A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Appendix B/21
[Sidenote: Sir W. Muir's conjectures not justified.]
21. Sir W. Muir has exceeded the limit he himself had marked out for a judicious historian of Mohammad when he abounds in his wild fancies, and observes—
- "Zeid went straightway to Mahomet, and declared his readiness to divorce Zeinab for him. This Mahomet declined: 'Keep thy wife to thyself,' he said, 'and fear God.' But Zeid could plainly see that these words proceeded from unwilling lips, and that the Prophet had still a longing eye for Zeinab."[1]
Now this is a mere libellous surmise. He goes on still with his defamatory conjectures, and writes:—
- "Still the passion for Zeinab could not be smothered; it continued to burn within the heart of Mahomet, and at last bursting forth, scattered other considerations to the wind."[2]
Mohammad never professed to have received a divine command to marry Zeinab. It was not necessary for him to have done so. The outcry raised by the Pagan Arabs was not because they suspected an intrigue on the Prophet's part to secure a divorce, but because they looked upon an adopted son in the light of a true son, and considered, therefore, the marriage with Zeinab, after her divorce from Zeid, as falling within the prohibited degrees. This adoptive affinity was already abolished in the Koran (Sura XXXIII, 4): "God hath not made your adopted sons as your own sons."
Sir W. Muir gravely mistakes in his remarks when he says:—
- "The marriage caused much obloquy, and to save his reputation, Mahomet had the impious effrontery to sanction it by special Revelation from on high, in which the Almighty is represented as formally recording a divine warrant for the union."[3]
He quotes verse 36, Sura XXXIII. But he has himself admitted (Vol. III, page 229 footnote) "that this verse is rather in a recitative style of a past event," and not a divine command to marry Zeinab. The words "we joined thee in marriage unto her" in the verse do not mean a command for marriage. They simply mean that the marriage had taken place. The phrase "we joined thee in marriage unto her" is a mere form of expression. Almost all human actions are attributed to God in the Koran, and whatever occurs in the world by the ordinary course of nature, and by the free agency of men, is referred in the Koran to the immediate agency of God.