Secure Between God and Man Peace, Tranquility and Sexuality through the Pietistic Aspirations of Believing Women

Abstract

This paper draws on a qualitative case study of the intersections of gender, religion and sexual and reproductive health and rights of Muslim wives on the east coast of South Africa. Under analysis are the ways in which women negotiate personal and domestic conflicts of married life guided by the religious aspiration to please God and secure a place in Heaven. This is achieved in part through pleasing their husband through sexual availability regardless of personal desire and, in their view, thereby ensuring a peaceful home. While their negotiations in the home expand our ideas of peace-making, their sexual choices through the course of peace-making raise ethical concerns on consent and mutuality. Taking up Kecia Ali’s argument for a ‘just ethics of sexual intimacy’ alongside Saba Mahmood’s analysis of pietistic agency and African feminist analysis of the place of domestic peace in human security, the paper highlights the interplay of choice and obligation in the negotiation of the pietistic aspiration of peace and tranquillity in the home.