Muhammad and Khadija
We tell stories; and stories are powerful. None more so than stories about our sacred past. Told repeatedly, tales become truth. We forget that they were once told differently, or not told at all. Stories told and retold lead us to expect certain outcomes. Stories that break patterns may be rejected, or misheard, or ignored. But sometimes, told often enough, new versions of old stories take root. Stories help make sense of who we are and how we are to live in the world. Among other things, we tell stories about love, about marriage, about sex. Our stories reflect our deeply held values and deeply rooted and unexamined assumptions.
Stories about sacred figures are not the only tool we have in the quest to end persistent gender inequalities in families, communities, and societies. Historical knowledge helps. Muslim advocates for women’s rights have pointed out, correctly, that Muslims have a wide array of expectations for men and women across space and time. There is no universal, trans-historical ‘Islamic’ role for women – indeed, no uniform set of laws governing Muslims across the globe now, or in the past. Take the example of children. The current fashion among many Muslims for describing homemaking and childcare as tasks for which females are biologically suited diverges from earlier ways of thinking. Classical thought about marriage foregrounded a wife’s sexual duties. Caring for children was simply part of life - delegated to servants when possible - not a dedicated calling requiring a special temperament. In other words, Muslims today already diverge from earlier norms in striking and unrecognized ways. The neo-traditional vision of homemaker wife-and-mother and breadwinner husband-head-of-household pretends seamless continuity with an ideal Islamic past. In reality, it rewrites that past.
Muslim feminist scholarship criticizes and historicizes this neo-patriarchal vision. But as cultural critic and theorist bell hooks reminds us, it is insufficient to criticize the status quo; we must offer a compelling alternative vision.
To be convincing, that alternative vision must draw from authoritative sources. Scholars, activists, and ordinary Muslim women’s accounts of egalitarian marriage have two main touchstones. The first is the account of creation of spouses ‘from a single self’ or ‘from a single soul.’ (Qur’an 4:1) This reciprocal relationship, originating in sameness according to theologian Amina Wadud’s now widely accepted interpretation, stands as basis for much thinking about marriage. The second is Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija.
Muhammad and Khadija are a compelling ideal for advocates of egalitarian marriages. Khadija was older, wealthier, and in a position of power: as Muhammad’s employer, she was in no way subordinate or submissive, which we usually hear, despite the patriarchal environs of sixth century Arabia. Theirs was a long-term monogamous marriage; so long as she lived, his biographers tell us, he took no other wife. She was the only woman to bear him children who survived infancy. At her death, he was devastated by grief. Though he remarried, Khadija remained the ideal – to the jealousy of at least one of his later wives.
These particulars have long formed part of prophetic biography. Khadija’s centrality to discussion of Muhammad’s marriages is not ancient, though. For many centuries, Khadija the Grand was a focus of idealization and devotion, the only one of Muhammad’s wives among the four perfect women who will be housed in splendour in paradise. Yet she was marginal to discussions about the ‘Mothers of the Believers’ in the Qur’an, in the hadith, or in jurisprudence.
One might assume that Khadija’s new importance is a result of pro-female-equality readings of the last few decades. Certainly, she has been cited by Muslim women looking for precedent for (elite) women’s work outside the home or seeking support to limit polygyny. However, the changes that have brought Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija to the fore in modern stories of his life came earlier and are in some respects deeply conservative.
Starting in the nineteenth century, Muslim biographies began to respond to Western criticisms by defending Muhammad’s polygamy or, more precisely, polygyny. One strategy was to emphasize Muhammad’s relationship to Khadija, dwelling on its length, its loving tenor, its offspring. The critical and polemical Christian focus on Muhammad’s polygyny to which these biographies responded grew out of new ideas about companionate (and by default, monogamous) marriage which were circulating in Europe and elsewhere.
Today, many worldwide take for granted the married couple as the key social unit. Not everyone, and not everywhere, but many more places than was the case a few centuries, or even a few decades, ago. Louis-George Tin, the Martinique born French historian, recently published a book explaining ‘the invention of heterosexual culture.’ By this, he does not mean physical intercourse between men and women, which is obviously as old as the human race. He means instead the organization of social and emotional life around sexual relationships between men and women. He argues that heterosexual culture arose in in medieval Europe in courtly contexts outside of marriage, eventually, over several centuries, in a series of fits and starts contested by poets, clerics, and doctors, coming to be cantered in married couples. In the twentieth century, he argues, the autonomy and centrality of heterosexual coupledom came to be taken for granted. People, he writes, ‘had become conditioned to accept heterosexuality a prior as the natural expression of human sexuality as a whole and found it impossible to think of it as anything other than a way of life.’
Indeed, it is striking, given the historicization of homosexuality, how little historicization of heterosexuality there has been. There is a vibrant debate between those who argue for an essential ‘homosexual’ orientation or identity and those who argue that sexual orientation is socially constructed. Still, it is clear that the term homosexuality is a nineteenth century invention. An Abbasid courtier having sex with his male slave is not ‘homosexual’ in the same way as two long-term-partnered Canadian Muslim men seeking an imam to marry them. The men’s physical acts may (or may not) be the same, but the meanings attached to them differ radically. This much most would grant – at least most who have read any of the copious writings on the history of sexuality.
Somehow, though, marriage between a man and a woman is discussed as though it were the same thing today as it was a millennium—or even a century—ago. A similar pattern prevails when Christian advocates of ‘traditional marriage’ attempt to draw a seamless line from biblical texts through the present day. Yet, as Tin shows, it is not just the legal institution of marriage that has changed but the social ideas associated with marriage and coupledom.
The developments in the intellectual and, to a lesser extent, social history of Europe chronicled by Tin have important parallels with modern developments among Muslims. Modern Arab and South Asian Muslim discourses on gender and sexuality are intertwined with Western writings on the same topics. In a recent book, I discuss the changing ways Muhammad’s life has been understood over the centuries by both Muslims and non-Muslims. I show that Muslims and non-Muslims today are actually much closer to each other in their ways of looking at Muhammad’s life than either is to members of their own religious groups who lived centuries ago. The ways they talk about his life overlap. This is particularly the case for his marriage with Khadija and, to a lesser extent, with Aisha.
Khadija was once first in a long list of examples that Muhammad’s critics used to illustrate his ‘depravity’. For centuries, European polemicists wrote that he tricked her into marriage in order to take advantage of her wealth and social standing. In this way, they saw his first marriage as, like his later ones, motivated by ambition and politics. Within the last few centuries, that changed. Now, even Muhammad’s detractors laud the marriage with Khadija, and contrast it to his later polygamous marriages, which they see as motivated by lust, more often than ambition. Contemporary polemical authors charge that Muhammad’s morality declined as his power increased – thus, a positive view of his marriage to Khadija serves a new type of criticism.
Muslim and sympathetic non-Muslim writers not only share the positive view of Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija, they also grant it disproportionate attention in their accounts of his life. This emphasis on Muhammad and Khadija’s marriage diverges sharply from premodern Muslim accounts of his life. It is not that those accounts reported trials or tribulations, or denigrated Khadija in any way; far from it. Yet though Khadija played a pivotal role at key moments in Muhammad’s life, she was absent from the bulk of the material transmitted about him. His public leadership of the community in Medina transpired after her death, and so relatively little of the hadith corpus concerns her. To read certain books about Muhammad’s life, one would think Khadija was his only wife.
Khadija, the powerful, older, prominent woman who bolstered the Prophet when he was unsure of himself, who lent him her confidence when he lost his own: that woman is someone to tell stories about. Just last week, a young Muslim woman stood up in a forum on Islam and feminism I was attending to affirm unhesitatingly that Muhammad was a feminist. Her evidence? He married Khadija. A Pakistani biographer wrote that Khadija was divinely chosen to be the prophet’s wife and his ‘twin preacher’ in order to demonstrate that God believes women may work outside the home. Her economic clout and personal involvement in commerce motivated a Saudi organization supporting women’s business to call itself the Khadija bint Khuwaylid Center.
Apart from her personal success, Muslim and non-Muslim authors alike have often come to distinguish between the marriage to Khadija, in which love and affection played a crucial role, and Muhammad’s later marriages which were politically motivated. Far from seeing political motivation as reprehensible, as European interpreters at least through the early modern era did, people have come to see marriages motivated by political alliances as understandable, certainly more laudable than those motivated by lustful urges.
The contrast between a marriage built on love and a marriage motivated by pragmatic political considerations is one among many reasons people have begun to focus on marriages to Khadija and Aisha and to oppose them to one another.
The political motivation for Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha is a story many times told. When the Anglican clergyman and polemicist Humphrey Prideaux told it in 1697, he lumped Aisha with Sawda and Hafsa and saw Muhammad’s ambition as despicable, marrying to strengthen alliances with the powerful fathers of his brides. Prideaux was writing before anyone was concerned about Aisha’s age. Like his peers before the nineteenth century, he was concerned with sexual debauchery rather than female oppression.
Contemporary Muslim and sympathetic non-Muslim stories about Aisha encounter and attempt to mitigate a victim narrative. Instead of a dangerous woman, powerful and controversial, Aisha is largely disempowered. One strand of storytelling attempts to reclaim her power and authority as a public figure who intervened in battle and who was sought after for legal and religious guidance. This celebratory if complicated narrative is attempted in a smattering of novels including, roughly in order of prestige, Assia Djebar’s Far from Medina, Kamran Pasha’s Mother of the Believers, and Sherry Jones’s Jewel of Medina. Though Jones especially makes love a centrepiece of her historical romance, more and more authors downplay any emotional connection in Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha, instead contextualizing (or simply rewriting) her age. Thus, the focus shifts to the motivations for the marriage, which are assumed to be strategic (rather than religious) and business-like, rather than motivated by divine decree, lust, or anything else. This leaves authors clear to highlight, at some length, the role of love and affection in Muhammad’s ‘perfect’ marriage to and ‘happy family life’ with Khadija.
To a striking degree, modern stories about Muhammad’s marriages are apologetic or polemical – often less stories than arguments with invisible interlocutors. A story about jealousy between co-wives might once have been about elevating one faction in the internecine contests over leadership that followed Muhammad’s death, even as it portrayed real human emotion. Today, it is typically a pretext for an excursus about the morality of Islam and its gender politics. Instead of an account of a few individuals in a challenging interpersonal situation, it is possible grounds for indictment of the religion of one fifth of humanity, and for summary judgment of their exemplar.
No wonder stories are so fraught.
Given the possibilities of misreading, criticism, and controversy in accounts of Aisha’s life, or Muhammad’s multiple wives, what could be less controversial than to emphasize Muhammad’s marriage to the upright Lady Khadija?
It turns out that one can overpraise monogamy. In some Muslim circles, how one views polygyny is a litmus test for one’s religious bona fides: one needn’t practice polygyny, necessarily, but one must accept it as legitimate. For many Muslims, and sympathetic non-Muslim authors, Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija represents the norm. His later marriages were exceptional, designed to fulfil pragmatic purposes. Intelligible in context, they are nonetheless not the best model for emulation. Historian Amira Sonbol presents a measured defence of this view when she writes, ‘the example of the Prophet is always used to support the contention that men have the right to take multiple wives. This example is problematic because of the essentialist and final way it is presented: as an argument to end all arguments, for who can question the Prophet’s actions? Yet the Prophet Muhammad’s marital history is rather intriguing and can lead in a different direction. When he was married to Khadija, he never took another wife. Given her importance, which went beyond being his strongest supporter, she may not have been willing for him to take more than one wife.’
By contrast, in other circles - for example, the ummah.net online forum - the idea that ‘monogamy is a sunnah too’ still raises controversy. Some argue that because Muhammad had not taken up the mantle of prophecy when he married Khadija, that marriage does not count as a sunnah. Others respond that he remained married to her even after he began receiving revelation, so it counts.
Polygyny, in theory and practice, presents one set of challenges to the widespread idealization of the monogamously married couple. In the United States, Muslims who live in polygynous relationships – mostly African American – explicitly reject dominant marriage norms. Not only are they rejecting monogamy, they reject, at least in part, the bureaucratic role of the nation-state in regulating their marriages. But one thing they are not rejecting is patriarchy. Indeed, one frequent justification for polygyny is that it enables men to uphold – and women to benefit from – male providership and authority in the household. This bolstering of patriarchal marriage and gender roles is, as noted earlier, ahistorical in crucial ways. But it also responds to deeply felt needs and anxieties about safety, security, and care that are not resolvable for everyone within the logic of the monogamous, companionate, nuclear couple-family which, following Tin, is often taken for granted today.
In addition to these conservative or traditionalist critiques of the triumphalist narrative of Muhammad’s egalitarian marriage to Khadija, there is also room for a progressive critique. In seeking to do away with hierarchical and potentially polygynous models of marriage, some ways of reiterating the story of Muhammad’s loving, lengthy, companionate marriage to the mother of his children unwittingly strengthen a model of male/female coupling and nuclear family life that excludes those who are single by choice, couples who cannot or do not have children, and especially gay people from its vision of the good family.
