What Hamas called its female prisoners and why it matters

This week, Israel released a horrific video showing five female Israeli soldiers captured at the Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Terrified and covered in blood, the women beg for their lives as Hamas fighters walk around them, alternately threatening them with death and complimenting them on their appearance. The captors call the women “Sabaya”, which Israel translated as “women who can become pregnant.” Almost immediately, others doubted the translation and said Sabaya referred only to “female prisoners” and contained no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word Sabaya has no sexual connotations,” wrote Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian in a post on X, criticising a WashingtonPost article that said this was the case. She said the Israeli translation “plays on racist and orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it seems overly sensationalist to claim, without direct evidence, that they were raped in captivity in the last few months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, letting readers do the pregnancy math. “Think about what that means for these young women.”) But to claim that Sabaya is devoid of sexual connotations and reflects ignorance at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female prisoners; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a preference for classical forms of warfare that codified sexual violence on a large scale. Just as concubine And Comfort woman bear the stains of their historical use, Sabaya is directly linked to what we call modern rape. Anyone who Sabaya In today’s Gaza Strip or in Raqqa, one can assume that there are concrete and repulsive reasons for reviving this conflict.

The word Sabaya has recently re-emerged into the modern Arabic lexicon through the efforts of the Islamic State. Not surprisingly, the scholars best placed to analyze this are those who have observed and catalogued how ISIS has re-emerged Sabaya (and many other dormant classical and medieval terms). I am referring here to Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, recently from Swansea University, and to Cole Bunzel of the Hoover Institution, both of whom have commented on this controversy without sensationalism, except insofar as the potential for sexual slavery is inherently sensational.

According to classical Islamic law of war, there are four possible fates for enemy prisoners: they can be killed, ransomed, enslaved, or released. The enslaved are then subject to the rules governing slavery in Islam—which are extensive and almost as irrelevant to the daily lives of most living Muslims as the rules governing slavery in Judaism are to the lives of most Jews. I say “almost” because there has been no state in Judaism that attempted to regulate slavery for many centuries, but the last Muslim-majority states did not abolish slavery until the second half of the 20th century, and the Islamic State enthusiastically resumed the practice in 2014.

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In doing so, the Islamic State reaffirmed the privileges and duties of the slave owner. (Bunzel notes that the Islamic State cited scholars who used the term Sabaya as if captured women were considered slaves by default and the other fates were implicitly unlikely.) The slave owner is responsible for the slave’s welfare, including her food and shelter. He may have sex with slaves, but certain rules apply. He may not sell her until he can confirm that she is not pregnant, and he has obligations to her and to her children, if any result from their union. I cannot stress enough that such relationships – having sex with someone you own – are rape in all modern interpretations of the word and are frowned upon, whether they occur in the Levant, the Hejaz, or Monticello.

But in the pre-modern context, before the human rights revolution that recognized individual, inalienable value in every human being, sex slavery was nothing special, and the primary concern was not whether it was done but what happened to the children. The Prophet Muhammad freed a slave after she bore him a child. The Jewish father Abraham let his slave Hagar die in the desert 14 years after she bore him Ishmael. But these are ancient cases, and modern people see things differently. Frederick Douglass, in the introduction to his autobiography, highlighted the inhumanity of American slave owners by pointing out the abhorrent consequences of these relationships: fathers who hated, owned, abused, and sold their own relatives.

Sabaya is a term that arose in part from the need to distinguish prisoners who might be subject to these reproductive regulations from those whose possession would be less complicated. The translation as “women who can become pregnant” is unfortunately misleading. It makes clear what the word implies, namely that these prisoners are subject to a legal category with different opportunities than their male counterparts. As Al-Tamimi notes, Hamas could just as easily have used a standard Arabic word for female prisoners of war, asirat. This neutral word is used in the Arabic Wikipedia, for example, for Jessica Lynch, the American prisoner of war from the 2003 Iraq invasion. Instead, Hamas used a term with a different history.

One could read too much into the choice of words. To my knowledge, no one has claimed that Hamas is following the Islamic State in reinstating sex slavery as a legal category. I know of no evidence that it has done so, and if it did, I would expect many of its supporters, even those who are OK with the murder of concertgoers and the elderly, to condemn the group. More likely, a single group of Hamas members used the word in a particularly heated moment when they wanted to degrade and humiliate their prisoners as much as possible. Fortunately, the prisoners seem unaware of the language being used around them. The language suggests that the fighters were prepared to rape the women, but it could also just be reprehensible talk after an already gruesome day of mass killing.

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Reading too much into the language seems less dangerous than reading too little into it at this point. As soon as the Israeli translation came out, it was attacked for its inaccuracy, when in fact it only clumsily hinted at a real, if not easily summarized, historical background. What, if anything, should the translation have said? “Female prisoners” does not have the right meaning; “candidates for sex slavery” would go the other way and imply too much. Every translation loses something. Is there a word in English that expresses that one views the abused women in one’s power as potentially sexually available? I think probably not. I would be very cautious before speaking out in defense of the user of such a word.