The Controversial Marriages of Prophet Muhammad (2021-04-03) ​

0:00:02 Perhaps more than any other feature of the prophet Muhammad's life, his marriages have 0:00:07 proved controversial whether it be the marriage to Aisha at a very young age, or his polygamy, 0:00:15 he married so many wives or his marriage to Zainab um this had caused well quite some scandal in some 0:00:23 western particularly the last marriage to zainab has caused scandal almost from the very beginning 0:00:29 so i just wanted to um look at some expert opinion on this from the west from western scholarship and 0:00:36 i'm just wanted to read from this book called 'Muhammed A Very Short Introduction, by Jonathan A 0:00:42 C Brown, and this Very Short Introduction is part of a series of books for anyone wanting 0:00:48 stimulating introductions to a new subject they're all written by experts chosen by Oxford University 0:00:55 Press and they published in more than 25 languages, and they cover everything from advertising, 0:01:01 african history, animal rights, anti-semitism, ethics, Galileo, galaxies - you name it they 0:01:07 cover it! Sociology, socialism, theology, United Nations, paganism, cancer, 0:01:13 the Vikings, witchcraft, you name it it's covered. So they picked a top expert to write this 0:01:20 uh little book on Muhammad, and I do recommend it it's superb and and Jonathan A 0:01:27 C Brown has written a section called 'Muhammad'S marriages in context', there's a very short section 0:01:33 i just wanted to share with you. Who is Jonathan AC Brown? He's a professor of Islamic studies 0:01:39 at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He's an American and he has 0:01:47 published in the fields of hadith (his PhD was in hadith), Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory, 0:01:56 and pre-Islamic poetry. On the back it's got some rave reviews: John L. Esposito, who's a professor 0:02:02 at Georgetown University, an expert on Islam, says "This is a masterful treatment informed by 0:02:09 first-rate scholarship yet engaging, accessible, and distinctively different from previous books 0:02:15 on Muhammad." So what does Jonathan AC Brown have to tell us about Muhammad's marriages in 0:02:23 context? Well I think he shares, there's some quite interesting information to help really 0:02:28 contextualize this whole subject in a very helpful way so more than any other feature of Muhammad's 0:02:35 life his many marriages have consistently struck and bewildered western readers since the rise of 0:02:42 islam the prophet's polygamy and the chronic ruling that muslim men can marry up to four women 0:02:49 at a time the prophet was allowed more because it was believed that he would never mistreat 0:02:55 any of his wives created early on in medieval christendom an image of muhammad as lustful 0:03:03 prior to christianity however the near east from pharonic egypt to ancient mesopotamia 0:03:10 was a world in which political polygamy was not foreign at all for most men it would have been 0:03:16 too expensive but for rulers or men of great import it was an expectable tool of politics 0:03:24 and propagation perhaps the most famous example exemplar for harem politics that's not haram 0:03:31 but harem politics was king solomon whom the bible says had 700 wives and 300 concubines you can read 0:03:40 all about that in one kings chapter 11. among them was the daughter of the pharaoh of egypt 0:03:46 whom he had married to cement an alliance indeed looked at through a political lens muhammad's 0:03:54 marriages worked towards clear political goals his marriage to khadijah of course had predated 0:04:02 his prophethood and she remained his only wife until she died let 0:04:08 us look at whom the prophet married after that and to whom he married his daughters 0:04:14 muhammad married the daughters of abu bakr and umar and married his own daughters to uthman and 0:04:21 ali these four men were the first four rulers of the muslim state after the prophet's death 0:04:29 muhammad also married the daughter of abu sufyan as well as the sister of abbas's wife maymunna 0:04:36 who was also the aunt of khalid bin al-walid the great general abu sufyan's son muawiwa founded the 0:04:45 umayyad caliphate after ali's death in 660 ce and khalid was a leading general of the muslim 0:04:53 armies the prophet's marriages and those of his family thus helped to create the network 0:05:00 that provided the leadership of the muslim community in the century after muhammad's death 0:05:07 the prophet also entered into other politically potent marriages he were the daughter of the 0:05:14 jewish chief of khabar as well as numerous women from leading arab tribes the fact that we know 0:05:22 nothing more than the tribal identities of two of these women further demonstrate that 0:05:28 it was the political relationship that muhammad was fostering that mattered 0:05:34 there is nothing more controversial to the modern reader than muhammad's