Author:
Publication: The Economist
Date: January 31, 2003
A paper that dipped into Muhammad's
sex-life is banned
TIME was, long ago, when Muslim
commentators delved with tabloid nosiness into the public and private life
of the Prophet Muhammad. Bukhari, considered the most authentic of the
early collectors of the Prophet's sayings, revelled in the ins and outs
of who slept with whom, when and where. No longer. When al-Hilal, a small
Jordanian weekly, published accounts, based on Bukhari, of the Prophet's
sex-life, the result was shock and horror.
This week, three of al-Hilal's journalists
were hauled, chained and caged, before a state security court and tried
for defaming the messenger of God. An army general had earlier closed the
paper down under a draconian decree, introduced after the September 11th
attacks. This new sanctimoniousness, said officials, was a precaution to
ward off a hue-and-cry from Jordan's Islamists, already restive over King
Abdullah's hands-off approach to the looming war on Iraq. Instead, the
government's action encouraged the Islamists.
Within days of the banning, the
main Islamist party, the Islamic Action Front, issued a hellfire fatwa
denouncing the jailed journalists as apostates, even though one of them
is a Christian. Little matter that, as the journalists told the court,
they had selected their quotes from books licensed by Al Azhar, the Cairo-based
font of Islamic orthodoxy, and on sale all over the kingdom. "The Prophet
was a man of religion not sex," pronounced a former religious-affairs minister
prissily.
The paper had quoted companions
of the Prophet recording that Gabriel, the angel of revelation, came to
Muhammad, then in his 50s, and revealed an unclothed Aisha, aged 6. When
the marriage was consummated three years later, said the paper, Aisha so
thrilled the Prophet that his libido soared from the "least of men" to
the strength of 40. She teased her conjugal rivals that she was favourite
because she alone had been a virgin, and the Prophet preferred "to eat
fruit from trees ungrazed".
Modern scholars draw a distinction
between the Meccan period, when the Prophet stayed faithful to a widow,
Khadija, until her death, and the Medinan period, when he acquired his
own city state, and took a young wife about once a year, having nine when
he died. "If I say Muhammad was hyper-sexual, I'm not criticising the faith,"
said al-Hilal's publisher, Ahmed Salama. "But we've stopped worshipping
God, and now worship his servants."
