Economic FEMALE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

viewpoints IN EARLY ISLAM ecaf_2074 93..95

Benedikt Koehler

The absence of female leaders in business and public life is conspicuous in Islamic
societies. One explanation may be that Islam imposes legal and social inequality on
men and women. However, a comparison of female entrepreneurship in pre-Islamic
society and in Mohammed’s era shows that women occupied leadership roles before
and after the establishment of Islam. Mohammed’s wives were commercially astute,
and Mohammed and his contemporaries respected the rights of women to make
decisions regarding finances, matrimony and religious affiliation. The right of
women to assume public leadership roles is compatible with Islam.

Keywords: Khadija, Aisha, Maisun, gender discrimination, Islam.

Women in business before the
advent of Islam
Contemporary Western perspectives often
view the marital status and teachings of
Mohammed as diametrical to the notion that
Islam accords equal rights to men and women.
Indeed, cursory glances at the life of the
Prophet remonstrate with norms of equitable
distribution of authority and potency between
the sexes; at the time of his death, Mohammed
was married to 11 different women, and even
his teachings dictate that ‘Men have authority
over women because God has made the one
superior to the other, and because they spend
their wealth to maintain them.’1
Perfunctory analyses of Islamic attitudes to
women notwithstanding, a closer investigation
of women in pre-Islamic Arabia and during
Mohammed’s era reveals that, in fact, they
exercised considerable rights in commerce and
in matrimony. Before turning to the status of
businesswomen in Mohammed’s immediate
family, a look at the position of women in
Arabian society and commerce prior to the
birth of Mohammed is in order.
Women in pre-Islamic Arabian society as a
rule were severely constrained due partly to
the constant threat of kidnapping raiders.
Protection of women would have been a
burden on their communities. Such
circumstances would have restricted freedom
of movement for women.
Geography may help further explain the
restrictions. The desert climate, poor
agricultural yields and recurring epidemics
exacerbate the vulnerability of all but the
most resilient. The imperative of tribal
survival may have been the reason for one of
the heart-breaking exigencies of desert life,
namely the custom of infanticide of newborn
girls deemed too weak to survive. Infanticide
was as cruel to parents as it was to babies. A
tradition relates that Osman, one of the
Righteous Caliphs born in pre-Islamic Arabia,
only once in his life was seen to shed tears in
public. This show of grief occurred when his
baby daughter wiped the dust from his beard
whilst he buried her.
One might expect that in such a harsh
social climate, men would not tolerate
women’s aspirations for autonomy. However,
pre-Islamic Arabia was familiar with female
entrepreneurs. One prominent example
features in Mohammed’s direct ancestry.
Mohammed’s great grandfather Hashim (born
c. 464) met his future wife Selma on a trading
mission to Medina, where he observed her
trading on her own account through
instructions to agents. Mohammed’s great
grandmother accepted Hashim’s marriage
proposal on strict pre-nuptial terms:
specifically, she retained control over her own
property and the right to divorce at will
(Muir, 1912, p. CXIII).
Mohammed, like his great grandfather
Hashim, was a trader who married a
businesswoman. The background and story of
the marriages of Mohammed’s first wife
Khadija, who belonged to Mecca’s social elite,
illustrate the opportunities open to
enterprising women of her class and era.

