robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

years of age. 6
The earliest Islamic sources offer no hint that anyone around Muhammad had a problem with this
marriage. Bukhari reports matter-of-factly, and more than once, that she was nine when the marriage was
consummated. Nothing in the accounts of this marriage can compare with the evident embarrassment
attending Muhammad's marriage to Zaynab. In fact, the Qur'an takes child marriage for granted in its
directives about divorce. When speaking about the waiting period required to determine if a woman is
pregnant, it says: “As for your women who have despaired of further menstruating, if you are in doubt,
their period shall be three months, and those who have not menstruated as yet” (65:4). The last part, “and
those who have not menstruated as yet,” has been understood in Islamic tradition not as a non sequitur or
incomplete thought but as a specification that the waiting period for divorce should be three months for
prepubescent girls as well. This passage suggests that in the time and place the stories about Muhammad
and Aisha began to be told, few people, if any, had any particular problem with a fifty-four-year-old man
consummating a marriage with a nine-year-old girl; it was a cultural norm, and that was that.
Other elements of Muhammad's career that jar modern sensibilities seem to have caused no
embarrassment for the authors of the earliest Islamic texts. Far from recoiling from their warrior prophet,
one hadith has him boast, “I have been made victorious with terror.” 7 Another hadith tells of how
Muhammad, enraged by a tribe that murdered a shepherd and drove away his camels, had the culprits
captured and ordered their eyes put out with heated pieces of iron and their hands and feet amputated.
(The latter punishment accords with the Qur'an's directive that the hands and feet of those who make war
against Allah and his messenger be amputated on opposite sides [5:33].) Then he left the tribesmen in the
desert without water. All this was justified, according to a companion of Muhammad who is quoted in the
hadith, because “those people committed theft and murder, became infidels after embracing Islam and
fought against Allah and His Apostle.” 8 As brutal as this episode appears to modern eyes, to those who
invented it, it demonstrated Muhammad's strength and fearlessness in the face of injustice. It also
supported punishments that are still part of Islamic law, including amputation for theft (cf. Qur'an 5:38)
and the death penalty for apostasy (cf. 4:89).
Similarly, hadiths portray Muhammad's polygamy as a sign not of libertinism but of his unmatched
virility. The prophet is reported as saying: “Gabriel brought a kettle from which I ate and I was given the
power of sexual intercourse equal to forty men.” 9 Other hadiths have Aisha saying, “I used to wash the
traces of Janaba (semen) from the clothes of the Prophet and he used to go for prayers while traces of
water were still on it (water spots were still visible).” 10 This is odd—how and why did the semen get on
his clothes in the first place?—but apparently it is meant to indicate his divinely assisted virility.
Other hadiths appear merely curious to modern readers. That is largely because the controversies that
gave rise to these traditions have long since faded, and also because a great deal of folk material and
superstition appears to have made its way into the Hadith. For example, in one hadith Muhammad is made
to say that Muslims should blow their noses three times upon waking, for Satan sleeps in the bridge of
one's nose at night. 11 He also said that if someone is troubled by a nightmare, “he should spit on his left
side and should seek refuge with Allah from its evil, for then it will not harm him.” 12 He claimed that
“yawning is from Satan and if anyone of you yawns, he should check his yawning as much as possible, for
if anyone of you (during the act of yawning) should say: ‘Ha,’ Satan will laugh at him.” 13 He advised the
Muslims that “when you hear the crowing of a cock, ask for Allah's Blessings for (its crowing indicates