"In much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran."...
8/13/15, "ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape," NY Times, Rukmini Callimachi, QADIYA, Iraq
"Claiming the Quran's support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool."
"In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her -- it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
"I kept telling him it hurts -- please stop," said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. "He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God," she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group's official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group's core tenets.
The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms, where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.
A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And
the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from
deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and
dating is forbidden.
A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and
selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only
justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault
as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.
“Every
time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old
girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and
was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by
The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first
initial because of the shame associated with rape.
“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.
“He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What
you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’
And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ” said the teenager, who
escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for
nearly nine months.
The
Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates
to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern
flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern
Iraq.
Its
valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority
who represent less than 1.5 percent of Iraq’s estimated population of 34
million.
The
offensive on the mountain came just two months after the fall of Mosul,
the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it appeared that the
subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt to extend
the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.
Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different.
Survivors
say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their
capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they
had armpit hair, they were directed to join their older brothers and
fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or
marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the
dirt and sprayed with automatic fire. The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.
“The
offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for
territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert
on the Yazidi minority. He was in Dohuk, near Mount Sinjar, when the
onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists.
Fifteen-year-old
F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain
switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her
sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were helplessly standing by their
stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic State fighters
encircled them.
“Right
away, the fighters separated the men from the women,” she said. She,
her mother and sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on
Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my mom. The young,
unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.”
The
buses were white, with a painted stripe next to the word “Hajj,”
suggesting that the Islamic State had commandeered Iraqi government
buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. So
many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F’s bus that they were
forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said.
Once
the bus headed out, they noticed that the windows were blocked with
curtains, an accouterment that appeared to have been added because the
fighters planned to transport large numbers of women who were not
covered in burqas or head scarves....
Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex trade.
In each location, survivors say Islamic State fighters first conducted a census of their female captives. Inside
the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed
between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were over
1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out and leaning against
the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by several other
women held in the same location.
They
each described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a
register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state
her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was
married, and if she had children....
In
much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later
to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites
specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the Sunna, the
traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, to
justify their human trafficking, experts say."...
[Ed. note: There you go, it's no different than the US and Christianity, so you can't object.]
(continuing): "Scholars
of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of
these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually
sanctions slavery.
Many
argue that slavery figures in Islamic scripture in much the same way
that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection of the period in
antiquity in which the religion was born.
“In
the milieu in which the Quran arose, there was a widespread practice of
men having sexual relationships with unfree women,” said Kecia Ali, an
associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of a
book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular religious
institution. It was just how people did things.”
Cole
Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University,
disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the phrase “Those your
right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has been
interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of
Islamic jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he
says includes detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.
“There
is a great deal of scripture that sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel,
the author of a research paper published by the Brookings Institution on
the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can argue that it is no longer
relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these
institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and
his companions did.”"...
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