Judd King (PhD Georgetown, Islamic Studies) teaches Arab World Studies at American University  In addition to researching how the tradition of formal Islamic ethics does (and does not) inform Turkish politics, he also examines conspiracy theories, Islamophobia, and the role of religious identity in the global rise of right-wing populism.  

Marriage and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: The Case of Temporary Marriage, by Roshan Iqbal, offers an excellent overview of mutʿa, a controversial kind of “temporary marriage” practiced chiefly within Shi’i Islam.  By tracing the intellectual history of the concept across a wide variety of historical exegetical perspectives, Dr. Iqbal argues that present-day discussion of Muslim sexual ethics cannot ignore the wider perspectives and concerns that have always quietly informed Islamic thought on the subject.

After introducing the topic and outlining her argument in the introduction, Iqbal devotes the first chapter to explaining what mutʿa is and how it has been practiced, both historically and in the present.  The second chapter introduces the concept of Qur’anic exegesis (tafsīr) and explores the earliest interpretations about mutʿa, highlighting both an early ambivalence about the practice and the beginnings of sectarian differences.  The third chapter examines the development of debates about the topic within the mature exegetical tradition of the classical era through the eighteenth century CE, tracing a growing polarization along sectarian lines and firmer answers on whether or not the practice was allowed.  Chapter four then follows innovations in treatment of the subject by modern commentators writing in colonial and postcolonial environments, beginning with Muḥammad ʿAbduh in the nineteenth century and continuing through to contemporary intellectuals, several of them female — including the late Iranian commentator Nuṣrat Amīn and contemporary Pakistani intellectual Farḥat Hāshmī.

Iqbal’s interpretation of all these discussions is that contemporary Islamic debates about temporary marriage will need to move beyond simple reference to foundational texts, the historical over-reliance on which she has shown to have been not only inconclusive, but also heavily subject to extraneous sectarian and social concerns over many centuries.  The fifth and final chapter draws on Muslim feminist thinkers to argue that determining whether a practice like temporary marriage aligns with Islamic ethics today requires considering not just sacred texts, but also methodologies suggested by Muslim feminists, the science and psychology of sex, and ethnography exploring women’s and children’s perspectives.

Iqbal’s work represents the first truly systematic look at the place of mutʿa across the intellectual tradition of Islamic ethics – and indeed one of the first major treatments of the topic at all.  While the most extensive prior scholarship, by authors like Shaila Haeri and Linda Walbridge, has focused on the lived realities of mutʿa as an institution within particular communities, scholarly treatment of mutʿa’s intellectual dimensions as a concept within Islamic hermeneutics has mostly been limited to a smattering of shorter articles addressing specific aspects.  Among these are an article by Robert Gleave addressing the role of sectarian polemics in interpreting a key Qur’anic verse (4:24) and another by Joseph Witztum that examines the same verse from a linguistic perspective.  Other authors including Shala Sherkat have touched on mutʿa from a contemporary ethical standpoint, but generally without sustained reference to the full breadth of the historical interpretive tradition.

On one hand, Iqbal takes advantage of the book-length format to provide a broader, more diverse look at the exegetical tradition than is possible in more limited articles, examining a total of 19 commentators.  Beyond that, though, she takes pains to find and highlight historical material from outside the traditional scope of formal interpretive discourse in order to bring them into dialogue with the ethical debates of contemporary Islam.  For example, while few women penned Qur’an commentaries before the modern era, Iqbal analyzes the Prophet’s wife, A’isha.  Iqbal’s refreshingly innovative argument that A’isha’s numerous narrations not only of the words of the Prophet, but also of the meaning of Qur’anic verses amount to a de facto form of commentary allows her to add an excellent historical analogue for the contemporary debates over Islamic ethics, in which many are calling for a greater role for women.

