Sexual Ethics and Islam

Kecia Ali, now Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, is a respectable scholar of fiqh related to women. I described her 2010 book, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, in a review (MWBR, 31:4, 2011), as ‘a very solid work of research by a Muslim feminist academic trying to get to grips with the theoretical concepts underpinning the arguments between the early Muslim fuqaha’ of the formative period’. This research is very evident in some chapters of Sexual Ethics, but this new book, a revised edition of Kecia Ali’s 2006 book of the same title, deals more with the sort of questions posed on websites about issues on sexual ethics, such as polygyny, same-sex relationships, paedophilia, bestiality, FGM, and transgender issues. To throw light on the Islamic position, she manages to find some fiqh writing by Ibn Hajar, al-Dhahabi and Abu Talib al-Makki, about such issues under the heading of kaba’ir (enormities). She also mentions the ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell’ (p. 96) principle that underpins much Muslim thinking on such subjects and the restraints imposed by the (slander law) qadhf. Trying to normalise and legitimise the abnormal is alien to Islamic thinking, which holds that ‘it is a greater offense to deny certain rules than to break them’ (p. 99)....