Fig & Olive

“Khadija was a tradeswoman of honor and wealth. She used to hire men to carry out her trade based on profit-sharing, as Quraysh were a people of commerce” (Seerah of Ibn Hisham). Upon learning of the prophet’s character she offered him a proposal to work for her in the same manner. Muslims utilize Khadija’s position as a tradeswoman to make a case either about women’s “empowerment” through work or to belittle men’s responsibility to care for women, but are either arguments truly validated by the example of Khadija?

Women working

Can women work in Islam? Yes, with all the obvious and appropriate considerations, women can work. Yet the example of Khadija cannot be utilized to make a case for women working. For one, we must ask, ‘what is work?’ Well, to most of us in the West, work is having a job and going to said job for a number of hours to make money. That is not what Khadija did. Khadija utilized her inheritance from her previous marriages to make more money through wisely investing in buying products and hiring others to sell on her behalf. The dynamic of having money and putting that money to use is quite different from the dynamic of one who gains an income solely reliant on the time clocked into a job. At best, we could compare what Khadija did to having a ‘passive income’ where one sets up a business that makes money not dependent on one’s time.

Women working as empowering

It may seem like splitting hairs to point out the difference between the kind of ‘work’ Khadija did and the kind of work the modern woman does, but it is, in fact, a crucial difference. Women who have to work for someone else, who are not in control of their time and must work to take care of themselves are not empowered, they are —like men who do the same, wage slaves.

Work is not in and of itself empowering. And this is especially true when work is not an option but a must, which is how it’s presented to modern women. Women are simultaneously told that work is empowering while also being told they must work because one-income homes are impossible in modernity. In reality, again, work is not empowering. What is in fact empowering is that women in Islam do not have to work, but can if they choose to. Empowerment is having the full ability to choose one’s life path.

Men’s right to care for women

The example of Khadija is also used to diminish men’s responsibility to care for their wives. Calls for men to uphold their financial responsibility are often met with “—but, Khadija worked,” by Muslim men. As we’ve already clarified, Khadija did not work in the way we think of ‘work’ in modernity. This is, again, important to make clear. In the dynamic of marriage —among both Muslims and non-Muslims, women are expected to continue to be primary caregivers and primarily responsible for household chores while also helping to pay the bills (sometimes being equal or primary breadwinners), this is an unjust division of labor. While it’s true that Khadija had more wealth than the prophet, peace to him, at the time of their marriage it is not true that their marriage resembles the unjust division of labor existent in modern marriages.

What’s also important to note is that, similar to the age difference between the Prophet (peace to him) and Khadija, their wealth-gap was an anomaly. No other wife of the prophet, peace to him, was a ‘tradeswoman’ as Khadija was or held any kind of employment. So it was not the prophet’s general sunnah to marry women wealthier them him, all of his wives —except Khadija, were financially dependent on him. And this, of course, supports the general command by God that “Men are the caretakers of women…” (4:34)

Ending false narratives

In short, men are the caretakers of women and women have the choice to work if they want to and they also have the choice to do with their money what they choose. This responsibility is so crucial that when Hind bint Utba told the prophet, peace to him, that her husband was a miser who had not given her enough money to take care of her needs that he gave her permission to take it by force,

Hind said, ‘O God’s Messenger! [My husband] Abū Sufyan is a miser. Is it sinful of me to feed my children from his property?’ The Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم said, ‘No unless you take it for your needs what is just and reasonable.’”

If a woman has wealth and her husband is poor than he and her children are most deserving of her charity. But it is exactly that, charity. Yet and still, having wealth and working out of force —even if due to the husband’s economic hardship, are two entirely different scenarios and there is no support in Islam for the later. Women are easily made to feel guilty if they have the ‘ability to work’ and do not want to or purposely seek men who can fulfill their financial rights. But it is not the women who should feel guilty but anyone —man or woman, who attempts to trivialize her right not to work, given to women by God Himself.

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