This paper examines the link between sexuality and inequality and its working in Iranian family laws, which continue to be based on pre-modern rulings of Shi’a jurisprudence (fiqh). I argue that this link has enabled the legitimation and institutionalization of the control and subjugation of women, and continues to do so. Informed by a strong patriarchal ethos, in classical fiqh marriage is defined as a contract of exchange, in which the husband acquires control of his wife’s sexual faculties through the payment of mahr and nafaqah. Such a conception of marriage affronts many contemporary Muslims, yet it remains alive in law and in the collective unconscious.
This paper aims, first, to examine from a critical feminist perspective the way in which the link between sexuality and inequality was constructed in fiqh and how it has been reproduced, though in a modified form, in modern times. Secondly, it explores the ways in which new feminist voices and scholarship in Islam are exposing and severing this link and are paving the way for equal constructions of gender rights in Muslim societies from within an Islamic framework. The focus will be on the wife’s legal obligation of tamkin (sexual obedience), which courts in Iran and elsewhere interpret as justifying marital rape.
