The Mothers of the Believers in the Hadith (3/4)

The Prophet's Wives in Early Hadith Hagiography

The Hadith collections that include the traditions on Muhammad's (Peace be upon him) wives' human frailties also contain reports of miraculous events that studded the women's lives.[1] These occurrences, to be sure, always involve the Prophet, and it is in their relationships with him that the women are granted miraculous experiences or abilities.

The traditions relate such an event in connection with Muhammad's first wife, Khadija bint al-Khuwaylid, said to have occurred during her participation in a popular annual pagan celebration for the women of Mecca that centered around an idol in the shape of a man. This idol began to speak and predicted that a prophet by the name of "Ahmad" would be sent with God's message, and "whichever woman can become a wife to him should do so." While the (other) pagan women pelted the idol with stones, denounced it, and "barked at it," Khadija paid attention to the idol's words and did not treat it as the women did (Ibn Sa'd, Nisa', p. 9). Khadija was the Quraysh "merchant woman of dignity and wealth" who hired Muhammad to trade on her behalf in Syria. It is reported that she heard about the miraculous events that occurred on this journey, and that it was because of this information that she asked him to marry her[2].  

Ibn Sa'd reports on dream visions experienced by most of Muhammad's other wives prior to their marriage to the Prophet. Sawda, while still married to her previous husband, dreamt that Muhammad approached her and "placed his foot on her neck," [3]also that a moon hurled itself upon her from the sky while she lay prostrate (ibid., pp. 38-39). When Umm Habiba and her husband lived as temporary refugees in Abyssinia, she had a dream in which she saw her husband disfigured; on the following morning she learned that he had "left Islam" and (some say, again) embraced Christianity. When she rebuked him, he took to drink and died soon afterwards. Then she heard a dream voice addressing her as "Mother of the Believers," and on the following morning the Negus (ruler of Abyssinia) informed her that the Prophet had written a letter asking for her hand in marriage (ibid., p. 68). Similar dreams are reported of Safiyya, the woman of Jewish descent from Khaybar. She is said to have told her Jewish relatives: "I saw as if I were (sic) with him who thinks that God sent him, while an angel covered us with his wings," but then they dealt harshly with her (ibid., p. 87). She also dreamt of "a moon that drew close from Yathrib [4] until it fell into my lap," to which her Jewish husband replied "you want to be married to that king who is coming from Medinah" and hit her in the face; the mark was still visible when the Prophet married her after the conquest of Khaybar (ibid., p. 86).

With A'isha, it was not she but the Prophet who is said to have been favored with a sign. Reportedly, Muhammad asked Abu Bakr for A'isha's hand in marriage only after the Angel Gabriel had shown him a picture of A'isha (Ibn Sa'd, Nisa', p. 44);[5] according to another account, Gabriel showed him the infant A'isha in her cradle as his future bride and befitting substitute for Khadija, a divine favor to lessen his grief over Khadija's death (ibid., p. 54). Among the wives, it was only A'isha in whose company Muhammad is said to have received revelations (ibid., pp. 43-44). Some traditions report that A'isha could even see the Angel on these occasions and exchanged salutations with him (ibid., pp. 44, 46), while others say that she could not see him but that she and the Angel greeted each other through the Prophet (ibid., pp. 46-47, 55).[6] Zaynab bint Jahsh, in turn, was miraculously blessed by God when the food the Prophet's servant Anas ibn Malik had prepared for her wedding feast multiplied until it sufficed to feed seventy-one guests, possibly even seventy-two (ibid., pp. 74, 125).

The Hadith establishes that all of Muhammad's terrestrial wives will be his consorts in paradise (e.g., ibid., pp. 44-45, 58, 76). Indeed, the Angel commanded the Prophet to take Hafsa bint Umar back after he had divorced her, saying that she was a righteous woman and would be his wife in heaven (ibid., p. 58). In A'isha's case, the Angel even showed the dying Prophet her image in paradise to make his death easier with the promise of their reunion in the hereafter (ibid., p. 45). It was the desire to be resurrected at judgment day as a member of the Prophet's household that led Sawda to implore the Prophet not to divorce her; she wanted no part of men or husbands in this world, she said, but yearned to be his consort in heaven, and therefore offered to assign "her day" with him to A'isha in her stead (ibid., pp. 36-37). The first of the wives to join the Prophet in heaven was Zaynab bint Jahsh. Muhammad had predicted this when he said that the wife who had "the longest arm" would arrive there soon after him. The women later comprehended that by "long­armedness" he had meant "charity" because the first to die after him was the charitable Zaynab bint Jahsh (ibid., p. 76).

