Men and women are considered to have similar instinctual drives, yet men are entitled to as many as four partners to satisfy those drives, while women must content themselves with at most one man, and sometimes as little as a quarter of one. Since saturation of the sexual impulse for males requires polygamy, one can speculate that fear of its inverse – one woman with four husbands – might explain the assumption of women’s insatiability, which is at the core of the Muslim concept of female sexuality. Since Islam assumes that a sexually frustrated individual is a very problematic believer and a troublesome citizen of the umma, the distrust of women, whose sexual frustration is organized institutionally, is even greater.
Polygamy also has a psychological impact on the self-esteem of men and women. It enhances men’s perception of themselves as primarily sexual beings and emphasizes the sexual nature of the conjugal unit. Moreover, polygamy is a way for the man to humiliate the woman as a sexual being; it expresses her inability to satisfy him. For Moroccan folk wisdom, this function of polygamy as a device to humiliate the woman is evident: ‘Debase a woman by bringing in [the house] another one.’5
The verse of the Koran justifying polygamy also grants men the right, without any condition or limit, to possess as many concubines as ‘your right hand possess’. But the Moroccan legislators, taking into account the budget difficulties of the contemporary believer, said nothing about the institution of concubinage, which died out in Morocco with the disappearance of female slavery at the beginning of the twentieth century. (My grandmother was kidnapped in Chaouia plain, sold in Fez, and bore my mother as a concubine to a member of the landowning urban bourgeoisie, then politically and financially powerful. This group was the main buyer of female slaves for decades after the French occupation in 1912.)
Repudiation
Though polygamy is mentioned only once in the Koran, repudiation is the subject of many long and detailed verses. Those most commonly referred to are in the second sura.
Verse 227: And if ye decide upon divorce [remember that] Allah is hearer, knower.
Verse 229: Divorce must be pronounced twice, and then a woman must be retained in honour or released in kindness.
But legally speaking, the most significant reference to the institution of repudiation is probably verse 20 of the fourth sura, which reveals the basic capriciousness of the male decision to sever the marital bond.
And if ye wish to exchange one wife for another and ye have given into one of them a sum of money (however great) take nothing from it.
The words ‘wish’ and ‘exchange’ are the key elements in the Muslim institution of verbal repudiation, whose characteristic is the unconditional right of the male to break the marriage bond without any justification, and without having his decisions reviewed by a court or a judge. In reenacting the seventh-century institution, the Moroccan Code limits the judge’s role simply to registering the husband’s decision.
Art. 46: Repudiation can be performed either verbally or in writing, or by signs and gestures if the husband is an illiterate man, or deprived of the capacity of speech. Art. 80: The adouls [Muslim court officials] issue a repudiation act as soon as they are asked to do so.
Like polygamy, repudiation has an instinctual basis, but whereas polygamy deals with the intensity of the male’s sexual drive, repudiation deals with its instability. Repudiation prevents the male from losing his sexual appetite through boredom. It aims at ensuring a supply of new sexual objects, within the framework of marriage, to protect him against the temptation of zina.
If God by His goodness and grace facilitates man’s life [by allowing him to be polygamous] and that man attains thus the peace of heart by them [women], that is good. If not, the changing process is recommended.6
This recommendation was acted upon by such exemplary men as Hasan, the Prophet’s grandson.
It has been said that Hasan Ibn Ali was a marriage addict. He married 200 wives. Sometimes he’d marry four at a time; he’d repudiate four at a time and marry new ones. Muhammad (benediction and salvation upon him) said to Hasan, ‘You resemble me physically and morally.’ . . . It has been said that this proclivity to marry is often precisely one of the similarities between Hasan and the messenger of God (benediction and salvation upon him).7
The somewhat ridiculous aspect of repudiation did not escape Allah himself, who warned the believer entrusted with the power to break the marital bond with a mere spoken formula not to make ‘the revelations of Allah a laughing-stock [by your behaviour].’8
The right to polygamy and repudiation granted exclusively to males seems to have been an innovation in seventh-century Arabia. Historical evidence indicates that earlier marriage patterns had been more varied and less codified. Some forms of marriage implied that the woman had a right to self-determination in choosing a husband or dismissing him. Indeed, the Prophet himself, despite his powerful attraction as a triumphant military leader and successful statesman, was himself faced with female sexual self-determination. He was solicited in marriage by many women and was rejected by many as well.