If the focus of the book’s original research is the interpretation of mutʿa within the intellectual tradition of Islam, it must be emphasized that the book provides excellent exposition of the institution’s ethical and practical dimensions as well.  On one hand, updates on the current use of the practice — its prevalence, origins, and purposes in a surprisingly diverse array of contemporary contexts — are helpfully included in a short section at the end of the first chapter.  On the other, the final substantive chapter also presents its own original argument about considerations Muslims ought to make moving forward.  In that regard, the book actually serves as a strong introduction to all aspects of the topic and how they interrelate, and as such, it earns its place as a must-have for anyone doing serious research about mutʿa.  In fact, it is hard to imagine future research on any aspect of the topic being complete without some reference to this work.

But quite apart from its status as a must-read for anyone researching mutʿa, I would argue that this book is an important read for anyone studying Islamic ethics — either normatively or descriptively — regardless of their particular interest in temporary marriage as such.  Those looking for a descriptive understanding of Islamic ethical debates, past and present, will find that Dr. Iqbal’s book, like any great treatment of the grand tradition of Islam, demonstrates that most questions have more than one answer. Mutʿa can be progressive or reactionary, it can be liberating or exploitative, and it can be deemed permitted or forbidden for reasons of scripture, sectarian identity, social pressure, or politics.  At the same time, those reading about mutʿa aiming to better inform their own normative understanding of Islamic ethics will find that Iqbal’s intervention supplies several productive channels to focus inquiry moving forward.

Overall, Iqbal’s writing is both precise and accessible.  Despite a modest protestation about not claiming to be comprehensive, the breadth of her research on commentaries on Q., 4:24 is in fact rather encyclopedic, containing an enormous variety of viewpoints from across the intellectual history of Islam — including Zaydī, Ismaīʿlī, and other perspectives typically overlooked.  While her basic comparative methodology has been long established, Iqbal strikes an excellent balance between reviewing a (virtually) comprehensive survey of authors and making each entry feel relevant and impactful (rather than included for the sake of inclusion).

To be sure, the book does contain the odd place where an argument goes by slightly faster than readers might wish — as is inevitable in any work tackling a reasonably-sized topic.  Such moments, however, serve more to invite readers to embark on their own research into several fruitful questions the book raises, rather than to detract from the volume’s power or utility.

Overall, this book is sure to attract scholars of Islam looking to challenge their received notions of the boundaries of Islamic discourse.  But while readers looking for a delightful intellectual rabbit hole to explore over a cup of tea will certainly not be disappointed, Dr. Iqbal’s work offers much more than a deep dive into an unusual legal construct endemic within a minority sect.

This topic in fact goes straight to the heart of sexual ethics in Islam across time, and especially into the present day.  It’s particularly significant that Iqbal carefully references not only Shi’i scholars trying to advise petitioners of the permissibility or impermissibility of “temporary marriage,” but also of the tenor and content of polemical debates in the Sunni world.  In so doing, she produces a comprehensive look at how Muslims across time have both understood and justified the meaning of the fundamental assumption that sex must be confined to marriage.  That latter point is something that is debated fiercely in the present day but, as her study reveals, has been a complex and varied discussion stretching back to the earliest days of Islam.

I would argue that it is precisely because this topic is situated at the awkward intersection of sectarian polemics, sexual probity, and the most basic definitions of the legal and social category of “marriage” that it serves as such a perfect window into the deeper mechanics behind Islamic ethics.  Far from being a cut-and-dried legal issue of assigning priority to one sacred text or another following a formula, this issue forced generations of scholars and believers to explain and justify things usually taken as axiomatic.  Why does marriage matter? Does it matter how many sexual partners someone has, and if so, why?  And is a public ceremony and acknowledgement necessary to legitimize sex between consenting adults?

If the answers to those questions were taken for granted for most of Islam’s premodern history, Muslims of newer generations are demanding justification and reformulation.  The genius of Iqbal’s book lies in expertly coaxing out the hidden thread of a surprisingly long history of sexual ethics that goes beyond law.  As such, while quite compelling simply as the new definitive treatment of mutʿa overall, the greater significance of this book arguably lies in the incalculable service of bridging the perceived disconnect between the struggles of today’s Muslims to formulate relevant contemporary ethics and the dynamic complexity of how their religious tradition handled these questions historically.

