Quratulain’s Reviews > Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam > Status Update

“The law is productive of gender difference and is part of a society’s gendering practices alongside other forms of knowledge. Social practices shape laws, which in turn affect both collective action and individual moral, social, and psychic formation.”

“...When conjoined with near-total exclusion of women from the processes whereby law was formulated, this means that woman’s basic rights are often sacrificed when dominant modes of argument press claims into their extreme form.”

“Women fundamentally have lesser rights both while a marriage ensures and when it is ending.”

“But insofar as they are willing to address these injustices only within the framework of the system that gives rise to them, they close off any possibility of women entering as subjects and reframing the issues in genuinely new terms....Inequality makes fully meaningful consent difficult when not impossible.”

“An examination of Maliki rules for property ownership by women and slaves lends credence to this suggestion that female property rights were sacrosanct to the extent they served to differentiate free females from enslaved persons.”

“A woman has the capacity to own property but nothing to be a proprietor of marriage...whiff of disability that attaches to women’s legal capacity , the persistent sense that women are less fully legal subjects than men.”

“Though some rulings were eventually implemented by judges, the texts discussed here were neither guides to adjudicatory practice nor themselves enforceable. Instead they present an ideal or a series of interlinked ideals ...”

“...when we speak of the ethical with regard to gender in Islamic law we often mean egalitarianism. It is vital to recall that these jurists did not idealize an egalitarian order.”

“How can women view the discriminatory sharia as a source of justice? One element of their support is undeniably a vagueness about what precisely constitutes the religious law they advocate”.

“The law is not consistent in its viewpoint. At times it clearly takes the part of the ruing class and at other times it is amenable to common-sense and humane considerations.”