Muhammad's illegitimacy and its effects on Islam's religious claims
Summary
We have already seen that Islamic society was shaped by a frequency of illegitimacy that caused the Arabs to accept the false idea that women can be pregnant for multiple years. And we have seen that Amina had such a long claimed pregnancy, and that despite accepting that extended pregnancies were possible, Muhammad’s “father’s” family did not really have confidence in his legitimacy. The final question, then, is understanding what was happening in Arab society that was behind all of this. What were Arab women up to, and specifically, how was it that Amina became an unwed mother?
Prostitution and the Arabs
Prostitution was such a common activity among the pre-Islamic Arabs that “female Arab” is used as a synonym for a prostitute in the Bible. In Jeremiah, Israel is being compared to a defiled prostitute because of the country’s idolatry. To call up an image of this behavior in a graphic way, Jeremiah 3:2 says, “Lift up your eyes to the bare heights, and see! Where have you not been ravished? By the waysides you have sat awaiting lovers like an Arab in the wilderness. You have polluted the land with your vile whoredom.”
This book begins in 627 BC, concluding around 582 BC. It is valid to ask how this Iron Age work is relevant to Arab society in Late Antiquity. But we see great continuity across the centuries–even for this specific activity of the highway prostitute, which was synonymous with Arab women in the experience of the Israelites.
When Muhammad’s troops rode out, they were accustomed like all Arab men to sleep with women who offered themselves at the side of the highway for money. But Muhammad was claiming to be a prophet in the line of the religion of the Jews and Christians, who both outlawed fornication.
Muhammad dealt with the deprivation of having to go a few days without sex by ordering one of his wives to always accompany him. But his men became so upset with this that they asked whether they should just get castrated. Muhammad then declared that prostitution was a form of marriage and let them pay for the trailside prostitutes.
Narrated ‘Abdullah: We used to participate in the holy battles led by Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) and we had nothing (no wives) with us. So we said, “Shall we get ourselves castrated?” He forbade us that and then allowed us to marry women with a temporary contract and recited to us: — ‘O you who believe ! Make not unlawful the good things which Allah has made lawful for you, but commit no transgression.’ (5.87) (Sahih al-Bukhari 5075)
Ahadith after this describe such things as buying sex for a cloak from Bedouin women.
The word for “marry” is actually the word for “intercourse.” Both pre-Islamic Arabs and Muslims lack a concept of marriage–not only in the way that Christians understand marriage, but in a way that other pagan societies understood it. Arabic intercourse was categorized as either permissible or not permissible. What made a relationship permissible is that a woman’s sexual access was available and being offered by an authorized person. Most transactions were financial: a payment for sexual access or a payment for not only sexual access but exclusive control over a woman’s sexual access.
Mahr marriage: the bride price paid for dominion over the body and sexual access
Muhammad’s pagan Arab imagery of standard “marriage,” then, involved a one-time purchase together with upkeep obligations for control of a woman’s sexual access. This dominion over a woman is called milk in Islamic law and is essentially a somewhat restricted form of slavery. (See Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam by Kecia Ali for a good overview of the topic.)
This is what mahr or bride-price marriage consists of: ownership of a female is transferred from her family to her husband. The mahr in pre-Islamic times was a payment that would come to the woman in the case of divorce or death, along with some partial inheritance from her husband. In that case, the milk would come to the woman herself. In Islamic times, women lost autonomy that they had in widowhood or divorce.
The difference between the wife and the slave in such cases is that the wife could bring suit to the sayyids or nobles of the tribe and demand a divorce if she was treated contrary to the rights or expectations due to a wife. She had the right of intercourse, the right of being housed, and the right of maintenance according to her station in society, and she had the right of additional maintenance for bearing and rearing children for her husband. She also had the expectation of not being humiliated–such as forced to have sex with other men against her will. Whether this was true in practice was another matter. She also had the expectation of being given gifts convertible to cash, especially jewelry, which would increase her personal wealth as the marriage went on.
