UNRAVELING ISLAM pt 3

IF MOHAMMAD HAD A SON WOULD ISLAM HAVE EVOLVED DIFFERENTLY?

If a son had existed, perhaps the whole history of Islam

would have been different. The discord, the civil war, the

rival caliphates, the split between Sunni and Shia—all might have been averted. But though Muhammad’s first

wife, Khadija, had given birth to two sons alongside four

daughters, both had died in infancy, and though

Muhammad had married nine more wives after her death,

not one had become pregnant.

There was surely talk about that in Medina, and in Mecca

too. Most of the nine marriages after Khadija had been

political; as was the custom among all rulers of the time,

they were diplomatic alliances. Muhammad had chosen his

wives carefully in order to bind the new community of Islam

together, creating ties of kinship across tribes and across

old hostilities. Just two years earlier, when Mecca had

finally accepted Islam and his leadership, he had even married Umm Habiba, whose father had led Mecca’s long

and bitter opposition to him. But marital alliances were

sealed by children. Mixed blood was new blood, free of the

old divisions. For a leader, this was the crucial point of marriage.

Most of Muhammad’s wives after Khadija did indeed

have children, but not by him. With the sole exception of the

youngest, Aisha, they were divorcées or widows, and their

children were by previous husbands. There was nothing

unusual in this. Wealthy men could have up to four wives at

the same time, with Muhammad allowed more in order to meet that need for political alliance, but women also often

had two, three, or even four husbands. The difference was

that where the men had many wives simultaneously, the

women married serially, either because of divorce—

women divorced as easily as men at the time—or because

their previous husbands had died, often in battle.

This meant that the whole of Mecca and Medina was a

ast interlocking web of kinship. Half brothers and half

sisters, in-laws and cousins, everyone at the center of Islam

was related at least three or four different ways to everyone

else. The result beggars the modern Western idea of

family. In seventh-century Arabia, it was a far-reaching web

of relationships that defied anything so neatly linear as a

family tree. It was more of a dense forest of vines, each one

spreading out tendrils that then curled around others only to

fold back in on themselves and reach out again in yet more

directions, binding together the members of the new

Islamic community in an intricate matrix of relationship no matter which tribe or clan they had been born into. But still,

blood mattered.

There were rumors that there was in fact one child born

to Muhammad after Khadija—born to Mariya the Copt, an

Egyptian slave whom Muhammad had freed and kept as a

concubine, away from the mosque compound—and that

indeed, the child had been a boy, named Ibrahim, the

Arabic for Abraham. But unlike the ancestor for whom he

was named, this boy never grew to adulthood. At seventeen months old, he died, and it remains unclear if he ever

actually existed or if, in a culture in which sons were

considered a sign of their fathers’ virility, he was instead a

kind of legendary assurance of the Prophet’s honor.

Certainly any of the wives crowded around Muhammad’s

sickbed would have given her eyeteeth—all her teeth, in

fact—to have had children by him. To have been the mother

of his children would have automatically granted her higher

status than any of the other wives. And to bear the son of

the Prophet? His natural heir? There could be no greater

honor. So every one of them surely did her utmost to

become pregnant by him, and none more than Aisha, the

first wife he had married after the death of Khadija.

The youngest of the nine, the favorite, and by far the most

controversial, Aisha was haunted by her childlessness. Like

the others, she must certainly have tried, but in vain.

erhaps it was a sign of Muhammad’s ultimate loyalty to

the memory of Khadija, the woman who had held him in her

arms when he was in shock, trembling from his first

encounter with the divine—the first revelation of the Quran —and assured him that he was indeed Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God. Perhaps only Khadija could be the matriarch, and only her eldest daughter, Fatima, could be

the mother of Muhammad’s treasured grandsons, Hasan

and Hussein.

There can be no question of impotence or sterility on Muhammad’s part; his children by Khadija were proof of

that. No question either of barrenness on the part of the

later wives, since all except Aisha had children by previous

husbands. Perhaps, then, the multiply married Prophet was

celibate. Or as Sunni theologians would argue in centuries

to come, perhaps this late-life childlessness was the price

of revelation. The Quran was the last and final word of God,

they said. There could be no more prophets after Muhammad, no male kin who could assert special insight

or closeness to the divine will, as the Shia would claim. This

is why Khadija’s two infant boys had to die; they could not

live lest they inherit the prophetic gene.

All we know for sure is that in all nine marriages after

Khadija, there was not a single pregnancy, let alone a son,

and this was a major problem.