Fatima Razvi is finishing her master’s degree in Islamic Studies with a concentration in Islamic Sciences at The Islamic Seminary of America in Dallas, Texas. Prior to her studies at the seminary, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Houston. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of theology, law, gender, and politics. Upon graduation from The Islamic Seminary of America, she will be pursuing further graduate training in Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focus will be on the legal application of the concept of nushūz within Muslim societies in the early medieval period.

Marriage in the Islamic tradition is commonly understood to be a contract between the two spouses which establishes rights and obligations, makes physical intimacy between them permissible, and creates a stable foundation for society to build on. Divorce, while disliked, is allowable, but one signs on to the marriage contract with the intention of permanence. Despite this, the Islamic tradition also preserves debates about a marriage limited in time, known as mut’a, an arrangement which unsettles these expectations.

Does Islam allow for such a marriage, which separates sexual access from the responsibilities associated with marriage, and do such arrangements protect women’s interests or privilege men’s desires? Mut’a cannot be dismissed as a practice external to Islam: the earliest sources indicate that it was known and, at least for a time, permitted within the first Muslim community. The central controversy, therefore, is not whether mut’a appears in the tradition, but how Muslim scholars interpreted its scriptural foundations, whether they believed its permissibility had been abrogated, and how sectarian and ethical commitments shaped their answers. Roshan Iqbal approaches this longstanding debate in her book Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: Rethinking Temporary Marriage by examining how Sunni, Sufi, Shi’i, and Isma’ili exegetical traditions have interpreted mut’a.

Roshan Iqbal received her MPhil from Cambridge, and her PhD in Islamic studies from Georgetown. An associate professor at Agnes Scott College, she works primarily on Islamic law, gender, and sexuality, and, as she states in her introduction, she was led to the field of Islamic studies primarily because of her fascination with the concept of mut’a marriage. Her experience in the field shines through in this book as she writes not through the legal field, but through the unexpected discipline of exegesis. Mut’a marriage, as a contract like the traditional Muslim marriage, belongs in the field of law. Iqbal recognizes, however,  that studying mut’a through law would be lacking. The questions she asks are not how and when mut’a becomes legally legitimate in practice, but whether and where mut’a is considered theologically legitimate in the first place –  questions that are better answered through an analytical reasoning project rather than a legalistic one.

Using the controversy over mutʿa as a case study, Iqbal examines how different exegetical traditions have interpreted Qur’an 4:24 – the only Qur’anic verse that some scholars understand to refer to temporary marriage – and the historical reports surrounding it. By comparing Sunni, Shiʿi, Ismaʿili, and Sufi tafsīr, she argues that differences in legal conclusions arise from the interpretive authorities and sources each tradition privileges but, most importantly, from each scholar’s theological leanings. Although the debate over mutʿa appears at first glance to hinge on a single Qur’anic verse, Iqbal demonstrates that the verse itself does not resolve the issue. Rather, legal conclusions depend upon how exegetes evaluate competing narrations, interpret key terminology, determine which authorities are binding, and reconcile apparently conflicting evidence.

Iqbal studies the works of nineteen exegetes hailing from different denominations, time periods, and theological commitments to display how the Qur’anic text itself does not resolve the problem of mut’a. The primary debate revolves around not just one verse, but one word – istamt’a. Sunni exegetes contend that this means the pleasure a man receives from his wife in marriage, whether sexual or otherwise, while Shi’i scholars argue that the word itself means mut’a marriage and that the verse in question therefore refers only to mut’a marriage. This tiny linguistic disagreement drives centuries of legal disagreement.