Here is the problem. Both feminists and queer activists insist, correctly, that dominant norms surrounding Muslim sexuality are unjust. In theory and in practice, however, gender-justice advocates and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender activists often work in ways, and with arguments, at odds with one another. Both feminists and queer thinkers oppose the version of male-dominated marriage (typically monogamous, sometimes polygynous) that flourishes in sanitized pamphlets and Saudi-subsidized books like Marital Discord: Al-Nushooz.
Some Muslim gay men and lesbians have fought to redefine religious marriage to include same-sex couples. Some, perhaps most, merely tinker with standard nikah – considering its strongly gendered legal provisions marginal to its symbolic importance (married coupledom, in a form Tin did not explore). In this way, they echo the behaviour of many Muslims committed to egalitarian married life and also the religious symbolism (or family expectations) of a nikah ceremony. On occasion, however, I have stumbled across gay Muslims, always male, advocating a new jurisprudence on marriage based on other forms of licit sexual relationship. Most often, they single out mut‘ah, so-called temporary marriage allowed by Twelver Shi‘a. Astonishingly, some mention milk al-yamin, slave concubinage, as an alternate form of relationship that merits exploration for its potential to yield new strategies for gay marriage.
I have insisted elsewhere that Muslims should acknowledge that our tradition considered slave concubinage lawful and normal for well over a millennium. I sought to build on the widespread rejection of slavery by ‘right thinking Muslims everywhere’ to insist that other things once taken for granted as acceptable, can also be up for debate. If the vast majority of Muslims reject slavery, a practice present in scripture and prophetic sunnah as well as Islamic jurisprudence, as legitimate or viable in the contemporary world, other reforms and transformations are also possible – perhaps including egalitarian marriage laws or even same-sex marriage. Writing nearly a decade ago, I did not consider the need to wage intellectual combat against those, like Boko Haram in Nigeria and ISIS/ISIL in the Levant, who would seek to justify the practice of kidnapping, enslavement, forcible ‘marriage,’ and rape in terms of Islamic norms. But neither did I expect to have to explain to progressive gay men why it is offensive to try to reimagine consensual male-male relationships by drawing on the by-definition non-consensual relationship of enslaved woman to male master. Apparently male privilege means never having to say you’re sorry for strategically appropriating an intolerable institution while ignoring its inherent misogyny.
I imagine a similar criticism could be made of straight women’s continual invocation of male/female partnering by quoting Quran 4:1 and talking about Muhammad and Khadija. Though there is no parallel between the viciously unequal dynamics of concubinage and the long-term marriage of two beloved figures, what the latter lacks in obvious offensiveness it makes up for with constant repetition. The motivation, as noted earlier, for telling and retelling the now-conventional version of their marriage is to portray polygyny and/or deeply hierarchical marriage as marginal, and companionate monogamy as central and privileged: the ‘true’ sunnah of the Prophet. As a by-product, however, this retelling reinforces a narrative of male-female complementarity as created mates – often with bonus Qur’anic quotation – and promotes a model of coupled family life that excludes, in some cases undoubtedly unintentionally, childless couples, those who remain single by choice or otherwise and same-sex couples.
In academic circles these days, the hot term is intersectional: identities, patterns, structures intersect. An intersectional analysis reveals the vital stake that queer Muslims have in feminism and that feminists have in supporting diverse sexual and gender identities and orientations. Our current stories are not doing this work. Muslim feminists typically shore up the institution of marriage while redefining its essential nature as companionate (and monogamous). And no surprise: the marriage to Khadija is a valuable tool in the toolkit of those who seek to reimagine heterosexual marriage in egalitarian ways. Straight feminists benefit from heterosexism just like gay men benefit from patriarchy. Muhammad and Khadija as the ideal couple, along with the Adam and Hawwa from a single soul version of the creation narrative (and not the hadith-based Adam’s rib version), aim to uphold monogamy. In doing so they insist on and repeatedly reaffirm coupled heterosexuality as normal, natural, and divinely chosen.
Is there a way out? Must stories pit non-dominant folks against each other? Divide-and-conquer tactics have a long history. In the American context, the classic example is that of post-Civil War suffrage, where ‘suffragette’ abolitionists saw male African-American freed slaves get the (nominal) right to vote while female suffrage was delayed for decades. Similarly, women’s participation in anti-colonial struggles throughout the twentieth century was often rewarded with nationalist rhetoric: thanks for your help; now is not quite the right time to focus on women’s issues. Time after time, equality delayed has been equality denied. Both of these examples are about the delay and denial of female rights by male allies. Among Muslims today, women’s rights are the easier sell, while gender and sexual diversity pose stickier challenges.
To be clear, I am neither suggesting that feel-good stories about Muhammad and Khadija should not be told nor that promoting egalitarian marriages between men and women is an unworthy goal. I am insisting rather that these stories have a lineage, and they have effects. They are not unproblematic retellings of ‘original’ authentic stories, drawn straight out of foundational texts. They grow out of nineteenth century colonial visions of a narrowly envisioned couple and family unit. Which is not to say they have remained static as they have been told by new, often female tellers, in new contexts. Told anew, they generate new responses.
One of those responses ought to be a cry for more complexity, more nuance, and more variability in the stories we tell. Are we so limited in our vision about what forms of committed, companionate, loving intimacy can flourish? I believe in long-term monogamous unions between equals. Still, to value only this form of connection excludes those who thrive in other forms of union, or no union at all. It excludes those who want but do not find or cannot sustain a marriage tie. And it excludes those who marry but maintain their primary intimate (not sexual) ties with friends or others not related by marriage or by blood.
Love and intimacy can flourish in the bounds of marriage, as stories tell us happened with Muhammad and Khadija. Love and intimacy can also surpass and overflow those bounds. Where are those stories? Might they help us envision forms of connection, belonging and flourishing that include divorced women, ‘spinsters,’ those who do not fit neat gender binaries, those who lack sexual desire, those whose families are blended, and include foster and step children, taken in out of affection rather than obligation?
These stories are available for the telling. We need look no further than the same sources from which current stories are drawn: prophetic biographies and the Qur’an.
Muhammad’s own family experience does not conform to the oft-touted Islamic family model. The standard biographies tell us that he was orphaned, fostered by another family, taken in by extended family, shuffled from relative to relative. He became a step-father before becoming a father, adopted a ‘son’ – a grown man whom he later disaffiliated, and then married that former son’s former wife. He mourned the loss of parents and parent-substitutes, children, and more than one wife.
A few of these bits slip into standard stories, such as his grief at Khadija’s death. But seldom do we linger on the strangeness of this account when compared to the idealized model of married couple who parent their own biological offspring, raising them to adulthood and seeing them happily married off in order to repeat the cycle. Muhammad’s life story does not fit the model.
Strikingly, neither do the life stories of other prophets such as we find them in the Qur’an. There is no singular timeless Islamic family structure depicted in its chapters. Through analysis of four prophets – Adam, Joseph, Jesus, and Muhammad – Amanullah De Sondy has recently argued that there are various ways of being exemplary man. These men have diverse relationships to marriage and procreation: a monogamous bond (Adam and Hawwa), non-monogamous bonds (Muhammad and his wives), celibacy (Jesus) and ‘restrained virility’ (Joseph). Moreover, though the prophets may be in some key senses exemplary, they come from families that are, at times, ‘dysfunctional.’ Other Qur’anic stories have absent fathers, fratricidal siblings, complicated reproduction (barrenness, nonsexual conception). Between scripture and biography, there is plenty of material for telling stories
A plurality of stories about marriage, about divorce, about remarriage, about family violence, about ‘blended families,’ about widowhood, and about loss and grief can challenge our smug certainties about marriage, about family, and about community.
Our lives, like those of the Prophet and his beloved Khadija, don’t come in tidy packages. Neither should our stories.
Citations
For form information about prophetic biography discussed in this essay, see Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,2014); and discussions about historical changes in gender roles, see Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (Oneworld, Oxford 2006) and on the wife’s sexual duties, also Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2010). The discussion of the need for compelling alternative visions is found in a discussion of beauty in bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (South End Press, Boston, MA, 2000), p 35. On interpretation of Qur’an 4:1, see Aysha Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, New York, 2014). Louis-George Tin’s Invention of Heterosexual Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012) limits itself largely to European history; the quotation is from p149. Amira Sonbol’s quotation comes from her contribution to Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito, Daughters of Abraham: Feminist Thought in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (University Press of Florida, Jacksonville, FL, 2002), page 142. Amanullah De Sondy’s book is The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Look out for Debra Majeed’s Polygyny: What It Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (forthcoming from the University Press of Florida).
My brief foray into traditionalist chat rooms included a visit to http://www.ummah.net/forum/showthread.php?239847-Monogamy-is-also-a-sunnah