62 No god but God
from his own wealth. If the husband died, his wife would inherit a por-
tion of his property; if he divorced her, the entire dowry was hers to
take back to her family.
As one would expect, Muhammad’s innovations did not sit well
with the male members of his community. If women could no longer
be considered property, men complained, not only would their wealth
be drastically reduced, but their own meager inheritances would now
have to be split with their sisters and daughters—members of the
community who, they argued, did not share an equal burden with the
men. Al-Tabari recounts how some of these men brought their griev-
ances to Muhammad, asking, “How can one give the right of inheri-
tance to women and children, who do not work and do not earn their
living? Are they now going to inherit just like men who have worked
to earn that money?”
Muhammad’s response to these complaints was both unsympa-
thetic and shockingly unyielding. “Those who disobey God and His
Messenger, and who try to overstep the boundaries of this [inheri-
tance] law will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suf-
fering the most shameful punishment” (4:14).
If Muhammad’s male followers were disgruntled about the new
inheritance laws, they must have been furious when, in a single revo-
lutionary move, he both limited how many wives a man could marry
and granted women the right to divorce their husbands.
In some ways, pre-Islamic Arabian custom was extraordinarily lax
when it came to both marriage and divorce. In Bedouin societies, both
men and women practiced polygamy and both had recourse to
divorce: men simply by making a statement such as “I divorce you!”
and women—who remained with their father’s family during mar-
riage—by turning their tent around so that its entrance would no
longer be available to the husband when he came for a “visit.” Because
paternity was unimportant in Bedouin societies (lineage was passed
primarily through the mother), it made no difference how many hus-
bands a woman had or who fathered her children. However, in seden-
tary societies like Mecca, where the accumulation of wealth made
inheritance and, therefore, paternity much more important, matrilin-
eal society had gradually given way to a patrilineal one. As a result of
this trend toward patriliny, women in sedentary societies were gradu-