CP-6

Focusing primarily on the Maliki and Hanafi schools of law, Hina Azam convincingly demonstrates that
Muslim legal discourses on rape were animated and informed by competing ways of imagining broader
categories such as sovereignty, agency, property, and rights. When it comes to the Maliki view, why is it
that the monetary compensation for raping someone is simply the amount that would be given to her as
a dower? Doesn’t that assume that the person who has legally attained the right to access her, and the
one who has forcibly done so, are on level terms? And this too is only applicable if vaginal penetration
has taken place? Moreover, what does it mean to be a minor? Are there any objective standards, like
age, in the modern world? For the Hanafis, if they are averse to the idea of monetary compensation,
how then, is istikrah and Zina differentiated, considering they don’t seem to propose any alternatives
either? Also, is it not ironic to consider legal union being constituted through the payment of mahr,
making sexual access halal, while at the same time claiming that payment of monetary compensation
when it comes to sexual acts outside of legal bounds, is something abhorrent? ? What is the rationale
behind imposing the hadd punishments on insane men but exempting insane women from it, under the
Shiite jurisprudence?