If This Item Were About the United States, It Would Be in Salon not National Review

It's a fairly good piece, too. But I disagree with its last set of conclusions. Admittedly, I suspect Muhammad was more liberal than some of his more vocal followers these days. But like the Byzantine clergy he may have encountered on his business travels for Khadija, he would be hoping for God to smite anyone who thought about sex in "Rousseauist terms."

However, there is one philosophical point to offer on this end. Many ancient and some modern societies seek a "monogamous ideal", i.e. a woman is only intimate with one man during her life. This ideal finds expression in cultural and legal norms that protect unmarried women from seduction and strongly penalize adultery on the grounds of property (or family purity). However, most ancient societies that sought this ideal also possessed large numbers of slaves, who because of their unfree status could be given a social and legal status that was non-human or semi-human. Greek and Roman law (and Mosaic law, for that matter) strongly protects the chastity of citizen women but allows more or less free intercourse with one's slaves, permitting more sexual freedom for wealthy men at the expense of the sexual freedom of everyone else.

Christianity threw a monkey wrench into the douliacratic order of sexuality in the Greco-Roman world. By asserting the moral equality of every person, even if natural inequality was still recognized, it treated fornication with slaves as fornication in general, but it was not quite effective because slavery remained in the civil law under the same rules (I believe...). Moreover, even if the Byzantines had made their civil law match their canon law, general principles of the law of evidence would have made accusations for rape by a slave effectively impossible. (No one is going to institute proceedings for stuprum against oneself...so rape would be the only conceivable charge.) Only the elimination of slavery can end the abuse.

And indeed, any society which effectively privileges the chastity of one particular group of women over another will see the same types of sexual arrangements between social unequals that one sees in the douliacratic order. But if there is social equality, the chastity of a woman is likewise equally privileged (or without privilege). But still the monogamous ideal remains... And there still exists a regulated market to traffic in marriagable women, the so-called "marriage market." Most societies have one. American society just makes it freer. Yet no market is perfectly efficient. And I'm sure the economists could come up with some function based on demographics etc. that would show the gap between a perfectly efficient market where one marriagable man and one marriagable woman get married at the instant of marriagability (or whatever) and what actually happens. Add to this the natural wickedness of all flesh and hormonal teenagers especially, and we have a large socioeconomic potential that tends toward a freer marriage market (despite what the moralists at the time may say). Eliminate slavery (or social inequality in general) and this potential will overcome many barriers.

I'm not sure this is exactly what has happened in the Arab world. But I'm pretty sure there's some feedback loop between the liberalization of the marriage market and social equality in general. Connubium quidem est ius civile Heh, heh.

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