Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

It is a bizarre irony of history that the physical consigning of women to the private space of the home, so ubiquitous in the Shariah heritage that flourished with classical Islamic civilization, clashes so discordantly with the decidedly open and active role that the Prophet’s wives and other Arab women played in the Arabian cradle of Islam. A woman once rose up and interrupted the caliph Umar while he was addressing the congregation from the pulpit of the Prophets’ mosque. Far from silencing her, he admitted the mistake she had pointed out.80 Aisha’s prominence in the life of the Prophet and the early Muslim community, ranging from a senior bearer of the religion’s teachings to the head of a faction in Islam’s first civil war (whatever her regrets), cannot be denied. During the vulnerable early days of Muhammad’s community, Umm Fadl, the wife of his uncle, killed one of the leading enemies of Islam in their home by crushing his skull with a tent pole after he beat a Muslim slave. When the Prophet was surrounded by enemy warriors at the Battle of Uhud, and the bulk of the Muslims had abandoned hope, a woman who had been tending the wounded, Nusayba bint Ka‘b, fought beside him to guard her Prophet from sword blows and arrows. Later, she accompanied the Muslim campaign into central Arabia to avenge her fallen son, returning to Medina with twelve wounds. At the Battle of Yarmouk against the Byzantines, another Muslim woman, Asma’ bint Yazid, killed nine enemy soldiers with ...