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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I remember this discussion. Muslima blithely declared that "Islam treats women captives well" and then quickly left the discussion except to pop up once in a while to call everybody Islamophobes.

The key here is that we are talking about [b]non-Muslim[/b] women were captured by Muslims and made into slaves/concubines. (As the ensuing discussion clarified, the captive women simply became slaves if they did not agree to sex. They became concubines if they agreed to sex, but they are not freed until or unless they (a) fall pregnant, and (b) the slave master dies.) Muslim PP is trying to compare this to the status of [b]pre-Islamic[/b] and [b]Muslim[/b] women. That doesn't work.[/quote]

I don't think it's historically established that captive women became slaves if they did not agree to sex.  It would have been more accurate to say that their position did not afford them an opportunity to agree or disagree to sex.  Sexual access to them was simply taken for granted.

To your list of conditions you should add a (c) if the slave master acknowledges the child as his.  That was also not a given.

The third point is that conversion to Islam by these women did not automatically result in any improvement of their status.  There were Muslim slaves as recently as last century.

The only distinction is that if women were ALREADY Muslim, they were prohibited to be enslaved.  But conversion to Islam while in captivity was not a ticket to anything.

There's a memoir book called "A Heart from Bangalan" (I don't think it's available in English, though) written by a woman who was captured as a girl of 13 at her village in Iran by an al-Saud slave-hunting expedition.  There's a scene in the book when she's yelling at her captors "I'm Muslim! I'm Muslim!", assuming, correctly, that Islam prohibits enslaving those who are Muslim.  It didn't matter to al-Saud but as a point of law, she was correct.[/quote]

We are getting off track. The point you make about the captives being NON muslim is to lend credence to your assertion that Muslim women did have ample opportunities to achieve success (as evidenced by Khadija). This is to show Arabs lied about there ever being a Jahiliyah period (age of ignorance and darkness). Am I correct?

However, Khadija achieved success pre islam, before the Prophet achieved his prophethood. She was not Muslim when she achieved success. [/quote]

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