“In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes.” See, the Islamic State doesn’t practice sex slavery because it is sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunnah, but because the U.S. did bad things in Iraq. This is what passes for analysis on most university campuses these days. Much more below.
“The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think,” by Kecia Ali, Huffington Post, August 19, 2015 (thanks to David):
…Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.
The disingenuous reasoning here is appalling. Can’t anyone in academia deal with a topic honestly anymore? I know Kecia Ali is a university professor, and university professors today are mostly muddle-headed ideologues more interested in pushing their far-Left agenda than having rational discussion or searching for the truth, but this is ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it is a breathtakingly compact example of how contemporary academics obscure, rather than expose, the truth. Here are a few of the ways Kecia Ali outrages the truth in that paragraph:
“Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so.”
Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that “the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it” actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, because of the absolute prohibition on declaring something to be wrong that Muhammad considered to be right.
“…indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point.”
Actually, it would settle the point if those majority-Muslim societies had outlawed slavery on the basis of Islamic principles, but they didn’t. They abolished slavery under pressure from the West. There was never an indigenous Muslim abolitionist movement, and to this day, slavery is practiced sub rosa in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, etc., and justified precisely on the contention that if the Qur’an assumes it and Muhammad practiced it, it cannot be wrong.
“It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so.”
Here again, this point is only valid if there were some mainstream Qur’anic case against slavery, reinterpreting the pro-slavery passages in a different way. But there isn’t. “Objective scholars” — as if Kecia Ali were one — may not find slavery in the Qur’an or Islamic law, but note that Kecia Ali is writing for an audience of Leftist non-Muslims in the Huffington Post: she is not trying to convince Islamic State slave owners that slavery is wrong on Islamic grounds. It is, in other words, far easier to lull non-Muslims into complacency about a human rights abuse that Muslims justify on Islamic grounds than it is to convince the Muslims who are perpetrating it to stop doing so.
“Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.”
Kecia Ali here assumes that the Bible and Qur’an are equivalent in their teachings and mainstream interpretation. In reality, the abolitionist movement arose in the UK and US among Christian clergymen who argued against the ongoing applicability of the Biblical passages justifying slavery on the basis of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and equal in dignity on that basis. The Qur’an and Islam, by contrast, make a sharp dichotomy between believers (“the best of people,” Qur’an 3:110) and unbelievers (“the most vile of created beings,” Qur’an 98:6), and consequently there was no teaching of the equal dignity of all human beings upon which an abolitionist movement could be based.
Kecia Ali probably knows all this, or should if she doesn’t. But she doesn’t tell her hapless HuffPo marks, that is, her readers.
Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet’s normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad’s life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use.
What she leaves out (again) of all this is the normative character of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example for Muslims. That normative character is not some crazy literalist subsect of Islam. It is mainstream Islamic theology among all sects and madhahib.
Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage.
Yet again: Kecia Ali doesn’t tell her unfortunate readers that Islamic law is not considered to be some man-made document like the U.S. Constitution; on the contrary, in Islamic theology Sharia is considered to be the unchangeable and perfect law of Allah himself. As such, its allowance for slavery is considered to be as divinely inspired and unalterable as the rest of it.
Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution, and jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.
“Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution” — an unsupported and false claim. “Jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries” — everyone did it, you see, so it must be OK. This tu quoque argument might hold water if theologically-justified slavery persisted in religious contexts other than Islam today, but it doesn’t.
To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam;
Don’t kid yourself, professor.
to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex.
Honesty and transparency on this issue would be refreshing, but it isn’t forthcoming in this article.
However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of “authentic” Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.
The Islamic State’s attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon.
Once again, an assertion without evidence. How is the Islamic State being superficial and selective in its interpretation of the Qur’an and Sharia? Kecia Ali doesn’t tell us. She just wants us to take her word for it.
Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines.
I’m all for that.
What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn’t do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth.
And why mustn’t one do this? Because above all, Kecia Ali and the Huffington Post don’t want you to have a negative view of Islam. But why should one not think that the Islamic State’s practices are the “legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth”? Yet again, we just have to take Kecia Ali’s word for it.
