Quran and Marriage

FutureAndAHope said:

Hi all,

This one is directed towards the Muslims in the house. I know that Islamic State, and many other Muslim groups have taken many sex slaves. I am wondering what their justification is for this. I have started reading the Quran in detail, and

4:19 Says O you who have believed, it is not lawful for you to inherit women by compulsion.

How is it that so many Muslim groups take salves for sex if they are supposed to only take with consent.

Click to expand...

Asking the average Muslims to justify the acts of ISIL or Boko Haram is like asking the average Christian to justify the acts of the KKK or the Australian Defense League. However the verse in question has to do with inheriting women from deceased kin, not slavery.

Whatever ISIL or Boko Haram have done, the Qur'an does not allow sex slavery. According to the Qur'an a female slave who wishes to remain chaste, must be allowed to do so. In practice, however, the people of almost no religion have honored this in time of war. Look at what the Christian soldiers in Bosnia did to Muslim women. Or look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo, considered the rape capital of the world. Christians make up 95% of the population there. What Islam does do that is different than Christianity is consider relations between a master and a slave legitimate, which means the offspring of such a union become legal heirs of their father instead of inheriting the slave status of the mother. How long do you think slavery would have lasted in the US if we had done that?

I have heard that the stories of Mohammad's life suggest he and others did take some women without consent. Is this true and what is your view of this?

Click to expand...

I don't think he ever forced any woman to have sex with him against their will, if that's what you mean. There were women given to him as slaves, some he married, some he did not. He doesn't appear to have had relations with the ones he did not marry.

FutureAndAHope said:

Hi I am interested to know the quote for this as I have not read the whole Quran yet:

"According to the Qur'an a female slave who wishes to remain chaste, must be allowed to do so".

Click to expand...

I was thinking of verse 4:25:

"If any of you have not the means wherewith to wed free believing women, they may wed believing girls from among those whom your right hands possess: And Allah hath full knowledge about your faith. Ye are one from another: Wed them with the leave of their owners, and give them their dowers, according to what is reasonable: They should be chaste, not lustful, nor taking paramours: when they are taken in wedlock, if they fall into shame, their punishment is half that for free women."

There is also this hadith:

: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: "Feed those of your slaves who please you from what you eat and clothe them with what you clothe yourselves, but sell those who do not please you and do not punish Allah's creatures." (Sunan Abu Dawud, Hadith 5142. Albani classified it as Sahih)

So if a female slave refuses to have sex with her master, she may be sold but not punished.

Unlike a sex slave a slave concubine may not be handed around to other men. She is exclusively bound to her master and if she gives birth to a child from him, even if she miscarries, her status radically changes. When her master dies she will be a free woman. There is a good website on this:
http://www.letmeturnthetables.com/2012/09/no-rape-slave-women-islam.html

I can't see that the Qur'an says anything different about slave women than the Bible says.

[QUOTE="smaneck, post: 68203275, member: 269871" There were women given to him as slaves, some he married, some he did not. [/QUOTE]
Yep. One of them was 6.

rider99 said:

[QUOTE="smaneck, post: 68203275, member: 269871" There were women given to him as slaves, some he married, some he did not.

Click to expand...

Yep. One of them was 6.[/QUOTE]

First off, Muhammad's youngest wife was the daughter of one of his best friends, not a slave. Second, while there is some debate as to her age at marriage, all agree that the marriage was not consummated until she reached puberty.

smaneck said:

Yep. One of them was 6.

Click to expand...

First off, Muhammad's youngest wife was the daughter of one of his best friends, not a slave. Second, while there is some debate as to her age at marriage, all agree that the marriage was not consummated until she reached puberty.[/QUOTE]
Not all agree.
She was nine and sill playing with dolls when the 55 year old had sex with her.
Was she a mature woman at nine? Were you mature enough to marry at nine?

FutureAndAHope said:

I was doing some reading, and it appears that at the time Muhammad was around, marrying young was considered normal, a king of England married a 12 year old. However I still think it shows a great lack of insight. A person of God should know to marry some one their own age.

Click to expand...

I found these facts with references. Hope it helps your search.

With regard to the age of Aisha.. the youngest wife of Prophet Muhammad ... I've posted before on this some time ago on this board. There are a couple points that need to be considered. One is that there was no universal calendar at use in the time of the Prophet... So the age of these people is problematic... No one really knows the answer as to how old they were.. You can estimate with in a few years... Actually Aisha had already been engaged to marry a Meccan pagan but he broke it off when he found out she was a Muslim.

The Hadith that's oft quoted about the age of Aisha when she married was collected well over a hundred years after the events reported..

