Abdal Hakim Murad – Aisha (ra) Paradigms of Leadership
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Yeah. It's great to be in
our new abode, CMC expanding and happy that
some of you who dug quite deep into
their pockets in order to make it possible
for us to buy this really essential extension
to our
little burgeoning empire,
are able to be with us today.
We're now able to host events like this
in house
and to expand into the various other spaces
of this building, which probably you've already had
to prowl around to see, what new possibilities
are being opened up. And downstairs will be,
inter, Allah, the new library, one of our
pet projects, bringing books in from different corners
of the CMC campus to put them all
together in one place where they belong with
a proper librarian
checkout system
to make sure that books that mysteriously
dematerialize
from our shelves
can be tracked down.
And, in fact, I'm going to be working
through some books which are in our library
today.
Fa'allah will be talking about,
al Mu'minin Aisha,
basing myself
on some of the underestimated
resources,
that the Muslim world has produced.
Very often,
western accounts of aspects of the Sira,
especially areas of the Sira that we might
be touching on today which have been contested
or which seems surprising,
have been
dominated
by a certain outsider's approach that tends to
marginalize the, as it were, sacred or religious
dimension, leading to stories that seem
rather flat, rather
rather dusty,
rather strange sometimes. So I'm going to be
basing myself today on original sources,
from our Arabic collection. Let me just talk
briefly about where I'm going to be speaking
from today.
One writer who we've already used once or
twice in this paradigm series is,
Al Akkad, the Egyptian
polymath
of the mid-twentieth
century. It's from Aswan
who wrote quite a bit about
key figures in
the sira. His 4 books on the 4
are still really popular.
So this is his book,
which he calls a siddiqah bint as siddiq.
Then also another person that we've used, another
Egyptian,
Ayesha Abdulrahman bint al Shate.
I used
her approach when I was speaking a couple
of years ago now about Sayda Sulkinah,
Bint al Hossein.
She has a book about him.
She was a professor at Cairo University,
a Tafsir expert, historian.
And her perspective is quite refreshing as somebody
who is kind of an Arab Muslim believing
woman who's also an academic,
a useful foil to the
sometimes rather fragrant biases of an outsider Orientalist
approach.
So this is a chapter in her book,
Nisa and Nebi,
the wives of the prophet.
And then another book, perhaps a little bit
less well known, but which, is really very
thorough as a historian's accomplishment.
So Eid al Afghani,
and
politics,
looking not so much
at the devotional,
hadith,
wifely side of her career, but specifically at
her
engagement with,
as we know, very turbulent politics of the
time.
So, those will be some of my sources,
but also
Seera and so forth, trying to get back
to the original sources, looking at it from
the perspective of how it was understood by
Muslims at the time
rather than on the basis of
what western elites
might regard as
a normative approach in the year 2023,
which is anachronistic and
tends to detract from this aspect of the
the sanctity of the story of the emergence
of the new world religion.
One thing, however, where these,
modern Middle Eastern scholars
and theologians
kind of agree with an orientalist
western professorial approach is their awareness of the
titanic importance of the background of tribalism
in Arabia.
Sometimes we tend to underestimate
that aspect of the Jahiliyyah.
We think of the Jahiliyyah as a time
when
everybody's wandering around on,
sleek camels reciting amazing poetry and then going
off to worship
gods of various
improbable kinds. And,
the the main feature of the Jahiliya, which
kind of
becomes a real possibility for people to revert
to in the first
couple of centuries of Islam, is the tribalism,
the ethnocentrism.
So no nobody was any longer
paying tribute to Hubal or Al Lat or
Al Al Azhar.
That was,
put a stop to.
But the tribal affiliation, the desire to be
with kith and kin
as a rival to the new religious
dispensation is something that,
was very important at the time and will
help us to understand certain aspects, particularly of
the political
career of,
Sidatna Aisha, Radiallahu Anher.
One of the titanic challenges which the holy
prophet faced
was not only to change the kind of
metaphysical belief system of
his people,
but also to deal with the way in
which they organize their society.
For who knows how many
tens of 1000 of years, Arabia had been
this pocket of hunter gatherer,
nomads, and semi nomadic
populations in a largely uncultivable,
really vast, inhospitable
area where tribal solidarity was essential for personal
survival.
And everything in your life was determined by
your tribe and which family and which clan
you existed
in within each tribe,
that was your identity.
