He urged women to educate themselves. He was confident enough not to let his own illiteracy hold back the women of his household or those outside it. “The search for knowledge is a duty for every Muslim man and woman,” he said, and he invited women to attend his lectures and participate in discussions, which they often did.

Muhammad discouraged the then prevailing practice of female genital mutilation. He banned female infanticide, the practice of burying newborn girls alive. He banned the custom of a son inheriting his stepmother after the father’s death. He condemned the practice of parents selling daughters at puberty.

He exhibited little or no prudery about sex. “I love to adorn myself for the woman, just as I love her to adorn herself for me.” “I am interested in three things: perfume, woman and prayer.” “Marriage is half the religion.”

Writes Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi: “Muhammad was a chief of state who publicly acknowledged the importance of affection and sex in life... He was not an asexual man completely consumed by the quest for power... His military and religious activities did not ever cause him to devalue his private life or to relegate it to the background.”22

His first wife, Khadijah, was said to be forty years old when he was only twenty-five. She was wealthy, he was poor. She was, in fact, his boss. A trader, she had employed him to conduct her business. She was not only impressed with his industriousness and honesty but was also captivated by him. It was she who proposed marriage through an intermediary. When he responded with a visit, she told him, “I love thee for thy kinship with me; and I love thee for thy trustworthiness and for the beauty of thy character and the truth of thy speech.”23 He accepted and moved into the bride’s house. They lived happily for almost twenty-five years, during which time he stayed monogamous — itself a break from the norm, since men routinely used to have more than one wife. It was after her death that he married a dozen times.

As per a Qur’anic recommendation, he married widows, eight in all. Two had been widowed thrice and another two twice, including Khadijah. Two of his wives were divorcees. Most were women in their thirties and late forties. Only his child-bride, Ayesha, was a virgin. There are arguments over how young she really was when betrothed to him and when they married. Accounts vary, from age nine to thirteen, the normal age of marriage at that time, and even today for millions of teenage brides in the Indian Subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa.