she is exempt from the prescribed punishment. For the Prophet ﷺ was asked about a slave woman who had unlawful intercourse without having married, and he said: “If she has unlawful intercourse, flog her; then if she does so again, flog her; then if she does so again, flog her; then sell her, even for a braided rope.” Ibn Shihāb said: “I do not know whether this was after the third or fourth time.” Thus, the Prophet ﷺ made clear that the prescribed punishment must be applied to her before marriage. Flogging in this hadith means the prescribed punishment, not discretionary punishment, because the command necessarily entails an obligation, whereas discretionary punishment is not obligatory: it may or may not be imposed. Some versions of this hadith say, “Let him flog her,” which clarifies Mālik’s version. Some scholars who discuss juristic disagreements have reported that Ibn Abbās held that enslaved people who have unlawful intercourse before marriage are not subject to the prescribed punishment. It is very difficult to accept that the Sacred Law should recognize unlawful intercourse for which no prescribed punishment is due. I believe this report from him can only be an error. Allah knows best.
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Those who adopt this interpretation say that the prescribed punishment for a slave woman who has unlawful intercourse before marriage is established by the Sunnah, whereas after marriage it is established by the Quran. His words,
“They shall receive half the punishment prescribed for free women” [al-Nisā: 25],
refer here to free Muslim women, not married free women, because the prescribed punishment for married free women is stoning, which cannot be halved.
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An enslaved man who has unlawful intercourse is given fifty lashes, whether married or unmarried, by analogy with the slave woman. The slave woman is thus excluded, by the verse concerning her, from the general scope of His words:
“The woman and the man guilty of unlawful sexual intercourse—flog each of them with a hundred lashes” [al-Nūr: 2].
The enslaved man is excluded from its general scope by analogy with the slave woman. Those who reject analogical reasoning hold that an enslaved man who has unlawful intercourse is given one hundred lashes.