In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points.
Note that Kecia Ali doesn’t actually offer an alternative interpretation of the Qur’an passages that the Islamic State adduces in order to justify slavery. She just tells us that some unnamed “Muslim opponents” of the Islamic State have offered this. Who? When? Where? She doesn’t tell us. Why not? Could it be that this Muslim challenge to the Islamic State hasn’t actually happened at all?
…In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world.
I doubt that even the Islamic State jihadis would deny that these are old terms and rules that have fallen into desuetude. But they would argue that they are part of the law of Allah; the fact that they’re old and long unused doesn’t change that, and actually only increases the urgency of reviving them, so as to bring the practice of Muslims back in line with the commands of Allah. Here yet again, Kecia Ali is attempting a sleight-of-hand, pretending that this issue is all about human law, not about the law that Muslims consider to be that of Allah himself.
By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.
The idea that the New York Times is interesting in retailing “familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity” is beyond ludicrous. For years, the Times has again and again obscured and whitewashed numerous incidents of barbarity committed by Muslims and justified by their perpetrators by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Rukmini Callimachi’s piece was highly anomalous in acknowledging, even in a slight and incomplete manner, that the Islamic State justifies its practices by referring to teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. But to admit that fact would be to expose as false and manipulative the ever-present narrative of Muslim victimhood, and Kecia Ali is not going to do that.
In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.
“Moral high ground is in short supply.” Because the U.S. Constitution “continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime” (the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”), we shouldn’t judge the Islamic State’s barbaric practice of sex slavery.
Kecia Ali’s moral equivalence here is nothing short of monstrous. But for her efforts, she will no doubt be hailed in Leftist circles and laden with honors, while the Islamic State’s sex slaves, for whose rights and human dignity she could have and should have spoken out instead of engaging in this gruesome apologetic for their enslavement, continue to suffer daily torture.
This is American academia today.
Azacque says
Prison sentences are proper punishment, not slavery.
Jay Boo says
MO did it
I assume that you are agreeing that Muhammad was wrong and a poor example to follow.
“Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that “the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it” actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, “
Gene says
Really, hard labor is an improper punishment for murderer and rapists? Slavery as a punishment for mass murder after a fair trial and conviction, is a lot different from slavery for being born to parents who were slaves because their parents were enslaved by Muslims because they were infidels. Slavery might be a fair alternative to a death sentence for someone like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Charles Manson.
mortimer says
Your views went out the fashion at Nuremburg in 1945.
Kepha says
No, Gene’s comments are nothing like what the Nazis pushed. Believe me!
Frankly, I would not like to have a serial murderer working anywhere near my house. The death penalty is good enough, and should be used when there’s a clear conviction for murder.
Jay Boo says
Dear Abby,
Should I submit willingly and allow my devout Muslim neighbor to behead my firstborn son and take my nine year old daughter as his personal sex slave.
I don’t wish to appear intolerant toward Muslims.
Signed:
Confused University educator
Jesis says
You are incorrect. Look at other sources for facts. The so called recorded sayings and behavior of Mohammed are counterfeit and we’re created 327 years after Mohammed died. Quran chapter 2 verse 62 “any Muslim, Christian, jew, and Sabian that do good deeds, believe in God and the day of judgment will have a beautiful reward from God and no fear nor sadness will come to them
Jay Boo says
Wow, What was I thinking.
“any Muslim, Christian, jew, and Sabian that do good deeds, believe in God and the day of judgment will have a beautiful reward from God and no fear nor sadness will come to them”
That sounds so soothing.
To think that for 1400 years Muslims have been getting it all wrong.
Western Canadian says
I can see you’ve been practicing your understated sarcasm again. VERY well done!!!
