Temporary Marriage (Mut‘ah): The Revocable Sexual Contract
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Both Sunni and Shia canons agree that the Prophet permitted mut‘ah — marriage contracted for a fixed term and a stated payment, dissolving automatically — during campaigns: Sahih al-Bukhari 5117–5119 and Sahih Muslim 1404–1406 record companions contracting temporary marriages, in one report for a cloak. Ibn Mas‘ud and Ibn Abbas read Quran 4:24 (istamta‘tum, “what you enjoy of them”) as the institution’s warrant, Ibn Abbas famously maintaining its permissibility into later decades. What happened next is the problem: the prohibition reports contradict each other on when (Khaybar; the conquest of Mecca; Awtas; later campaigns), al-Nawawi’s harmonization concedes the institution was permitted, banned, re-permitted, and banned again, and Umar’s sermon — “two mut‘ahs existed in the time of the Messenger of Allah and I forbid them both and punish for them” — attributes the operative ban to the caliph, which is precisely why Twelver Shia law holds mut‘ah lawful to this day and practices it. One revelation, two living canons, opposite rulings on whether a standing sexual institution is permission or prostitution.
Common Muslim Responses
Sunni scholarship answers that the final prohibition is prophetic and explicit — Ali’s report bans mut‘ah at Khaybar (Bukhari 5115) and Sabra al-Juhani’s has the Prophet forbidding it “until the Day of Resurrection” (Muslim 1406) — with Umar merely enforcing what some companions had not yet learned; staged legislation (as with wine) is divine pedagogy, not vacillation. Shia scholarship answers that the Quranic warrant stands, the prohibition reports conflict too badly to abrogate it, and Umar’s own words claim the prohibition as his (al-Islam.org collects the Sunni-source evidences). Both agree the original permission addressed the hardship of men long separated from their wives.
Counter-Rebuttal
The critic observes that each side’s case is built from the other’s authenticated documents, which is the internal problem in its purest form: the tradition’s most rigorous sources cannot settle whether a standing sexual institution is lawful, and the split is not academic — mut‘ah is practiced today, and its documented modern abuses (contracts of hours’ duration around shrine cities; the related Sunni device of halala marriage) descend directly from the unresolved texts. Either the Prophet banned it (and Allah first revealed a license for term-limited sexual access, later withdrawn — the abrogationnaskhAbrogation: the principle that a later Quranic revelation can cancel or replace an earlier ruling. Classical scholars catalogued dozens to hundreds of abrogated verses.Full glossary → problem of Part II applied to sexual ethics), or Umar banned it (and a caliph’s decree overrode standing revelation, the precedent Shia polemic has pressed for centuries). The wine parallel fails: wine’s staged verses are in the Quran; mut‘ah’s prohibition is not in the Quran at all, only in mutually contradictory reports — a case study of the hadithhadithA report of Muhammad's words, actions, or tacit approvals. The hadith corpus is the second source of Islamic law after the Quran.Full glossary → dilemma of Part VIII operating on a question of basic morality.