marriage to aisha who is 0:05:40 believed to have been between nine and ten years old when the marriage was consummated the most 0:05:47 reliable historical sources on this marriage are the sahih hadith collections of al-bukhari 0:05:54 and muslim interestingly no critic of muhammad from his fiercest opponents in the quraish 0:06:02 to medivh to medieval christian clerics objected to his marriage to see younger wife until 0:06:09 the modern period this is noteworthy since there has certainly never been a shortage of detractors 0:06:17 seeking chinks in the armor of muhammad's character to exploit his marriage to zainab 0:06:25 his adopted son's former wife which attracted criticism even during muhammad's own lifetime 0:06:32 the fact that zayd is one of only two contemporaries of muhammad ever mentioned 0:06:37 in the quran the other is abu lahab as well as the book's sizable passage on the zainab episode 0:06:44 testifies to the controversies surrounding muhammad's marriage to her 0:06:49 one of the earliest christian polemicists against islam john of damascus he died in 749 0:06:57 accused muhammad of tailoring the quranic laws on marriage and adoption to legitimize his desire 0:07:05 for zainab this accusation has been repeated endlessly throughout christian writings 0:07:11 on islam and certainly on youtube and other places christians are still milking this 0:07:16 story for all they can get in their desire to discredit the prophet of islam the 13th century 0:07:23 english historian matthew paris for example wrote in his great chronicle that muhammad had 0:07:29 pronounced polygamy permissible to cover up an affair with a servant presumably zade's wife 0:07:38 the reason that no pre-modern critics paid attention to the prophet marriage prophet's 0:07:43 marriage to a ten-year-old was because marrying girls considered underage today was commonplace 0:07:51 in the pre-modern world it was a common reality then under roman law the earliest permitted age 0:07:58 for marriage was 12. in the heyday of the roman empire that's the second century a.d by 14 a girl 0:08:06 was considered an adult whose primary purpose was marriage in many pre-modern law codes such 0:08:14 as the hebrew biblical law and the salic frankish law marriage age was not a question at all it was 0:08:22 assumed that when a girl reached puberty and was able to bear children she was ready for marriage 0:08:29 so basically the the biblical norm uh for marriage age of marriage was puberty whenever that might be 0:08:37 as a result we find that average marriage ages in the pre-modern world 0:08:42 were remarkably young surviving evidence from several centuries of imperial roman history 0:08:50 suggests that as many as eight percent married at ten or eleven that's one in ten in italy in 0:08:58 the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds the average age for women was sixteen to seventeen 0:09:04 even in the 1861 census in england over 350 women married under the age of 15 0:09:12 in just two counties that year according to both christian and muslim teachings 0:09:18 the virgin mary was not the mature maternal figure seen in artwork about the bible she was at most in 0:09:26 her mid-teens having only just begun menstruating and is reported to have been as young as 10 years 0:09:34 old muhammad's decision to consummate his marriage to a ten-year-old would have been based on the 0:09:41 same criteria as most pre-modern societies aisha's sexual maturity and readiness to bear a child 0:09:51 consummation of the marriage would have occurred when she had menstruated and started puberty as 0:09:58 the great muslim historian al tabari died 923 reported at the time of her marriage contract 0:10:06 aisha was young and not capable of intercourse three or four years later however she was able 0:10:15 aisha herself would later remark that a girl can menstruate as young as nine and thus become 0:10:23 a woman so i think i'll end the quote there so that's absolutely fascinating i think when you 0:10:30 have a scholarly objective analysis of muhammad's marriages in their historical and cultural context 0:10:38 things look very very different than our local very recent historical obsession with uh related 0:10:45 issues like this so i think it's very very uh interesting and also the biblical norm as well uh 0:10:51 marriage at puberty uh which would have mohammed's own marriages would have fitted in quite neatly 0:10:56 with that paradigm as well so as i was saying i do uh recommend uh this book it is very short but 0:11:02 it's packed full of useful scholarly and uh first first-rate scholarship as it says on the back here 0:11:09 published by oxford university press it's quite cheap and have a look at the other items uh in 0:11:14 their series as well i've learnt a great deal on many other subjects uh from experts in the field 0:11:19 who produce these little booklets so there we go i hope you found that interesting until next time