Rape and Sexual Slavery In Islam (Part 2)

The “Four Witnesses” Clause

As well as directly sanctioning rape, the Qur’an also indirectly enables it, by means of a stipulation that allegations of adultery and fornication must have four witnesses to back them up, or the accuser will be liable to punishment themselves: “And those who accuse honourable women but bring not four witnesses, scourge them (with) eighty stripes and never (afterward) accept their testimony – They indeed are evil-doers.” (24:4) This requirement derives from a famous incident in Muhammad’s life, in which his favourite wife, Aisha, was accused of adultery, only to be exonerated by Allah Himself, much to Muhammad’s relief (Bukhari v.5, b.59, no.462). The Qur’an directly addresses the incident, berating Aisha’s accusers with the question: “Why did they not produce four witnesses? Since they produce not witnesses, they verily are liars in the sight of Allah.” (24:13)

Importantly, subsequent Islamic legal authorities explained that the four witnesses must all be men. For example, the authoritative legal manual known as the Hedaya, which is widely consulted today in Pakistan and elsewhere, elaborates: “The evidence required in a case of whoredom is that of four men, as has been ordained in the Qur'an, and the testimony of a woman in such case is not admitted...because the testimony of women involves a degree of doubt, as it is merely a substitute for evidence, being accepted only where the testimony of men cannot be had; and therefore it is not permitted in any matter liable to drop from the existence of a doubt...”  This likely derives from another verse in the Qur’an, where a woman’s testimony is said to be worth half that of a man: “And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not (at hand) then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if the one erreth (through forgetfulness) the other will remember.” (2:282) When Muhammad was asked about this, he explained: “This is because of the deficiency of a woman's mind.” (Bukhari v.3, b.48, no.826)

Muslim apologists often claim that the “four witnesses” rule is a positive thing, as it makes the standards for proving guilt when it comes to adultery so high that it is much harder to convict, and so the infamous sharia punishment of stoning to death for adultery will therefore be applied quite rarely. This may be technically true, but it also has far more disturbing implications. Adultery in Islam falls into the general category of zina, or fornication, which encompasses any illicit sexual intercourse not prescribed by sharia.  If a man rapes a woman who is not his wife or his sex slave (both of whom, as we have already seen, can be legally raped under sharia law), then this would be a punishable zina offence, but if the woman cannot provide four male witnesses who say they saw the act, then she is liable to be punished instead.

This is not just a hypothetical problem. In Dubai in recent years, numerous Western women have reported being raped, only to find themselves being arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms on charges of extramarital sex. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Muslim women’s rights organisation Sisters in Islam estimates that three-quarters of women in jail in the country are there because they were raped. Furthermore, when the Pakistani government considered reforming these rape laws in 2006, a group of furious Islamic clerics protested. They demanded that the amendments be withdrawn, since they would turn Pakistan into a “free-sex zone”. They insisted that these modernisation efforts were “against the teachings of Islam”, and that they had only been passed to appease the West.

Based on all that we have discussed so far, we can see that far from forbidding rape, Islam actually permits the rape of almost every woman on the planet. And yet, what we have covered to this point is not even the worst of it.

Coming soon: Islam's divinely-sanctioned form of statutory rape - child marriage.