The Prophet’s life is not a simple historical document in Islam. The detailed record of his thoughts and deeds is, after the Koran, which is the word of God, the prime source of the teachings that shape and guide the believer’s life. The Prophet’s life is an example of how a Muslim should deal with and find solutions to his daily problems. It is the guiding light for overcoming obstacles according to the Muslim ideal.
The Prophet’s Experience of Female Self-Determination
The Prophet’s marital life seems to be symbolic of the transition Arabia was undergoing. He lived for 62 years (born AD 570 of the Christian calendar, he died in 632). He married for the first time in the year 595 and with his first wife, Khadija, had a monogamous. marriage that lasted twenty-five years, until her death in 620. It was only then that the Prophet started a new marital life, and in a span of twelve years (620-632) he married twelve women, arranged three other marriages which did not take place, and rejected several female suitors who asked for his hand, or rather ‘offered themselves’, according to the consecrated Muslim formula.9
The first woman who asked to marry him was his first wife, Khadija Bint Khuwalid, a wealthy and active woman of the Quraish tribe who invested her fortune in the trade caravans then flourishing in Mecca. She employed Muhammad to accompany one of her caravans and was so impressed by his trustworthiness that she decided to marry him. He was then twenty-five years old, and it was his first marriage. She was forty, and it was her third. She bore all his children (four daughters and two sons who died young), except for Ibrahim, the son of Maria, his Coptic concubine.10
Among the women who offered themselves to the Prophet were Umm Sharik, whose proposal he did not accept, and Leila Bint al-Khatim, whose proposal he did accept. But the latter marriage did not take place, because Leila was discouraged by her tribe. Her people convinced her that her proud temperament was ill-suited for the accommodations a polygamous marriage requires.
The lack of ritual surrounding such a move by a woman is illustrated by a dialogue between the Prophet and Leila.
She came to the Prophet (upon him Allah’s peace and prayer), who was sitting talking to another man, and who did not see her coming, until he felt her hand on him. He said, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ‘I am Leila Bint al-Khatim. I come to you to offer myself. Will you marry me?’ He said, ‘I accept.’11
For a woman to decide to initiate a sexual union seems to have been a casual gesture made by the woman herself, without reference to her father or male relatives. Although Leila’s kin discouraged her marriage, they did so not as authorities, but as persuasive counsellors concerned about her well-being. She decided not to marry the Prophet not because she was coerced, but because she was convinced by their argument about the Prophet’s other wives and her inability to cope with them.
Hiba (‘the act by which a woman gives herself to a man’) was outlawed after the Prophet died.12 If he was the last Arab ma
n to be chosen freely by women, he was also probably the last to be repudiated by them.
There were several women with whom the Prophet contracted marriages that were never consummated.13 In three cases the marriage was broken by a repudiation formula pronounced by the woman. Some reports say that she repeated the formula three times. (This makes it look identical to the repudiation formula institutionalized by Islam as a man’s privilege: if the man pronounces it three times, the divorce is definite; if he pronounces it once or twice only, the marital bond is suspended for some weeks, after which the husband can resume his marriage.)
Every time the formula was pronounced by the woman, the Prophet covered his face with his sleeve, left the nuptial room and asked for the woman to be returned to her tribe immediately. It appears that repudiation, like hiba, was characterized by a lack of ritual, which leads me to think that it was a rather common occurrence.
