Studies in a Mosque - The Search For Mecca

78 STUDIES IN A MOSQUE.
that Abu-Bekr and 'Othmun had ah^eady politely
declined the honour of her alliance before the Prophet
married her. Several of these marriages must
have been entered into from the feeling that those
women whose husbands had fallen in battle for the
faith, and who had thus been left unprotected, had a
claim upon the generosity of him who prompted the
fio-ht. Other marrias^es were contracted from motives
of policy, in order to conciliate the heads of rival fac-
tions. It was not a high motive, but one does not
look for very romantic ideas about love-matches from
a man who regarded women as " crooked ribs," and
whose system certainly does its best to make marriage
from love impossible; yet, on the other hand, it was
not a sensual motive. Perhaps the strongest reason
—one of which it is impossible to over-estimate the
foi-ce—that impelled Mohammad to take wife after
wife was his desire for male offspring. It was a
natural wish that he should have a son who should
follow in his steps and carry on his work ;
but the wish
was never gratified, Mohammad's sons died young.
After all, the overwhelming argument is his
fidelity to his first wife. When he was little more
than a boy he married Khadija, who was fifteen years
older than himself, with all the added age that women
gain so quickly in the East. For five-and-twenty
years Mohammad remained faithful to his elderly wife,
and when she was sixty-five, and they might have
celebrated their "silver wedding," he was as devoted
to her as when first he married her. During all those
years there was never a breath of scandal. Thus far