Sexual Ethics And Islam Summary

Book Review on Sexual Ethics and Islam by Kecia Ali Sexual Ethics and Islam is a comparative analysis of classical and modern Islamic discourses on sexual ethics. Dr. Kecia Ali demonstrates a skilled familiarity with the textual sources of the Quran and hadith literature, and she is clearly well acquainted with Islamic exegetical and jurisprudential tradition. She offers a re-reading of traditional Islamic values, sexual ethics, and how they relate to Muslim experiences in the modern world. Rather than proposing a new vision of Islamic sexual ethics or presenting answers on how Muslim should reform, she shows how the approaches tried so far run into dead ends because they don’t address the fundamental questions of patriarchy and hierarchy.

Kecia Ali starts her book by a fascinating discourse on the sexual subordination of Muslim women in Muslim cultures, using jurists such as al-Shafi to back up some of her statements. She asserts that the commonly-practiced Islam is a consequence of “men’s Islam,” which is the interpretation of Islam as understood by Muslim male scholars and jurists in medieval times. She points out that the conclusions of the early jurists and scholars of Islam were deeply influenced by their cultures and societies, and therefore eternalizing their views is irrational.

Dr. Kecia Ali addresses many controversial topics related to the Quran as understood by Muslim jurists, using case studies on the topics of marriage, divorce, illicit sex, slavery, male agency and female bodies in the Quran as well as a discussion of the Prophet’s marriage to Aisha. Each chapter analyses tensions between ancient and modern interpretations of Islamic law, and primarily she shows how the conservative tradition as exemplified in the fiqh and tafsir books fail to address the fundamental assumptions of patriarchy and hierarchy that undergird law and practice closely relating to gender

Kecia Ali points out that Muslims in fact invented “Don’t ask, don’t tell” long before the U.S. military, and the Muslim concern with concealing “sin” complicates any attempt to define homosexual relationships as simply being illicit sex. She claims that the prohibition of same-sex marriage in Islam does not stem from the Qu’ran, but instead from the legal construction of marriage. The paradoxical fact between the tacit acceptance of homosexual relationships and the harsh condemnation of it by the legal thoughts could be attributed to the general insistence on not attempting to pursue potentially incriminating information about one’s fellow Muslims or oneself. An interesting point that Dr. Kecia Ali brought up in this chapter is that if Muslims were to accept gay marriage, it would create non-hierarchy in marital relationship since as there would be no gender differentiation within the