Sex Slavery and the Islamic State
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Why does Islamic State's enslavement of women seem to appeal to potential recruits, and why is it not challenged more vigorously by mainstream Muslims?
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Jamie Walker, Middle East correspondent for The Australian, asked two critical questions in arecent article that discussed the involvement of two Australian citizens, Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, in Islamic State sex slavery. In 2014 Elomar purchased sex slaves, of whom four, all Yazidis, later escaped to a refugee camp, where the ABC caught up with them andinterviewed them. Elomar had also boasted on Twitter that he had "1 of 7 Yehzidi slave girls for sale" at $2500 each.
Walker's questions were "why this debased appeal seems to be gaining traction with Islamic State's target audience, which increasingly includes women, and why it's not challenged more stridently in the public arena."
The Islamic State has given its own answer to the first question. In the fourth edition of its magazineDabiq, it aggressively promoted sex slavery as an Islamic practice, arguing that the practice conforms to the teaching and example of Muhammad and his companions.
Many Muslim scholars have upheld the practice of enslaving captives of war.
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Does this argument have any wider appeal than among Islamic State recruits?
The reality is that many Muslim scholars have upheld the practice of enslaving captives of war. For example Islamic revivalist Abul A'la Maududi wrote in his influential and widely disseminated tract Human Rights in Islam that for Muslims to enslave their captives was "a more humane and proper way of disposing of them" than Western approaches. Enslavement by Muslims, he argued, is preferable to the provisions of the Geneva Convention because of the value of this policy for fuelling the growth of Islam:
The result of this humane policy was that most of the men who were captured on foreign battlefields and brought to the Muslim countries as slaves embraced Islam and their descendants produced great scholars, imams, jurists, commentators, statesmen and generals of the army.
Islamic revivalist movements that look forward to the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate have repeatedly endorsed the practice of slavery in the name of their religious convictions. For example the (now banned) Muhajiroun movement in the UK announced in an article, "How does Islam Classify Lands?" that once a true Islamic State is established, no-one living in other nations (which it calls Dar al Harb, 'house of war') will have a right to their life or their wealth:
[H]ence a Muslim in such circumstances can then go into Dar Al Harb and take the wealth from the people unless there is a treaty with that state. If there is no treaty individual Muslims can even go to Dar Al Harb and take women to keep as slaves.
