Muhammad was the kindest man who ever lived, according to Muslims. He was filled with love and compassion for all living things. In fact, he was the only perfect human being who ever lived, according to Muslims. If you want to lead a perfect life, you just have to look at Muhammad and do what he did.
I’m no Muslim, but I’ve always yearned to be perfect, so I decided to get myself some sex slaves. Muhammad had several, in addition to ten or a dozen wives. This is all legal according to God’s laws, given in the Koran, and God’s laws don’t change. What was legal 1400 years ago is legal today.
There has been a polite tradition in English of referring to these sex workers by the old-fashioned euphemism “concubines,” but we’re not living in the Victorian era, so let’s use plain English. They were slaves and their job was to provide sex. By the way, those dark-eyed virgins waiting for Muslim martyrs in paradise are also sex slaves. If they were only there to serve heavenly tea and cookies they wouldn’t have to be virgins, right?
I’m still wondering about certain practical problems of acquiring my slaves, since Islamic law is not recognized in the United States, but I decided to start researching Islamic sources on the subject, so I’ll know how to handle my women when I do get them. In particular I want to know the kind way to deal with sex slaves. The Koran doesn’t have a lot of detailed slave management advice, but that’s not really a problem. There are thousands of traditional stories about the prophet’s daily life and sayings known as hadith, collected after his death by people who knew him. There are six main collections of hadith considered reliable by Muslims and these books have authority equal to the Koran. I found just what I needed in the collection known as Sahih Bukhari, in volumes I, IV and V.
After the Battle of Khaybar one of Muhammad’s soldiers named Dihya asked the Prophet if he could choose one of the captive women. Muhammad told him to take his pick, but not long afterwards some other soldiers told Muhammad that Dihya had snagged the hottest babe they had ever seen. The Messenger of Allah immediately ordered the couple to be brought to him. After one look at the slave, named Safiyya, Muhammed told Dihya to choose someone else. Safiyyah was not only gorgeous, she was high-class, the daughter of the chief of the tribe that had just been defeated. Bukhari adds that Safiyyah’s father and all the other men of her tribe had been killed. This means that those who didn’t die in battle were murdered as prisoners. Bukhari also notes that Safiyyah’s husband, Kinana, had just been tortured before being killed. You might be wondering at this point, as I was, how Muhammad (a.k.a. The Soul of Kindness & Compassion) would treat this unfortunate woman.
Wasting few words, Bukhari continues, “Muhammad immediately freed her and married her himself—since she agreed to convert to Islam, she was able to be elevated beyond the portion of a slave. That night Safiyyah was dressed as a bride and a wedding feast was hastily arranged. On the way out of Khaybar that night, Muhammad halted his caravan as soon as they were outside the oasis, pitched a tent and consummated the marriage.”
At this point I began to wonder if I have what it takes to own slaves in the authentically kind Islamic manner. The first un-Islamic thought that occurred to me is that Safiyyah might have preferred a longer engagement. Maybe she would have preferred a little time to mourn her father and her husband, a day or two to adjust to the fact that every adult man in her tribe had just been butchered. The dead would have included her brothers, cousins, nephews, every male above the age of say, fifteen. And perhaps Safiyyah could have used a little time to mourn for her mother, her sisters and all the children of the tribe, who were headed to the nearest slave market. I wondered also if the women and children were forced to watch the murder of their menfolk, but due to his extraordinary kindness I’m sure that Muhammad would have allowed them to look in the other direction. But then, screams carry a long way. When I think about that wedding feast, which Bukhari tells us was “hastily arranged,” I figure that Safiyyah probably noticed that all the guests were from the groom’s side.
But Muhammad’s unbelievable kindness really shines out in this story. After all, he freed her, gave her one thousand gold pieces and an escort of soldiers to take her wherever she wanted to go. She moved to Cairo, well outside Muslim control, and observed the one year period of mourning required by Jewish law. Then Muhammad sent her so many beautiful letters describing his great love for her that she returned to Mecca and married him.
Except I guess I made most of that up. In my version, though, she would have been really free, as in free to leave the man who had erased her tribe, free to accept or reject his proposal of marriage, free to decide if she wanted to bow down to him as the anointed of God. In Bukhari’s version though, which is unimpeachable truth for Muslims, Safiyyah had a choice of (A.) remaining Jewish, in which case she would still be a sex slave, with the same status as Mary, another sex slave who was Christian, or choice (B.) she could convert and become a “wife” of Muhammad. Saying that Muhammad had set her free is absurd. She was a woman with nothing but the clothes she was wearing, she had no money, no food, no family, no one to protect her and she was surrounded by ten thousand soldiers who knew that God wanted them to kill Jews like her. If Muhammad had truly freed her, in the sense of cutting her loose and then forgetting about her, she would have starved to death or become the slave of some other soldier.
She was never offered freedom and she knew it, from the moment she and Dihya were ushered into the Prophet’s presence. When Muhammad looked her up and down and told Dihya to go pick himself another slave, Safiyyah knew that her future would be providing sexual services to Muhammad. She knew she was going to spend the rest of her life being raped by a man more than thirty years older than she was and that she would have to pretend to enjoy it. She could submit to him as a slave or as a quote, wife, unquote. I imagine that she chose “wife” in the hope that her higher status would allow her to help some of her people, who now had the status of livestock. Perhaps she thought she could convince Allah’s Messenger to choose her mother for a slave also, allowing them to remain together. However, if the Kindest Man Who Ever Lived showed any compassion to his new wife’s family, none of the books of canonical hadith mention it.
