"In medieval early modern Islamic legislation on zina, therefore, a number of issues collide with one another, setting the foundation for eventual modern reinterpretations. Most fundamentally, sex law is intimately connected in this jurisprudence-as it is in the modern period-to both political identity and political space. At the same time, however, although there is a definite overlap between rape and adultery under the larger rubric of zina, the two remain relatively distinct-rape having to do with inappropriate copulation and adultery having to do with violating a contract. Likewise, for the most part sexuality and reproduction are emphatically separate-pregnancy irrelevant to adultery legislation and (male) sexual behavior the issue at stake in determining sexual crime. Nonetheless, there is also a starting point set here for an eventual conflation of rape and adultery as well as an eventual conflation of sexuality and reproduction. Indeed, by the time the early modern Ottoman codifications were being promulgated, these lines had been effectively blurred. Sexuality and reproduction remained to some extent separate, but with the collapse of hadd and tazir, sex crime became increasingly political and increasingly central to state structures. Likewise, sex crime became far more closely linked to emerging notions of the public and the private spheres-the primary difference between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century being the seventeenth century emphasis on quasi private contracts and the nineteenth century emphasis on the emphatically public social contract. Moreover, these issues play almost the same role in medieval and early modern Catholic, French, and Italian law. There is, for example, a definite overlap in medieval France and Italy between rape and adultery-rape “defined as any sexual act outside of marriage and in particular applied to sexual intercourse with virgins, regardless of the aspect of violence.” At the same time, however, the punishment for adultery/rape-death and/or the obligation to settle a dowry on a deflowered virgin -sets up distinctions between the two that should at this point be familiar. The emphasis on the marriage contract, for example, once again creates a situation in which the punishment for raping a woman capable being contracted in marriage (i.e., a virgin) is far less severe than the punishment for raping a woman who could not be contracted in marriage (i.e., a married woman)."

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Lombardi 1994, 152; as quoted on p.82-83

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rape_in_Islamic_law