The Case of Muhammad

OF MUHAMMAD'S childhood and adolescence nothing is known that would in any way explain the peculiarities of behavior which developed when he was about forty years old. To be sure there are reports which have been taken to indicate epilepsy on two occasions in childhood; but these have been rejected by most competent recent scholarship.' At about twenty-four or twenty-five 2 Muhammad married Khadija, a woman fifteen years his senior. In spite of the disparity of age he lived happily with her until her death, about twenty-five or twenty-six years later. During her lifetime he made no attempt to take another wife; and she appears to have occupied a unique place in his affections even long after her death and after many matrimonial experiences. She bore him at least six, and perhaps as many as seven or eight3 children, although she had come to him when forty years old and already the mother of two children by two previous marriages. For the bearing of Muhammad's children quite obviously we cannot allow less than six years; on the other hand, even assuming that there were eight children, we cannot well allow more than ten years, for at the end of that time Khadija would have been fifty years old, and probably would have been incapable of further childbearing. During these six to ten years, then, Muhammad lived the life of an obscure and contented husband and parent. At the end of that time, however, Khadija probably became senescent; while Muhammad, being in the early thirties, or at most thirty-five, was scarcely middle-aged. The physical stress of this situation is evident. The natural disparity between the sexes in their resistance to old age is nowhere plainer than in the East; and here the disparity was aggravated by an unheard-of seniority in the woman. The strain was heightened by Muhammad's unusual austerity and loyalty. To make

Education and Islamic Studies · Families in Therapy and Culture · Linguistic, Cultural, and Literary Studies · Philosophy

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