The Women’s History of the World

Before Islam a woman could practise polyandry and marry more than one man. When she became pregnant she would send for all her husbands . . . Gathering them around her, she would name the man she wished to be the father of her child, and the man could not refuse . . .11

When a Bedouin woman wanted to divorce one of these spare husbands, she simply turned her tent around to signal that her door was no longer open to him. In later generations Muslim women must have considered folk tales or memories of those freedoms either a cruel joke or the purest fantasy. Yet the proof that they existed lies in the marriage story of the founder of Islam, the prophet Muhammad himself. When the self-assured Khadijah wanted him, she despatched a woman with instructions for Muhammad to propose to her – and he did.

Even more remarkable than this free right of sexual choice was the readiness with which the women of early Islam took up arms and fought in pitched battles alongside the men. One honoured heroine and war-leader was Salaym Bint Malhan, who with an armoury of swords and daggers strapped round her pregnant belly fought in the ranks of Muhammad and his followers. Another is credited with turning the tide in a fierce fight against the Byzantines, when the wavering forces of Islam were rallied by a tall knight muffled in black and fighting with ferocious courage. After the victory, the ‘knight’ was reluctantly exposed as the Arab princess Khawlah Bint al-Azwar al-Kindiyyah.

Even losing in battle could not defeat Khawlah’s spirit. Captured at the battle of Sabhura, near Damascus, she rallied the other female captives with the passionate challenge, ‘Do you accept these men as your masters? Are you willing for your children to be their slaves? Where is your famed courage and skill that has become the talk of the Arab tribes as well as the cities?’ A woman called Afra’ Bint Ghifar al-Humayriah is said to have returned the wry reply, ‘We are as courageous and skilful as you describe. But in such cases a sword is quite useful, and we were taken by surprise, like sheep, unarmed.’ Khawlah’s response was to order each woman to arm herself with her tent-pole, form them into a phalanx, and lead them in a successful fight for freedom. ‘And why not?’ as the narrator of their story concludes, ‘If a lost battle meant their enslavement?’12

Another woman warrior of Islam, as potent with her tongue as with a sword, was the celebrated ’A’ishah. Although the youngest of the twelve wives of the polygamous prophet, married to the aged Muhammad when she was only nine and widowed before her eighteenth birthday, ’A’ishah became famous for her courageous intelligence and resistance to the subordination enjoined on virtuous Islamic wives. She had no hesitation in opposing or correcting Muhammad himself, arguing theology with him in front of his principal male followers with such devastating logic and intellectual power that Muhammad himself instructed them, ‘Draw half your religion from this ruddy-faced woman.’ Her courage extended even to resisting the will of the Prophet when it came through the hotline of a revelation from Allah himself. When in answer to his desire to take another wife Muhammad was favoured with a new batch of Koranic verses assuring him that Allah permitted his prophet to marry as many women as he wished, she hotly commented, ‘Allah always responds immediately to your needs!’13

What else would a father god do? And how were women to respond? ’A’ishah, still only a girl of eighteen when Muhammad died, outgrew this rebellion and went on to become a leading figure in Islam, where her active political power and influence on Muslim evolution and tradition were enormous. But the challenge she had thrown down remained unanswered. It could only gain in immediacy and urgency in the years that followed.

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