Chapter 8 - Intersections of Gender, Sex, and Slavery: Female Sexual Slavery

Summary

This chapter explores the intersection of gender, sex, and slavery in the medieval dar al-islam (“the lands of Islam). A background survey is provided for sexual ethics, male social reproduction, and female sexual slavery in these societies that illustrates how Islamic sexual ethics, derived from the Quran, and the Islamic legal understanding of legitimacy were very different from those of Roman law, Christianity, late antique Judaism and seventh century Zoroastrianism. Two central questions of the chapter are how was the status of an enslaved woman defined and whether or not the child of an enslaved woman was born with slave-status. In classical Islamic law, the rule of umm al-walad (“mother of child”) meant that an enslaved woman who bore her Muslim owner a child gave birth to a free born person. The status of umm al-walad thus provided enslaved women with limited opportunities to assert their agency.