A recent Huffington Post article claimed that Muhammad was a feminist.
While the use of the term feminist seems anachronistic, I wanted to know if there was some truth in the author's idea that Muhammad created laws to protect and help women. He claims that:
Female infanticide was commonplace in the middle east
Muhammad gave them the right to own property and extended marital and inheritence rights
He changed the way dowry was paid, instead of going to the father it went to the wife and that she would keep it even after the marriage was terminated (by death)
He gave women the right to divorce their husbands (for any reason? Exceptions?)
Women were given the right to inherit property and family assets.
Is any of this true?
Hi,
I'll try to be brief. You're right that it's highly anachronistic to apply a modern term like "feminist" to someone like Muhammad, but the same has been done with terms like "socialist", for example in Maxime Rodinson's biography of the aforementioned. This is also not a scientific article, so we arguably do not have to hold it to the same standards. Whether that is ethical is another question.
As you'll probably know, the biggest problem with our understanding of Muhammad is that there are virtually no contemporary accounts of his life. All our information on his deeds and his life is derived from later, Islamic sources that sometimes contradict eachother and naturally exhibit a certain kind degree of bias. This is not to say these sources are false, but at the very least they should be treated with a large degree of caution, especially where it concerns pre-Islamic Arabia.
Another aspect of this problem is that the inhabitants of pre-Islamic Arabia were not a homogenous group. For example, pre-Islamic Yemen was characterised by a highly developed urban civilisation, and it seems unlikely that they would have the same laws as the settlements along the Syrian frontier, let alone those of the Bedouin tribes in the Arabian heartland. Interestingly, judging solely from the written material available, it would appear that gender distinctions in the upper part of the Peninsula were not as strongly defined as elswhere, considering the amount of materials written by women.
Moving on to the actual questions: I'm not a specialist on Islamic law, so I'm not quite comfrotable talking about marital and property rights, but I'll try to go through your points one-by-one:
Muhammad gave them the right to own property and extended marital and inheritence rights
It's possibly that Muhammad extended marital and inheritance rights, but even from Islamic sources it's apparent that women in pre-Islamic Arabia owned property and land, such as in the case of Khadija, Muhammad's first wife.
He changed the way dowry was paid, instead of going to the father it went to the wife and that she would keep it even after the marriage was terminated (by death)
Hoyland (2001) notes that something like this is mentioned by Tabari:
In pre-Islamic times, when a man died and left a widow, his heir, if he came at once and threw his garment over her, had the right to marry her under the dowry of her deceased master or to give her in marriage and take her dowry. But if she anticipated him and went off to her own people, then they took charge of her.
So it seems that according to the Islamic tradition that widows in pre-Islamic Arabia could be forcefully integrated into the tribal structure of her deceased husband. At the same time, Tabari also notes that they were able to escape from this fate. It doesn't seem very clear either way, but that is also the nature of the texts we're dealing with.
He gave women the right to divorce their husbands (for any reason? Exceptions?)
The trend seems to be in the opposite direction here, actually. Isfahani in his Kitāb al-Aghanī says that (some) women in pre-Islamic Arabia had the right to dismiss their husbands, which is to be contrasted with the Islamic perspective that a woman has to ask her husband to divorce her. She is theoretically able to go to a judge independently, but her husband will always have to finalise the divorce.
Women were given the right to inherit property and family assets.
This can be contested by looking to the Islamic sources, not just the aforementioned example of Khadija, but also the girl Waraqa, who is considered to have promised Muhammad's father a hundred camels if he would sleep with her. The implication here is that Waraqa herself was the owner of this stock of camels, and in the case of Khadija it is likely that she (partially) inhereted her wealth from her father or another male family member.
Is any of this true?
It is likely not completely false, but seriously ambiguous at best. It would appear that many of the things mentioned here as being introduced by Muhammad already existed at the time, and in some cases the preceding structure allowed more freedom to women. However, many of these things likely partially depended on class and wealth. It seems that Muhammad might have straightened this out and leveled the laws for society as a whole.
Opinion warning: In my opinion the article is poor journalism. We should be very careful with applying modern terms to historical figures so far removed from our own period, especially those with tremendous impact, such as Muhammad. Make no mistake, the same goes for terms like socialist (Rodinson), terrorist (Coulter, Spencer), post-colonialist (Crone), etc. In some cases these terms are useful in order to increase our understanding of the period, but we must be extremely cautious that these do not cloud our judgment.
Sources
EDIT: I'm bad at reddit formatting.
And if not, what was the motivating factor behind these actions?