Does Islam Promote
and Safeguard Sound
Moral Values?
MUSLIMS STILL BRISTLE AT THE OLD European Christian term for their religion: "Muhammadan." This was one of the first things my earliest Muslim acquaintances hastened to assure me: "We do not worship Muhammad. It is an insult to call us Muhammadans." Referring to Muslims by this hated name is to fall once again into the Christian error, as they see it, of deifying one of God's prophets and taking his name for the name of God's cause.
Yet even without being deified, Muhammad wields enormous influence down through the history of Islam. Muslims revere him above all other men. Throughout the world, Muslims show tremendous respect and genuine affection for the Prophet. By all accounts, he was an exceptionally charismatic and appealing man who won the hearts of the men and women who followed him. He was charming, delightfully down-toearth, and full of vigor and zest for life. His courage and cunning made him one of the most successful generals in history.
But for Muslims, he is even more than all this: he is the supreme model for human behavior. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr remarks:
It may be said that the Prophet is the perfection of both the norm of the human collectivity and the human individual, the norm for the perfect social life and the prototype and guide for the individual's spiritual life.... He is both the Universal Man and the Primordial Man (al-insan al-gadim). As the Universal Man he is the totality of which we are a part and in which we participate; as the Primordial Man he is that original perfection with respect to which we are a decadence and a falling away.'
The great Persian poet and revered Muslim saint Sheikh Moslehedin Saadi Shirazi summed it up succinctly, addressing Muhammad: "In short, after God you are the greatest."' Professor Akbar S. Ahmed of Cambridge concurs:
As the Prophet is the messenger, the Quran is the message of God. Together they provide the basis for the ideal type of Muslim behaviour and thought.... The Prophet himself had said in his last sermon: "I leave behind me two things, the Quran and my example the sunnah [traditions about the words and deeds of the Prophet], and if you follow these you will never go astray."3
So it is essential for anyone trying to understand Islam to look closely at the figure of Muhammad. From Tehran to Toronto, from Dar es Salaam to Des Moines, Muslims emulate him today. As the Universal and Primordial Man, he offers a unique view of Islamic morality incarnated in its purest form.
But this undertaking may be more challenging than it initially seems. Nasr says, "it is in a sense easier for a non-Muslim to see the spiritual radiance of Christ or even medieval saints, Christian or Muslim, than that of the Prophet, although the Prophet is the supreme saint in Islam without whom there would have been no sanctity whatsoever."4 It's hard to see Muhammad's sanctity, Nasr explains, because he is fundamentally different from the central figures of other religions:
If the contour of the personality of the Prophet is to be understood, he should not be compared to Christ or the Buddha whose messages were meant primarily for saintly men and who founded communities based on monastic life which later became the norm of entire societies. Rather, because of his dual function as "king" and "prophet," as the guide of men in this world and the hereafter, the Prophet should be compared to the prophet-kings of the Old Testament, to David and Solomon, and especially to Abraham himself.'
Nast's assessment of Christ's mission is, of course, highly debatable, but his point about Muhammad is clear: the prophet of Islam cannot be regarded as an ascetic holy man who renounced this world in search of a better one, but as a man very much of this world, a leader of men in the great cause of Allah.
Fair enough. Certainly Muhammad was no ascetic. Even in the heaven that he imagined, as we've seen, the pleasures of the flesh were paramount. The righteous "shall recline on couches lined with thick brocade.... Therein are bashful virgins whom neither man nor jinnee [spirit beings] will have touched before.... Virgins as fair as coral and rubies" (Sura 55:54, 56, 58). (No mention is made in the Qur'an of what heaven will be like for women.)
