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abstract
This article analyses sexuality and subjugation in the context of Islamist militarism. It examines how the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram style themselves upon narratives of Islamist militancy that appear to be historically authentic narratives of Muslim militarism read out of classical legal texts. The article argues instead that because ISIS and Boko Haram read these narratives through contemporary understandings of militarism using contemporary sexual technologies of the body, they also read these narratives in entirely contemporary and modern ways. The product of this reading is therefore also a contemporary form of Islamist militarism, using contemporary sexual technologies of the body. The justifications for these modern enactments of militarism, law and sexual subjugation are not to be found in the historical texts, but in the modern readings of the text. To illustrate these modern readings of sexuality and subjugation, I take up three publications produced by ISIS, and further, two online fatwas (legal opinions). Viewed against their historical precedents, the first reveal the aberrant nature of ISIS and Boko Haram style sexual subjugation in terms of historical legal practice. The online fatwas reveal how ordinary Muslims have come to conceptualise the intersections of war and sex in ways contrary to the practices of ISIS and Boko Haram.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the two reviewers for their valuable comments and also acknowledge the various conversations with partners who offered important insights in the course of writing this article, amongst them Sarojini Nadar, Sarasvathie Reddy, Farhana Ismail, Abdul Karriem Matthews and Mariam Bibi Khan.
2. Drawing on Jacklyn Cock’s (1991) analysis of the ways in which aggressive masculinities are made normative, Yaliwe Clarke speaks of “militarised masculinities that are key to militarism” (Citation2008:51), and earlier Okazawa-Rey and Kirk (Citation2000:124) also developed Cynthia Enloe’s (Citation1993) observations on how militarism “relies on militarised notions of manhood”. Desiree Lewis (Citation2013:26) has in turn proposed reframing Clarke’s “militarised masculinity” as “gendered militarism”, to avoid “a misleading binary of male prosecutors and women victims”. I have retained the former for the ways in which it speaks to the gendered nature of sex slavery in the ISIS and Boko Haram contexts, and which supports the argument that ISIS and Boko Haram forms of militarism produce and rely on a militarised masculinity.
3. Available online here: http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27–4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201820.pdf. site accessed 11 November 2016.
4. Aurelia Armstrong (http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucfem/) draws together the genealogy of these concepts from Michel Foucault through Sandra Bartsky to Susan Bordo. Bartsky (Citation1988:77) draws upon Foucault’s “notion of normalizing-disciplinary power” as a useful tool for understanding how societies control women’s bodies; these include disciplinary practices of dieting and body sculpting. Susan Bordo (Citation1988) extrapolates upon these as disciplinary technologies of the body. I draw upon these ideas to offer an argument for reproductive technologies as sexual technologies of the body used to discipline the bodies of concubines.
5. Women and girls taken captive by Boko Haram and from Chibok have been referred to as ‘wives’ more than concubines.
6. Dabiq (2014:17) states:
Before Shaytān reveals his doubts to the weak-minded and weak hearted, one should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffār and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharī’ah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’ān and the narrations of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhiwasallam), and thereby apostatizing from Islam. Finally, a number of contemporary scholars have mentioned that the desertion of slavery had led to an increase in fāhishah (adultery, fornication, etc.), because the shar’ī alternative to marriage is not available, so a man who cannot afford marriage to a free woman finds himself surrounded by temptation towards sin.
7. Rukmini Calamachi, ‘To maintain supply of sex slaves ISIS pushes birth control’, New York Times, 12 March 2016, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/world/middleeast/to-maintain-supply-of-sex-slaves-isis-pushes-birth-control.html?_r=0., accessed 14 December 2016.
8. In wars amongst nation states, sexual technologies used to discipline women’s bodies for the war efforts are managed by the state’s war apparatus. Accordingly, it would be of interest for new research to investigate the pathways of supply and management of contraceptive pills, injections and other treatment modalities for contraception and termination in the caliphate.
9. Qur’an 4:24 suggests marriage to slave women where men cannot marry free women, the former having a smaller dower. It does not suggest enslaving women to facilitate marriage for poor men.
10. The online ‘Open Letter to Bhagdadi’, which was also addressed to “the fighters and followers of the self declared ‘Islamic State’” was signed by a group of prominent Muslim scholars, and cited a universal Muslim consensus against the practice of slavery. See: http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com, accessed 2 November 2016.
11. The website is run by Shaikh Assim al-Hakeem http://www.assimalhakeem.net. The fatwa under discussion is available here: https://www.assimalhakeem.net/the-subject-of-the-women-captives-of-war-has-come-up-in-discussion-with-a-christian/, accessed 14 December 2016.
12. See the section on legal capacity (al-Ahliyya) in Jiwan (Citation1960).
13. The Law Reports (Appeal Cases) [1992] 1 AC 599, [House of Lords], Regina Respondent and R. appellant 1991 Feb. 27; March 14; 1991 July 1; Oct. 23, available at: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1991/12.html, accessed 14 December 2016.
14. The fatwa was available until early this year as fatwa #13082 on the website of the scholar Al-Munajjid here: https://islamqa.info/en. While the original fatwa #13082 is no longer available on the site, a link to the fatwa remains visible in another fatwa, #20085: https://islamqa.info/en/20085, accessed 14 December 2016. A copy of the fatwa also exists in a later publication Islam Questions and Answers (Citation2004:340), a compilation edited by Muhammad Saed Abdul-Rahman.
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Notes on contributors
Fatima Seedat
FATIMA SEEDAT lectures in the Gender and Religion Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) where she also coordinates the Masters programme in Gender, Religion and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. Prior to this she held an Innovation Fund Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, an NRF Equity Scholarship for Doctoral Studies Abroad at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Canada, and a Chevening Fellowship at the Human Rights Law Center at University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Islamic Law from McGill University where, through a study of legal capacity in Islamic jurisprudence, she investigated the discursive construction of women as legal subjects. She has also published on the politics of the convergence of Islam and feminism. Outside of academia, she has worked for the Commission on Gender Equality, at the Women’s and Children’s Rights Desk of the Department for International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), co-founded Shura Yabafazi, a South African NGO that focuses on sex difference in Muslim family law and consulted on criminal law reform for UNWomen Afghanistan.