You said,
minbaton
bakr bin wa'il or whatever it was, and
everybody immediately knew everything
about you.
That was your whole world, your horizon. It
was the basis for your moral behavior. It
was the basis for your marriage plans. It
was the basis for how much authority
he would receive in the councils of the
tribe.
Everything was determined on these
ultimately accidents
of birth. And this is the hamiyatul Jahiliyyah,
when the Quran warns people of possibly
being influenced by
the feverishness.
Hamir is kind of like a feverish group
solidarity,
fanaticism
for
kith and kin.
It is referring specifically to this
ethnocentrism
rather than to fanaticism for idols or for
some of their beliefs or lack of beliefs
about life after death. It's a major
aspect of the prophetic revolution
and a really challenging one. And you can't
really understand
early Islamic history and the titanic,
sometimes calamitous events that happened then when you
unless you understand how people are trying to
negotiate
family with the new
disposition of religion, which meant that in all
significant things, in this new thing called the
Sharia,
it didn't really matter a whole lot, you
know, what social class you were from, what
region you were from.
Bilal could marry an aristocratic
pale skinned Arab woman that the holy prophet
did, and it was just fine. This was
an incredible
insurrection
against the way in which they had been
for,
since time immemorial.
And in order to understand
a lot of the early factionalism, sectarian tendencies,
different caliphal allegiances
in the 1st century, you have to understand
who are Beni Umayyah,
who are Bani al Abbas,
who are these various groups, why is it
that the Khawarij come primarily from the Tamim
tribe in Central Arabia?
Tribe is behind a lot of these things.
And because it's not really much in our
world, we tend not to realize
what a titanic transformation this was. If the
holy prophet
confronted with the building of Arabian society, which
had been there forever,
was saying it has to be completely rebuilt
from the ground up. Certain virtues can continue,
hospitality, generosity, and so forth, horsemanship.
Those things are fine. But the basic mortar
which holds together the mansion of Arab society
is all taken out, the tribal thing, and
replaced with something else.
In the Aqlam Yakom,
the noblest of human on our side is
he who has most taqwa.
This was an idea that really blew the
minds
of very many in his time. And,
in order to understand
something like the family of the holy prophet,
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
multiple wives.
You have to understand each one of them
is from a particular tribal
constellation or galaxy.
And each one of those marriages has a
political dimension.
There's a love dimension as well, affinity and
those things, but the politics can't be excluded.
In the premodern world, generally,
people in positions of authority formed dynastic marriages.
That was the case with the British royal
family really until the time
of Queen Victoria or even later. Marriage was
an opportunity to
overcome conflict. So Montgomery Watts is one of
the best known western writers on the Sira.
His book, Muhammad, at Merkha, Muhammad in Medina,
is all about the tribes. And he goes
through all of these really boring genealogies.
And his view is that every single one
of the marriages of the holy prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam is a political marriage. And he
explains she's from this tribe and this averted
this conflict, and this was one way in
which Arabia was united. And, again, in our
culture,
you know, when we're all
addicted
to romcoms
and chick flicks, whatever it is that gives
us the idea of boy meets girl, this
is a very different world.
This is a world in which there are
questions of survival, questions of building
a new polity, and things necessarily looked different.
So to understand a story like this, we
have to
tweezer our hearts out of the sort of
sentimental world of the 21st century where Hollywood
has really shaped or misshaped our
understandings and get into a different
idea,
a different context.
Another aspect is, of course, that and certainly
these authors and, in particular,
talks about what he calls,
the eternal feminine.
Nowadays, we don't like
gender
essences. Keir Starmer can't define what is a
woman.
He goes into his usual kind of gormless,
slightly
annoyed face and what is a woman? Oh,
it's really difficult. Try something about the economy,
please.
So it's it's an age in which we
are kind of
our understandings, which went back a 100000 years
about what is male, what is female, are
breaking down in a very radical way.
And even the older feminist understanding, which is
based on women being a certain thing, cause
they had to be a certain thing if
they were to talk about equality, if they
don't really exist. As Salma says, how can
you have equality between things that don't exist?
So it's a kind of meltdown phase for
the west in its ascertaining
of,
the nature of gender. And this can't be
a lecture about gender. That's a whole different
thing. But it may well be as we
move through, this story of a really different
time,
with these amazing personalities,
that our understanding
of
what gender is will be enriched
a little bit.
Is, Akkad right to say that there is
the eternal feminine? There is a female essence,
a female temperament.
