The Marriage of the Holy Prophet ﷺ with Hazrat Khadija (R.A.): Western Critiques & Revert Muslim Re-evaluations

Abstract

The marriage of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with Harat Khadija (R.A.) is one of the more profoundly spiritual marriages in Islamic history. This marriage has long been the area of debate of the pro-orientalist critique; such a critique has frequently portrayed this marriage as evidence of economical and personal motivation. This article critically highlighted the underlying assumptions of the Western representations of the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ marriage with Hazrat Khadija (R.A.). In response to these critics, this study provides the reevaluations provided by the Western revert Muslim intellectuals, those individuals who have embraced Islam from a non-Muslim background, mostly from the Western societies. Their uniqueness is that they use both the Islamic traditional process and the Western academic approaches and challenge the reductive narratives. To give the historical rooted and academic perspective by critically analyzing how the western revert Muslims reevaluate the western critiques of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ's marriage with Khadija (R.A.). The study has a qualitative methodology and applies the analytical and comparative framework to examine. This comparative analysis of Western critique and the revert Muslims' work gives the evidence that these reverts play the significant role between the Islamic Sīrah tradition and Western academia. This analytical study also illustrates that these reevaluations contribute to challenging the persistent misrepresentation of the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ marriage with Hazrat Khadija (R.A.) and give the nuanced understanding about that relationship that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself remembered with profound reverence throughout his life.