Islamic State theologians (ISIS) have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them.

“The ruling or fatwa has the force of law and appears to go beyond the Islamic State's previous known utterances on slavery,” a leading Islamic State scholar said.

How the group is trying to reinterpret the ancient teachings to justify the sexual slavery of women in the swaths of Syria and Iraq, it controls, is what all fatwa shows.  
 
In May, during a raid targeting a top Islamic State official in Syria, the fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by U.S. Special Operations Forces.

The Fatwa bans a father and son having sex with the same female slave. It says that the owner of a mother and daughter cannot have sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as “part of a joint ownership.”

Also read: More than 'jihadi brides'

Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by the Islamic State's Committee on Research and Fatwas, codifies the sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.

A leading IS expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel opined that, Islamic state’s sexual exploitation of female captives has been well documented. “It reveals the actual concerns of IS slave owners,” he said.

Dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari said, “A 1,000 year old Egyptian center for Islamic learning has nothing to do with Islam" and is deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.”

“Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around,” he said.

“Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it.”

By Phani Ch