Muhammad often married outside his tribe, mostly to consolidate his expanding domain — a much-used modus operandi of many rulers. Two of his wives were Jews and one a Coptic Christian. But fostering political alliances was not his sole motive. He was a human being who was attracted to women. All of his relationships were open. He had no closet affairs that came to light later. No secret mistresses or children born outside of marriage materialized at his funeral, as in the case of both French president François Mitterand and former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Nor was Muhammad the first prophet or patriarch to have practiced polygamy — Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Hosea, Saul, David and Solomon kept multiple wives or concubines.

Yet Westerners remain curiously obsessed with Muhammad’s sex life. Even as they become voracious consumers of sexually explicit TV shows and movies, as well as of biographies of sports heroes boasting of hundreds of one-night stands, many North Americans and Europeans continue to be vituperatively prurient about Muhammad.

SHARIA AND WOMEN

Islam gave women the right to inheritance and divorce centuries before the West did. It gave them the right to own and manage property. Early Muslim women maintained separate accounts, initiated marriage, dictated prenuptial contracts and kept their maiden names. They participated in public debates and made a seminal contribution to religious texts and traditions. Women often assisted and sometimes fought in wars with the Prophet and, later, in the bloody succession feuds that followed his death. Women poets and singers performed at public gatherings and competed with men.

However, as Islam spread far and wide and Muslims got away from the pioneering spirit of reform, several factors undermined the status of women.

In the period after Muhammad, sharia proved unfriendly to women. Developed over a period of 200 years, the Islamic law was based mainly on the Qur’an and the hadith (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet). But the collection of sayings did not begin until well after his death, in a chaotic period of civil war. “Forging hadith became a flourishing industry; different interests used to twist the sayings of the Prophet for their own use,” writes Asghar Ali Engineer, a Muslim scholar based in Mumbai.24 At one time, there were 700,000 ahadith (plural of hadith) in circulation.

For example, there is still much argument over three ostensible sayings of the Prophet: “A people who hand their leadership over to a woman will not succeed.” “I do not leave after me any cause for fear, except that of women to men.” “I was shown the Paradise and the majority of the people I saw there were the poor; I was shown the Hell, and the majority there were women.” Some scholars have said that the first saying was a general statement that allowed for exceptions, as seen even during the Prophet’s time when women did play leading roles. The second was deemed a general warning about illicit sexual relations. And the third was circumscribed by an explanation offered by the Prophet himself when confronted by a woman angered by his pronouncement; he told her he was referring only to those women who unfairly blamed their husbands. Islamic feminists, however, question the very authenticity of those sayings. Fatima Mernissi has traced in historic detail the unreliability of the attributions. American academic Aisha Bewley suggests that the Prophet’s saying about not entrusting power to a woman was forged twenty-six years after his death.25 In any case, all three sayings are clearly out of character with all of Muhammad’s words and deeds.