Bukhari does however conclude his tale with the truly romantic story of Muhammad pitching a fast tent on the edge of the oasis to sample the charms of his new bride A.S.A.P. Some people might find this a bit abrupt, but Muhammad had needs. Powerful needs. As he explained himself, in another hadith (Ibn Ishaq, 459) “(The Angel) Gabriel brought a kettle from which I ate and I was given the power of sexual intercourse equal to forty men.” In other words, it is Allah’s fault that The Soul Of Compassion was so horny he couldn’t wait to get Safiyyah into the tent.
From our wimpy 21st century viewpoint it might not be pleasant to contemplate that particular sex act, but I think we should try to imagine Safiyyah’s options when she found herself alone in that tent with the butcher of her people, who for some twisted hypocritical reason wanted to think of himself as her “husband.” Resistance would have meant death. She could have merely submitted. She could have let Allah’s Anointed do what he had come to do and hope it was quick…
But she was a woman of high status. Bukhari says that she was “the chief-mistress of the ladies of the tribes of Qurayzah and An-Nadir.” At that point she was the only high-ranking member of her tribe left and it was therefore her duty to do what she could to help her enslaved relatives. But she was now the newest wife of four, and she would be competing with those other three wives and several sex slaves in trying to gain influence with Muhammad. If she were to have any chance of helping what was left of her people, she would have to do more than submit to Muhammad, she would have to thrill him.
Her duty, and I imagine that she understood it, was to make the old murderer fall in love with her.
***********************************************************
Sources: Robert Spencer: The Truth About Muhammad
Sahih Bukhari, vol. I (book 8, #371)
Sahih Bukhari, vol. IV (book 53, #3169) cf. Ibn Sa’d vol.II, 144
Sahih Bukhari, vol. V (book 64, #4242)
See also the Wikipedia entry for Muhammad’s Wives, Safiyyah
Muhammad also had another sex slave named Rihana (or Rihayna), whose story is very similar to that of Safiyyah.
AND DON’T FORGET, June 21st is coming soon and that’s “International Say Anything About Islam Day.”
Read about it here:
http://edmundpickett.com/blog/2009/05/14/say-anything-about-islam-days/
washes all the kingdom’s dirty linen in public, and though the fall predicted by Aburish hasn’t happened yet, after reading his indictment, it’s hard to believe the princes can last much longer. By the way, there are over twenty thousand princes and not one of them has to work for a living. That sounds like an incredible number, but Ibn Saud, the first king, who died in 1953, had 37 sons and they have all been reproducing with similar dedication ever since. You do the math. No one knows how many daughters the old man had because no one kept score. Girls don’t count, but I would guess that their sons are princes. It’s an exponential dynasty.
,by Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the 
by Hamid Algar, is a short, focused look at the legacy of Muhammad ibn-Abd al-Wahab (born 1703), the Muslim scholar who founded the sect that has become the official religion of 
, Mackey describes her part of this whirlwind, with a very keen eye for the human dimension. She knew very little about Islam before arriving in the kingdom and never shows much interest in religion. This doesn’t harm her book at all. Her focus is always on the people and since Islam affects every aspect of daily life there, the effect of religion is always evident. She tells her story like all good travel writers, by anecdote. Certainly much has changed since she left, but I’m sure the things she noticed: the oppression of women; the privileges of the royals; and the unimaginable corruption have not abated at all.
, Yaroslav Trofimov, a veteran journalist for the Wall Street Journal, uncovers the astounding facts about the battle that changed Islam forever, facts that the Saudi government is still trying to suppress. He talked to soldiers who fought for the army and even found a few survivors from among the rebels, most of whom were beheaded. It is a gripping story of brutal close combat that lasted weeks, most of it in the endless tunnels under the Grand Mosque. At the time, because the Saudis were saying nothing, disinformation predominated, mainly coming from 
by Karen Armstrong, a former nun, who previously wrote a best selling biography of God. In her telling, Mohammed is the very soul of compassion, who brought enlightenment to the pagans of 
, Armstrong’s general thesis is that Mohammed never did anything wrong, and if he did, everyone else was doing it too, and in 
she describes her seven years as a nun, an experience which she says left her scarred emotionally. It is difficult to summarize her current religious beliefs, but basically she thinks all the great religious traditions are trying to approach the same God, and if you don’t take what they say literally, they are equally valid. She says that compassion is the supreme virtue and the one we must honor when speaking of anyone else’s religion. She believes this requires her to accept at face value everything Muslims say about Muhammad and Islam, so she accepts without question every dodgy excuse Muslims have ever made to excuse the barbarous cruelties of their prophet. For instance, Muhammad had two concubines, more correctly known as sex slaves, one of whom he enslaved after defeating her tribe in battle, and then executing her husband and father. Armstrong says, “The emancipation of women was a project dear to the prophet’s heart.” And on the same page she adds, “…Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company of women.” (Islam: A Short History, pg. 67) In short, Karen Armstrong might as well be a muslim missionary.
by Ibn Warraq, a readable guide to every argument ever made against Islam. The author was raised as a muslim, then became an atheist. He attacks every claim made by muslims about their faith and leaves not one stone standing on another. The Koran is not infallible, not the word of God, it is not even good Arabic. Mohammed was a mass murderer, a pedophile and a fraud. Islam despises women and hates science. If this sounds harsh, you should be aware that all the facts presented by Ibn Warraq come from canonical Muslim sources. I believe his arguments are irrefutable and that they should be read by anyone who wants to discuss Islam in public. Aside from the fraudulent nature of the Koran and the reprehensible character of Mohammed, Ibn Warraq discusses two important areas which are commonly shrouded in myths: Science and Women.