Tagged: Zaynab bin Jahsh

Harem tales: The merry wives of Muhammad

Almost to the day he died, Muhammad continued to add women to his harem, either as wives or concubines. Most married him voluntarily, others were taken as captives and had no choice in the matter. The following account of his love life is from It’s All About Muhammad, A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet:

ACCORDING TO THE STANDARD ACCOUNTS, MUHAMMAD HAD THIRTEEN wives and concubines, beginning with Khadija, his wealthy wife of twenty-five years who died three years before he fled Mecca to Yathrib. Then came Sauda, the stout, matronly woman he married several months after Khadija’s death as a caretaker for his children; Aisha, Abu Bakr’s daughter whom he married shortly after he arrived in Yathrib when she was nine years old; Umar’s daughter Hafsa, a twenty-year-old widow when he married her; Zaynab Khuzayma, who died eight months after the marriage; Umm Salama, an early convert and widow of one of Muhammad’s first cousins; Zaynab the daughter of Jahsh, a maternal first cousin previously married to Muhammad’s adopted son Zayd; Juwayriya, the Bedouin princess taken as booty after he conquered her Mustaliq tribe; Ramlah, the daughter of Muhammad’s foremost Meccan enemy Abu Sufyan; Rayhana, a Jewish woman enslaved after the massacre of the Qurayza Jews; Safiya, a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl taken as booty during the conquest of Khaybar; Maria the Copt, given to him as a slave by the ruler of Egypt along with her sister, a mule, and a eunuch; and Maymuna, the thirty-six-year-old half-sister of Zaynab Khuzayama. Read more »

Was Muhammad Insane?

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF ISLAM is the belief that God talked to Muhammad and dictated the contents of the Koran to him. Muslims are indoctrinated into believing the Koran is God’s word, and so they act on the numerous incitements to violence that they find in it.

What they find in the Koran came from the mind of Muhammad, and for insight into the mental condition of this “prophet,” consider Chapter 33 of his Koran, entitled “The Confederates.” This is one of the chapters Muhammad composed in Yathrib (later called Medina) where he fled after his previously divided Meccan compatriots realized that the only way to preserve their way of life was to kill him.

The chapter is like a wild theme park ride that races in and out of numerous topics. In the 73 verses that make up the chapter, Muhammad covers the following in the God-voice he used for the Koran: He recaps a recent battle with the Meccans and excoriates people who were afraid to fight and die for him; he gloats about his extermination of the men and boys of one of the Jewish tribes of Yathrib, the confiscation of their property, and the enslavement of their women and children; he authorizes himself to take as many wives as he likes, permits himself to marry the wife of his adopted son, forbids himself from taking any more wives after he has taken as many as he likes, but allows himself sex slaves. Read more »