Westman says
Sorry, Jesis, but you do err:
“And whoever desires a religion other than Islam, it shall not be accepted from him, and in the hereafter he shall be one of the losers.” Quran 3:85
“And whoever does not believe in Allah and His Messenger, then surely We have prepared burning fire for the unbelievers.” Quran 48:13
Here is the actual meaning of 2:62
“And who believe in that which has been revealed to you(Muhammad & Quran) AND that which was revealed before you(Judaism, Christianity) and they are sure of the hereafter. These are on a right course from their Lord and these it is that shall be successful.” Quran 2:4-5
Only those who accept all the prophets, including Muhammad, are saved from Hell in Islamic doctrine.
You’re either a muda’rat/taqiyya artist or poorly read. Time for some swatting on the books.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Should I submit willingly and allow my devout Muslim neighbor to behead my firstborn son and take my nine year old daughter as his personal sex slave?
According to them, yet. Good question, though.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
I mean to type “yes.” Or maybe “yeth.”
Stephanie says
Why not blaming allah for SEX SLAVERY (allowed to Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50), goody two-shoes of Boston University & HuffPo — TOO AFRAID 🙂
A society which sells Islam as peace™ has a problem!
http://192.96.206.71/sex-in-islam.html
(video) Sex in islam, facts — Q. 4:24 “agree Mutually” (Mu’ta marriage, temporary) — 24:2 “(adulterers) flog each of them with a hundred stripes”
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Why does the Islamic State have such a tough time convincing dim-witted American academics of the glories and legitimacy of right-hand possession? Maybe it has to do with their flag, with its uninspiring Gothic color scheme, a white scrawl on a black background, with script that looks like the scribbled English wording “alll Jews Dog”:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Flag_of_Islamic_State_of_Iraq.svg/2000px-Flag_of_Islamic_State_of_Iraq.svg.png
What the Islamic State needs is a new flag, something more colorful, and pre-13th-Amendment:
http://atimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/NEWFLAG.jpg
jihad3tracker says
For those of us here who are considering sending a pizza with extra reality on it to this beacon of shining enlightenment, here is a contact path : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kecia-ali/
She might have 5 minutes free in a very busy schedule for ROBERT’S SHREDDING OF HER REMARKS, on this blog post.
You could start by alerting her to that, and proceed on to the kind of superb references which commenter Stephanie has written above . . .
NOTE THE MANY HOTLINKS TO MS. ALI’S SCHOLARLY ARSENAL in that bio page, with titles bearing enough cognitive dissonance to last me until Christmas.
Lesley says
I looked at the sympathetic comments on Ali’s blog and nearly barfed. Is this the downside to living in a first-world nation, that our sheltered academics are so blind to obvious truth that they have to rationalize barbarity done in the (texturally supported) name of Islam with some kind of self-loathing drivel?
I bet if I put an orange on the table before her, she would insist that it was a rare alien egg… and if it was a bad piece of fruit, it is somehow our fault…
Mirren10 says
http://www.wisemuslimwomen.org/muslimwomen/bio/kecia_ali/
This morally obtuse and deeply stupid bint is apparently a muslim herself.
As well as being a muslim, she’s also one of those leftist ‘feminists’ . As Robert notes, she couldn’t give a tuppenny damn about those poor women, girls, and *children* enslaved, raped and abused by the foul monsters of the IS – all she wants to do is exculpate islam, and blame America for what muslims do.
You can’t cure stupid.
Western Canadian says
No, but if we had a reliable and trustworthy news media (good luck with that!!), you could embarrass and humiliate it into silence….
Kathy Brown, Esq. says
Indeed you cannot because ‘stupidity’ is volitional.
Still it’s inconceivable that this moron is ‘teaching’ anyone, anything. She wouldn’t last 2 seconds in our [trad] Catholic post-homeschool school in the middle of a cornfield here in Kansas.
And I mean the 6th-7th graders would put her AWAY.
Our older students wouldn’t even need the full 2 seconds.
Jay Boo says
Reality is whatever you want it to be. — just make it conform to the preconfigured fantasy world.
Muhammad did not hold himself accountable either so who are we to judge him they wonder.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
I call that Fictive Reality, where a falsehood becomes so widely accepted as the truth that it may as well be. There are five bubbles in Fictive Reality, which together comprise G.S.E.R.S., or Geezers for short:
1) Globo-
2) -Socialist
3) Environmentalist
4) Racist
5) Sexist
The Geezers bubbles are a wide open door to the Moslems, who walk though it every day, God bless their peanut sized hearts.
Westman says
“..whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime..”
So, cutting off hands and feet, beheading, stoning, hanging, tossing from high buildings, public beatings, and killing apostates, all enshrined in Islam for crimes defined in the Quran and Sunnah, is somehow morally superior to keeping real criminals away from the public for a specified period?
Kecia Ali’s reasoning is bordering on desperate and is indicative of a current crisis in Islam’s status in the West. Notice that she won’t accuse Saudi Arabia or any other UN recognized majority-Muslim country of being outside the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah, or, of being primitive in practice.
Let’s have more of it until most Americans will suspect, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”, and start looking at actual Islamic doctrine. That is the last thing Muslim apologists desire. The status of Islam is declining due to the weight of its own doctrines and there is panic among the crew.
Kuffar says
Greasy hair, vapid expression, vacant stare, wildly gesticulating gestures, incoherent argument… Yep. An ivy league liberal.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Technically, they’re called Ivy League Morons, the most powerful cabal in the world. There are exceptions, of course, such as Dr. Andrew Bostom, M.D. of Brown, Peter Ferrara of Harvard, David Goldman (aka Spengler) of Columbia, and Arthur Laffer of Yale. But these are few.
nacazo says
Pst.Pst. Let me get you on a little secret…. Kecia Ali is a muslim. According to muslim doctrine, you can lie to protect islam from its ugliness. Kecia Ali is a good muslim following muslim doctrine. To hell with logic and coherent arguments. Her priority is to protect an evil ideology.
Good job! kecia ali.
/sarc off
dante says
nacazo you hit it out of the ballpark.
mortimer says
MORAL EQUIVALENCY ARGUMENT GONE WILD!
Kecia Ali uses the ‘tu quoque’ defense to deflect modern criticism of backward, Sharia-based enslavement. But it is a red herring. Her fallacious argument is this: “If you reject Sharia-based enslavement, you must reject the US constitution whose 13th Amendment permits ‘involuntary servitude’.”
In fact, America DID remove ‘involuntary servitude’ as a punishment in 1928, 1933 and 1942.
Convict leasing or peonage began in 1846 and lasted until July 1, 1928, when Herbert Hoover was vying for the White House. Alabama was the last state to use convict leasing in 1928, but North Carolina was the last state to legislate it out of existence in 1933. When the U.S. entered World War II, the Franklin Roosevelt administration realized that the continued existence of involuntary servitude in the South undermined war propaganda against the Axis. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor, Circular N0. 3591 was issued to all federal prosecutors instructing them to prosecute cases of “involuntary servitude and slavery”. It took several months after Pearl Harbor for convict leasing to be officially abolished in the United States. Finally, the Thirteenth Amendment would be enforced.
Sharia law is ‘perfect, eternal and complete’ and therefore may not be changed. Shari maintains and protects slavery ‘forever’ as a normative part of Islam. Over 70,000 slaves are promised to Muslims in paradise. Islam is a word that means ‘submission’. No one is as submitted as a slave. The word ‘Islam’ is a euphemism for slavery. Nothing could be more Islamic than slavery.
(Oh, one small detail…tens of thousands of American soldiers died fighting in the Union Army for the abolition of slavery, and tens of thousands of others against the enslavement of entire nations in Europe and Asia. MUSLSIM SOLDIERS ALWAYS FIGHT FOR slavery. Thank you.)
Westman says
Thanks Mortimer,
Very interesting.
Ilpalazzo says
Don’t forget that we wouldn’t have slaves in the US if not for the Muslims that originally enslaved them and sold to the Dutch.
KrazyKafir says
It’s delightful to imagine the dhimmi professor reading Robert’s devastating scholarly reply, until one remembers that being a uber-leftist the dhimmi prof no doubt is inflicted with a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Casting pearls before swine.
nacazo says
She’s not a dhimmi. She’s a card carrying member of the totalitarian ideology. She would collect the jizya and make the dhimmis feel subdued.
KrazyKafir says
She certainly is a lover of totalitarianism, or she wouldn’t be a leftist tool who has such admiration for another totalitarian ideology……Islam.
abad says
Wrong. Miss Ali, it is NOT complicated.
Islam and its followers – Muslims need to start being held accountable for their behavior and actions because as of right now, such doings are getting your people despised around the world.
Islam and its followers need to have its “special protection” status completely revoked in every single non-Muslim nation around the world. Muslims have proven to not be worth it.
VOX POPULI says
…. I’m surprised this lady has not been accused, yet, of progressive islamophbia …
Edward says
‘Boston University prof blames U.S. for Islamic State sex slavery’
Open letter to:
It’s all ‘gobbledygook’ talk coming from you Professor Kecia Ali!
Pretentious and scarcely intelligible language, especially of the sort attributed to bureaucrats, sociologists and academia. – Representative Maury Maverick of Texas (1944)
This gobbledygook presentation of yours includes your explanations of the precepts of a very wayward religion!
BTW, have you ever bothered to check out the inspirational certainty and authenticity of this very unmerciful religion that you now profess?
mortimer says
Agree. Islam’s calls for enslavement of anyone who refuses the founder’s religion…when taken at the most basic level…are obviously the ideas of someone who is INSANE.
Islam is a collection of self-contradictory RANTINGS of a certifiable LUNATIC unendorsed by philosophy, logic, history, science or other religions. It’s obviously that Islam was the MENTAL MEANDERINGS of a psychopathic killer…or schizophrenic or epileptic…or all of them. Mohammed was nuts. So is Islam.
Linde Barrera says
To Edward- Thank you for your 2:32 pm post of Aug 21, 2015. I am in total agreement with you. Her article is rubbish. And just to keep you up to date, I never got a call back from Harvard Univ. Prof. Noah Feldman’s assistant Shannon, to answer my questions on his article (which was given here at JW several days ago) as to why he paralleled sex slavery in the Islamic State with slavery in the US prior to 1866. I also never got a response to my email to the Nat. Organiz. of Women (NOW) as to why they don’t speak up for voiceless girls in Islamic countries who are victims of FGM. Very coincidential.
jewdog says
Hey, I think I had her in one of my courses when I majored in Virtual Reality. Then later, when I had to pay off my student loans, they insisted that I pay in actual money. Maybe Bernie Sanders will get elected.
Frank Mosta says
See! I think the Prof has it wrong! I say that Islamic sex rape and slavery happens because Muslim men have no control of their sex drive and Muslim women don’t want sex with Muslim men.
Diana says
No Frank islamic sex slavery happens because it is sanctioned and encouraged in the koran and haddiths. And because women are but mere chattels of their menfolk – property to be bought and sold – by raping non-muslim women, the twisted logic of islam is that this is a good way to attack the honour of the men who own these women. Get it?
Of course it is true that muslim men have no control over their sex drive because the oh so perfect mo had none. Gotta disagree about the muslim women tho’ – it is completely irrelevant to any muslim man what any woman wants. It is impossible according to the religion of filth that a man can rape his wife – she MUST have sex with him like it or not. It’s all written in the koran & associated islamic writings. Cheers
Jake says
Hey professor, if you love Islam so, MOVE TO IRAQ, IRAN wherever and see how long before you are raped by over 100 men and then beheaded ! ! !
Angemon says
It should be a surprise. According to islamic orthodoxy, islam is supposed to be a divine revelation with instructions on how to act in any and every aspects of life. Muslims proudly say how terrible the pagan arabs were and how islam improved their lives. If pre-islamic arabs had slaves and is islam allows slavery there’s not much of an improvement.
jewdog says
Ali Sina of FaithFreedom.org claims that actually, when the Arabs were pagans, before Islam, they were famous for their tolerance, and indeed, they had many gods. Islam, he maintains, changed them for the worse.
Joseph says
This woman is a prefect example of a person with years of education and is still is dumb as a rock.
People like this I like to call *doorknobs#……they are about as smart as one, and everybody is going to have a turn at them.
Canadian Capitalist says
This female is a “USEFUL IDIOT”….USEFUL IDIOTS serve a purpose for the “DEMORALIZATION” of Western Civilization. This clueless specimen is a typical component of “ACTIVE MEASURES”….what’s dangerous is the fact that she’s a clueless slug with an audience….equally as clueless but more stupid.
I’m really sick of these people and the media that supports and enables them.
SI VIS PACEUM PARA BELUM
CANADA
Sam says
Evil and it’s enablers like this America hating woman will only be defeated by force. Islam is evil and all it’s enablers are, knowingly and/or through ignorance are evil too. So………
Western Canadian says
If this intellectual prostitute is even known to be travelling to a muslim dominated country, if we started a rumor that she has been found to continually commit adultery, or has used the unholy and bloody koran for toilet paper (all it is good for!), those who’s boots she licked would take care of our problem….
duh_swami says
If she was blond she would look like Marie Harf…
Bezelel says
If you put the two of them together it would be insanity in stereo
Matthieu Baudin says
“…To say this is not to present an apologetic defence of Islam…”
Her blinkered, lazy mind is intent to debunk any notion of universal human right,s as part of the Post Modern game of handing the blame for everything odious to the Dominant Culture. In the process, active Jihadists (following the Islamic tradition of demanding grovelling submission and self abasement from its captives and subjects) are let off the hook from taking moral responsibility for their actions. Those of us who wish to live fruitful and cooperative lives in today’s universal civilization want universal standards respecting ‘life and limb’ and wont have anything to do with the mushy culturally relative interpretations of sex slavery that this shameless woman would have us adopt.
Wellington says
Demonstrating once again that no amount of education, however much, is a guarantee against general stupidity and moral idiocy. In the final analysis, ideology trumps everything else. After all, Joseph Goebbels had a PhD, now didn’t he? And it’s the main reason why being very particular about what one embraces is paramount.
For instance, I embrace liberty. I submit that no Muslim or no dhimmi apologist for Islam can even remotely do so, such as this pathetic academic, the subject of this article.
And, in closing, I would add this: Just imagine if Robert Spencer were to engage this silly woman in a one-on-one debate (she would of course refuse for whatever bogus reason), it would be an oratory massacre of the finest and most deserving kind. Worth buying tickets for most definitely. Ah, if only, no?
I Kahn says
Somebody forgot to mention that Kecia Ali is a Muslim. Hello? Anybody home??
More Ham Ed says
“Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for …”
Before the U.S. – Mo’ Ham Mad and his unholy ko ‘ran existed.
Far leftists seem to have trouble w/ timelines among other things.
Wal Man says
All I can say is that anyone paying big bucks, and it is big bucks, for a Boston University education for their kid has got to be wondering why so many crazy professors are on the school payroll. There was that other dilly last year, Saida Grundy, who got so many things wrong in a crazed hatred-filled diatribe against “problem white people” that it sent BU Alumni’s heads spinning. BUT these nit-wits are still drawing checks from BU so future students should think twice when they think of Boston University. Is this the culture I want for myself?
gravenimage says
Boston University prof blames U.S. for Islamic State sex slavery
In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime…
………………………
Where to start with this crap? Despite her denial, it isn’t “Islamophobes” who claim that ISIS is practicing slavery and sex slavery on the model of the “Prophet”, but ISIS themselves.
And then the grotesque claim that America “enslaves” its felons is absolute calumny. In some jurisdictions, inmates can either reduce their sentences and/or earn spending money if they work–but in no cases are they ever compelled to. This is utter calumny.
And the idea that slavery in the Islamic State is the fault of America is similarly ludicrous. America and the rest of the coalition made myriad mistakes in Iraq–setting up a slave state was *not* one of them.
AtheistDude says
Seriously, the only cure for these overpaid elitist prick university professors is to abduct them and plop them down in the middle of Mecca where they can get a good, hard taste of what real-life Islam is all about! When they say they’re not Muslims and they get the shit raped out of them After being Sold off as sex slaves…then Maybe they’ll open their entitled lily-white eyes to reality!
David says
A moslem lying about islam….gee, who woulda guessed?
WatchingTheFall says
What the hell is wrong with women in this country? ThIs whole “empowerment” thing is getting way out of hand. If their not home watching “Your man’s not good enough” television, they’re sitting in a classroom listening to this nutcase. Oh and isn’t the Revenge of the Nerds glasses used by the militant left a nice touch to help piss us off?
Craigtrump says
There are a lot of nuts like this in the universities. Get rid of them. Parents , look into other colleges and avoid the many, hiring useless fools & liars like this .
Boston University fire her !
brenrod says
the prof is a muslim, how else would she justify belonging to such a despicable cult. its like belonging to the nazi party, not all sent jews to the ovens. If you belong to the muslim religion it is the same as belonging to the nazi party. by their fruits you shall know them
Larry A. Singleton says
Comment on HuffPost:
“Slavery was not entirely racialized, however, and slaves were captured or bought from Europe, Asia and the Caucasus as well as Africa”
Huh? Arabs are the most racist people on the planet. Read Hugh Fitzgerald’s article Islam as a Vehicle for Arab Supremacism.
“Muslim history reflects a wide variety of historically specific patterns of enslavement, slave holding, manumission and abolition.”
Just out of curiosity, where are William Wilberforce, John Newton, William Carey, David Livingstone (I presume), Lord Shaftesbury and General Charles (Khartoum) Gordan in Islamic history?
“ there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity”
There’s a reason you’re reading about beheadings, crusifixions, rape and other barbarities related to Islam as opposed to stories about them dancing through the airports annoying people by banging tambourines and tossing rose petals in the air. Read Andrew Bostom’s Legacy books. Particularly The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Read about the mass murder, pogroms, rape, looting (a common theme) and dhimmitude of Jewish communities that have existed as long as Muslims have been around to this day. And still happening via Imams inciting mobs to go out and kill unbelievers. Academic frauds like Kecia Ali “Associate professor of religion” at Boston University, depend on the fact that the average reader won’t go any further than the bilge from these apologists for Islam.
“singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of “authentic” Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.”
Really? A “distorted” view of Muslim polity? I wish I had room to put what this dumb-ass construction worker has learned about jihad alone. If you can find it, read Jihad in the Qur’an and Sunnah by Sheikh Abdullâh bin Muhammad bin Humaid. I found this article, almost as an Introduction, in a Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari published by Dar-Us-Salam and plugged by the sinister gen. Manager of Sound Vision Abdul Malik Mujahid.
You might want to ask the good “professor” to consider this: Explain this articles prominence, and significance almost as an “Introduction”, in a book, my Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari, and tell me….
….WHY, out of all the articles, out of all the words of pearly Muslim poetry and wisdom the publishers could have put in this, “the most authentic and true among the books of the Prophet”, this article on JIHAD is the one they chose?
Also
If Islam is the “religion of peace”, where in Sheikh Abdullah bin Humaid’s article on jihad can I find the equivalent of “Love Thy Neighbor” and “good will toward men”?
Compare Humaid’s “jihad” and Emmet Fox’ Sermon on the Mount and tell me which one best represents a spirit of Love and “compassion”
Also address “jihad” as it’s defined in Reliance of the Traveller and answer the same question. Chapter O-9.0: Jihad O: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada signifying warfare to establish the religion.” And explain why the “greater” jihad is only mentioned once here and never seen again in this “Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law”.