Because Sunni and Shi’i scholars privilege different evidences, the same historical material produces opposite conclusions. For example, Iqbal discusses how Sunni and Shi’i exegetes work from different canons. Shi’i scholars consider narrations from their own imams to be legitimate and authoritative. Due to political grievances, they do not take the narrations of many of the companions as equally valid, such as the narrations of the first three caliphs and of Ayesha, the wife of the Prophet. Sunni scholars on the other hand, accept narrations from all four caliphs and Ayesha as fully legitimate, while not accepting narrations from the imams.

Iqbal walks us through how alternate readings of the exact same hadith, such as the hadith of Ibn Abbas whose narrations are accepted by both Sunnis and Shias, have led to differing conclusions on this topic. Some narrations state that Ibn Abbas considered mut’a permissible, others contend that he regarded it as prohibited, and still others hold that he believed it was later permitted once again. Faced with these varying reports, scholars had to evaluate the authenticity of these narrations, reconcile them where possible, and determine which reports they regarded as the strongest evidence. Iqbal’s discussion demonstrates the methodological complexity involved in weighing multiple narrations to arrive at a legal conclusion.

Similarly, the sermon of the second caliph, Umar, in which he categorically prohibits mut’a, is taken by Sunnis to be a clear evidence in favor of its prohibition, while Shi’i scholars insist that it is illegitimate because he uses the phrase “I forbid” in the report, indicating that he is performing ijtihad and prohibiting it of his own will, not the will of God through the prophet. Through the analysis of the twelfth century Sunni scholar Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s, Iqbal shows us the back and forth that scholars engaged in over this:

According to al-Razi, the claim that ‘Umar falsely forbade mut’a is unreasonable. This would mean that not only was ‘Umar an unbeliever but so were those who heard him in the sermon and failed to protest. This would have included ‘Ali, since he was also present. Therefore, the logical conclusion to draw from ‘Umar’s prohibition is that ‘Umar forbade mut’a because the Prophet Muhammad had done so as well.” (Conclusion, p. 4)

Iqbal also highlights examples that complicate a simple Sunni-Shi’a divide. Ibn Ashur, for example, was the first Sunni exegete to allow mut’a, not because he believes Q 4:24 allows it, but because he does not believe that its permissibility was abrogated and he could not find proof of its final prohibition. This is a vitally important example. Ibn Ashur’s position demonstrates that methodological commitments could, at times, outweigh sectarian expectations. By highlighting debates such as these, Iqbal enables readers to appreciate the methodological rigor with which Muslim exegetes approached questions that later came to define sectarian identity.

More than anything, Iqbal’s discussion shows us how complicated these discussions can get. No Sunni scholar, for example, uses any of the narrations by Ayesha to decide whether or not mut’a is permissible, despite the fact that some narrations by her reference this topic directly.

One possible explanation is that Sunni scholars had already concluded that mutʿa was impermissible and therefore saw no need to invoke Ayesha’s reports as additional evidence. Yet the complete absence of her narrations from the discussion remains striking, and it raises important questions that Iqbal invites us to consider.

An effective tool Iqbal uses is of looking at prominent exegetes who, in their discussion of Q 4:24 either did not say much on the topic of mut’a, or did not mention mut’a at all. Several very influential Sufi and Sunni figures such as Abu’l ‘ala Maududi, the contemporary Farhat Hashmi, and two Sufi exegetes Rashid al-Din al-Maybudi, and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani, do not mention mut’a at all in their exegeses. This is one of Iqbal’s more suggestive findings. She leaves open whether this silence reflects the presumed doctrinal settlement on mut’a, discomfort with its sectarian implications, the exegete’s methodological priorities, or the marginality of the question within the exegete’s community.

The fact that Iqbal chooses to work through exegetical analysis rather than jurisprudential analysis is, in my opinion, the strongest feature of her scholarly work. She outlines four reasons for doing so. First, to add a scholarly contribution to the study of mut’a as it has not been analyzed through exegesis before. Second, scholarly works on tafsir (exegesis) predate scholarly works on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), allowing for a larger depth of field and a richer corpus to study. The study of tafsir has been uninterrupted since it began, continuing even through major disruptions such as sectarian divisions, wars, and modernity. Finally, because tafsir is interdisciplinary by nature and therefore contains a plurality of opinions and methods, once again giving one a larger canon of source material to work with. Working through the case of mut’a in this way allows Iqbal to conclude that classical exegetes were more open to considering opinions far from their own theological positions, whereas modern exegetes have narrowed this and do not discuss opinions except where they are in theological agreement with their own beliefs (Ch. 2, p.. 2)

Roshan Iqbal’s other significant contribution to the scholarly study of exegesis is her inclusion of Ayesha and Farhat Hashmi as exegetes, despite neither of them having a complete written exegesis. Ayesha’s thousands of hadith narrations have been used in the primary hadith collections of Sunni scholars since the beginning, and her own opinions on some topics, such as on the topic of mut’a have also been preserved. That she is not considered an exegete but that Sunnis do take religion from her, as they do in general from the companions and the first four caliphs in particular, begs the question of whether the distinction between an authoritative religious source and an exegete may ultimately be one of terminology rather than substance.

Farhat Hashmi, the other unconventional name examined by Iqbal, does not have an exegetical work on the Qur’an, but her audio lectures on the entire Qur’an are her thought out, fully-formed opinions on it. Iqbal leads us to wonder whether such lectures, in an age where we have many scholarly discussions on specific Qur’anic verses, should be considered an individual scholar’s exegesis. Neither Ayesha, the wife of the Prophet, nor Farhat Hashmi have written what could be considered a traditional tafsir, yet they have both expounded their opinions on Qur’anic verses, and Ayesha in particular with full knowledge of the sunnah, hadith, and other hermeneutical tools that exegetes contend with such as reasons for revelation (asbab al-nuzul), abrogation (naskh), etc. What is the substantive difference between her opinions, then, and those of traditional exegetes with written works?

In her concluding chapter, Roshan Iqbal  presents a valuable claim: legal permissibility does not answer ethical questions. While she has done a thorough job up till this point in portraying the polysemy of exegetical works in the Islamic tradition, it is in her post exegetical analysis that she really shines. Iqbal shifts from asking whether the Islamic tradition upholds mut’a as a legitimate practice , to asking whether Muslims should engage in it. She presents ethnographic studies in Iran and in the United States that question the benefits of mut’a and outline its harms especially towards women. Further than this, however, she engages in an analysis of mut’a marriage that far exceeds exegesis and even ethnography and delves into philosophy, physiology, sociology, feminism, ethics, spirituality, the idea of akhlaq (good character) in the Islamic tradition, sufism, biology, and intra and intertextuality of the Qur’an. Iqbal argues that once the exegetical debate has been explored, the discussion need not end there. She is very careful to not impose her own worldview on her readers. In fact, in one of the most striking sentences in her book, she concedes that “my idea of justice might not be God’s idea of justice”, leaving open the possibility that her own understanding of justice – as is true for all of us – may not ultimately align with the conception of justice articulated by her religious tradition. However, her studying mut’a through all these fields is an attempt to try to access that conception of justice, particularly since Qur’anic exegesis has not yielded a clear answer on this that is agreed upon by all Muslims.

Using feminists as an example, Iqbal argues that their call to read the Qur’an intertextually, in light of the sunnah, the hadith, and the marriages of the Prophet is one we should consider as a means to understand this justly. As the prophet is believed, by all sects – Sunni, Shi’i, Sufi, Isma’ili – to be the perfect man and some of his wives dealt with emotions of jealousy and ill-will towards his other wives, we must consider whether it is possible to have a peaceful household when a husband has multiple wives. While this is an insightful observation, I believe that Iqbal falls short in her analysis here by not considering ‘urf, or custom, which is an important consideration in Islamic law. In societies where polygamy was the norm, jealousy existed despite cultural acceptance of polygamy. In societies where monogamy is the norm, then, the emotional consequences may be significantly greater, possibly making mut’a impermissible through the maqsad, the legal goal, of not imposing harm. As Iqbal does throughout the book, it would be advantageous to study the differences here between Sunni and Shi’i communities.