Under Caliph Omar which was quite awhile after the passing of the Prophet a Muslim calendar was adopted.

I've also wondered about the age of the first wife of Prophet Muhammad... She was supposed to be forty years old when she married Muhammad. It's reported they had five children together... Even today with the best medical care available a woman over forty having children is not that common and would be risky. The Prophet was married to Khadijih we are told for around twenty years. Monogamy was unusual for that time in Mecca.

Most of the marriages that were contracted after the passing of Khadijih were either for state reasons or with widows of some of the companions of the Prophet who lost their lives.. A Christian ruler of Egypt sent two women as "gifts" to the Prophet... The Prophet married one of them and that was Mary the Copt...She being a Coptic Christian.

So these marriages were not what some critics have alleged... usually by Christian groups be careful of your sources.

I'm attaching a note here regarding the calendar issue ... that there was no calendar in use among Muslims until the time of the Caliphate of Omar:In AD 638 (17 AH), Abu Musa Ashaari, one of the officials of the CaliphUmar in Basrah, complained about the absence of any years on the correspondence he received from Umar, making it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. This report convinced Umar of the need to introduce an era for Muslims. After debating the issue with his counsellors, he decided that the first year should include the date of Muhammad's arrival at Medina (known as Yathrib, before Muhammad's arrival). Uthman ibn Affan then suggested that the months begin with Muharram, in line with the established custom of the Arabs at that time.[21] The years of the Islamic calendar thus began with the month of Muharram in the year of Muhammad's arrival at the city of Medina, even though the actual emigration took place in Safar and Rabi' I.[3] Because of the Hijra, the calendar was named the Hijra calendar.
Islamic calendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The verse is regarding marriage, not sex slaves. It goes on to mention the dowry and how you can divorce one wife and take another so you could not really apply this to a slave.

FutureAndAHope said:

The verse does allow a man to marry a woman who is a captive from war. But note the man must wait one whole month before having sex, he can’t have sex with the woman immediately he must first live with her for a month, before he is allowed to marry. In this way the man will learn if the woman can live peaceably with him. .

Click to expand...

Those aren't the reasons the Bible gives. The reason it gives is so she can mourn her losses. The shariah requires that the man should wait until after the woman's menses to insure she isn't pregnant which in practice would be around the same amount of time. It must also be determined that her husband is in fact dead, otherwise it would be adultery to take her.

FutureAndAHope said:

Are there any Muslims with a view on why rape is occurring with ISIS and other Islamic groups, what does Islam teach?

Click to expand...

Are there any Christians here with a view as to why the Christian Serbs committed rape against Muslim women or why the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is overwhelmingly Christian has the highest incidence of rape in the world? What does the Bible teach on this?

Oh yeah, if the woman doesn't cry out, she should be stoned to death.

rider99 said:

Not all agree.
She was nine and sill playing with dolls when the 55 year old had sex with her.

Click to expand...

As I said, the only thing everyone agrees on is that she had already reached puberty. And as I've shown numerous time here she couldn't possibly have been that young because the chronology doesn't match. In all probability an impossibly young age was ascribed to Aisha in order to make her the Prophet's little darling instead of his daughter Fatima whose progeny was being denied their inheritance. Aisha was born around 604 A.D. The Prophet did not take any other wives until his first wife died which was in 620 A.D. Even after that the marriage was not consummated for another three years. You do the math.

Were you mature enough to marry at nine?

Click to expand...

Neither was I mature enough to raise a child at 15 which tradition has it was Mary's age when she gave birth to Jesus.

What does that prove? Things were different in antiquity. A girl was considered marriageable as soon as she reached puberty.

FutureAndAHope said:

Hi I have heard in the past that Muhammad had a young slave girl .... does anyone have references for this ... so I can increase my learning. p.s. I think is is disgusting if that is true. That is pedophilia, and all in the name of a false god.

Click to expand...

What you heard is a complete lie.

FutureAndAHope said:

I was doing some reading, and it appears that at the time Muhammad was around, marrying young was considered normal, a king of England married a 12 year old.

Click to expand...

According to canon law 12 was the marriageable age in the Catholic Church up until the beginning of the 20th century.

However I still think it shows a great lack of insight. A person of God should know to marry some one their own age.

Click to expand...

And they would know this from what divine revelation?

Should a 'person of God' know not to marry their sister? Yet Abraham did precisely that. Does that mean he is not a person of God?

The average age difference between a husband and a wife in antiquity was at least seven years. The reason was simple. Women married as soon as puberty as possible, men not until they could support a wife.