Slave women had the expectation of housing and maintenance but did not have the absolute right to anything. Muhammad’s men made money by prostituting their slave women, running brothels from their conquests. While Muhammad ordered them not to prostitute the women against their wills, he also immediately said Allah would forgive the men if they ignored this.
In a mahr marriage, the man buys the woman’s sexuality. So the woman has no power over the man’s sexual access. He can have sex with whomever else he chooses, but he has the power to control whom his wife has sex with.
The bride price reflected certain ancient traditions. In Mesopotamia, the father of a bride combined the husband’s bride price with a dowry, and the two together were given to her as capital against misfortune. The husband’s payment was recognition of her worth, while the father’s represented her inheritance. In the marriage of Rachel and Leah to Jacob, the daughters express how their brother cheated them because the bride price Jacob made was not converted into monetary form and given to them. This is in line with Bronze Age tradition.
But the Arabs did not view this as household formation, because they did not have the view that the normative unit of society was a household. Rather, they saw relationships as independent financial arrangements involving the purchase of goods (a woman’s body) and sex (her services). And their normative unit of society was a tribe, which was formed of male-line offspring and adoptive sons from whatever source. Sexual relationships were often unstable, terminated at the whim of the husband even when early death from their dangerous lifestyle did not carry a man away prematurely.
Prostitution as short-term mahr
As prostitution is also the purchase of sexual access to a woman, which is exclusive for the very short time that it lasts, if this was the arrangement of the engagement, the only thing that distinguishes prostitution from mahr “marriage” is that prostitution has a definite end.
As laughable as Muhammad’s ruling that prostitution is marriage, in the Arab view, any mahr marriage is fundamentally slave prostitution. This removes much of the shame from prostitution in in the Arab mind and creates the conceptual bridge that regards nikah mutah as being as legitimate as any other. Is a contract made with definite terms of payment for sex? Then this is extremely close to a mahr “marriage.”
One’s mother is always in a form of slave prostitution, even if her prostitution was organized by her father. This also explains the certain level of shame that is attached to divorced women, who now have more authority on selling themselves to another man. One of the few features distinguishing “nikah mahr” of virgins from prostitution is that the woman is sold by her family members rather than herself. This also explains the shame of the “love match,” because this again removes some of the thin distinction between the different forms of buying and selling sex that pass for “marriage” in the Islamic world to this day. Almost much shame as there can be from prostitution is involved in the divorced woman selling herself into another sexual transaction, even now that her autonomy has been severely curtailed by Islamic law.
Given this framework, it is little surprise, then, that a common profession of no longer virginal women who lack the support of a husband was to prostitute themselves. What distinguished the slut from the professional modest whore was that the modest whore could be considered to not derive enjoyment from sexual intercourse. A woman of lust was still reviled, even when a woman who sold herself by the highway was normalized. The purpose of female genital mutilation in this society was the extinction of female sexual pleasure. “Modest” women and “chaste” women were those who had their clitorises excised, whose technical virginity was guaranteed at first marriage by having the vaginal opening sewn too tightly to admit a penis. This in no way protected girls from molestation: digital rape by very close family members remains so rampant in some Islamic areas that it is practically normative. But the cutting of the woman stands in for actual modesty and provides the endorsement that roadside prostitution is not a matter of indecency but is a legitimate activity of women of some level of social diginity.
After Umar forbade nikah mutah, and with male relatives regaining control of divorced women, roadside prostitution of women decreased substantially. Only in isolated cases was prostitution the normative activity of a tribe, such as the Ouled Nail, who actually prostituted their pre-teens and young teens before their more permanent marriages within their tribe. But misyar (traveler) marriage and ‘urfa (“customary”) marriage remain as similar institutions even in Sunni Islam to this day. These are partly descended from prostitution and partly descended from a related institution called a beena marriage.
Pre-Islamic beena “marriage”
Aisha described this pre-Islamic marriage form in this way: : “Another type of marriage was that a group of less than ten men would assemble and enter upon a woman, and all of them would have sexual relation with her. If she became pregnant and delivered a child and some days had passed after delivery, she would sent for all of them and none of them would refuse to come, and when they all gathered before her, she would say to them, ‘You (all) know what you have done, and now I have given birth to a child. So, it is your child so-and-so!’ naming whoever she liked, and her child would follow him and he could not refuse to take him.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 5127)
She was almost certainly confusing multiple kinds of marriage. The first was polyandrous slave concubine marriage. Poor men would buy a slave together who would be forced to cook for, clean for, and serve them all, and the men would each have a turn to have sex with her in rotation. This kind of “marriage” has been imposed on women in various depraved cultures around the world. The children of such a marriage are either the common heir of all the men or are assigned to one particular man–in the case of Arabs, single paternal assignment appears to be the norm. There were diviners who specialized in physiognomy examination to assign paternity in various situations involving prostitution and polyandry (which is little more than prostitution).
The second kind of beena marriage was that of a free woman. A free woman would contract a marriage where the man did not pay her a mahr in excess of a wedding gift that she might give him. The man would then come to the woman’s house according to her discretion. Denying him entry generally constituted divorce. The man was still required to contribute maintenance according to his means and expected to contribute gifts. But the woman remained in her own home. The ownership of the marital home was the most noticeable feature of this marriage.
Where women owned their home, they could initiate a divorce by denying a man entry to it. Though not ethnic Arabs, Taureg have either adopted pre-Islamic Bedouin traditions or have inherited them through a common Neolithic ancestry. To this day, Taureg women, who have the ownership of herds and houses, initiate divorce by turning the direction of their tent away to symbolically deny their husbands entry. The man then sought another wife from available women.
When a woman has a beena marriage and right of divorce, if she lives in the same tribe as her husband, the man almost never has more than one wife. The woman does not have ownership of her husband’s sexual access, but she punishes affairs with divorce.
This is the kind of marriage Muhammad had with his first wife Khadijah. While he famously had to borrow 20 goats (value: 100 dirhams) from his tribe to pay her a mahr, she gave him the slave Zaid ibn al-Haritha (value: 700 to 900 dirhams) in return, which was a much more valuable gift and canceled out the mahr. (Even the extremely unlikely narration that he borrowed 10 camels, worth 800 dirhams, would have Khadijah canceling out the mahr.) He then lived in her house and worked as her agent or employee as his labor that provided the value of maintenance. Within twenty days of her death, he had contracted marriages with two females and had consummated one. His monogamy was enforced, not voluntary.
The beena polyandrous traveler’s wife
Another kind of beena marriage was in between the monogamous local marriage and the polyandrous slave concubine. It involved a free woman, but she contracted with multiple men. The man provided less in maintenance and had fewer rights of visitation.
The marriage of Muhammad’s father to Amina seems to have been of this sort because their marriage, such as it was, was consummated in her uncle’s house, and Abdullah never provided a house for Amina. Amina, being an orphan, would have been poorly treated, as well. The Ethiopian slave Barakah is often said to have been inherited from Muhammad after she had been given to his mother for her mahr, but she would have been very old by the time she married Zaid to have been old enough to be given as a slave to Amina at her marriage, and so it seems more likely that she was purchased by Amina herself.
Another woman who lived not only in her own house but in an entirely different city than her so-called husband was Salma bint ‘Amr of the Najjar clan of the Khazraj tribe in Medina. This was the wife of Hisham, the father of Abdul-Muttalib, Muhammad’s grandfather. She was a divorcee, and she was known as a wealthy woman. Ibn Ishaq spins her relationships in this way: “On account of the high position she held among her people, she would only marry on the condition she should retain control of her own affairs. If she disliked a man, she left him.”
This evidence strongly indicates that not only was the marriage of the beena type, but she was the pre-Islamic version of a traveler wife. That is, she was most likely a town courtesan who served as the temporary concubine of any number of men who traveled the Incense Road or who belonged to nearby Bedouin tribes. When one of her “husbands” visited Medina, he brought her gifts and slept with her while she provided him food and lodging. This would have been the means by which she had acquired a certain level of wealth.
Returning to Amina, we find that she had a matrilocal marriage with Abdullah, as he was only allowed to spend three days with her in her uncle’s house. And she somehow ended up with a child 4.5 years later. This would indicate that she, too, was a polyandrous beena wife–unless she was simply a common prostitute or slept around without any compensation at all. Keep in mind that evening assignations with women who were going out to modestly defecate in the fields under the cover of darkness was very common in Meccan society, just as the Thursday night outdoor rendezvous between men and boys or men and livestock is now normative in many Islamic villages, so it is difficult to be certain what precisely her arrangements were. There was also an entire neighborhood for prostitutes in the tiny pre-Islamic town, and their houses were marked with special flags outside.
Even more strikingly, when Muhammad is with her, Amina is in Medina for some reason. Medina would be a superior place to set up as a traveler’s wife, as it had many more visitors than remote Mecca, and she could have upgraded to a much better lifestyle there. It would have been particularly attractive after the disappointment of the Hashimite clan refusing to give her support for Muhammad.
Ibn Ishaq claims that Amina was only in Medina because she was taking Muhammad to visit his great-grandmother’s relatives. This an extremely farfetched claim. Such a distance for a brief visit with people of such a distant relationship is hardly to be believed.
Also, Muhammad was also supposed to have had a very strong connection from childhood to Medina. The people of his great-grandmother’s clan recognized him in a way that would be peculiar if they had only ever seen him for a couple of weeks, maximum, when he was very young. It seems more likely that he spent the two years that he lived with his mother in Medina. This also made it far less coincidental that she died on her way back to Mecca.
This also explains the fact that Muhammad inherited no livestock from his parents but had two slaves from his mother: Barakah and Abu Kabshah. Though there are isolated reports that Muhammad did get some amount of livestock from his father, he owned nothing when he wanted to marry Khadijah, so this hardly seems possible. If his mother was a professional traveler’s wife, she would have need for both a girl for women’s-type work and a male slave to conduct male business as her agent and to act as her protection, as she needed it. But she would not have necessarily acquired any livestock.
Given that Muhammad was called Ibn Abu Kabshah as an insult, this indicates that Aminah’s professional sexual career, along with the money to buy a male slave and the need for one to protect her, began in Mecca before relocating to Medina.
There is one final element that points to the likelihood of a career in sex work, and that is Muhammad’s preoccupation with female infanticide. Given the birth ratios of wealthy men in Mecca, they were not routinely killing their legitimate daughters. One of the wealthiest had something like six daughters and only two sons. Additionally, the Hums pagan religious sect officially condemned female infanticide, one of its features it used to try to ape Christian and Jewish values. But the very early Islamic material shows Muhammad being preoccupied with condemning this act.
If Aminah was a sex worker, then most likely, Muhammad was not her only child. And we find in Ibn Sa’d that she claims to have given birth to other children, of whom Muhammad is the heaviest at birth: “The Prophet’s mother said: I became pregnant with children, but no lamb was heavier than him.” Of course, the exegetes hate this hadith because they want to deny anything unseemly in Muhammad’s family line, but it is a striking hadith to appear at all.
This may indicate that Aminah had born other children who were miscarried, stillborn, and/or daughters. Not believing that the men to whom she might assign the daughters would support them (and her), she then buried them in the pit she dug for the afterbirth. If Muhammad had lived with her at a time when she gave birth and had come to believe that she had buried his sister alive, his trauma and preoccupation with this practice would be understood.
Today, such traveler’s wife arrangements are still common, but the difference is that girls are almost always prostituted by their fathers or brothers into these arrangements, she is usually taken to housing provided by her “husband”/client, and between each man’s period of residency with her comes a divorce.