Iqbal also considers the real effects of mut’a on lived experiences, not just through ethnographic studies, but by considering the requirements of mut’a in Shi’i communities. Primary among these is the non-requirement of registration. A marriage that does not require registration is one that is open for abuse, and Iqbal does well to point this out as a serious concern for women. Similarly, because mut’a does not require a public announcement of the marriage, women may be left in precarious positions with little means of establishing the existence of the marriage. What is the purpose of making mut’a fully legal and religiously legitimate, as well as saying that children born of it are full children with full inheritance rights, while at the same time not requiring registration or a public announcement? Without such basic protections, both women and children remain vulnerable to abandonment and abuse.

Iqbal tackles this question of abuse by showing how many of the women who enter mut’a marriages are poor and in need of money. Mut’a marriage requires a dowry paid by the man to his wife, but it explicitly does not require lifelong financial maintenance, a hallmark of traditional marriage in the Islamic tradition. While one can argue that poverty and need can force women to do many things, mut’a being just one of them, the obvious power hierarchy and abuse inherent in cases such as men from wealthy Arab countries traveling to India and picking brides for mut’a marriages from orphanages ((ch. 1, p. 13), only to abandon them weeks later, should speak to our conscience and compel us to ask how this can be in the spirit of the law, even if it is in the letter of the law.

While Iqbal’s ethical reflections are among the book’s strongest contributions, I occasionally wished she had pursued exegetical questions raised by her own discussion more fully. Muhammad Husayn Tabatabi’i, for example, considers classical, modern, Sunni, and Shi’i sources and comes to the conclusion that istimtāʿ had become a recognized expression for temporary marriage during the Prophet’s lifetime, so it can only refer to mut’a in Q 4;24. This argument, however, is not self-evident and I wish that Iqbal had interrogated it more critically. Throughout the Qur’an, words that possess specialized or emerging technical meanings are frequently employed according to their broader lexical sense, where context, not contemporary usage, determines their meaning. The word Nikah to refer to both sexual intercourse or to the marriage contract is one example, as is the case of zakah to mean purification or growth as well as the alms tax, both meanings of which are used in the Qur’an. Consequently, demonstrating that istimtāʿ could refer to mutʿa does not, by itself, establish that this is the intended meaning of Q. 4:24.

Iqbal’s imbricated discussions demonstrate the richness of her project. Her work continually raises questions that extend beyond the immediate scope of her study, inviting readers to pursue lines of inquiry stemming from her research and leaving its readers with further questions about mut’a, Islamic law, and the foundations of exegesis.

Roshan Iqbal’s book succeeds because it resists simplistic answers. Rather than presenting mutʿa as a settled legal issue, it reveals the complexity of the exegetical tradition and the competing evidences upon which Muslim scholars have relied. Iqbal has produced a careful, non-polemical, and highly original contribution to the fields of Islamic law, Qur’anic exegesis, and gender studies. Her contribution is to push the conversation forward and force us to contend with the questions she asks, such as, if the Qur’an tells us to control our desires, does mut’a marriage not display a lack of self-control? Why is this simple return to Qur’anic ethics not discussed in the scholarly literature? Why, in fact, does the hadith in which the Prophet says “The best of you is he who is best to his family” not exist in the scholarly literature as a means of discouraging mut’a due to the harm it causes existing wives?

The book’s greatest strength, however, lies in demonstrating that Islamic law is far more than the straightforward application of Qur’anic verses to legal questions. Through her close reading of Qur’an 4:24 and the centuries of exegetical debate surrounding it, Iqbal reveals that legal reasoning is an interpretive enterprise shaped by language, history, hadith, theology, and competing conceptions of authority. For every argument put forth, there are counters, and as the Sunni and Shia divide deepens with time, these counters become increasingly polemical and more difficult to untangle. Iqbal demonstrates that debates over mut’a are, at their core, debates over authority; whose reports are accepted, whose readings are authoritative, which historical evidence is privileged, and how exegetes decide among competing sources.

