As for God's Messenger himself, the juicy goss about his love life comes not from the Koran but the complementary collections of hadiths, or sayings attributed to the Prophet that Muslims still use to nail down the particulars of everyday life.
For infidels like me, however, many of these tidbits fall under the heading of Too Much Information. Not for nothing did one Islamic commentator declare: 'The Prophet of God taught us everything, even how to defecate.'
Take these examples concerning Mohammed's only virgin bride, Aisha, who was eighteen when he died in his early sixties: one hadith recounts how the Prophet would fondle his child bride while she was menstruating (so long as she wore a special skirt to cover her 'unclean' bits).
And in a particularly bizarre anecdote, Aisha recalled spot-cleaning his garments: 'I used to wash the traces of semen from the clothes of the Prophet and he used to go for prayers while water spots were still visible.'
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| A 'Bahname' illustration from the late 1800s: 'bah'= potency/lust in Arabic; 'name' = booklet in Farsi (Sexual Life in Ottoman Society) |
Nevertheless, Muslim women often got screwed, so to speak, when it came to the bigger picture.
Despite their manifest usefulness for sex and the post-coital clean-up, a famous hadith quotes the Prophet as saying: 'I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.'
Maybe that's why Islam never got round to detailing the afterlife for members of the lascivious sex.
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