A recent article in The Huffington Post claims the prophet Muhammad was actually the world’s first real feminist and advocate of women’s rights.
In his article, “Muhammad was a Feminist,” Jim Garrison of something called Ubiquity University believes women’s equality is “key” to a real Arab Spring, and Muslims should promote the many ways in which Muhammad was a feminist. He writes:
“Of all the founders of the great religions - Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam and Judaism — Muhammad was easily the most radical and empowering in his treatment of women. Arguably he was history’s first feminist.”
So just to be clear, Garrison says a man who married 12 wives, one of which was six years old, is the first world feminist. Got it.
Muhammad, he claims, was “fundamentally different. He both explicitly taught the radical equality of women and men as a fundamental tenet of true spirituality, and he took numerous concrete measures to profoundly improve the status and role of women in Arabia during his own lifetime. Muhammad was sensitized to the plight of women because he was born poor and orphaned at a very early age. He was also illiterate. He knew as few did what poverty and social exclusion meant.”
(Not sure how being illiterate, poor and orphaned constitute relating to women and women’s rights.)
Garrison then went on to list a litany of what he considers are “examples” of how Muhammad showed his “feminist” side. He writes that Muhammad abolished female infanticide, gave them the right to own property and given inheritance rights, and was often seen doing “women’s work” around the house and was attentive to his family…and that he took poor and destitute women into his household, along with their children, and made those women his wives.
Garrison can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim Muhammad is a feminist when he’s basically telling women that are poor and destitute that they need to rely on a man because they apparently can’t make it on their own. Still, he claims that “liberating women would have profound effects politically, economically, culturally, artistically, and religiously… It is time for Islam to liberate women fully and do so upon the example of Muhammad and the authority of the Quran that holds compassion and mercy as the first and foremost attributes of Allah.”