Roshan Iqbal hails from a small hamlet of 20 million–Karachi, Pakistan. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University. Prior to this she read for her MPhil at the University of Cambridge. She has studied in Pakistan, the US, Morocco, Egypt, Jordon, the UK, and Iran. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in the Qur’an, Islamic Law, Film and Media Studies, and modern Muslim intellectuals. Her recent book is titled, ‘Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: Rethinking Temporary Marriage.’ As an associate professor at Agnes Scott College, she teaches classes in the Religious Studies department and also classes that are cross-listed with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies. When she is not working, she loves talking to her family and friends on the phone (thank you, unlimited plans), tracking fashion (sartorial flourishes are such fun), watching films (love! love! love!), reading novels (never enough), painting watercolors (less and less poorly), and cooking new dishes (sometimes successfully).

I am grateful to Fatima Razvi and Judd King for reading Rethinking Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law with such care, pushing exactly where it needed pushing. Writing about mut’a means writing about a practice most readers already have an opinion on before they open the book. Both reviewers resisted that temptation and met the argument on its own terms. I am grateful, too, to Maydan for hosting this forum; the work it does to make academic scholarship more legible and more public is its own service to the field.

I want to start with something neither of you set out to agree on but did. Razvi and King, working independently, both singled out one of the things the book does: the treatment of A’isha, and later Farhat Hashmi, as exegetes despite neither having produced a formal tafsir. Razvi asks whether the line between an authoritative source and an exegete is finally a matter of terminology rather than substance; King calls it a historical analogue for present debates about women’s interpretive authority.

Both examples share a feminist methodological intention, but they do two distinct kinds of work. A’isha’s inclusion is an act of creative recovery, undertaken to give female voices from the past both inclusion and evidentiary weight; it insists she be treated as a mufassir. In her era, tafsir meant above all what the Prophet had said, and she was a major source of that knowledge. She also has something to say on mut’a: not permitted. Razvi observes that no one, not even Sunni scholars, has used her hadith on the types of marriage as evidence in that debate, not because the matter was considered settled, but because her testimony was never brought into the mut’a discussion to begin with, and because she was not seen as a mufassir at all. Farhat Hashmi’s inclusion is the second move: a claim of epistemic parity between orality and written text, since orality is a mode more accessible to women. I am glad, out of everything the book takes up, that this is what two reviewers, working independently, both noticed.

Now to the harder work. Razvi challenges me for not pushing back on Tabatabai’s reading of istamtā’, pointing out that Qur’anic words with emerging technical senses, such as nikah and zakah, are often read according to their broader lexical sense. It is a fair challenge, and I want to answer it directly. Legal exegesis generally gives priority to what a word meant at the moment of revelation, not to how flexibly later generations could read it. Istamtā’ did not enter Arabic as a neutral word for pleasure that scholars gradually narrowed toward mut’a; it named the practice itself in pre-Islamic Arabia, where temporary contractual unions were already a known custom before the Qur’an addressed them. Tabatabai’s argument rests on that historical specificity, and this is exactly why, as Razvi also notes later, Ibn Ashur, a Sunni scholar par excellence, permits mut’a. So, I would gently turn the burden around: if istamtā’ denoted mut’a before revelation, those who read verse 4:24 as ordinary marital pleasure must explain how the word drifted from its own origin, not the reverse.

I would also add one thing here. Razvi frames the question of permissibility as resting on istamtā’ itself, but that is not quite the whole picture. Verse 4:24, the proof text for mut’a’s permissibility, is among the most debated verses in the tafsīr literature for several reasons at once: the meanings of certain words, the grammatical questions the verse raises, and questions of transmission, all of which generations of mufassirs have taken up.

