The Wives and Daughters of the Prophet Muhammad

Discussing “women in Islam” is a potentially thorny topic, so I would first like to refer you to my idol, Reza Aslan, who can address the issue more eloquently than I can:

Cliff notes in case you didn’t watch the video: Islam, like every religion, is subject to interpretation and there are as many interpretations of Islam as there are Muslims in the world – more if you count the interpretations of non-Muslims. What follows is my historical (not theological) interpretation, based on the interpretations of others. (Mainly Reza Aslan).

            Many Westerners view Islam as monolithically “oppressive to women” – problematic because no religion or culture is monolithic and ironic for numerous reasons. Number one: women played an important role in the nascent Ummah (Muslim community), and were among some of the earliest converts to Islam because (number two) Islam extended many rights and protections that were denied to women in pre-Islamic Arabia (not to mention much of Christian Europe). 

            How better to discuss the immediate impact of Islam on women, than by investigating the lives of the women closest to the Prophet: his wives and daughters. In order to talk about these women, I must also give an overview of some of the generally accepted facts of the Prophet’s biography.

            The Prophet Muhammad had a highly precarious social position in the tribally-based society of pre-Islamic Arabia. He was a member of an important tribe (the Quraysh) but as an orphan his connection to the tribe was tenuous. Still, he managed with the protection of his uncle to become a moderately successful merchant and negotiator. As a young man, he gained another important guardian: a wealthy older widow named Khadija, who first hired Muhammad to manage her affairs, and then proposed marriage to Muhammad, who accepted. Although Muhammad would later have polygynous marriages, he was monogamously married to Khadija for twenty-five years until her death.

            Generally, the role of women is more proscribed in societies in which large amounts of inheritable property are at stake, especially if property is passed from father to son – there is much greater motivation for a man to assure the paternity of his children. Nomadic societies, by their nature, don’t amass nearly as much property as sedentary societies. So, typically, women in nomadic societies face fewer restrictions than their sedentary counterparts. (This doesn’t necessarily make nomadic societies egalitarian.) Among the Bedouin nomads of Muhammad’s time, women stayed with their father’s clan – not their husbands’ – could easily divorce their husbands, and polyandry (one woman with multiple husbands) was practiced alongside polygyny (one man with many wives).

            Muhammad, however, was not a nomad. He lived in the sedentary society of Mecca, where women could not own or inherit property – with rare exceptions like Khadija – women could not divorce their husbands, and had no recourse if their husbands chose to divorce them. Therefore, widows and divorcees were vulnerable in the tribal structure of Mecca, much as Muhammad, as an orphan, had been.

            Muhammad and Khadija’s relationship was, by all accounts, highly irregular. Khadija had been twice married and twice widowed before she met Muhammad, who it is estimated was about 15 years younger than her. For many widows in Meccan society, re-marriage was an economic necessity: Khadija had not only held onto her property, but also managed a thriving business. She had no economic motive to marry again. Muhammad, on the other hand, was facing the prospect of perpetual bachelorhood because he was not in an economic position to support a wife and family. Khadija didn’t need a breadwinner, so Muhammad was able to accept her proposal. Many critics of the Prophet Muhammad focus on his later polygynous marriages, but as Reza Aslan points out in his book No God But God, in a society where polygamy was the norm, it is this first monogamous marriage that really should stand out.

            Muhammad’s revelations began when he was about forty. Khadija was his first follower and continued to support and protect Muhammad, even when preaching is revelations got him into hot water with the Quyrash who ruled Mecca. However, when Muhammad’s protectors – his Uncle and Khadija – died, he and his infant religious community were in grave danger. With no other options, Muhammad and his followers – including his daughters – fled to Yathrib, now known as Medina.  

            While in Medina, Muhammad began to establish a community run by the rules of his new religion. Because of the important example that the community in Medina sets for Muslim life, the flight from Mecca (Hijra) is year one of the Islamic calendar. The ethic of this Ummah (community) was based on social welfare and taking care of each other, as a reformation of the social inequalities in Mecca. This included the expansion of certain rights to women: such as the ability to initiate divorce and the ability to inherit property, which would not be granted to most Western women until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

            Muhammad’s ruling on polygyny, however, remains the subject of heated debate. It is possible to find evidence in the Quran and hadith to both support and reject the practice, meaning if you want to come away with the understanding that Islam allows polygyny, you can find evidence to support that conclusion. If you want to find evidence suggesting that Islam promotes monogamy, you can just as easily find the evidence.