When she [Asma Bint al-Numan] entered the room where he [the Prophet] was, he closed the door and released the curtain. When he thrust his hand towards her, she said, ‘I take refuge in Allah from thee.’ The Prophet immediately covered his head with his sleeve and said, ‘You are granted such a protection’, three times. He then left her and gave orders for her to be returned to her tribe.14
Similar incidents happened with Mulaika Bint Ka’ab and Fatima Bint al-Dahhak.15
Muslim sources give many versions of the motives that led these three women to behave as they did. The most common explanation is that the three of them, who all belonged to tribes different from that of the Prophet, were deceived by their co-wives.16 The Quraishite wives of the Prophet (led of course by Aisha, the indefatigable, vivacious beloved of the Prophet), threatened by the three women’s beauty and exoticism, instructed the newcomers to pronounce the formula ‘so that the Prophet would love them more’. Victims of deceit, according to these versions, the three tribal women were surprised by the Prophet’s reaction.
I think these rather heavy-handed versions of the story are the work of Muslim historians who thought it necessary to disguise the embarrassing fact that the Prophet had been rejected and ‘repudiated’. It is hard to believe that three women, from different tribes and with different personalities, were equally gullible and equally easily deceived by their rivals in exactly the same way. Once perhaps. But three times? One report says explicitly that the woman rejected the Prophet because she did not like him.17 This is a much more likely reason. At least two of the women, Asma and Mulaika, were famous for their beauty.18 They were young. The Prophet was in his early sixties, and – a very important point – he was polygamous. For women like Asma, who was herself from a princely tribe,19 the Prophet’s prestige as a leader would not make him very desirable if what he had to give her was shared with more than nine colleagues. But the explanation of their behaviour is secondary here. What we are interested in is the fact that in the Prophet’s time there was a customary formula by which a woman could dismiss her husband. The Prophet’s phobic behaviour (having to leave her immediately) after the woman pronounced the formula shows that this was so.
If a woman could dismiss her husband at will, then she possessed substantial independence and self-determination. The Muslim social order was vehemently opposed to self-determination for women and declared that only men could repudiate their spouses.
The fear of female self-determination is basic to the Muslim order and is closely linked to fear of fitna. If women are not constrained, then men are faced with an irresistible sexual attraction that inevitably leads to fitna and chaos by driving them to zina, illicit copulation. The Prophet’s own experience of the corrosive attraction of female sexuality underlies much of the Muslim attitude towards women and sexuality. Fear of succumbing to the temptation represented by women’s sexual attraction – a fear experienced by the Prophet himself – accounts for many of the defensive reactions to women by Muslim society.
The Prophet’s Experience of the Irresistible Attraction of Women
The Prophet’s interactions with women, his intimate quarrels with his wives, his behaviour with the women he loved, are the basis for many legal features of the Muslim family structure. One of the striking aspects of his interaction with women is the contradiction between the ideals he preached as a model for Muslim believers when dealing with women and the way he actually dealt with them himself. One of those ideals is what should motivate a man to marry.
The Prophet said that the woman can be married for her religion [Muslim faith], for her fortune, or her beauty. Be motivated in your choice by her religion.20
Although many of his marriages were motivated by religious and political considerations (politics, after all, is religion in Islam), such as the need for tribal alliances, many of them were motivated solely by the woman’s beauty.
His marriage to the Jewish woman Safiya Bint Huyay could not possibly have been motivated by the need for an alliance, the Jews being his defeated enemies at the time. Moreover, when Safiya was captured by Muslim soldiers after the defeat of her people, it was not evident that she, as part of the booty, would fall to Muhammad since booty was shared according to the democratic, customary rules of Arab raiding. One report mentions that Safiya was allotted to a soldier called Dahia but that when the Prophet heard of her ‘incomparable beauty’ he sent for Dahia, paid him Safiya’s price, and freed her before marrying her.21
His marriage to another Jewish woman, Rayhana Bint Zayd, could not have been motivated by alliance either. Like Safiya, she belonged to a Jewish tribe, was captured after her people’s defeat, and was known to be ‘a beautiful woman’.22 But unlike Safiya, her marital status is contested; some reports say that she was kept as a concubine and never became a wife of the Prophet.
