among the Ottoman courtiers, only the imperial treasurer kept female slaves for sex and others thought of him as a lustful person.

Muhammad Ali was appointed vice roy of Egypt in 1805, and by Imperial Ottoman example assembled a harem of slave concubines in the Palace Citadel of Cairo.

The life stories of these women were similar to Roxelana, who rose from being a Christian slave-girl into the chief advisor of her husband, Sultan Suleyman of the Ottoman Empire.

[citation needed] Richard Francis Burton wrote "Public prostitutes are here few, and the profession ranks low where the classes upon which it depends can always afford to gratify their propensities in the slave-market.

[166] After Akbar's death there was a return to older patterns, such as Jahangir taking the wives and daughters of a rebel into his harem and soldiers enslaving women from rebellious villages,[164] but the sale of slaves remained banned.

[181] 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.

[187] In the 20th century, women and girls for the harem market in the Arabian Peninsula were kidnapped not only from Africa and Baluchistan, but also from the Trucial States, the Nusayriyah Mountains in Syria, and the Aden Protectorate.

[196] After the abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia in 1962, the Anti-Slavery International and the Friends World Committee expressed their appreciation over the emancipation edict of 1962, but did ask if any countries would be helped to find their own nationals in Saudi harems who might want to return home; this was a very sensitive issue, since there was an awareness that women were enslaved as concubines (sex slaves) in the seclusion of the harems, and that there were no information as to whether the abolition of slavery had affected them.

[27] In the 1830s, a group of ulama led by Waji al-Din Saharanpuri issued a fatwa that it was lawful to enslave even those men and women "who sought refuge" after battle.

According to Amal Ghazal, the abolitionist stances of modernist ulema in Egypt such as Muhammad 'Abduh and his disciples were strongly opposed by the majority of Islamic jurists.

Most also ignore the millennia-old consensus permitting it and a few writers even claim that those Islamic jurists who allowed sexual relations outside marriage with female slaves were mistaken.

[210] Ali notes that one reason for this defensive attitude may lie with the desire to argue against the common Western media portrayal of "Islam as uniquely oppressive toward women" and "Muslim men as lascivious and wanton toward sexually controlled females".

[212] Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker noted in The Better Angels of Our Nature that despite the de jure abolitions of slavery by Islamic countries in the 20th century,[213] the majority of the countries where human trafficking still occurs are Muslim-majority,[214] while political scientists Valerie M. Hudson and Bradley Thayer have noted that Islam is the only major religious tradition that still allows polygyny.

[224] The violence was paralleled on both sides of the conflict, with Muslim girls in East Punjab also being taken by and distributed among the Sikh jathas, Indian military and police for sex and sold on multiple times.

[235] The justifications for modern reiterations of slavery and violence against women, most notably in the context of ISIL, have been vocally condemned by Islamic scholars from around the world at the time.

[236][237][238] In response to the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram's Quranic justification for kidnapping and enslaving people,[239][240] and ISIL's religious justification for enslaving Yazidi women as spoils of war as claimed in their digital magazine Dabiq,[241][242][243] 126 Islamic scholars from around the Muslim world signed an open letter in September 2014 to the Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi decrying his group's interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith.