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Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body: Militarised

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Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies

of the body: Militarised Muslim masculinity and
the Islamist production of concubines for the
caliphate

Fatima Seedat

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the body: Militarised Muslim masculinity and the Islamist production of concubines for the caliphate,
Agenda, 30:3, 25-38

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 article
Sexual economies of war and sexual
technologies of the body: Militarised
Muslim masculinity and the Islamist
production of concubines for the caliphate
Fatima Seedat

abstract
This article analyses sexuality and subjugation in the context of Islamist militarism. It examines how the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram style themselves upon narratives of Islamist militancy that
appear to be historically authentic narratives of Muslim militarism read out of classical legal texts. The article
argues instead that because ISIS and Boko Haram read these narratives through contemporary understandings
of militarism using contemporary sexual technologies of the body, they also read these narratives in entirely
contemporary and modern ways. The product of this reading is therefore also a contemporary form of Islamist
militarism, using contemporary sexual technologies of the body. The justifications for these modern
enactments of militarism, law and sexual subjugation are not to be found in the historical texts, but in the
modern readings of the text. To illustrate these modern readings of sexuality and subjugation, I take up three
publications produced by ISIS, and further, two online fatwas (legal opinions). Viewed against their historical
precedents, the first reveal the aberrant nature of ISIS and Boko Haram style sexual subjugation in terms of
historical legal practice. The online fatwas reveal how ordinary Muslims have come to conceptualise the
intersections of war and sex in ways contrary to the practices of ISIS and Boko Haram.

keywords
sex slavery, Islamic law, consent, ISIS, Boko Haram, militarism

Overview new Muslim masculinities which are mili-

This article analyses the intersections of reli-
gion, militarism and sexuality in three
aspects.1 The first examines the intersections
of militarism and sexuality in ISIS enactments
of war to dispel the suggestion that these are
aberrant in the sense that they deviate from
normative practice in the sexual economy of
modern forms of war. The second aspect
argues that ISIS uses historical practices in
distinctly contemporary ways to produce
tarised, hyper-sexualised and articulated as
resistance to imperialism. Finally the article
highlights the ways in which this hyper-sex-
ualised and militarised Islamist masculinity
is also premised upon a paradigm of sexual
control that is essential to historical Muslim
legal narratives of sexuality in marriage and
concubinage, but out of step with contempor-
ary Muslim sexual norms. Marriage outside of
Muslim militarist discourses in a normative

Agenda 109/30.3 2016

ISSN 1013-0950 print/ISSN 2158-978X online
© 2017 Fatima Seedat
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2016.1275558 pp. 25–38
 Muslim context at present includes some
article
aspects of this paradigm of control but it
also includes a second paradigm based on
ideas of consent and mutuality. The result is
that Islamist militancy produces a militarised
masculinity premised on extreme forms of
sexual control that run contrary to how ordin-
ary Muslims conceptualise both sexual
relations and resistance to imperialism.2 To
illustrate these second and third aspects, I
take up three documents on sex enslavement
produced by ISIS and two online fatwas pro-
duced on two mainstream Muslim fatwa sites.
Islamist militancy produces a militarised
masculinity premised on extreme forms of
sexual control
The sexual economy of war
However problematic, sex has functioned as
a normative element of the economy of war
and therefore ISIS and Boko Haram enact-
ments of sex in the economy of war are not
aberrant to the practice of war. The use of
sexual labour by ISIS and Boko Haram is
portrayed by media and other sources in
terms that suggest an aberration caused by
the unique presence of Islam in the ideology
of these militarised groups. Yet, the intersec-
tions of war and sex are not unusual; rather,
they are normative to the sexual economy of
war by which I refer to the demand and
supply of sex in the context of war.
Whereas the use of sex as a weapon of war
has been sufficiently recognised to prompt
a United Nations Security Council resol-
ution, number 1820, unanimously adopted
in 2008, recognising and condemning the
use of rape as a weapon of war and a
threat to international security,3 the use of
sex in the economy of war is less obvious.
War requires combatants receive a steady
supply of arms, food and sex; all three are
considered crucial to the combatants’
ability to fight and a number of wars in the
last century illustrate this. As below, what
distinguishes each instance is the nature of
sexual trade or sexual subjugation in each.
The ianfu, Japanese for the euphemism
applied to women forced into sex to
provide ‘comfort’ for soldiers in Indonesia,
Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and other areas
conquered by Japanese forces in the
second world war is the most popular
26 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
example of this sexual economy in oper-
ation. Estimates range from 20 000 to
400 000 women captured to supply the
sexual economy of military personnel in
the Japanese imperial endeavour (Sun,
2014). Also during World War II, “the Wehr-
macht was running over 500 so-called
“Wehrmachtsbordellen”; German military
brothels which took two forms, garrison
brothels and field brothels, which gathered
women from concentration camps, work
camps, prisoners of war or prostitutes from
Germany and occupied territories to
provide sexual incentives to military person-
nel. The total estimate is of 30 000 women
forced into sex slavery in Nazi occupied
Eastern Europe (Milano, n.d.). Concentration
camp brothels are a more recently
researched phenomenon that documents
approximately 200 women recruited as
incentives for prison inmates (Herzog,
2008; Sommer, 2009). Women were
screened for sexually transmitted diseases,
forcibly sterilised and those who became
pregnant were forced to terminate. The
code word for British brothels established
by secret edict for the exclusive use of
British officers, was “blue lamp”, and
formed part of British strategy in the First
World War. The distinction of these brothels
from others was to avoid military personnel
“sullying their uniform by consorting with
prostitutes in public” (Makepeace,
2013:413). In this way British Expeditionary
Forces prescribed and enforced “ideal pat-
terns of male sexual conduct in war” (Make-
peace, 2013:413). Recognising the “needs of
men” as officers they “were granted excep-
tional permission for visiting” blue lamps.
They were also issued road passes for trans-
porting prostitutes and married men were
given special authorisations for brothel
visits, prostitutes being considered a
natural alternative to an absent wife (Make-
peace, 2013:415–8). In Paris, both US and
French military officials agreed that sex
was necessary to the war effort, and in the
view of the US military, control of the body
of the American GI “gave them dominion
of the French woman’s body as well”
(Roberts, 2013:162), accordingly, they
managed the health and mobility of the
women traded into brothels “run directly
by and for U.S. soldiers” (Roberts,
2013:160). Similar efforts were made for US
soldiers in Italy. A study of the sexual
economy of war demonstrates how
 the U.S. Army first attempted to gain
control of almost all aspects of soldiers’
sexuality and then tried to carefully
manage and regulate that sexual
economy to best fulfill the army’s mis-
sions … It encouraged those aspects of
sexual identity that the army believed
benefited the service – for instance, hyper-
masculine demeanor and actions (Byers,
2012:403).
More recently, Guatemalan indigenous com-
munities have sued the state for the sexual
slavery of Mayan Q’eqchi women. Closer to
home, in African National Congress (ANC)
women’s accounts of Quatro, a training
camp for the ANC, and Swapo women’s
experiences in Lubongo, they recount the
regular rape of female cadres, in the camp
to support the struggle for liberation from
apartheid rule but required also to have sex
with their senior commanders and others
(Trewhela, 1993a:1993b).
Along these lines, in Baghdadi’s cali-
phate, Yazidi women have been used to
supply the sexual needs of a militarised
force constituted from a disparate group of
expatriate and local fighters. In Nigeria,
girls and young women from Chibok and
surrounding areas have been forcibly taken
to supply the sexual economy of the Boko
Haram fighters. I explore these last two
below but locate them here to include
these practices amongst the various ways
in which the management of war includes
the management of sex as a wartime com-
modity. Accordingly, one American
General, George Patton said of his troops:
“if they don’t fuck, they don’t fight” (Moon,
2015:143), making a definitive link between
the prosecution of the war effort and the
sexual activity of the combatant conceived
in heteronormative terms as a married or
unmarried straight male (and exclusive of
similarly single or married queer men and
straight or queer women). Patton’s state-
ment formulates the combatants’ sexuality
at the intersections of penetration and mili-
tarism, producing a militarised hyper-
masculinity that necessitates the supply
and availability of sex for combatants; and
the violent nature of war means that this
sex may be either solicited formally or
enforced violently.
In addition to the supply of sex to comba-
tants, the economy of sex in war requires
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
article
also that the outcomes of that supply be
managed, in battle and back at the comba-
tant’s home. Sexually transmitted diseases
and pregnancies are two material outcomes
of the sexual economy of war. Infidelity to
partners at home and the violation of peace
time sexual norms are other outcomes.
Women forced into military prostitution
were sterilised or forced to abort, subject to
medical scrutiny of their bodies, and preven-
tative or curative treatments were enforced
by the military (Makepeace, 2013). In these
ways military strategy includes the manage-
ment of sexual reproduction and sexually
transmitted diseases amongst combatants
to maintain the healthy supply of comba-
tants and sustain the momentum of war
(Makepeace, 2013).
the intersections of war and sex are not
unusual, even if they are brutal
The examples above illustrate that the
intersections of war and sex are not
unusual, even if they are brutal. Yet in
media and other representations of this
intersection in the war efforts of Islamist
militants, there is a suggestion that the inter-
sections of sex and war are unusual, almost
aberrational. Because the combatants are
Muslim their practices are portrayed as
anomalous to the economy of war, and the
suggestion is that the anomaly may be
traced to the distance between European or
western and Muslim norms. In response to
the othering of Muslim practices which are
ascribed to the distance between the West
and its Muslim other, Armando Salvatore
(2016:73) argues instead for
the historic closeness and density of the
West’s interactions and competition with
the Islamic ecumene and its political
centers, more than any purported cultural
distance and civilizational alterity.
The multiple imbrications of modernity as
well as western military forces present in
the caliphate suggest that this distance
may be even smaller than we imagine. For,
historically too, the distance was not great,
sexual concubinage practices are evident in
a number of related near eastern contexts.
Ancient practices that illustrate the place of
sex in war are represented in Deuteronomy,
the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 21:10–14,
27
 where female captives are considered
article
amongst the spoils of war, which practice
recent scholarship describes as genocidal
rape intent on erasing the ethnic identity of
the captive women (Rey, 2016). Genesis:
25:1–5 and 1 Chronicles1:32 also refer to
Abraham’s marriage to the pilegesh,
Hebrew for concubine. And at present the
distance between the historical and contem-
porary caliphate appears even smaller; it is
as though in the production of concubines
is the completion of the contemporary
caliphate.
Much like the sexual economy of other
wars, ISIS and Boko Haram, more so the
former, have made women’s sexual and
reproductive labour a matter of open trade
as vital to the health of combatants and the
momentum of war as the supply of
weapons and food. Less than an aberration,
however unacceptable and egregious, these
practices are consonant with historical and
contemporary war time strategies for mana-
ging the sexual economy of war. And there-
fore, as significant an argument as the
brutality of the forms of sex trade ISIS and
Boko Haram conduct is the brutality of the
sexual economy of war and military
combat. In the sexual economy of war the
patriarchy of imperialism and the impulse
to control territory is intimately linked with
the patriarchal impulse to control women’s
bodies, connecting the sexually penetrating
male body with the conquering military
male body. While slavery as an economic
institution has been compatible with Islam
as an historical system of law and econ-
omics, ISIS has prioritised sexual slavery of
women over other historical forms of
slavery; similarly, Boko Haram has priori-
tised taking women captives over other
forms of captivity. The Islamist militants’
trade in women as sex slaves represents
the sexual economy of the caliphate at war.
Thus the conclusion, that the sexual
economy of ISIS and Boko Haram militarism
in pursuit of the caliphate is not unique to the
war time practices of Muslims, but may be
generalised to the sexual economy of
warfare, including modern wars.
ISIS and Boko Haram succeed in producing
forms of war time sexuality that are con-
temporary to present day sexual technol-
ogies of the body
28 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
Therefore, rather than a simple re-enact-
ment of historical Muslim practice in the
present, ISIS and Boko Haram succeed in
producing forms of war time sexuality that
are contemporary to present day sexual
technologies of the body, namely the ways
in which women’s bodies are disciplined to
manage and meet the needs of a militarised
masculinity (Armstrong, n.d.).4 Through the
apparent re-enactment of the historical in
the present times, what I refer to as an
attempt to make the ‘historical present’,
they produce a contemporary narrative of
Islam which is centred on the intersections
of militarism and sexuality, mediated
through notions of Muslim piety. What is
the origin of this narrative which centres on
the hypersexual and militarised Muslim mili-
tant in control of the sexual other through
the institution of forms of female sex
slavery justified as a practice of war? Are
they simply re-enacting the past or are they
producing contemporary forms of militarism
and sexuality?
Muslim political memory and the
operations of sex slavery through
sexual technologies of the body
I argue first that the discourse of Islamist mili-
tarism such as that of ISIS and Boko Haram
produces a modern Muslim militarised mas-
culinity through a ‘historical present’ that
revives the figure of the jariya or female
slave. Fatima Mernissi (1996) has argued
that the jariya is central to the political
memory of the historical Abbasid caliphate.
For scholars of Muslim women’s history,
therefore, it is not surprising that the narrative
of enslaved women has become central to
the narrative of al-Baghdadi’s caliphate
under ISIS. Mernissi offers a pressing analy-
sis of the treatment of sex difference in
Islamic thought and the location of slavery
in Muslim political memory. The first years
of Islamic history, she argues, are years
where women feature prominently in the pro-
phetic narrative as disciples who are also
advisers, strategists and otherwise active
traders, politicians and soldiers. The second
period following soon after and terminating
in the later Umayyad period, is of aristocratic
wives instrumental in consolidating the for-
tunes of the empire and marked by their
“capacity to defy men in a position of auth-
ority”, whether in the refusal either to veil or
to accept polygyny (Mernissi, 1996:83). The
third period, associated with the Abbasids,
she characterises as the period of the jawari
(single: jariya), whose figure dominates nar-
ratives of women’s marginal status in later
Islamic political thought. The Abbasid era is
characterised by the often accomplished
slave women captured in Muslim conquest
across the empire and who begin their lives
notoriously as slaves but end in prominence
as mothers of caliphs. The popular narrative
of the subjugated feminine, Mernissi argues,
is best traced to this period, where the
ensuing “cult of courtesans in ‘political
memory’ reflects our nostalgia for absolut-
ism” (Mernissi, 1996:87).
How predictable, then, to see in the con-
temporary revival of the caliphate the simul-
taneous revival of the jariya, representative
of “male fantasies, inspired stories from the
days of imperial Islam” (Freamon, 2014); as
above, it is as though in the production of
Yazidi concubines and Chibok captive
‘wives’ is the militarists’ imaginings of the
caliphate made complete as it is, simul-
taneously, also made both historical and con-
temporary.5 But before we jump to easy
parallels to argue as Islamist militants do
that their practices are merely contemporary
re-enactments of historical caliphal gender
relations or that they simply make the ‘histori-
cal present’, we should bear in mind the mul-
tiple forms of distance that separate the
historical practice and its contemporary
forms. Not only are these practices anachro-
nistic in that they attempt at the present day
enactment of historical norms but, as below,
the capture of Yazidi women of al-Bhagdadi’s
caliphate and the kidnapping of the Chibok
girls of Boko Haram, also represent contem-
porary aberrations of historical concubinage
practice. The ways in which militarised Isla-
mists have enslaved women for sex rep-
resent modern sexual technologies of the
body and, from the perspective of the histori-
cal Islamic laws of war, aberrant expressions
of the historical sexual economy of war.
Together, however, they produce concubines
and ‘wives’ for the contemporary caliphate.
The understanding of slavery in Islamic
thought rests upon a corpus of refined intel-
lectual effort that produces everything from
the metaphor of spiritual submission of
humanity to God to the very minutiae of
law governing the enslavement of people.
On the relationship between God and
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
article
humanity, God is master, whether of the
present or the hereafter, commander of all
that is good, purveyor of all knowledge. Sim-
ultaneously however, God is also benefi-
cent, all loving and all merciful. Modelled
on this, the relationship of God with human-
ity is that of a benevolent master with a
willing slave. On the legalities of slavery,
there is little in a slave’s life that is not legis-
lated, since together with age, puberty, sex
and mental ability, enslavement is a key
determinate of social, legal and spiritual
status. Legal manuals hold detailed presen-
tations of the legal norms proscribing licit
forms of enslavement and guidelines for
owners and enslaved people on the limits
and terms of enslavement. Amongst these
are rules establishing the paternity of the
child of a concubine whom, it explains,
upon giving birth to her master’s child may
no longer be traded and, upon death of her
master, is also released from captivity
(Qudū rı̄, 2010)
Islamist militants appear to draw upon
two narratives in the context of sex slavery.
The first is the political narrative explained
by Mernissi’s argument on the place of the
jariya in political memory which combines
a memory of the subjugated feminine and
nostalgia for territorial absolutism. This is a
mythical narrative of a Muslim past where
the caliph controlled both his territory and
his women. The second narrative Islamist
militants appear to draw upon comes from
nationalist understandings of masculinity
shaped in the protection of the nation, its
women and traditions from colonial others.
Colonised men were called upon not only to
rescue the land from penetration by the
outsider, but also to protect Muslim women
rendered similarly vulnerable to colonial
violation
The metaphor of the colonial era framed
Muslim nations as locations of rape and
colonial powers as penetrative rapists
(Adibi, 2006). Colonised men were called
upon not only to rescue the land from pen-
etration by the outsider, but also to protect
Muslim women rendered similarly vulner-
able to colonial violation (Adibi, 2006).
These nationalist narratives of masculinity
prescribe ways of being male and female
which are further shaped by global
29
 hegemonic masculinities. When domestic
article
masculinity finds itself humiliated and
forced to save the motherland, sisters,
daughters and wives amongst them, and
where this is coupled with active resistance
to western imperial and hegemonic masculi-
nities, local Muslim masculinity comes to be
subordinated to the hegemonic masculinity
of the invading coloniser. In response, a
new militarised Muslim masculinity offers a
counter claim to produce an alternate mas-
culinity. My suggestion is that in the sexual
economy of Islamist militarism, the impera-
tives of the caliphate and the nation state
combine; in the operations of religion, war
and sexuality. Groups such as ISIS and
Boko Haram produce a masculinity that is
located dually in the historical absolutism
that accompanies the political memory of
the jariya, of the caliphate, and in the mili-
tarised freedom-fighter or saviour of Islam
who upholds the sovereignty of the postco-
lonial nation state. While the narratives of
Islamist militarism that conflate the caliphate
and the nation state, two widely different
political formations, may appear to be con-
ceptually anomalous, both offer congruous
methods for the control of territory and
women’s sexuality.
these practices rely on historical Muslim
legal norms of sex and captivity found in
Islamic law manuals
Historical legal mechanisms for the
control of women’s sexuality. as with cap-
tives and slaves, provide the justification
for captive Yazidi women to be rendered
concubines, similarly for the kidnapping of
more than a hundred Chibok girls to forcibly
become wives to jihadist soldiers. Although
they are differently interpreted, these prac-
tices rely on historical Muslim legal norms
of sex and captivity found in Islamic law
manuals. The justifications for these con-
temporary enactments of sexuality in war
are not, however, to be found waiting in
the historical texts and innocently revived
and re-enacted today. Instead, they are
actively produced in present day readings
of the text, informed by the normativity of
sex in the economy of war using modern
sexual technologies of the body. Though
militant Islamists read these narratives out
of classical texts, they also read these narra-
tives in the present, in a global context
30 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
where sex in the economy of war is norma-
tive. Thus they produce uniquely contem-
porary forms of Islamist militarism, modern
forms of sexual control, and modern read-
ings of Islamic law facilitated by modern
technologies for managing sexual
reproduction.
These modern readings of law and tech-
nologies for managing sexual reproduction
are illustrated in a series of three docu-
ments on slavery produced by ISIS. The
last is a fatwa and it is preceded by an
earlier question and answer publication
titled ‘Questions and Answers on Captives
and Slaves’ produced by the ISIS Ministry
of Research and Legal Opinion, in the
month of Muharram 1436 (Common Era
[CE] 25 October-24 November 2014). The
first of the three publications is the ISIS
newsletter Dabiq Issue 4, produced in the
month of Dhul Hijja 1435 (CE 26 September
-24 October 2014). Presented just a month
before the legal manual, the newsletter
Dabiq includes a three page entry, ‘The
revival of slavery before the hour’ where
Yazidis present a problem of legal defi-
nition. Are they non-Muslim or Muslim
apostates? Resolving on the former, the
article explains the legalities of their ensla-
vement through a direct link between the
practice of enslaving Yazidi women and
the nearing of the hour signalling the end
of times evident in the revival of slavery,
its abandonment having occasioned
various forms of immorality.6 The connec-
tion between the revival of slavery and the
end of times is drawn through a hadith or
Prophetic tradition,
that one of the signs of the Hour was that
“the slave girl gives birth to her master.”
This was reported by al-Bukhā rı̄ and
Muslim on the authority of Abū Hurayrah
and by Muslim on the authority of ‘Umar
(Dabiq, 2014:15)
The laws on enslavement determine that a
slave woman who gives birth to her
owner’s child is released from the slave
trade, in that she may remain a slave but
may not be traded again, and her child is
considered free, i.e. the child has the legal
status of the father and may inherit from
him (Qudū rı̄, 2010). The resultant status of
umm-walad (a slave mother of a child of a
free father) is a form of release from
slavery since the law renders the umm-
walad free on the death of her owner.
Amongst the narratives emerging from
escaped Yazidi women is that slavery in the
caliphate is marked by meticulous contra-
ceptive practices. The stories of escaped
women indicate that combatants ensure
the women do not become pregnant
through various forms of forced contracep-
tion. One woman described how she was
forced to take contraceptive pills under
supervision of her owner, others also
recount forced contraception, pressure to
terminate pregnancies and an instance of
forced termination. Because pregnancy
implies a woman may no longer be traded,
some women interviewed by the New York
Times said:
they knew they were being sold when
they were driven to a hospital to give a
urine sample to be tested for the hCG
hormone, whose presence indicates preg-
nancy. They awaited their results with
apprehension: A positive test would
mean they were carrying their abuser’s
child; a negative result would allow
Islamic State fighters to continue raping
them.”7
The absence of pregnancy keeps the women
in circulation as slaves and avoids their
potential legal freedom from slavery. Classi-
cal law on slavery also requires that a
women traded between two owners
observe a period of abstinence to establish
pregnancy or its absence and therewith
paternity, such that the sale of a pregnant
slave woman is invalid (Qudū rı̄, 2010).
Instead, enforced contraception and testing
for the pregnancy hormone ensures the
absence of pregnancy in ways that were
not possible in earlier times and restricted
under classical law; primarily it allows the
owners to trade women without the interim
waiting period. Though unsanctioned, his-
torical slavery practices were not without
similar manipulations, reflected in literature
on induced miscarriage and contraception
which allowed slave owners to avoid the
legal consequences of pregnancy in slave
women (Eich, 2009). What is unique now is
the modern day efficacy of these sexual
technologies of the body. Without the possi-
bility of an interim period of abstinence
between owners and the possibility of
freedom through pregnancy, the results of
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
article
ISIS trade in women is a particularly
modern form of concubinage that allows
the management of women’s reproduction
through contemporary contraceptive prac-
tices, including pregnancy tests, contracep-
tive injections and pills and safe
terminations, facilitated by the efficacy of
these technologies.8
Therefore, while Dabiq first argues for re-
establishing slavery as an indication of the
end of times and a necessary aspect of
belief, ISIS practises slavery in some
uniquely contemporary sexual technologies
of the body, amongst them the free market
trade in reliable contraception, reliable
testing for pregnancy and safe termination
of pregnancy. The efficacy of these technol-
ogies render their application particularly
useful in controlling the sexual labour of a
captive slave woman and the strict manage-
ment of her sexual reproduction.
A further uniquely contemporary aspect
is the way the historical law on slavery is
invoked in terms of the affordability of mar-
riage and in issues of domestic work. In
Dabiq (2014:17), the article explains:
… a number of contemporary scholars
have mentioned that the desertion of
slavery had led to an increase in
fā hishah (adultery, fornication, etc.),
because the shar’ı̄ alternative to marriage
is not available, so a man who cannot
afford marriage to a free woman finds
himself surrounded by temptation
towards sin. In addition, many Muslim
families who have hired maids to work
at their homes, face the fitnah of prohib-
ited khalwah (seclusion) and resultant
zinā [adultery] occurring between the
man and the maid, whereas if she were
his concubine, this relationship would be
legal. This again is from the conse-
quences of abandoning jihā d and
chasing after the dunyā (world),
wallā hul-musta’ā n (and in God we seek
help). May Allah bless this Islamic State
with the revival of further aspects of the
religion occurring at its hands.
Whereas historically war captivity allowed
for enslavement as a means of sexual subju-
gation, Dabiq suggests enslavement as a
means of addressing the needs of poor
men. The article argues that those who
cannot afford the ordinary cost of a dower
31
 may either go to war to secure a concubine
article
as booty or they may rather afford the cost
of a concubine, and further a concubine
might serve better than a domestic worker.
Whether this was how slavery actually
worked in classical times is known to some
extent, in that the texts often suggest the
first option, marrying a slave woman in
case a man cannot afford the dower for a
free woman, the two being historically differ-
ent.9 The distinction between marrying a
slave woman and making a woman a concu-
bine is significant, in that the Qur’anic injunc-
tion on slavery does not suggest enslaving
women in order to make licit sex (i.e. mar-
riage and concubinage) more affordable.
This is a different and novel motivation for
war in that it argues for enslaving women
as war captives in order to facilitate the
sexual needs of poor men.
This explanation indicates a lack of
knowledge and a novel application of the
historical legalities of the practice of concu-
binage. While a concubine may also have
been required to offer domestic services, a
slave purchased for domestic service could
not be automatically expected to also
provide sexual service, so that the slave
woman of a wife for example may not be
expected to provide sexual service for her
owner’s husband. Her sexual service would
needs-be negotiated through her owner.
While historical texts suggest a clear distinc-
tion between domestic service and sexual
service, the manuals often refer to concu-
bines as ‘jariyya’, as Mernissi does above,
or ‘sariya’ as we will see later, the author
here seems to make no similar distinction.
Instead the author sees domestic and
sexual services interchangeably, and that is
likely true for most ISIS fighters too. This
is, first, a present day reading of the practice
which is built on little to no actual experience
of the practice to build upon, and second it is
evident that the historical laws of slavery are
not common knowledge amongst ISIS mili-
tary. Having been abandoned by main-
stream Muslim society almost a century
ago, only those with a keen interest in the
texts of law might have been familiar with
these rules prior to their present revival.
Accordingly ISIS confirms that,
[t]his large-scale enslavement of mushrik
families is probably the first since the
abandonment of the Sharı̄’ah law. The
32 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
only other known case – albeit much
smaller – is that of the enslavement of
Christian women and children in the Phi-
lippines and Nigeria by the mujā hidı̄n
there. The enslaved Yazidi families are
now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as
the mushrikı̄n were sold by the Compa-
nions (radiyallā hu ‘anhum) before them.
Many well-known rulings are observed,
including the prohibition of separating a
mother from her young children (Dabiq,
2014:17).
Despite or perhaps because of these ‘well
observed’ rulings, soon after the Dabiq
article, the ISIS primer on captives and
slaves was prepared in a question and
answer form, familiar to Islamic legal texts.
It is addressed to the fighters and anyone
else who engages in the trade or use of
enslaved women, establishing the acts of
enslavement, and the use of the sexual
labour of non-believing women as norma-
tive aspects of conquest and trade. It
begins with a definition that clarifies who is
a captive, what constitutes the permissibility
of their enslavement and the legalities of sex
with a war captive who has been enslaved,
trading her, ownership shared between two
men, terms that prohibit her resale, the
dress code of a slave woman, and contracep-
tion with an enslaved captive. It concludes
with the rewards of freeing slave women.
Evidently, the primer is addressed to ques-
tioners looking for confirmation that the
practice has religious legal sanction. What
necessitates the pamphlet is also that the
majority of combatants are likely unfamiliar
with these rules or the practice. The
authors’ intention is therefore to also offer
legal and spiritual guidance. If we were to
imagine a questioner, their concern would
be with the legal or shari’ parameters of an
aspect of faith that is no longer in practice
and so requires confirmation, first that it is
indeed a legal Islamic practice and second,
the parameters in which this legality func-
tions. By contrast, the rules of conduct for
sex with slave women are detailed and
extend into the minutiae that represent the
extent to which pre-Islamic and historical
cultural norms were subsequently formal-
ised in Islamic culture.
Reflecting further the lack of knowledge
and the limited degrees of compliance, not
long after the release of the question and
answer manual, a fatwa responds to a ques-
tioner who explains that,
… some brothers had committed viola-
tions in the treatment of the female
slaves. These violations are not permitted
by Shariah law. Because these rules have
not been dealt with in ages (sic). Are there
any warnings pertaining to this matter?
The response focusses again on the legal-
ities of having sex with captives, when and
how is sex possible with a legal captive,
the processes for ensuring paternity, or
‘emptiness’ of the womb before a new pur-
chaser has sex with a slave, the ownership
of sisters simultaneously, fathers and sons
owning the same slave and the ownership
of mother and child simultaneously. An
analysis of the enslavement primer and the
subsequent fatwa suggest that both docu-
ments are necessary because the fighters
on the frontline are not familiar with these
laws or practices. While ISIS combatants
may claim to be following established
Muslim practices of war, and establishing
an Islamic State in response to the ‘violation’
of Muslim sovereignty, they cannot claim
equal knowledge of the laws pertaining to
captivity and sexuality in war.
In the implementation of these laws
through the article in Dabiq, the question
and answer manual and the fatwa, rather
than simply making the ‘historical present’,
ISIS produces a contemporary iteration of
historical enslavement practices premised
upon sexual technologies of the body specific
to a contemporary militarised Muslim mascu-
linity that relies on sexual control of women
and military control of territory.
The enactment of these classical sexual
norms in contemporary ways transforms
the historical sexual practice, in ways
which are also new to contemporary
Muslim communities, the ISIS combatants
amongst them. I argued above that the
intersection of war and sex is not uncom-
mon, but is in fact normative in the
modern global context and further, that
through contemporary sexual technologies
of the body, ISIS and Boko Haram style
militarism enacts contemporary rather
than historical forms of military manage-
ment of sexuality. Hereon I will argue that
the mainstream community of Muslims
also find these new forms of militarised
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
article
sexuality aberrational in that they conflict
with contemporary Muslim sexual norms
and values.
Sex, consent and desire in
contemporary Muslim practice
Historically, fighters proceeded to war
without partners and were familiar with the
possibility of taking enemy captives as
slaves and concubines. With the end of
slavery in European and western contexts,
Muslim communities followed and even-
tually terminated the practice to the extent
that a recent collective statement by promi-
nent scholars cited a universal Muslim con-
sensus against slavery.10 When enacted
today, Muslims who are not aware of the his-
torical legality of slavery in the Muslim past,
find dissonance in the ways in which it might
operate. To illustrate the conflict I take up
two online fatwas; they show how the con-
temporary enactments of classical texts,
concepts and practices are wanting, not
only for non-Muslim outsiders, but for
Muslims insiders too.
The first example is from an online forum
where petitioners ask for advice that is deliv-
ered in the form of a legal opinion or a
fatwa.11 In March 2014, enslaving women
for sex was sufficiently prevalent to prompt
a Muslim man who had been in discussion
with ‘Christian people’ to ask the scholar of
the site,
… taking a woman and sleeping with her
is not fitting for a God fearing man. I
know that this is a special situation and
the captives are given by the leader of
the Muslims after jihad and it is then per-
missible to have sex with them. My ques-
tion is what if a woman refuses, can she
be compelled? I feel almost all women
would hate this situation and few would
accept it except with loathing. Although
this is academic, if I was in this situation,
I would never force myself on a woman
who did not want me. I of-course accept
whatever Islam says about this. Some
say 24:33 indicates you cannot compel
women to have sex but I see this as refer-
ring to prostitution not sleeping with your
concubine.
The questioner is clear that the situation of
war is a special one, and therefore his
33
 concern is not with the legalistic view, since
article
he argues that this is “permissible”. His
concern is with the matter of consent
“what if a woman refuses, can she be
compelled?”
The answer from the scholars of the site
who is a “graduate of the Umm al-Qurra Uni-
versity in Makkah and the imam at a Jeddah
mosque”:
In Islam, we don’t have personas of war
who are put in concentration camps. We
have slavery which is a humane way of
treating these prisoners. These prisoners
have great rights in Islam. They must eat
and wear from what their masters eat
and wear. They can’t be beaten or mis-
treated as the Prophet salla Allah ualaihi
wa sallam saw a man beating his slave
and said to him: remember Allah’s
power over you. The man set his slave
free for the sake of Allah …
As for the female slave, Islam secured her
freedom if she bore a child from her
master. Once she does that she can’t be
sold or given away as her child frees her.
She remains a concubine until her
master dies and then automatically she
is freed. Concubines were found also in
the previous nations. You can check the
Bible and you will see that clearly. Pro-
phets of Allah had them such as Ibrahim,
Jacob, David, Solomon, and many
others. This is not unique thing of Islam.
The question speaks through a rights dis-
course to ask about consent, “what if the
woman refuses, can she be compelled?”
and the scholar in response begins in the
same discourse of rights, “prisoners have
great rights in Islam”. Yet, at the end of his
response he has not answered the issues
of consent. The reasons for this are poten-
tially many, but I will explore the operations
of legal personality and the constitution of
the legal person, which is markedly different
in classical and contemporary understand-
ings of Islamic law. Classical scholars
employ enslavement as an impediment to
the realisation of full legal capacity (Qudū rı̄,
2010; Jiwan, 1960). While the scholar on
the site spoke of the rights of a slave, the
deficiency that arises from the status of
slavery renders the enslaved person a differ-
ent sort of legal subject from the free person,
a slave has incomplete legal capacity.
34 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
Complete legal capacity is only held in a
person who has complete control of their
body and mind. Slavery is premised upon
the absence of control over the body, since
it transfers control of the body and labour
of the slave to another person, including
sexual control.12 Therefore to ask the ques-
tion pertaining to compulsion or consent of
the enslaved person is to ask a question
that does not have legal salience. Enslave-
ment by definition removes the requirement
for consent. The questioner asks a question
that does not apply to the scholar’s legal
paradigm, and therefore he cannot answer
adequately. The scholar cannot answer a
question of rights from the perspective of a
system based on impediments to status,
because the two frames of reference, that
of rights and that of status, are at odds. In
his attempt, he can only return to a system
of status to show its benevolence.
Also, he cannot answer to issues of
consent where the premise of control relies
on the absence of consent. An analogous
situation occurred in early attempts to
address marital rape in English law.
Because the law presumed sexual avail-
ability to be inherent in the situation of mar-
riage, a wife’s consent was not a criteria for
marital sex, and until the close of the last
century English law allowed husbands
exemption for raping their wives. In 1991
R v R (1991) UKHL 12, declared that under
English law the marital rape exemption did
not apply.13 Many countries continue not to
recognise the possibility of marital rape.
Similarly, the matter of a slave’s consent to
sex does not feature in legal terms because
the legal definition of slavery excludes the
capacity to deny consent.
Thus to a second example, which is a
ruling on intercourse with a slave woman
when one has a wife.14
Could you please clarify for me something
that has been troubling me for a while.
This concerns the right of a man to have
sexual relations with slave girls. Is this
so? If it is then is the man allowed to
have relations with her as well his wife/
wives. Also, is it true that a man can
have sexual relations with any number
of slave girls and with their own wife/
wives also? I have read that Hazrat Ali
had 17 slave girls and Hazrat Umar also
had many. Surely if a man were allowed
 this freedom then this could lead to
neglecting the wife’s needs. Could you
also clarify for me whether the wife has
got any say in the matter.
The questioner refers to the possibility of sex
with a slave, and more so, concern with its
impact on an existing marriage, mostly
how this may lead a man to neglecting his
wife, and further the degree to which a
woman may constrain her husband in his
capacity to have sex with a slave woman.
The questioner’s assumptions are that sex
should have legal sanction, a wife should
have a say when her husband has sex with
a slave woman, and also that it should not
amount to neglect of his wife.
The response:
Praise be to Allah. Islam allows a man to
have intercourse with his slave woman,
whether he has a wife or wives or he is
not married. A slave woman with whom
a man has intercourse is known as a sar-
iyyah (concubine), from the word sirr,
which means marriage. This is indicated
by the Quraan and the Sunnah, this was
done by the prophets. Ibraheem (pbuh)
took Haajar as a concubine and she bore
him Isma’eel (peace be upon them all).
Our prophet (peace and blessings of Allah
be upon him) also did that, as did the
Sahaabah, the righteous and the scholars.
The scholars are unanimously agreed on
that and it is not permissible for anyone
to regard it as haram or to forbid it.
Whoever regards that as haram is a
sinner who is going against the consen-
sus of the scholars.
The scholar is Shaykh Muhammad Saalih al-
Munajjid, a popular scholar who established
the islamqa.info website in 1996. His
response is first to allay the questioner’s
fears on the legality of the sexual relation-
ship, explaining that concubinage has the
status of marriage. The background to this
is that the two legal methods for sexual
relationships in classical Islamic law, as in
many other medieval legal norms, are mar-
riage and concubinage (Ali, 2010). While
the petitioner’s concern is for neglecting
his wife’s sexual needs, the scholar’s
concern is with maintaining the legal integ-
rity of concubinage. The last line is important
because it chorales the petitioner back into
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
article
the fold, to question the legality of the prac-
tice is to question practise of the prophets
as well as the consensus of the scholars.
However, the scholar is unable to assess
the issue of neglect because the question
comes from an understanding of marriage
and sexuality which considers both partners
to be active sexual agents with the capacity
to influence their own and their partner’s
sexual lives. In this paradigm a Muslim
man may not be neglectful of his wife’s
sexual needs and must ensure that she is
sexually satisfied. The scholar and petitioner
are working with different understandings of
marriage and sexuality. As much as the
scholar can muster after three more pages
is that “(t)he wife has no right to object to
her husband owning female slaves or to
his having intercourse with them”. The peti-
tioner considers the impact of a sexual
relationship with a concubine on the
relationship with a wife, suggesting the
wife’s right to her husband’s attentions and
the scholar answers by negating the wife’s
capacity to object to the arrangement of
concubinage.
Whereas the dissonance in the ways in
which sexuality in the context of slavery
operates in the first fatwa is between classi-
cal and contemporary understandings of
consent, in the second, it pertains to different
concepts of sexuality and marriage, namely
a wife’s capacity to restrict her husband’s
sexuality, and a husband’s obligation
to ensure his fulfillment does not neglect
hers.
The easy availability and high levels of effi-
cacy of oral and injectable contraception
means that slave owners can enforce con-
traception on the women they own, manage
their fertility and deny it as they choose
Conclusion
The article has argued that while the sexual
practices of ISIS and Boko Haram are con-
sidered aberrant to western sexual norms
and normative to historical Islamic laws of
war and contemporary Muslim sexual
norms, the sexual practices of groups such
as ISIS and Boko Haram in fact constitute
the normative sexual economy of war but
are aberrant both to historical Islamic laws
35
 of war and contemporary Muslim norms of
article
sexuality, marriage and consent. Through
the enactment of what is constructed as a
‘historical present’, groups such as ISIS and
Boko Haram purport to the enactment of a
pristine historical past in the present as they
produce a narrative of contemporary Islam
centred on the intersections of militarism
and sexuality, mediated through narratives
of Muslim piety. However, we see instead
how the sexual economy of militarised Isla-
mism combines the caliphate and the nation
state to produce new forms of concubinage
using modern sexual technologies of the
body. While historical law produces a
system of sexual slavery that includes possi-
bilities for emancipation, ISIS enactment of
sex slavery uses forced contraception and
termination to ensure that enslaved women
can never release themselves from slavery
through pregnancy. Neither is there the
opportunity for reprieve between slave
owners, instead slave women are passed
between slave owners without the historical
requirement for a period of time in which to
confirm a woman is not pregnant. The easy
availability and high levels of efficacy of oral
and injectable contraception means that
slave owners can enforce contraception on
the women they own, manage their fertility
and deny it as they choose.
Sexuality managed in these ways does
not find easy resonance outside of mili-
tarised Muslim communities where believ-
ers struggle with the implications of sex
with a concubine. Petitioners inquire about
consent of the concubine, the danger of
neglecting a wife’s sexual needs and the
requirement to fulfil her desires. Couched
in the framework of a rights based argu-
ment, these concerns jar against the sensi-
bilities of the militarised Islamist who sees
Yazidi women as the reward for his war
efforts, or military organisers who use glob-
ally normative military practices to ensure
the supply of sex in the provisions of war.
The impossibility of release from sex
slavery through historical guarantees is
accompanied by the dissonance between
concubinage as a contemporary form of
licit sexuality and common understandings
of sexuality in marriage. While the historical
legal paradigm of marriage is sexual control,
the common understanding of marriage
reflected in the non-military fatwas today
suggest partners view sex in terms of
36 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016
mutuality, consent and responsibility to
fulfil the desires of their partner. ISIS formu-
lations of sex slavery in its military efforts is
therefore aberrant both to historical Islamic
legal norms of sex slavery and contempor-
ary Muslim understandings of sexuality.
