Muhammad in Yathrib; Hijab, Creation, Women's Rights, Hadith

I finished Walking the Bible earlier today (enjoyed it!) and then started back reading No God but God and finished chapter 3.   Really enjoyed the brief history of settling Yathrib (now Medina) and the discussion of women's rights and the reason for hijab in the beginning. Author Reza Aslan is quite good at explaining things and makes a lot of sense to me.  I could better understand the marriage issues that I've often had a hard time understanding especially when he stated that Muhammad's 25 year monogamous relationship with Khadija was actually the most noteworthy thing! I suppose polygyny was just more prevalent in world history than I wanted to believe.  I'm glad we've mostly evolved past that!  ;)  Actually he claimed bedouin men and women had multiple spouses at one time.  Since lineage was passed mostly through mothers in that wandering society, there wasn't the huge concern for who fathered the children. 

While Aslan admitted that Islam did away with a woman's right to marry more than one man (and limited all men except Muhammad to four wives at a time), he argued strongly that Muhammad was very much focused on empowering women and orphans and redistributing wealth so there wasn't such a great divide between the extremely rich and miserably poor.

He did make me curious with his statement "beginning with the unbiblical conviction that men and women were created together and simultaneously from a single cell, the Quran goes to great lengths to emphasize the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God."  (pg. 60) The "unbiblical" part caught my attention because I assumed Muslims accepted the Adam and Eve story of God creating Adam first and later causing a deep sleep to come upon him and forming Eve from one of Adam's ribs.  Now I see that must not be true!

I found talk of Arab Jews in Yathrib interesting especially how they were having conflicts and Muhammad came in as a hakam or, I guess, a mediator of sorts to help them work through the issues.  Later he gained a lot of power and the city was basically the model of perfect Islam which Aslan notes is very moderate for today's moderates and very traditional for today's traditionalists. Basically you take from it what you want so I suppose even the "ideal Islamic state" (or what characterizes it) is subject to interpretation (which, by the way, is why some Muslims I've come across do NOT want to go back to that form of government. What if the leader's interpretation of "ideal Islam" is waaaaay different from yours?)

Aslan reminds us that Muhammad's biographers were living when the Muslim community was "an enormously powerful empire" thus "their accounts more often reflect the political and religious ideologies of ninth-century Damascus, or eleventh-century Baghdad, than of seventh-century Medina."  (pg. 53)

Aslan mentioned the Constitution of Medina "often celebrated as the world's first written constitution" and how it was a bit controversial because of how much authority it assigned Muhammad over the entire population including Jews. (pg. 55)

I found it a bit amusing that the first mosque was picked out by a camel although I didn't find it quite as amusing that graves were excavated in order for the mosque to be built directly on a cemetery!  (pg. 52)  Really?  It's that important to build a mosque in a place a camel chose so you have to disturb graves?  Eh, I guess it's not a big deal when the graves don't belong to your ancestors. 

I also learned that the word ummah is of questionable origin and meaning and was actually replaced later in the Quran by the word "tribe" or qawm in Arabic.  Aslan notes that unlike most tribes, the Muslim "tribe" was open to all who wanted to join.  They only needed to say their oath of allegiance which we today call the shahada (there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger).  It's what basically makes one a Muslim. (For any who grew up like me, think "sinner's prayer" which makes you a Christian according to some traditions.)

Aslan states that hijab was initially given to Muhammad's wives simply because their house was the mosque and people were in and out of there all the time.  Hijab was perhaps adopted from interactions with high society women in Syria and Iran who kept themselves hidden away because they were not needed as common workers in the fields.  Later hijab (wearing the scarf) became more popular as women sought to follow the fashion of the mothers of the believers (Muhammad's wives)  and still later it was adopted more widely when "a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet's egalitarian reforms."  (pg 66)

Indeed, Reza Aslan puts much of the blame for unjust practices on male scholars who invented hadith to suppress women and basically call them "weak, silly, and in one sense like a child."  Whether hijab today is empowering or oppressive is, in his opinion, up to the women to say!  He mentions many women are now reading and interpreting the Quran from a feminine point of view and calls Amina Wadud's book Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective by name.  (Are any of you familiar with this book?)


One final thing, yesterday I was reading the Chapter 2 End Notes and Reza Aslan wrote something that I found interesting concerning orphans.  (We had been talking of orphans and slaves in Islam on another blog.)

He said it was interesting to note that “the protection of orphans and widows has always been the primary criterion for just rule….Hammurabi….states that he conquered his enemies in order to give ‘justice to the orphan and the widow.’” (pg. 276)

And I also couldn’t help but remember that the book of James in the New Testament states:

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Any thoughts or corrections or anything to add from what I posted from this chapter?  Let me know if you agree, disagree or have another side to the story than what Aslan or I have shared here.