103 Mohammed and women

In ‘Religion: a discovery in comics’ Dutch graphic artist and theologian Margreet de Heer compares the ‘men’ behind the five biggest world religions for their women friendly reputation. Is it really a surprise Mohammed wins hands down? And him being a ‘child molester’ according to Geert Wilders. Reading about his life and accounts in the Hadith he loved the company of women. His first wife Khadija was not only considerably older than he, she was also his employer and socially and financially superior to him. He could have resented this. Instead he let himself be tutored. They seem to have had a happy marriage. They had six children. Three girls survived to adulthood. Fatima became the best known. When Mohammed started to get revelations, he was afraid and unsure. He didn’t turn to other men for advice but to his wife. She was very supportive and so became the first Muslim. After Khadija’s death and Mohammed’s subsequent move from Mecca to Medina at the request of his mother’s people his life changed completely. There were only a few people who followed him to Medina. Among them were Abu Bakr and his small daughter Aisha. Aisha was the first child born in a Muslim household. It was fitting that she became his new wife and yes: she was only 9 when they married. In Medina he became a statesman and a warrior. His other marriages reflect that. There are many stories in the Hadith about Mohammed and his wives and the women among his companions. They are often rather funny. At least that’s my opinion. Some Muslims might find it blasphemy. In their eyes he is ‘perfect’, but I see him as a man who sometimes is bumbling and tries to get out without scratch. Mohammed also liked to have sex and cared that his women were equally happy and satisfied. And yes, he had also concubines. Mohammed was strictly Hetero and that wasn’t very common at the time. His position on women must have been so strong that it has survived all misogynist interpretations by the men who collected testimonials for the Hadith.

102 The messenger and the message

According to the Hadith his wife Aicha testified that Mohammed ‘lived’ the Koran. That made him at the same time a man, a lover and a Prophet. But in his youth in Mecca he was an orphan who became by marriage the foreman of a caravan and after his move to Medina he became a statesman and a warrior out of necessity. These eight ‘roles’ are very important to keep constantly in mind when reading the Koran. He clearly was a man who knew what was going down in the world from hands on experience. One could speculate about why this man at that time and place was the chosen human to channel the Divine message. But reading his life and how he dealt with the challenges the revelations presented it fits. Of course it could have been made to fit by either God or if you are cynical, by subsequent writers, but one way or the other this man acquitted himself of his difficult task. The question is: is it God who forms the words of the revelations or Mohammed? It must be God because Mohammed’s human (fallible, time shackled) brain would not be able to process what is Divine. At the same time the message must have been made superficially understandable for Arabs living in the 7th century and given an eternal quality as it would be the last Divine communication. That should make the message multi layered and extensive. It had to address urgently the wrongs of the moment but it had also to have a lasting validity, guiding humanity on its merry and erratic way through time and forever changing circumstances. This way one had to expect that not everything could be understood equally always and not everybody could be happy with its meaning at all times. A meaning could become clear over time when circumstances demanded it. Anyway to me it seems like a giant jigsaw puzzle: extremely complicated but meant to be solvable… somehow… eventually, Inshallah…

100 What’s going on?

After my breakfast reading of the Koran was completed I was reeling. Although one professes to be open to the unexpected and wants to be surprised one really wants to be confirmed what one always thought one knew. What I had learned from reading the Koran was something I did not expect at all. Okay, I was never negative towards Islam and I didn’t share Geert Wilders’ prediction of ‘our culture’ loosing out against a normative, violent and invasive religion. Had I read a different Koran from the one he (or rather his Koran advisor Hans Jansen) portrayed in his short film ‘Fitna’? Or had poor N.J. Dawood the Jewish Arabist from Bagdad been so enamoured with ‘his’ Koran that his willingness ‘to increase the understanding and pleasure for the uninitiated’ had won it over a straightforward translation? Had I been blinded by my ‘Lesbian Feminist’ viewpoint, my historical interpretation and my intra-textual endeavours? I had expected writings that would confirm what I had seen everywhere in the Islamic world. I had taken for granted that the Koran would be a Divine acknowledgement of male superiority over women and allocate a subservient role to women in all things starting with religion. After careful reconsideration I came to the conclusion that I had been too fanciful in reading the text. I should have done less ‘reading’ between the lines and setting it in a historical context. Some subconscious sympathy for the vilified religion had coloured my judgement, I was sure. I resorted to Wikipedia again and found that there were extensive writings about the man through whom the Koran had been channelled: the Prophet Mohammed. I set myself to find out more about the man Geert Wilders characterizes as a child-molester and a pig.