The Truth:
Muhammad ordered the murder of several
women in his time. After he captured Mecca in 630, for example, he
demanded that two female slaves be put to death along with their master, merely
because they had mocked Muhammad in song (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 819, Abu Dawud
2684 & 2683, Sunan an-Nasa'i 4067).
The brutal death of
Umm Qirfa also refutes this
myth. So do the women who were killed in battle (Bukhari
52:257), when Muhammad’s men
attacked a town or tribe – although his preference was that women be captured
for sexual servitude rather than killed.
One account not only speaks of the killing of a
defenseless woman, but also refutes the broader misconception that Islam is
against attacking others for reasons other than
self-defense:
We went with the apostle on the raid of
Dhatu’l-Riqa of Nakhl and a man killed the wife of one of the polytheists. When
the apostle was on his way back, her husband, who had been away, returned and
heard the news of her death. He swore that he would not rest until he had taken
vengeance. (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 665) Muhammad ordered a Jewish woman put to death for
literally losing her mind while the male members of her family were being
beheaded (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 691). There were also
several women that the prophet of Islam ordered killed for adultery. One
example:
He went to her in the morning and she made a
confession. And Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) made pronouncement
about her and she was stoned to death. (Sahih Muslim
4209) There are other examples as well, but perhaps the
story from Muhammad’s biography that best lays to rest the silly idea that he
never approved of harming women is the assassination of Asma bint Marwan,
a poet and mother of five. For the crime of "displaying disaffection"
at the Muslim murder of an elderly man (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 995), the "apostle" ordered
her executed in the dead of night.
The brutal murder of this woman
by an assassin - who had to remove a suckling infant before plunging the knife into her
breast - is recounted
here, as
is Muhammad’s glee on hearing that his order had been successfully carried out.
Muslims who don’t deny the story outright (as
some are prone to do) usually claim that Asma posed a threat to Muhammad, since
she urged the Medinan community to put and end to the Muslim reign of terror
before it was too late. Such fervent believers never appear to question why a man
claiming to be Allah’s mouthpiece would find it necessary to respond to a
woman’s dissention with violence rather than logical argument, particularly if
he had done nothing wrong to begin with.
It is also interesting to note that even when
Muhammad forbade the killing of non-combatants in war, he took no action against
the most brutal abusers from among his ranks. In addition to the account
of Umm Qirfa (noted above) there is the fate of an unknown woman "whom Khalid
bin Walid had killed" in front of the other Muslims (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 856).
Although not approving of the woman's murder, Muhammad took no punitive measures
against Khalid, who was left in charge and went on to
lead the military conquest
of Christian and Persian lands. (This was not even the first time that Khalid bin Walid had slaughtered innocent people, including women - see
Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 834-838 for a more graphic event).
Finally, it is worth mentioning
that sparing the lives of captured women (and children) had less to do
with compassion and more to do with the fact that they were considered
property.
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