How Allah Cared for His Prophet
At a point in Muhammad's life when he already had nine wives and numerous concubines, Allah gave him special permission to collect as many women as he wished:
Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty; the daughters of your paternal and maternal uncles and of your paternal and maternal aunts who fled with you; and any believing woman who gives herself to the Prophet and whom the Prophet wishes to take in marriage. This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no other believer. (Sura 33:50)
The circumstances of this revelation show a great deal about Muhammad. The Prophet had adopted a former Christian slave, Zayd ibn Haritha, as his son, and married him to a woman named Zaynab bint Jahsh. This marriage was unhappy. According to early Muslim sources (as retold by historian Maxime Rodinson):
One day Muhammad knocked on the door, looking for Zayd. He was not at home; but Zaynab met him in a state of undress and asked him in. After all, he was as father and mother to her. Muhammad declined but the wind lifted the curtain, evidently while she was hurriedly dressing. He fled in some confusion, muttering something which she did not quite catch. All she heard was: "Praise be to Allah the Most High! Praise be to Allah who changes men's hearts!"6
Zaynab was, by all accounts, spectacularly beautiful, and obviously Muhammad noticed.
As for Zayd, he took this with equanimity. "Messenger of Allah," he said to Muhammad, "it has come to my ears that you went to my house. Why did you not go in? Are you not father and mother to me, O Messenger of Allah? Can it be that Zaynab found favour with you? If that is so, I will part from her!"
Muhammad responded, "Keep your wife for yourself."
But that was not the end of the matter. Soon Allah himself, ever attentive to the needs of his Prophet, intervened:
You [Muhammad] said to the man [Zayd] whom God and yourself have favoured: "Keep your wife and have fear of God." You sought to hide in your heart what God was to reveal [i.e., your attraction to Zaynab]. You were afraid of man, although it would have been more proper to fear God. And when Zayd divorced his wife, We gave her to you in marriage, so that it should become legitimate for true believers to wed the wives of their adopted sons if they divorced them. God's will must needs be done. (Sura 33:37)
And so Muhammad married Zaynab. To forestall, or answer, any criticism from the community, the Qur'an then enjoins: "No blame shall be attached to the Prophet for doing what is sanctioned for him by God" (Sura 33:38). The Muslim scholar Caesar Farah explains:
A study of Muhammad's marital inclinations reveals that ... pity and elementary concern prompted him in later years to take on wives who were neither beautiful nor rich, but mostly old widows.... His marriage to Zaynab, wife of his adopted son, was the result of her unhappy marital relationship with Zayd. Both she and her family, the noble of Hashim and Quraysh, frowned upon a marriage to a freed slave. Muhammad, however, was determined to establish the legitimacy and right to equal treatment of the adopted in Islam.'
He was determined, that is, until the revelation came from Allah indicating that he should marry Zaynab. Then what could he do but obey?
But this was not a marriage to someone who was "neither beauti- U nor rich." Zaynab, as Farah acknowledges, was nobly born, and despite later Muslim commentators' attempts to downplay her looks on account of her "advanced" age of thirty-five, all the early accounts say she was beautiful. According to Rodinson, "the Arabic histories and traditional texts ... stress Muhammad's disturbed state of mind after his glimpse of Zaynab in a state of undress; it is they that describe her remarkable beauty."' One of Muhammad's other wives, Aisha, bears witness as well, saying, "Zainab was competing with me (in her beauty and the Prophet's love)."9
It is easy to conclude from these incidents (and others that we'll recount shortly) that prophethood was exceedingly comfortable for Muhammad. He co
uld indulge himself in any way he wished, and Allah would supply divine sanction for his behavior, no matter how egregious.
Defenders of Christianity as far back as al-Kindi, who wrote an apology for the Christian faith against Islam in the ninth century, have compared the libertine Muhammad unfavorably with Jesus and Christian ascetics.10 At this, Muslims cry foul. Nast explains that Muhammad's marriages "are not at all signs of his lenience vis-a-vis the flesh. During the period of youth, when the passions are strongest, the Prophet lived with only one wife who was much older than he and also underwent long periods of sexual abstinence. And as a prophet many of his marriages were political ones which, in the prevalent social structure of Arabia, guaranteed the consolidation of the newly founded Muslim community.""
