Saadia Yacoob

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religion, Williams College

Marriage to Minor Girls: Intercourse, desire, and the female body in Islamic Law

Monday, February 23 at 4pm
121 Bay State Road, 1st Floor

This talk focuses on how Ḥanafī jurists made ethical sense of the consummation of marriages between pre-pubescent girls and adult men.  Ms. Yacoob will argue that Ḥanafī jurists configured sexual intercourse as an act of penetration in which the male desiring agent acted upon the desirable female body.  This confluence of sex as penetration, male desire, and the female body as locus provided an ethical framework for permitting the consummation of marriages between minor brides and adult men.

 Saadia Yacoob is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Duke University. She received her B.A. in Legal Studies from American University and a M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University. Her research interests include the history of Islamic law and Muslim feminist studies.

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