I’ve posted this hundreds of times to many Muslims and have yet to get a single response. Well, I did receive a response from some goofball named “Dr.” Mohsen El-Guindy asking me to read his books. Instead I downloaded a bunch of his articles. Which were pure rants. An Imam, sidestepped it by telling me I had to “study Islam” to gain a greater understanding.
Also read The 4th Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research: Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel. Sept. 1968. Translated by D.F. Green/David G. Littman (Support Secure Freedom)
http://supportsecurefreedom.org/…/Arab-Theologians-on…
I use Humaid’s article as “Exhibit A” when it comes to refuting the “religion of peace” claim. “The 4th Conference…” could easily be Exhibit B.
“Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime”
Where in the hell is this?
They ALWAYS bring up “Slavery in America” when the Islamic slavery is mentioned. The ONLY reason Muslim countries still don’t have slavery is pressure from Christian countries America and Britain otherwise, like Mauritania, slavery and rape, (what your right hand possesses), would still be an institution in every Muslim country in the world.
Cut all this academic crap and Muslim whitewash and get yourself a copy of Peter Hammond’s book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam and learn the real story about slavery.
Learn that a “comparison of the Islamic slave trade reveals some interesting contrasts. While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic slave trade. Two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims. While the mortality rate for slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Trans Sahara East African slave trade was between 80 and 90%”. “At least 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. At least 80% of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets. It is believed that the death toll from the 14 centuries of Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been over 112 million. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the Trans Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 million people.”
“While Christian Reformers spearheaded the anti-slavery abolitionist movements in Europe and North America, and Great Britain mobilized her Navy, throughout most of the 19th Century to intercept slave ships and set the captives free, there was no comparable opposition to slavery within the Muslim world. Even after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and Europe abolished the slave trade in 1815, Muslim slave traders enslaved a further 2 million Africans. This despite vigorous British Naval activity and military intervention to limit the Islamic slave trade.”
Contrary to the myth that whites went into the African interior and captured slaves, America wouldn’t have even HAD slavery were it not for the blacks in Africa who enslaved and sold their own people and Islam.
And again; slavery has never been abrogated in Islam. Just ask Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.
TruthWFree says
This liberal idiot woman needs to be sold to an an Islamic Jihadist leader to be used as a sex slave…based on her looks, she would not bring a good price.
Robert, you give her way too much ink than what her hair brained statements deserve.
mach37 says
For Robert Spencer: Re: the paragraph that begins “Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology …”
I believe you are writing more for western infidels (like me) than for Muslims; if that is not the case, then read no further.
Your untranslated words appear to be supporting the Arabic language as supreme over English translations, in that you put the English translation of “uswa hasana” in quotes, rather than following the English translation with the Arabic in quotes. This is a pet peeve of mine, that English translations of the Qur’an far too often do not fully translate Arabic words, but leave them intact and forcing the reader to consult other sources for the meaning of those words. This is especially egregious in the web site http://quran.com, which provides a supposedly English translation of the Qur’an but leaves many Arabic expressions completely untranslated.
In my opinion, translations of the Qur’an should leave no Arabic words untranslated in the text, only include original Arabic words in footnotes if they somehow seem to be untranslatable.
mach37 says
Defining jail and prison sentences as “enslavement” – professor Ali has a very twisted mind, claiming that imprisonment is the same as slavery. Perhaps she would be happier with punishment for crimes to consist of hacking off hands and/or feet, then releasing the criminal? Or simply consign criminals to death by sword, fire or crucifixion as being more humane than a prison sentence?
JayT says
This is why I avoid reading the Huffington Post. Almost daily, it is headlined with some offering intended to portray Islam as the salvation of all. It’s clear to me, the HP wants to grease the way for as many American converts as they can funnel or at the very least, grow a bountiful crop of sympathizers.
Arianna Huffington is very good friends with George Soros for a reason. They both want to jump in bed with anyone that will bring about the fall of America.
EYESOPEN says
I wonder what this ignorant, Leftist bimbo would have to say about THIS article:
Mauritania court upholds conviction of anti-slavery activists
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/08/mauritania-court-upholds-conviction-of-anti-slavery-activists