Allow me demonstrate.

 The Quran allows men up to four wives – provided they can all be treated equally – and after Khadija’s death, Muhammad had nine simultaneous wives, far exceeding the limit. However, opponents of polygyny would point out that by allowing only four wives, the Quran actually limited the previously unregulated practice of polygyny. Furthermore, the Quran permits multiple wives only if the husband can treat them all equally, with the injunction that no matter how one tries it is impossible to treat multiple wives equally, implying that monogamy is preferable. As for the prophet’s example: monogamy advocates would point out that the long monogamous marriage to Khadija was clearly his preference, and his polygynous marriages in Medina were to cement political alliances.

Like Khadija, Muhammad’s wives in Medina played an active role in his life and community, from leading prayers, to going into battle, to helping fund the community (Sawda, one of his wives, was a gifted leather-maker), to giving Muhammad counsel and debating with him.

The most famous and controversial of these wives was Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite. The daughter of Muhammad’s friend and successor, Abu Bakr, Aisha may or may not have been a child when she married Muhammad (depends on who you ask). She was the only of Muhammad’s wives to have never been married to anyone else, and to never have had any children of her own. Although much younger than Muhammad (whether she was a child or not) Aisha and Muhammad clearly shared a mutual fondness, and hadith show Aisha’s willingness to challenge, and even play pranks on the Prophet. Because Aisha was very much Muhammad’s companion during the years in Medina, she is also the originator of many hadith – stories of things the Prophet said and did that are used to set an example for Muslims of how to live their lives. Aisha continued to play an important role in the young Muslim community, even after Muhammad’s death.

The years after Muhammad’s death were fractious for the Ummah. When Muhammad died, the prophecy died with him. Muslims consider him to be a seal on the prophecies of God: there will be no prophets after Muhammad. However, Muhammad was also the political and spiritual leader of the community, and left behind no clear instructions about who should succeed him in this role, leading to a fundamental divide that still exists in Islam between the Sunni and the Shi’a. Two women found themselves at the center of this divide: Muhammad’s widow, Aisha, and his daughter, Fatima.

The two women – close in age to each other – had no love for each other, and have sometimes even been described as rivals, politically as well as for Muhammad’s affection. The fundamental split in the community after Muhammad’s death was over whether his successor should be chosen by the community as whoever was most fit to rule, or if the leadership should stay within the Prophet’s family. If the successor (or Caliph) of Muhammad were chosen from among the community, then Aisha’s father – Abu Bakr – was a strong candidate. (Spoiler alert: Abu Bakr was the first Caliph.) If, however, leadership stayed in the prophet’s family, then the only candidate was a man whom Aisha loathed: Muhammad’s cousin and Fatima’s husband, Ali.

Fatima was the only of Muhammad’s children to outlive him. All of his sons died in childhood, and all of his descendants are from Fatima and Ali’s children. Although not as public or outspoken as Aisha, Fatima insisted that her father had named Ali as his successor – but Ali was passed over, and Fatima died only six months after her father.

In the successive years, each time it was time to choose a new caliph, Aisha campaigned against Ali, and when Ali finally did become Caliph, Aisha led troops into battle against him. 

Many Westerners conflate Islam with oppression of women, because in some Muslim-majority countries (*cough Saudi Arabia cough*) Islam is used as a pretense to control the movements and activities of women. However, Geraldine Brooks in Nine Parts of Desire reminds the reader that there is nothing inherent in Islam that suggests it must be that way and Reza Aslan notes that many practices deemed oppressive to women – such as clitorectomy or veiling – are based on local practices which predate Islam, and have been practiced by Christians and Jews as well.

I’ve gone on quite long enough, so here’s the bottom line: gender roles and relations are complicated. Religions are complicated, too. There is no definitive answer about what Muhammad’s vision was for women in his Ummah, and it is open to interpretation. From where I’m sitting, it seems to me like he surrounded himself with powerful, inspirational women, to whom he listened, and to whom he wanted to extend rights and legal protections. But the jury is out.

It has been for centuries.

Sources: This post started out as pontifications from my background knowledge about Islam, and then I went back to two somewhat conflicting books about the topic, so I do not have many specific sources to recommend this time around.

No God But God, by Reza Aslan

Nine Parts of Desire, by Geraldine Brooks (Although she brings up some important points, I am less enthused by certain parts of her argument.)

Another good source: Who Speaks for Islam?, by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed