I have a scenario for you to imagine: suppose you are a young, married tribal woman. Suppose your tribes loses out in the tribal politics and there is hell to pay. Suppose you come under armed assault from your sworn enemies, having waited their moment of glory for years. There is blood, chaos and bedlam everywhere you look. In the fighting you lose all your family members, including your husband (once he is duly tortured). Then, you marry the invader-in-chief-and it is all consensual. How plausible does that sound? Well, if Islamic historians (aka, the victors in the aforementioned battle) are to be believed, that is precisely what happened between Prophet Mohammad and an Arab Jewish woman named Saffiyah:
The apostle seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them. The first to fall was the fort of Na‘im; there Mahmud b. Maslama was killed by a millstone which was thrown on him from it; then al-Qamus the fort of B. Abu’l-Huqayq. The apostle took captives from them among whom was Safiya d. Huyayy b. Akhtab who had been the wife of Kinana b. al-Rabi’ b. Abu’l-Huqayq, and two cousins of hers. The apostle chose Safiya for himself.
Dihya b. Khalifa al-Kalbi had asked the apostle for Safiya, and when he chose her for himself he gave him her two cousins. The women of Khaybar were distributed among the Muslims. The Muslims ate the meat of the domestic donkeys and the apostle got up and forbade the people to do a number of things which enumerated. (The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasulullah The Life of Muhammad, with introduction and notes by Alfred Guillaume [Oxford University Press, Karachi, tenth impression 1995], p. 511)
When the apostle married Safiya in Khaybar or on the way, she having been beautified and combed, and got in a fit state for the apostle by Umm Sulaym d. Milhan mother of Anas b. Malik, the apostle passed the night with her in a tent of his. Abu Ayyub, Khalid b. Zayd brother of B. al-Najjar passed the night girt with his sword, guarding the apostle and going round the tent until in the morning the apostle saw him and asked him what he meant by his action. He replied, ‘I was afraid for you with this woman for you have killed her father, her husband, and her people, and till recently she was in unbelief, so I was afraid for you on her account.’ They allege that the apostle said ‘O God, preserve Abu Ayyub as he spent the night preserving me.’
Kinana al-Rabi, who had the custody of the treasure of Banu Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came (Tabari says “was brought”), to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” He said “Yes”. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr Al-Awwam, “Torture him until you extract what he has.” So he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead. Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud.
To recap this dense material: Saffiyah’s husband, Kinana, is the treasures of the Jewish tribe named Banu Qurayza, residing at Khyber. Once the tribe’s hometown falls to advancing Muslims, and Saffiyah’s father and other men are killed in the battles; Kinana is captured and subjected to torture for refusing to give away the tribe’s treasures, and then killed in revenge for a fallen Muslim. At which point, Saffiyah “marries” Prophet Mohammad.
Now all this would be of little relevance if the conquering war lord did not have over a billion followers in the 21st century. And yet, this ties in with the plight of hundreds of school girls abducted in an armed raid, “converted” to Islam (like Saffiyah did?) and used as sex slaves. As Tareq Fatah (whom I’ve quoted before) explains:
In the aftermath of Islamic jihadis — the Boko Haram — enslaving Christian school girls in Nigeria, the Muslim intelligentsia, instead of doing some serious introspection, has chosen to exercise damage control.
Columns by my co-religionists have appeared in newspapers ranging from the Toronto Star to The Independent in London and on CNN.com, where they avoid any reference to Sharia laws that permit Muslims to take non-Muslim female prisoners of war as sex slaves.
The fact is Muslim armies throughout history have been permitted under Islamic law to make sex slaves of non-Muslim prisoners.
Here is chapter 33, verse 50 of the Qur’an:
“O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.”
The ninth-century Persian historian al-Baladhuri writes in his book The Origins of the Islamic State that when the Arab general Muhammad bin Qasim invaded India in the year 711AD, the non-Muslim prisoners taken were given a choice of death or slavery. Sixty thousand captives were made slaves in the city of Rur, among whom were “thirty ladies of royal blood.” One-fifth of the slaves and booty were set apart for the caliph’s treasury and dispatched to Damascus, while the rest were scattered among the “army of Islam.”
He goes on to add:
I asked the writers of the Toronto Star and The Independent columns why they had not addressed the passages of the Qur’an that permit Muslims to take slaves. They did not answer.
I wrote to a woman who told Christiane Amanpour of CNN that “Boko Haram do not understand Islam.” I asked her why she had not addressed Sharia law that permits taking non-Muslim females as POWs. She too, did not respond.
Ah, the good old “No True Muslim” fallacy again. And yet, the Boko Haram are certainly not the first to believe enslavement of non-Muslim women in battle for sexual purposes is permissible in Islam.
(Disclaimer: Personally I have plenty of doubts about early Islamic history, as the Hadith narratives documenting it were not put in writing until hundreds of years later, and is not corroborated by modern evidence such as archaeological finds. However, this story is quoted by different sources, and hence we can be as sure about it as anything from the days of the prophet.)
