Sabi: Contested narratives

Mustafa, Balsam 2022. Sabi: Contested narratives. Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 69-106. (10.5040/9781350152014.ch-003)

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

When ‘IS’ invaded the northern town of Sinjar on 3 August 2014, they took Ezidi girls as ‘سبايا’ (sabaya, female captives of war) in what is known in Arabic as ‘سبي’ (sabi, the captivity of women in wars), sexually abusing and torturing them. Reasons for this, according to ‘IS’, were religious. The group defined Ezidis as infidels whose women should be taken as sabaya according to theological reasons. Moreover, ‘IS’ was seeking to redefine sabi as an institution that was a prerequisite for the final battle ahead of judgment day. Also, I believe that ‘IS’ had another equally important motive: to empty areas under its control of any heterogeneity that would threaten the caliphate project (Bahrani, 2015b). This chapter examines how narratives related to sabi first emerged and how they changed later in translation by multiple media discourses, genres and actors. Contrary to the Speicher massacre case, narratives about sabi first unfolded when eyewitnesses and survivors spoke to human rights organizations and when Ezidi female MP, Vian Dakhil, made her famous plea before the Iraqi parliament. At first, those stories were also fragmented. Although sexual violence is often associated with wars and conflicts as a strategy to control and has taken various forms across history, including sexual slavery and rape (Wood, 2006; 2014), sabi has a unique religious dimension. It represented a tradition that predated Islam and continued to be practised in the early period of Islam. Sabi was incorporated into religious practices, yet, whether it was institutionalized or not remains contested among scholars of Islam (see Freamon, 2015; Callimachi, 2015). In either case, sabi had discontinued across history (Ali, 2016). As such, I argue that sabi emerged as an antenarrative in the sense that it was detached from its original historical context. Sabi became a loose signifier with different signifieds and translations. Each of these translations contributed to establishing disparate contested narratives....

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:	9781350152014
Last Modified:	24 Jul 2025 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180000

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item