Muhammad: Seal of the Prophets — Page 472
MUHAMMAD : SEAL OF THE PROPHETS 472 he lived a virtuous life; and at the age of twenty - five he married a widow forty years old, during whose lifetime for five and twenty years he was a faithful husband to her alone. Professor Vaglieri has observed ( An Interpretation of Islam, pp. 67,68): Enemies of Islam have insisted in depicting Muhammad as a sensual individual and a dissolute man, trying to find in his marriages evidence of a weak character not consistent with his mission. They refuse to take into consideration the fact that during thos e years of his life when by nature the sexual urge is strongest, although he lived in a society like that of the Arabs, where the institution of marriage was almost non - existent, where polygamy was the rule, and where divorce was very easy indeed, he was m arried to one woman alone, Khadija, who was much older than himself, and that for twenty - five years he was her faithful, loving husband. Only when she died and when he was already more than fifty years old did he marry again and more than once. Each of the se marriages had a social or political reason, for he wanted through the women he married to honour pious women, or to establish marriage relations with other clans and tribes for the purpose of opening the way for the propagation of Islam. With the sole e xception of Aisha, he married women who were neither virgins, nor young nor beautiful. Was this sensuality?