Muhammad’s polygamy was political alliance-building, not lust

Evidence

Yet Muhammad did not marry until the age of twenty-five and then remained monogamous for another twenty-four years, until Khadîja’s death in 619. Perhaps more significant is that his polygamy begins in Medina, where he has become an important political and military leader: like many an Arab potentate before him, Muhammad used marriage to forge important political alliances and to reflect his political and economic prestige. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 224

Categorization

• QUESTION: A useful counterframe to the standard Christian polemic image of Muhammad as lustful — worth checking whether historians of marriage in early Islam confirm the alliance interpretation.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The politics of marriage’ — how rulers across traditions used polygamy/diplomatic marriage (Arab potentates, European royalty, the prophet himself) purely as statecraft, and how that reading gets lost in polemic.
• XREF: connects to: One medieval writer read polygamy as Islamic law’s cure for covetousness