Traditions of this genre, then, are of inspirational character. In the sample narratives just quoted, the Prophet's wives are depicted as divinely favored individuals lifted high above the realm and ranks of ordinary womankind. God's grace surrounds them because they are His Prophet's chosen consorts. [7]A close reading of the sort attempted above, however, could perhaps find in this hagiographic material a typological resemblance with the Prophet's wives as "ordinary women." The material suggests that one of its functions may have been to elevate the Prophet's wives individually but also unequally (in a sort of competition for miracles). This, in turn, would suggest that such traditions, prestige building as they undoubtedly were, may originally have had a political dimension. What remained when the latter had fallen into oblivion was the linkage between the Prophet's wives' wondrous experiences and their exemplary morality.

The Prophets Wives as Paragons of Virtue,

And Precedent-Setting Models for All Women

A large segment of the Hadith depicts the Mothers of the Believers as models of piety and righteousness, whose every act exemplifies their commitment to establish God's order on earth by personal example. Their battlefields are not the plains of war on which Muslim men fight against infidel armies but involve the struggle to implement and safeguard Islamic norms and values. Indeed, the traditions on the women's personal comportment, dress, performance of ritual and worship, and the like must largely be read as (para-) legal texts in that their intended meaning is normative, not descriptive. Each recorded detail represents a facet of Sunnah-in-the-making, while their sum reflects the proliferation of categories of acceptable, forbidden, or value-neutral behavior first debated and then promulgated in early Islamic law. This process, then, involved a dynamic spiral of mutual reinforcement of its two constituent components, that is, the principle of these women's righteousness on the one hand, and their function as categorical norm-setters on the other. This is especially clear in the traditions which deal with modesty, veiling, and seclusion. Here, the Prophet's wives are depicted both as models and enforcers of the then newly imposed Qur'anic norms. It is reported, for instance, that A'isha ripped off the thin, transparent khimar ("kerchief") her niece Hafsa wore in her presence; "she chastised her, reminded her of the modesty-verse of the 'Surah of the Light' (Surah An-Nur, 24:31), and clad her in a thick cloth" (Ibn Sa'd, Nisa', pp. 49-50). A'isha is said to have worn the "veil" in public at all times, even as a little girl before she had reached puberty (but after the Prophet had asked for her hand in marriage) (ibid., pp. 40, 54).[8] Indeed, the Hadith-in concert with the Qur'anic text-establishes that the invisibility of the Prophet's wives went beyond restrictions placed upon Muslim women in general. [9]Thus it reports that when the Prophet returned to Medinah from the Khaybar expedition, he shared his camel with his war captive Safiyya whom he had wrapped in his rida'("cloak") from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet; no one, so the story continues, dared to look at her when the camel stumbled and threw off its riders, until the Prophet had replaced the wrap (ibid., pp. 86-89). [10]During prayer, A'isha was heavily clad in a dii' ("chemise"), jilbab ("mantle," "cloak"), and khimar ("kerchief"), and she performed the circumambulation (tawaf) of the Ka'ba in a niqab ("head veil") (Ibn Sa'd, Nisa', p. 49). During prayers, Maymuna is like­wise said to have worn a khimar ("kerchief"), but no izar("wrap") (ibid., p. 98). [11]

The Prophet's wives were scrupulous in hiding behind the hijab (enjoined upon them by the revelation of Surah Al-Ahzab, 33:53) in the presence of individuals who did not belong to the "exempt groups" defined in Surah Al-Ahzab, 33:55. A'isha, for instance, is said to have secluded herself (behind the screen) from Hasan and Husayn, the Prophet's grandchildren (Ibn Sa'd, Nisa', p. 50). [12]She also hid behind the partition in the presence of a blind man, Ishaq al-A'ma, saying that although he could not see her, she nevertheless could see him (ibid., p. 47). [13]During travels, the Prophet's wives were secluded in camel litters so unrevealing and undistinguishable that even the Prophet mistook one woman's litter for that of another (ibid., p. 67). In A'isha's case, her litter was once moved on even though she was not inside it, as related in the "affair of the lie" (al-ifk) mentioned above.

(Continued)