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

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

            Welcome to 17^th century Mexico, where an upper class woman’s number one job was to stay inside so that the men of the family could be sure she was a virgin and the family honor was safe. Nothing more dangerous than female sexuality, you know – except perhaps female intellect and curiosity.

            You may remember that in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue – and Europeans swiftly decimated native population of the Americas with disease and slavery and Europeans (mostly Spanish and Portuguese) had colonized much of Central and South America within a century. (Concerted European colonization of North America didn’t start until the 17^th century.)

            In Spanish America, the Spanish established a racially-based caste system which – despite its problems – was more fluid than the race and class system later established in North America, possibly because Spanish men in the early days of colonization didn’t have as much of a problem with marrying indigenous women as the British did. As you might expect, Europeans were at the top of the pecking order, mixed race people were somewhere in the middle, and indigenous peoples and African slaves were at the bottom. Women at the bottom of this caste system – both free and slave – had to work to survive, and although this was certainly not a glamorous lifestyle, some of these women had more freedom than their upper class European counterparts. For upper class women, there was only one alternative to marriage and family life that potentially offered more freedom: the convent.

            This brings us to this week’s subject: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. John Charles Chasteen, author of Born in Blood and Fire, describes Sor Juana thusly:

At the age of seven, Juana had made a surprising announcement. She wanted to attend the University of Mexico (which had opened its doors in 1553, a century before Harvard). She offered to dress as a boy, but it was hopeless. A university education was supposedly over Juana’s head. Never mind that she had been reading since the age of three or that she learned Latin just for fun. Forget that she stumped a jury of forty university professors at the age of seventeen, or that Juana became known throughout Mexico for her poetry. Like other women of her class, she had two alternatives: marry and devote her energies to husband and children, or become a nun.

Sor (Sister) Juana, as you may have guessed, chose the convent so she could continue her studies. Sor Juana lived from 1650(ish) and 1695 – during the so-called “Scientific Revolution” and on the cusp of the “Age of Enlightenment.” She lived during a time when Europeans – particularly Europeans outside of monastic life – were learning about and expanding on several centuries worth of scientific and mathematic discoveries developed in the Muslim Empires of the Middle East and North Africa during Western Europe’s “Dark Ages.”

During the Medieval period, knowledge was controlled and distributed in Europe by the Catholic Church. Knowledge is power, and all knowledge came from the church. To some extent, the essential conflict of Europe from the 16^th to 18^th centuries was a power struggle between the Catholic Church and its allies, versus those who challenged the authority and power of Rome for any number of reasons.

Because Spain was an unwavering member of Europe’s Catholic bloc, Sor Juana’s colonial Mexico was also ruled by the Church, and even though she was a nun, she still managed to get on the Church’s bad side.

Juana Inés de la Cruz may have been destined for a scandalous life, being that she was born out of wedlock to a Spanish father and Creole (American-born of European heritage) mother. Young Juana’s superior intellect was obvious early on and so her mother sent her to Mexico City where wealthier relatives could foster her education. Juana became infamous for her intelligence – and was apparently quite beautiful – but rejected several suitors in favor of convent life so she could continue her studies.

During most of the two decades that she spent in the Convent of the Order of St. Jerome, she was allowed to aggressively pursue her passions, becoming a great and celebrated mind of her age. She studied mathematics, and music, creating her own form of musical notation. She collected books, amassing an enormous library. She gathered scientific instruments, and studied the new sciences. She studied languages: not just Latin, but also Nahuatal, the language of the Mexica (often erroneously called the “Aztecs”). But, she was probably best known for her poetry, some of it romantic (celebrating her patroness Countess de Pareda), some of it acerbic criticism of gender norms. She famously accused men in her poem, “Hombres Necios” (Foolish Men) of projecting their own illogical and passionate tendencies on women whom, Juana argued, were actually the more reasonable sex. (What a babe.)

While the Church did not necessarily sanction her voracious appetite for knowledge or her condemnation of men, neither are what ultimately got her into trouble. In 1690, she critiqued a sermon by a well-known Jesuit priest. Her critique was published – possibly by the Bishop of Mexico – along with a critique by an imaginary nun “Sor Filotea” who condemned Sor Juana for un-womanly intellectualism. Sor Juana took the bait and in her “Reply to Sor Filotea,” she publicly criticized the church for denying women access to education, arguing not only that women’s education could be devotional in the service of God, but also that women had a right to education. This was the last straw for the Church, and Sor Juana was censured. The Church banned her previously published work and barred her from publishing anything new. She was pressured into giving away her library and instruments – which she duly did.

Based on what we know of Sor Juana, I would guess that the last few years of her life were pretty miserable, but maybe she found solace in prayer, and maybe she continued her studies, if less robustly than before. Regardless, she only lived another five years after her censure. In 1695, a bout of plague swept through the convent, and Sor Juana caught it while caring for her ill sisters. 

What Sor Juana’s story demonstrates is that patriarchal societies are afraid not only of female sexuality, but also female intelligence and curiosity. Western creation myths – Pandora and the box, Eve and the apple – suggest that women are innately more curious than men, and being too curious for their own good leads to disobedience and disaster for both sexes. The moral of the story is to stamp all knowledge with a warning label: Keep Out of Reach of Women.

As icky as patriarchal fear of female sexuality is, it kind of makes sense – if you apply the internal logic of patrilineal society to it. In societies where there is property to be had, and where property is passed down the male line, male property holders want to be assured of the paternity of their children: ergo, seclude the women. Controlling women’s access to education and curtailing curiosity, is a way to control women’s movements, and therefore, their sex lives – thus leading to the many stereotypes that follow our girls to school each day, haunting them in their STEM classes, and making them more likely to be written up for dress code violations that “distract” their male peers.

Q.E.D., bitches.

Sources:

Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, John Charles Chasteen

My Favorite Feminist: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dahlia Grossman-Heinze, Ms. Magazine Blog, March 16, 2011.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poets.org

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Stephanie Merrim, Encyclopedia Britannica.