© 2011 The Author. Economic Affairs © 2011 Institute of Economic Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford
94 female entrepreneurship in early islam
Before meeting Mohammed, Khadija had been married
twice, and had built her fortune by trading on her own
account. She provided Mohammed with the start-up capital
for his first venture. Khadija was older than Mohammed,
richer and educated to a higher standard; for example, unlike
Mohammed, Khadija could read and write. It was she, rather
than Mohammed, who proposed their marriage, which lasted
25 years, and during which Mohammed remained
monogamous until she died in 619.
Mohammed’s later wife Aisha was jealous of Khadija and
once chided Mohammed for his affection for a ‘toothless old
woman’. However, Mohammed rebuked her: ‘She believed in
me when I was rejected; when they called me a liar, she
proclaimed me truthful; when I was poor, she shared with me
her wealth; and Allah granted me her children though
withholding those of other women’ (Abbott, 1985, p. 48).
Mohammed’s domestic economy
Prior to finding his vocation as a Prophet, Mohammed had
been a successful businessman enjoying a comfortable lifestyle.
When his fellow citizens, led by his adversary Abu Sufyan,
realised that his espousal of monotheism might disrupt
Mecca’s standing as a trading entrepôt hosting pilgrims
irrespective of their creed, Mohammed and his followers were
boycotted and persecuted, resulting in his business falling on
hard times. Eventually, Mohammed fled from Mecca to
Medina.
Exile in Medina presented Mohammed with an
opportunity to establish an Islamic society. A novel aspect of
Mohammed’s interpretation of his religion upon his arrival in
Medina was that he now eschewed the monogamy of his
earlier years and, as a widower in his early fifties, he now
practised polygamy.
Descriptions of Mohammed’s lifestyle derive from
accounts by his later wife Aisha. According to her, exile from
Mecca in the first instance resulted in a severe drop in
Mohammed’s standard of living. During their early years in
Medina, the family went without meat or bread for months,
and was forced to survive on a diet of dates and water.
Mohammed’s habits were frugal to the point of self-denial:
he refused to eat flour made from almonds, which he
considered food for a spendthrift (Muir, 1912, p. 527), he did
not increase his household spending, even after he established
his rule over Medina and gifts from followers improved his
income. His home in Medina was plain, built in unburnt
brick. Mohammed expended little effort to improve his
home’s appearance, and he did not care for opulence.
However, he was fastidious about his personal appearance.
His kept his clothes clean and neat, and he used perfume in
his rooms and on his person. Mohammed helped with
housekeeping, for example with sewing and cobbling shoes,
and he took communal meals with his wives and his servants.
Ultimately, Mohammed’s military success soon restored his
personal wealth. He claimed a fifth of the bounty from military
conquests; however, he passed on most of his personal share
as charitable gifts to those who had proved loyal, deserving,
and needy. He was exacting in his respect for property rights.
A tradition relates that when Mohammed saw a child chewing
a date from a tree given over to provide for the poor, he
© 2011 The Author. Economic Affairs © 2011 Institute of Economic Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford
scooped the date out of the child’s mouth and declared it
impious to take away from the dues of the poor. All told,
Mohammed’s own lifestyle does not suggest he would have
encouraged his wives to expect let alone aspire to material
wealth.
Mohammed died as he had lived. His grave, dug in the
very spot where he had died, was maintained without any
remotely extravagant trappings, and he left most of his estate
to charities. As a consequence, his 11 surviving widows had
very little money and their future required financial planning.
One might assume that given Mohammed’s single-minded
insistence to enforce the tenets of Islam in all spheres of life,
he would not have expended efforts to improve the protection
of women. On the contrary, he bettered the rights of
vulnerable women by terminating the custom of infanticide of
infant girls. Moreover, he outlawed forcing female slaves into
prostitution.
Pension rights
One might expect that after so many years of cohabitation
with an ascetic husband, Mohammed’s widows would have
submitted to indigence. One possible means of providing for
their future would have been for the widows to find a new
husband. The example of Khadija shows that remarriage was
common in pre-Islamic Arabia, and indeed this tradition
continued in Islam. A further example for this custom is the
marital history of Asma, wife of Jafar, who was one of
Mohammed’s senior commanders.
Jafar was killed in battle in 629, after which Asma then
married Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s father-in-law. After Abu Bakr
died in 634, she married Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law. We may
assume that necessity rather than emotions motivated Asma’s
choice of partners, and that marriage was a form of social
security. To Mohammed’s widows, on the other hand, the
option of remarriage was closed as the Prophet had willed that
they should not be wives to other men. If the Prophet’s
widows were to escape penury, they needed to find another
solution.
The caliph Umar was aware of the need for financial
support and settled pensions on each of the Prophet’s widows.
He offered an annual pension of 12,000 dirhams for Aisha,
and a smaller stipend for each of Mohammed’s other widows
on a sliding scale down to 5,000 dirhams. This offer, the
widows found, was wholly inadequate, and they complained
and asked Umar to reconsider. Their appeal succeeded: his
revised settlement raised individual pensions to 10,000
dirhams, whilst Aisha retained her pension of 12,000 dirhams.
Thus, the total annual stipend to Mohammed’s surviving
family was 112,000 dirhams per year (Abbott, 1985, p. 95).
Records of property transactions illustrate the purchasing
power of this amount. For example, Sawdah, another of
Mohammed’s widows, bequeathed her apartment to Aisha,
and Aisha sold this property for some 180,000 dirhams (ibid.,
p. 197).
The women were not shy to assert financial interests and
did not shirk conflict. Aisha is a case in point: traditions relate
that she topped up her income by trading in slaves; we also
know that she participated in the military campaign against

