Sexual Ethics in Islam by Kecia Ali Read Free Book Online

contraceptive meas- ures and approved of sex with pregnant women and nursing mothers, making clear that sexual pleasure was a worthwhile aim even where pregnancy was an impossible, unlikely, or undesir- able outcome of intercourse. Shaikh is thus largely correct in her broad claim that “Within the Islamic view of marriage, an individual has the right to sexual pleasure within marriage, which is independent of one’s choice to have children.” 28 Yet the mention of an ungendered “individual” who has this right ignores the context within which classical thinkers discuss mar- ital sex. Although Hanbalis, Malikis, and Hanafis viewed the wife’s permission for withdrawal as necessary, most Shafi‘is dis- agreed, and the reasons behind their disagreement are instruct- ive. 29 According to one rationale, since a wife didn’t have the right to demand intercourse at any given time (a point on which the jurists largely agreed across the legal schools), her husband could prevent her from conceiving or attaining sexual pleasure by abstaining from intercourse with her entirely. Given that she therefore had no independent right to orgasm or to conception, her consent regarding withdrawal was irrelevant. This doctrine, a minority view, complicates the simple view of an “Islamic right” to female sexual pleasure.
    Muslim acknowledgement of the positive aspects of female sexuality has historically coexisted with two views that challenge it in different ways. First, certain elements of the clas- sical Muslim tradition treat female sexuality as dangerous, with potentially disruptive and chaotic effects on society. 30 Histor- ians have demonstrated how anxieties about temptation and female sexuality translated into insistence (never fully achieved in reality) on restricting the appearance of women in public
    marriage, money, and sex 9
    spaces. 31 Muslim worry over fitna – chaos and disorder – has often focused on the sexual temptation caused both by women’s unregulated desires and the troublesome desire that women provoke in men. Second, and in a paradoxical relationship to this view of women as sexually insatiable and thus prone to create social chaos, Muslim authorities have stressed the importance of the fulfillment of male sexual needs, especially in the context of marriage. Drawing particularly on several hadith delineating dire consequences for women who refuse their hus- bands’ sexual overtures, the insistence on men’s sexual needs and wives’ responsibility to fulfill them has competed for prom- inence in modern intra-Muslim discourses on sex with the recognition of female sexual needs.
    Despite the scholars’ acknowledgement of the import- ance of female satisfaction in the sexual act, the overwhelming weight of the Muslim legal and exegetical tradition is on women’s obligations to make themselves sexually available to their husbands, rather than the reverse. This bias in the sources emerges even in contemporary discussions that attempt to dis- cuss male and female sexual rights in parallel, highlighting the immensity of the task for those who would redefine sex within marriage as a fully mutual endeavor. A fatwa by conservative Saudi mufti Ibn Jibreen 32 exemplifies the extent to which con- cepts of reciprocity and mutuality permeate even conservative Muslim discourses. At the same time, his strongly gendered understanding of male and female sexuality is broadly represen- tative of much contemporary Muslim discourse, including that produced in Western contexts.
    Ibn Jibreen’s fatwa, entitled “The Ruling on Either of the Two Spouses Denying the Other Their Lawful Rights,” responds to the query, “Is it permissible for either of the two spouses to deny the natural rights of the other for a long period of time, without any acceptable excuse?” 33 The mufti’s response exem- plifies the tension between moral exhortations surrounding wives’ sexual rights in marriage, and the legal logic governing sex as