Yet Muhammad's self-control in his youth says nothing about his behavior as an older man. After all, Henry VIII had no trouble becoming an elderly libertine. Moreover, it's hard to see how Muhammad's divinely certified sexual access to the daughters of his uncles and aunts, as well as to "any believing woman who gives herself to the Prophet and whom the Prophet wishes to take in marriage," would guarantee "the consolidation of the newly founded Muslim community," as Nasr claims.
Political stratagems are hard to find also in the celebrated incident that forms the background of Sura 66 in the Qur'an. Muhammad's wife Hafsa found him in bed with yet another woman, Mary the Copt (a Christian girl), on the day allotted to Hafsa. Furious, she enlisted the help of another of Muhammad's wives, Aisha, and confronted the Prophet. Muhammad sheepishly promised to avoid Mary.12 But again Allah intervened:
Prophet, why do you prohibit that which God has made lawful to you, in seeking to please your wives? God is forgiving and merciful. God has given you absolution from such oaths.... If you two [Hafsa and Aisha] turn to God in repentance (for your hearts have sinned) you shall be pardoned; but if you conspire against him, know that God is his protector, and Gabriel, and the righteous among the faithful. The angels too are his helpers. It may well be that, if he divorce you, his Lord will give him in your place better wives than yourselves, submissive to God and full of faith, devout, penitent, obedient, and given to fasting; both formerlywedded and virgins. (Sura 66:1-5) 13
Of course, it may be that Muhammad sincerely believed Almighty God was granting him special privileges as his chosen prophet. But in any case, the effect on Islam has been deleterious. Men who look to Muhammad as an example, whether they marry many wives or not, find nothing in him of the mutuality, self-giving and self-sacrifice that most Westerners assume should be part of marriage. Certainly Muhammad was kind to his wives, but they were in effect little more than his servants, on hand to cook his food and meet his sexual demands. Most in the modern West would disapprove, for here, Christian ideals of marriage are still pervasive, even among non-Christians and post-Christian secularists.
The Importance of the Sunnah
The Sunnah of the Prophet-early Muslim traditions about the sayings and doings of Muhammad-raise even more serious questions about his status as a moral example for all Muslims. In Islam, these texts have a status just below the Qur'an, and because they are much more voluminous and detailed than the Qur'an, they are the main source for the Sharia, or Islamic law, and much of Islamic practice. The Islamic scholar Mohammed Nasir-ul-Deen al-Albani states the traditional Muslim position when he says, "There is no way to understand the Qur'an correctly except in association with the interpretation of the Sunnah."14 According to another scholar, Wael B. Hallaq, that "the Sunna is binding on Muslims has ... been demonstrated by Shafi'i (as well as by later jurists) on the basis of the Quran which enjoins Muslims to obey the Prophet and not to swerve from his ranks.""
Western academics have elaborated numerous theories about the provenance and importance of the Sunnah, but these have not had much impact in the House of Islam itself. Some rigorist movements within Islam have discounted the Sunnah in their zeal to emphasize the uniqueness and centrality of the Qur'an, but this view has not displaced the Sunnah from its traditional standing in Islamic theology. A Muslim scholar, Abu Abdir Rahmaan, says it is Satan who has suggested "to the hearts of some of the Muslims that the Qur'an, as Glorious as it is, is sufficient enough alone as guidance for Mankind. Meaning that the Sunnah, or way of the Messenger of Allah ... is something that can be left off, or abandoned. Without a doubt this is a growing disease that has no place in this wonderful way of life of ours."" In his guide to the study of the Qur'an, Ahmad Von Denffer sums up the prevailing view: "There is agreement among Muslim scholars that the contents of the sunna are also from Allah. Hence they have described it as also [after the Qur'an, that is] being the result of some form of inspiration.""