Ali, and in the decisive engagement of that civil war, she was
present on the battlefield, exhorting soldiers to fight.
The assertiveness of women in Mohammed’s own family
was by no means unparalleled in Mohammed’s era. Abu
Sufyan, Mohammed’s adversary in Mecca, faced similarly
resolute women in his own family. Abu Sufyan’s daughter
Ramlah disobeyed her father’s injunctions against
Mohammed; she was an early convert to Islam and married
Mohammed.
When Abu Sufyan finally conceded rule over Mecca to
Mohammed, against a concession that his son Muawiya would
be offered a senior post in the new government, his angered
wife, Hind, rebuked his lack of fortitude. Hind’s marriage with
Abu Sufyan eventually ended in divorce, but that did not
compel her to withdraw from public life. The Arab historian
Al Tabari reports Hind borrowed capital from the caliph Umar
to set up as a caravanning trader between Syria and Mecca.
The last mention of the formidable Hind in Al Tabari’s
chronicles has her haggling over trade duties.
Female self-determination in choice
of religion
Finance and war were not the only spheres were women in
Mohammed’s era exercised their right to autonomy. Other
spheres of independence were in religion and literary pursuits.
Abu Sufyan’s daughter Ramlah, in asserting her right to choose
her religion, was not unique. Mohammed respected this right
even in his own household. One of his wives, the Coptic
Christian Mariya, accepted his invitation to convert to Islam;
another, the Jewess Rihana, preferred to stay true to her faith.
In seventh-century Arabia, society’s female elite was as
articulate as it was assertive. Arabian society prized literary
accomplishment, and some of the country’s poets were female.
Mohammed himself praised the work of one such
contemporary female poet, Tumadir al-Khansa, another early
convert to Islam. This tradition continued long after
Mohammed’s death. Poems have survived authored by
another accomplished female poet of early Islam, Maisun, wife
to Abu Sufyan’s son, the caliph Muawiya.
© 2011 The Author. Economic Affairs © 2011 Institute of Economic Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford
iea e c o n o m i c a f f a i r s j u n e 2 0 11 95
Maisun, of Bedouin stock, found life at the caliphal court
in Damascus contrived and stilted. She refused to settle into
married life with Muawiya and vented her frustration in one of
her poems:
The rustic youth unspoiled by art
Son of my kindred, poor but free
Will ever to Maisuma’s heart,
Be dearer, pampered fool, than thee.2
This poem (and other anecdotes) projects an image of a wife
who was anything but demure and subservient to her
husband. Indeed, Muawiya and Maisun in due course
divorced. Maisun returned to her Bedouin tribe, taking her
son Yazid with her.
Conclusion
These biographies of women in early Islam do not conform to
preconceptions of female discrimination. For the sake of
comparison, early Islamic society seems to feature greater
self-determination by women than would have been the case
in then contemporary Christendom. Female merchants and
poets are not recorded for seventh-century Europe. Facts do
not support the assertion that the advent of Islam reversed or
thwarted the right of Arabic women to take decisions
regarding their finances or their choice of religion.
1. Sura 4:34.
2. Reproduced in Carlyle (1796, p. 38).
References
Abbott, N. (1985) Aishah, the Beloved of Mohammed, London: Saqi
Books.
Carlyle, J. (1796) Specimens of Arabian Poetry, Cambridge: John Burges.
Muir, W. (1912) The Life of Mohammad from Original Sources,

Edinburgh: Elibron Classics.
Benedikt Koehler (Koehler.benedikt@gmail.com).