While wholly violative it is not however aber-
rant to the ways in which sex is otherwise
factored into the general economy of war
where colonial and neo-colonial war efforts
are orchestrated in ways that formulate the
supply of women’s sexuality into a commod-
ity under control of the military.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the two reviewers for their
valuable comments and also acknowledge the
various conversations with partners who
offered important insights in the course of
writing this article, amongst them Sarojini
Nadar, Sarasvathie Reddy, Farhana Ismail,
Abdul Karriem Matthews and Mariam Bibi Khan.
2. Drawing on Jacklyn Cock’s (1991) analysis of the
ways in which aggressive masculinities are
made normative, Yaliwe Clarke speaks of “mili-
tarised masculinities that are key to militarism”
(2008:51), and earlier Okazawa-Rey and Kirk
(2000:124) also developed Cynthia Enloe’s
(1993) observations on how militarism “relies
on militarised notions of manhood”. Desiree
Lewis (2013:26) has in turn proposed reframing
Clarke’s “militarised masculinity” as “gendered
militarism”, to avoid “a misleading binary of
male prosecutors and women victims”. I have
retained the former for the ways in which it
speaks to the gendered nature of sex slavery in
the ISIS and Boko Haram contexts, and which
supports the argument that ISIS and Boko
Haram forms of militarism produce and rely on
a militarised masculinity.
3. Available online here: http://www.
securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-
6D27–4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S
%20RES%201820.pdf. site accessed 11 Novem-
ber 2016.
4. Aurelia Armstrong (http://www.iep.utm.edu/
foucfem/) draws together the genealogy of
these concepts from Michel Foucault through
Sandra Bartsky to Susan Bordo. Bartsky
(1988:77) draws upon Foucault’s “notion of nor-
malizing-disciplinary power” as a useful tool
for understanding how societies control
women’s bodies; these include disciplinary prac-
tices of dieting and body sculpting. Susan Bordo
(1988) extrapolates upon these as disciplinary
technologies of the body. I draw upon these
ideas to offer an argument for reproductive tech-
nologies as sexual technologies of the body used
to discipline the bodies of concubines.
5. Women and girls taken captive by Boko Haram
and from Chibok have been referred to as
‘wives’ more than concubines.
6. Dabiq (2014:17) states:
 Before Shaytā n reveals his doubts to the
weak-minded and weak hearted, one
should remember that enslaving the families
of the kuffā r and taking their women as con-
cubines is a firmly established aspect of the
Sharı̄’ah that if one were to deny or mock,
he would be denying or mocking the
verses of the Qur’ā n and the narrations of
the Prophet (sallallā hu ‘alayhiwasallam),
and thereby apostatizing from Islam.
Finally, a number of contemporary scholars
have mentioned that the desertion of
slavery had led to an increase in fā hishah
(adultery, fornication, etc.), because the
shar’ı̄ alternative to marriage is not avail-
able, so a man who cannot afford marriage
to a free woman finds himself surrounded
by temptation towards sin.
7. Rukmini Calamachi, ‘To maintain supply of sex
slaves ISIS pushes birth control’, New York
Times, 12 March 2016, available at: http://www.
nytimes.com/2016/03/13/world/middleeast/to-
maintain-supply-of-sex-slaves-isis-pushes-birth-
control.html?_r=0., accessed 14 December 2016.
8. In wars amongst nation states, sexual technol-
ogies used to discipline women’s bodies for the
war efforts are managed by the state’s war
apparatus. Accordingly, it would be of interest
for new research to investigate the pathways of
supply and management of contraceptive pills,
injections and other treatment modalities for
contraception and termination in the caliphate.
9. Qur’an 4:24 suggests marriage to slave women
where men cannot marry free women, the
former having a smaller dower. It does not
suggest enslaving women to facilitate marriage
for poor men.
10. The online ‘Open Letter to Bhagdadi’, which was
also addressed to “the fighters and followers of
the self declared ‘Islamic State’” was signed by a
group of prominent Muslim scholars, and cited a
universal Muslim consensus against the practice
of slavery. See: http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com,
accessed 2 November 2016.
11. The website is run by Shaikh Assim al-Hakeem
http://www.assimalhakeem.net. The fatwa under
discussion is available here: https://www.assimal
hakeem.net/the-subject-of-the-women-captives-of-
war-has-come-up-in-discussion-with-a-christian/,
accessed 14 December 2016.
12. See the section on legal capacity (al-Ahliyya) in
Jiwan (1960).
13. The Law Reports (Appeal Cases) [1992] 1 AC 599,
[House of Lords], Regina Respondent and
R. appellant 1991 Feb. 27; March 14; 1991 July
1; Oct. 23, available at: http://www.bailii.org/uk/
cases/UKHL/1991/12.html, accessed 14 Decem-
ber 2016.
14. The fatwa was available until early this year as
fatwa #13082 on the website of the scholar Al-
Munajjid here: https://islamqa.info/en. While
the original fatwa #13082 is no longer available
on the site, a link to the fatwa remains visible in
another fatwa, #20085: https://islamqa.info/en/
20085, accessed 14 December 2016. A copy of
Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body
the fatwa also exists in a later publication Islam
article
Questions and Answers (2004:340), a compi-
lation edited by Muhammad Saed Abdul-
Rahman.
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FATIMA SEEDAT lectures in the Gender and Religion Programme at the

University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) where she also coordinates the
Masters programme in Gender, Religion and Sexual and Reproductive
Health Rights. Prior to this she held an Innovation Fund Post-Doctoral
Fellowship in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of
Cape Town, an NRF Equity Scholarship for Doctoral Studies Abroad at
the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Canada, and a
Chevening Fellowship at the Human Rights Law Center at University of
Nottingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Islamic Law from
McGill University where, through a study of legal capacity in Islamic jur-
isprudence, she investigated the discursive construction of women as
legal subjects. She has also published on the politics of the convergence
of Islam and feminism. Outside of academia, she has worked for the Com-
mission on Gender Equality, at the Women’s and Children’s Rights Desk
of the Department for International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO),
co-founded Shura Yabafazi, a South African NGO that focuses on sex
difference in Muslim family law and consulted on criminal law reform
for UNWomen Afghanistan.
Email: Seedatf@ukzn.ac.za

38 AGENDA 109/30.3 2016

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