After the age of Aisha, three relationships in the Prophet’s life attract the most criticism. Zaynab bint Jaḥsh had been married to his adopted son Zayd. Ṣafiyyah bint Ḥuyayy was a captive after the conquest of Khaybar. Māriyah the Copt came to Medina as a gift from the ruler of Egypt. The prophet’s marriages, critics argue, show a man who took what he wanted and produced revelations to justify it. Each case rests on specific sources, and each deserves to be examined on them.
Zaynab bint Jaḥsh and the adopted son
Zayd ibn Ḥārithah had been a slave in the Prophet’s household, freed and adopted by him before the prophethood, and known as Zayd ibn Muḥammad. The Prophet arranged his marriage to Zaynab, his own cousin, a woman of noble lineage who accepted the match reluctantly. The marriage was unhappy, and Zayd came repeatedly to the Prophet wanting to divorce her. The Quran records what followed:
Two hadith in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī fix the context. Anas reports that the verse was revealed about Zaynab and Zayd (4787), and that the Prophet kept telling Zayd to fear God and keep his wife (7420). In the same report ʿĀʾishah remarks that if the Prophet had concealed anything of the Quran, he would have concealed this verse.
That remark answers the central accusation. The verse rebukes the Prophet for hiding something out of fear of what people would say, and it records that he urged Zayd to stay married. A man composing revelations to serve his desires would not publish a verse that criticises him and exposes the awkward detail he had tried to keep private. The verse’s stated purpose is legal: to end the pre-Islamic rule that an adopted son’s former wife was forbidden to the adoptive father, as if the adoption created a blood tie. The Quran makes the same point a few verses later:
Adoption in pre-Islamic Arabia transferred lineage, inheritance and name. The Quran abolished that legal fiction while keeping the duty of care for orphans and foster children, and the Prophet’s marriage to Zaynab was the public demonstration that the old taboo no longer applied. Critics may disagree with the reform. They cannot fairly describe it as a pretext invented after the fact, because the verse that announces it is the one that rebukes him.
Later biographies contain a story in which the Prophet saw Zaynab unveiled and was struck by her beauty, and some critics build their case on it. The story has no sound chain, and scholars such as Ibn Kathīr declined to repeat it for that reason. Zaynab was the Prophet’s cousin; he had known her all her life and had himself proposed her marriage to Zayd. A sudden infatuation fits the facts poorly.
Ṣafiyyah bint Ḥuyayy
Ṣafiyyah was the daughter of Ḥuyayy ibn Akhṭab, a chief of the Banū al-Naḍīr, and was among the captives taken at Khaybar in 628. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī records how the marriage was concluded:
In the warfare of the time, captured women became slaves, and the law of war in every neighbouring empire allowed it. The Prophet freed her, and the marriage followed her freedom, with her liberty itself as the dower. The sources report that she was offered the choice of returning to her people and chose to stay. Later reports record the other wives taunting her as the daughter of a Jew, and the Prophet telling her to answer that her father was Aaron, her uncle Moses and her husband Muhammad.
The marriage took place days after a battle in which her husband and relatives were killed, and modern readers find that difficult. The question is fair. The answer from the sources is that a woman of her rank, captured in war, faced either slavery in another household or the protection of marriage to the leader of the victors, and that the Prophet chose to free her and offer marriage. Her later life in Medina, as a respected wife and then a widow honoured by the caliphs, does not resemble the story the critics tell.
Māriyah the Copt
Māriyah came to Medina as a gift from al-Muqawqis, the ruler of Egypt, in reply to the Prophet’s letter. She bore him a son, Ibrāhīm, who died in infancy. Critics point out that the sources describe her as a concubine and not as one of the “mothers of the believers.”
The status was a recognised one in the ancient world, including in the Hebrew Bible, where Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon had concubines. Islamic law placed limits on it that the surrounding cultures did not: a concubine who bore her master a child became umm walad (mother of a child), could not be sold, and became free on his death, and the child was free and legitimate. Māriyah’s son was the Prophet’s acknowledged son, and the Prophet wept at his death. The scholars differ over whether she was formally freed in his lifetime, and both views are found in the classical literature.
Judged by the standards of its time, the relationship carried protections that slavery elsewhere lacked. Judged by modern standards, any form of slavery is objectionable, and the Islamic legal tradition itself encouraged manumission so strongly that freeing slaves became an expiation for many sins. The fair question is whether the Prophet’s conduct moved his society toward or away from the abolition that later came, and the sources point toward.
Reading the marriages as a whole
The Prophet was married to one woman, Khadījah, fifteen years his senior, for twenty-five years, until her death. Almost all of his later marriages took place in Medina during a decade of war, and most of the women were widows or divorcees. Several marriages sealed alliances with tribes, and several gave protection to women whose husbands had been killed. The Quran also told his wives that they were free to leave him if they preferred worldly comfort:
None of this requires the reader to approve of every custom of seventh-century Arabia. It does require the critic to explain why a man supposedly driven by desire spent his youth in a single marriage to an older widow, published a verse that rebuked him over Zaynab, freed Ṣafiyyah before marrying her, and offered every wife the option of leaving. The charge of lust fits the summary. It fits the sources much less well.