So I mentioned awhile ago that I'm reading Matt's copy of Reza Alsan's "No god but God", a book about the origins of Islam, and last night I was reading and I though that this passage was very poignant:

After having a monogamous life with Khadija for more than twenty-five years, Muhammad, in the course of ten years in Yathrib, married nine different women. However, with very few exceptions, these marriages were not sexual unions but political ones…
Nevertheless, for fourteen hundred years – from the medieval Popes of the Crusades to the Enlightenment philosophers for Europe to the evangelical preachers of the United States – Muhammad’s wives have been the source of numerous lurid attacks against the Prophet and the religion of Islam. In response, contemporary scholars – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – have done considerable work to defend Muhammad’s marriages, especially his union with Aisha, who was nine years old when betrothed to the Prophet. While these scholars should be commended for their work in debunking the bigoted and ignorant critiques of anti-Islamic preachers and pundits, the fact is that Muhammad needs no defense on this point.
Like the great Jewish patriarchs Abraham and Jacob; like the prophets Moses and Hosea; like the Israelite kings Saul, David, and Solomon; and like nearly all of the Christian/Byzantine and Zoroastrian/Sasanian monarchs, all Shaykhs in Arabia – Muhammad included – had either multiple wives, multiple concubines, or both. In seventh century Arabia, a Shaykh’s power and authority was in large part determined by the size of his harem. And while Muhammad’s union with a nine-year-old girl may be shocking to our modern sensibilities, his betrothal to Aisha was just that: a betrothal. Aisha did not consummate her marriage to Muhammad until after reaching puberty, which is when every girl in Arabia without exception became eligible for marriage. The most shocking aspect of Muhammad’s marriages is not his ten years of polygamy in Yathrib, but his twenty-five years of monogamy in Mecca, something practically unheard of at the time…

I feel that this passage is a great example of how many Western attitudes toward Islam are so one-sided and uninformed. I’m way too lazy to go into great detail, as school is almost here and I’m going to have to actually put thought into things way too often soon, but it reminded me that some of the world’s largest religions have histories that are so intertwined that one cannot simply attack a religion other than one’s own before really thinking about how both religions actually came to be. Right after this Aslan goes into the history of the use of the veil, which is also incredibly interesting to read, unless you are one of the screaming anti-Islamic ultra Christians of the Midwest… Anyway, I just wanted to appreciate a different view of the world, and not the processed one you find in the US news. I also wanted to remind you all that deep, deep down inside you secretly want to be a History major. Deep… deep down.