Maria the Copt, a famous beauty, was given as a gift from Egypt to the Prophet.23 He had intercourse with her as a concubine, and she bore him a son, Ibrahim, who died in infancy. The Prophet’s desire for Maria was so strong that it led him to violate another of his ideals: that a man should be just in his dealings with his wives. A man should keep strictly to the rotation schedule and not have intercourse with a wife, even if he so desired, if it was not her day. Hafsa, one of the Prophet’s wives, however, caught him having intercourse with Maria in Safiya’s room on Safiya’s day. ‘O Prophet of God, in my room and on my day!’ fulminated Safiya angrily. Afraid of the anger of his other wives, and especially of his most beloved Aisha, he promised Hafsa never to touch Maria again if she would keep the incident secret.24 But she spoke out, and the Prophet received orders from God to retract his promise; he then resumed relations with Maria.25 Maria’s power over the Prophet is best described in Aisha’s words:
I never was as jealous as I was of Maria. That is because she was a very beautiful, curly-haired woman. The Prophet was very attracted to her. In the beginning, she was living near us and the Prophet spent entire days and nights with her until we protested and she became frightened.26
The Prophet then decided to transfer Maria to a more secure dwelling far from his legitimate wives, and kept seeing her in spite of their pressure.
Another woman the Prophet married for her beauty (although in this case alliance was a motive as well) was Juwariya Bint al-Harith who was, according to Aisha’s description, ‘so beautiful that whoever caught a glimpse of her fell in love with her’.27 According to Aisha, the main motive of the Prophet’s marriage to Juwariya was physical attraction.
The Prophet was in my room when Juwariya came to ask him about a contract. By God, I hated her when I saw her coming towards him. I knew that he was going to see what I saw [her beauty].28
Another instance of the effect of female beauty on the Prophet was that of Dubaa Bint Amr, who ‘was among the most beautiful of Arab women. . . . Her hair was long enough to cover all her body.’29 The Prophet heard of her beauty, went to her son, and asked him if he could marry his mother. The son, following the custom in such instances, told the Prophet that he would have to ask his mother’s opinion. He did, and sh
e was so excited about the prospect of such a union that she told her son that he should have given her in marriage right away, that it was impolite of him to have placed any condition on the Prophet’s legitimate desire. But when the son went to the Prophet with the hope that the subject of his mother would be discussed, the Prophet never brought it up again. He had heard meanwhile that although she was indeed beautiful, she was also ageing.
But the most significant example of women’s irresistible power over the Prophet is probably his sudden (and scandalous, by his own people’s standards) passion for Zainab Bint Jahsh,30 the wife of his adopted son Zaid. In Muhammad’s Arabia, the link created by adoption was considered identical to blood-ties. Moreover, Zainab was the Prophet’s own cousin, and the Prophet himself had arranged her marriage with his adopted son.
One morning Muhammad went to his adopted son’s house to ask after him. When he saw Zainab, who was half-dressed, he felt an irresistible passion for her. She had hurried to the door to let the Prophet know that her husband was not in. She was surprised when he declined her invitation to come in, and instead ran off, mumbling prayers. When she reported the incident to her husband, he went to his adopted father to say that he was prepared to divorce Zainab if the Prophet wanted to marry her. The Prophet refused Zaid’s proposition until God revealed, his order to Muhammad to marry Zainab.
. . . And thou didst hide in thy mind that which Allah was to bring to light, and thou didst fear mankind whereas Allah had a better right that thou shouldst fear Him. So when Zaid had performed the necessary formality [of divorce] from her, We have her unto thee in marriage, so that [henceforth] there may be no sin for believers in respect to wives of their adopted sons, when the latter have performed the necessary formality [of release] from them. The commandment of Allah must be fulfilled.31
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