Razvi also names two questions I raised in the book and left open. Does mut’a, examined against the Qur’an’s broader ethic of restraint, represent a kind of surrender to desire the text elsewhere asks believers to resist? And why has no one used the hadith “the best of you is he who is best to his family” against mut’a? Stronger still, to my mind, is that the Prophet would not grant his son-in-law Ali permission to marry another wife while his daughter Fatima was alive. What does that refusal say about a father’s sense of the harm done to a first wife? I bring in these hadith and verses, as Muslim feminist scholars have long done, to make a broader point: privileging one strand of evidence over another can lead the tradition to a different outcome. The harm to existing wives is an obvious ground worth naming, and I name it here, among other harms not previously considered. Even so, I did not want the book to settle either question for readers who deserve to sit with that discomfort.

Razvi quotes my citation of al-Razi here, that ‘Umar’s prohibition of mut’a must trace back to the Prophet, since the alternative would implicate everyone present at his sermon, including ‘Ali, in the same error by their silence. Elsewhere, I have already presented Shi’a pushback holding that ‘Ali’s silence was not agreement but taqiya. Whether a reader finds that response convenient or takes it seriously, it points to something real: other recorded disagreements between the first three caliphs and ‘Ali show the same pattern, unity repeatedly privileged over open disagreement.

King places the book against a literature that includes Shahla Haeri and Linda Walbridge, who gave us the lived reality of mut’a inside particular communities; Robert Gleave traced the sectarian polemics embedded in readings of 4:24; Joseph Witztum approached the same verse linguistically; Shahla Sherkat brought a contemporary ethical lens, without the historical depth King is generous enough to say this book supplies. Whereas King locates the book among these secondary voices, Razvi points to its primary source: the Qur’an and its tafsir, which I use because it is the precursor to all other Islamic knowledge production, and because no one had looked for it there before. I did not set out to replace that secondary scholarship, but to put it in the same room, along with the Zaydi and Isma’ili voices rarely invited to that room at all.

If I could ask for one thing more from either review, it would be closer attention devoted to chapter five. Both reviewers move through it quickly on their way to conclusions about the book as a whole, but that chapter holds what I am actually most proud of. Scholarship on Islamic law has traditionally stayed inside textual interpretation and scriptural hermeneutics, and I argue that contemporary legal and ethical questions cannot be resolved through textual analysis alone. Chapter five poses as a tentative Imāmī feminist mujtāhida and borrows Mudarrisī’s maqāṣid tools to justify that move. In effect, it proposes a new methodology for the field, placing Islamic legal reasoning in conversation with Muslim feminist thought, legal ethnography, moral philosophy, and the science of sexuality, expanding the evidentiary and intellectual foundations on which Islamic ethical reasoning can be built. This changes what a scholar is allowed to ask. Not only what the text permits, but what it costs the people living with it – a question textual analysis alone cannot answer.

This moves beyond asking how legal traditions developed, to asking how they might be ethically reimagined for the realities Muslims experience now. The clearest example sits in the final chapter, where I put the history of clitoral anatomy, oxytocin research, Khomeini’s own fatwa on transgender surgery, the seriousness owed to children’s voices and sentiments alongside adults’, and many other previously unconsidered aspects into direct conversation with fiqh on mut’a, something no one in Islamic legal scholarship had done before. This multidisciplinary method, bringing textual traditions into sustained dialogue with lived experience and contemporary scientific and philosophical knowledge, is the book’s central scholarly contribution, and has since become the foundation for my ongoing research. Mut’a gave me the occasion to think through these methodological questions, but they reach well beyond it. A scholar working this way is no longer confined to asking whether the tradition permits something. She can ask what the tradition owes the people it governs, a question that demands justice as much as it demands fidelity to the text.

My hope for this book was not necessarily to settle the conversation about temporary marriage. An honest reader might well close it convinced a moratorium is in order until the questions I raise are answered, and I would not argue the point. What I hoped for was something else: a method for reinterpreting Islamic law from within the tradition itself, with marital and sexual ethics held at its center.