There's a tremendous proliferation of these traditions, including numerous forgeries. Western scholars such as Ignaz Goldhizer have demonstrated that there is an astonishingly high number of these inauthentic tales about Muhammad. Goldhizer speculates about the motives behind them:
It is a matter for psychologists to find and analyze the motives of the soul which made such forgeries acceptable to pious minds as morally justified means of furthering a cause.... The most favourable explanation which one can give of these phenomena is presumably to assume that the support of a new doctrine ... with the authority of Muhammad was the form in which it was thought good to express the high religious justification of that doctrine. The end sanctified the means.18
Faced with a situation that was rapidly spinning out of control, several Muslims relatively early in the history of Islam assembled collections of accounts (hadiths) of the Prophet's words and deeds that were considered more or less definitive and authentic." Six collections were almost universally recognized early on, and continue to be regarded today, as the most reliable, generally free of forgeries and inaccuracies. These were given the collective name of Sahih Sittah, the six authentic and trustworthy collections. (Sahih means "sound" or "reliable.") These are Sahih Bukhari, that is, the collection of hadiths made by the imam Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (81o-87o); Sahih Muslim, a similar collection compiled by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Qushayri (821-875); the Sunan of Abu Dawud as-Sijistani (d. 888); and works by Muhammad ibn Majah (d. 896), Abi cEesaa Muhammad at-Tirmidhi (824-893), and Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb an-Nasai (d. 915).
The appearance of a hadith in one of these respected sources, however, isn't enough by itself to guarantee its authenticity. Muslims classify hadiths variously as "sound" (sahih), "good" or "approved" (hasan), "weak" (da'if), and "forged" (maudu). These categories are based on how many times a hadith is repeated in the traditions, how many different sources report it, its agreement (or disagreement) with the teachings of the Qur'an, the strength of the chain of reporters that link it to the Prophet, and other factors.
The fact that the entire collections by Bukhari and Muslim bear the name Sahih is one indication of their prestige among Muslims. These collections "have enjoyed an especially high status as authoritative sources," says Muslim scholar John Esposito.20 The English translator of Sahih Muslim, Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, agrees: "The collections by Bukhari and Muslim are particularly held in high esteem." He explains that the hadiths "which are recognized as absolutely authentic are included in these two excellent compilations," and that "even of these two, Bukhari's occupies a higher position in comparison to Muslim's."21
Indeed, Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan of the Islamic University in Medina declares that "many religious scholars of Islam tried to find fault in the great remarkable collection Sahih Al-Bukhari, but without success. It is for this reason, they unanimously agreed that the most authentic book after the Book of Allah [the Qur'an] is Sahih Al-Bukhari." He explains that the imam Bukhari dreamt that he was "standing in front of Prophet Muhammad having a fan in his hand and driving away the flies from the Prophet," and after this dream was interpreted as meaning that he would "drive away the falsehood asserted against the Prophet," he spent his life distinguishing authentic hadiths from forgeries. Bukhari ultimately winnowed down the 300,000 he collected to the
slightly over 22 2,000 that he includes (some several times) in Sahih Bukhari.
Even if a hadith is included in Bukhari or Muslim, some Muslim scholar somewhere may classify it as "weak" or "forged." Still, these collections carry such weight in Islam that virtually everything in them bears a presumption of reliability and authenticity. Thus, whether the stories to follow are classified as weak or strong or somewhere in between, their place in Bukhari and/or Muslim gives them an immediate claim to reliability and an undeniable influence-an influence that is highly damaging.
Child Brides
Given the stature that the traditions of the Sahih Bukhari and the Sahih Muslim have in Islam, it is worth noting what they say about Muhammad and his child bride Aisha.
Bukhari lets Aisha recount in her own words how she came to be the bride of the Prophet:
Narrated Aisha: My marriage (wedding) contract with the Prophet was written when I was a girl of six (years). [Apparently three years then elapsed.] ... My mother, Umm Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became normal, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari [recent Muslim converts] women who said, "Best wishes and Allah's Blessing and a good luck." Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah's Messenger came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age.23
At this point, according to the best Muslim sources, the Prophet was a little over fifty.24
Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith Page 6