4.2 Research Design
4.2.2 Sampling and Selection
This is a collective case study in which the issue of sexual agency within multiple fatwas authorised by one individual were analysed (Creswell 2012). My rationale for using this approach as opposed to an instrumental or intrinsic approach, stems from my preliminary overview of the data, which demonstrated that one particular case as required in an instrumental approach would be unable to provide data on the broad range of issues encompassed by the notion of sexual agency as outlined in the literature. Secondly, an intrinsic approach, which would have focussed only on the Imam’s fatwas to the exclusion of the phenomenon of sexual agency under scrutiny, would not have served the purposes of this research (Creswell 2012). Using a purposeful sampling method, Desai’s fatwas on the site ask-imam.com were selected to gain an understanding of the notions of sexual agency as identified in the literature.
Two main approaches were used in the preliminary selection of fatwas. Firstly, because askimam.org is easily searchable, an online keyword search of
‘contraception’, ‘sex’, ‘abortion’, ‘sexual health’, ‘agency’, ‘sexual consent’, ‘tamkin’
and ‘wife obedience’, were done immediately prior to archiving the sites. By way of a conceptual analysis, I read and recorded every fatwa that dealt with any aspect of sexual agency as defined by me in chapter one. This included themes associated with consent, male control, pleasure, desire, sexual satisfaction, force, sexual violation, female passivity, sexual availability, choice, consent in both licit and illicit sex in relation to questions on contraception, abortion, fertility, sexual positions, and sexual health. Secondly, after archiving the website, I then redid the keyword search in addition to two readings of all the fatwas in the website’s categories of marriage, divorce and miscellaneous fiqh in order to provide additional rigour to the selection process.
An initial large sample size of 120 fatwas dealing with the broad notion of sexual and reproductive agency including both male and female agency, were identified. These included fatwas by both men and women, related to sex and contraception both inside and outside the context of marriage. Consistent with my research aims of analysing the discursive constructions of married women’s sexual agency in the fatwas of askimam.org, and assertions that petitioners’ questions are a rich source of “social data” which can provide insights into the lived experiences, actual problems and concerns of men and women in society (Larsen 2015: 201), the 120 fatwas were further investigated through a process of textual analysis for further refinement according to the framing of the question by the petitioner.
As established in the introductory chapter, in this study the scope of ‘sexual agency’
within a discursive religious tradition like Islam has been expanded from the focus on young unmarried women to include married women in a religious community. The underlying rationale being that Muslim marriage in its classical and normative delineation is a marriage of dominion (Ali 2006; Wadud 2006). Following on a reading of the literature on sexual agency in the introduction, I located sexual agency in terms of the capacity to choose when and with whom one wants to experience sex, to choose how to define oneself sexually, to choose how one wants to engage in and negotiate around sexual activity, and to be afforded choices in making health decisions in relation to sex and sexuality.
In line with this definition, I chose to focus on those fatwas that only dealt with petitions that spoke to these ideals of sexual agency relating to the capacity to choose to have sex in marriage. Those that dealt with other aspects of agency in the realm of reproduction, contraception, abortion and fertility, as well as questions on what should not be divulged before marriage, the afterlife, and reasons for the prohibition of polygyny, were excluded. The questions dealing with desire in the afterlife and polyandry, by virtue of providing insights into contemporary women’s thoughts on equality and justice in marriage, and their resistance to normative beliefs, were kept aside as beneficial for a possible supportive analysis, but were not included in the main sample. Overall, these fatwas, including the others on contraception, reproduction, abortion and fertility, all warrant additional research. This meant that
only those questions which divulged firstly what kind of sexual possibilities wives wanted and were experiencing in terms of their desires, pleasures and experiences of sexual and bodily controls and rights, and secondly what was being divulged in terms of what wives didn’t want in terms of sex were included in the final sample of 26 fatwas.
Selection of Fatwas for Data Production
By virtue of the personality of Ebrahim Desai as the master teacher and creator of the website in this case study, the selection process incorporated an overview of the authorship of the fatwas. Of the 26 fatwas, most were answered by students of Mufti Desai even though he had a final say in approving and sanctioning them. Only four fatwas were answered directly by him, two65 of which comprised of enquiries which related to purely pietistic concerns eliciting brief, perfunctory and legalistic responses, providing very few insights into the Mufti’s thinking.
I selected the remaining two fatwas for analysis. I attribute my decision to the potential of both these fatwas to provide deeper insights towards my research goals.
For instance, in fatwa # 17537, from hereon referred to as fatwa A (seeAppendix 1), Desai’s response was explanatory and therapeutic according with Larsen’s (2015:
201) typology of fatwas. His answer in fatwa # 15085, from hereon referred to as fatwa B (seeAppendix 1), although equally perfunctory, diverged from the others in that instead of dealing directly with the pietistic concerns of the petitioner, Desai mainly dealt with the husband’s biomedical sexual health constraints in the context of satisfying his wife. In addition to these two fatwas, another two related ones were selected. Fatwa # 18350, from hereon referred to as fatwa C (seeAppendix 1) and # 16306, from hereon referred to as fatwa D (seeAppendix 1), both comprised of similar enquiries to those answered by Desai, except that his students answered them, providing an opportunity to gain insights into the master/ student relationship in the context of sexual health concerns.
65 See fatwa #24644: http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/24644 and fatwa # 14954 : http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/14954.
In addition, two other fatwas, # 32049, from hereon referred to as fatwa E (seeAppendix 1) and # 32362, from hereon referred to as fatwa F (seeAppendix 1), generated by the same female petitioner and answered by two different students, were also selected for a diachronic analysis, to add further insights to the deconstruction of the answers of the fatwas. This process, as earlier outlined, is important though not always possible because the anonymity of petitioners makes it impossible to determine which fatwas are generated by the same petitioner over a period of time.
These two fatwas were unique by virtue of being the only ones in the sample that were written by the same petitioner with a second petition following upon the response to her first, providing a window into the reality of what happens when a petitioner acts in accordance with the advice of a jurist, the subsequent experiences and concerns that arise, the type of follow up questions provoked, and the attempts by the petitioner to elicit a favourable response from the jurist regarding her circumstances. The follow-up question in this case dealt particularly with the sexual agency concerns of the petitioner and was an attempt by her to elicit a religious response from the mufti in line with her psychological, mental and pietistic concerns.
To summarise, the final six selected fatwas, as displayed inAppendix 1 are identified as follows:
# 17537- A
# 15085 - B
# 18350 - C
# 16306 - D
# 32049 - E
# 32362 - F
Other fatwas from the larger sample were also occasionally referred to in the analysis.
These are displayed inAppendix 2.