A lot of
geneticists will say, well, yes, obviously.
But a certain
cultural pushback against that has led us to
our current
strange situation in our world
where we know so much about science and
biology and DNA and chromosomes and hormones, but
still,
we can't
define these fundamental things. So you have 12
year old boys
going to the GP, not having to tell
their parents, saying, I think I'm a girl.
And the GP,
even 10 years ago, would have said, well,
in what way?
Because even then there was a sense that
girls are a certain kind of thing and
they like certain things. Now he can't say
that because that's essentialism
and stereotyping.
So all he can do is to say
to this confused boy,
does your understanding of what it is to
be a woman coincide with your understanding of
yourself?
This 12 year old is supposed to crack
this deep philosophical question that's caused the civil
war between JK Rowling and The Guardian, and
it's kind of
it's led to all kinds of strangenesses.
So one of the advantages of the sera
is that it does give us some very
strong
feminine personalities
and some very clear heroic masculine personalities,
not as a kind of ideology, but just
as examples.
And one thing
that we need to think about in connection
with this
is that
these women are really and this is not
some kind of modern feminist
reinterpretation,
obviously, at the center of the story.
Whereas,
Allah himself says it, his wives are their
mothers, mothers of the believers,
matriarchs.
They have authority,
a natural authority in fiqh, in wisdom, in
deference.
You have this
unique situation amongst major world religions where the
inner circle is kind of women.
Christ has his 12 disciples. To the dismay
of feminists, they're all male.
The holy prophet's inner circle could from a
certain perspective, you could say it's his family,
it's his women and his daughters because he
doesn't have sons who live.
There's a real
kind of accumulation
of of women, amazing women, at the center.
And another thing we see is that even
though Akkad can talk about the eternal feminine,
Aisha is not Habiba.
Aisha is not Khadija. Aisha is not Hafsa,
Sauda. They're all really different.
Some of the olema have said that one
of the wisdoms and the benefits of the
prophetic polygamy
is that if it had only one wife,
that would have been the model of personality
perfection for every Muslim woman forever.
If it had only been Aisha, everybody would
have said, I have to be like Ayesha.
I can't be like Ayesha. I'm no good.
In the Christian context, this is an issue
for the feminists where there is only the
Virgin Mary.
Saint Ambrose said, alone of all her *,
she pleased the lord. You have to be
like the Virgin Mary, meek and mild
and and
quiet and passive, be it done unto me
according to thy will.
That's one feminine possibility, and Islam does give
you that possibility, but there's others as well.
So the multiplicity
of these perfect women, these Umahat and Muqmeen
actually,
deconstructs the idea of there being one eternal
feminine, one way in which all women have
to be. They're really diverse.
It's quite an interesting
perspective.
So we do have these
mothers of the believers, which you don't get
in early Buddhism,
apostles
of
female and all apostles
of female
and all different. And some of them really
strong personalities. Maybe Artesho is the strongest.
She answered back. She was even though married
really young, she was kind of
a very independent personality, and she didn't just
go into quiet retirement
after her husband died
after 9 years of amazing marriage, but, you
know, she wanted to be out there.
We'll talk about that in due course. So
we have these
positive role models.
Does anybody,
at least from the Atlas on Earth, ever
dare to criticize
any of them
as moral, perfected, saintly women? Of course not.
We have that core,
that female core, which is quite unlike, say,
the biblical story. Open any text on
Christian feminist theology, and they're all grumbling about
the bible.
Bad women,
femme fatale, scarlet women,
who bring down the whole story beginning with
their rather unpleasant view of, say, that now
Eve and how she's responsible for original sin
and everything which is not our position at
all.
Temptresses like
Delilah,
like Jezebel,
the witch of Endor, there's
lots of them.
Generally, the female conspicuous characters
in,
the bible are kind of negative
femme fatale temptress type figures, and those stories
don't exist.
The only one that does exist is, of
course, Imra'atul Aziz,
Potiphar's wife.
But even that, you know, she's not really
depicted as somebody evil. She's just kind of
lost it. She's gone. He's beautiful.
It's kind of
and the women, when she's they see him,
they cut their hands because they're so amazed.
It's really about love and the crazy things
that lovers do rather than about wickedness.
And, of course, in all of
the Muslim stories that develop that and the
tafsirs,
she ends up as a convert
and maybe in some of them,
in
Nizami's account, she ends up marrying
Seder Iosef and so forth. There's a happy
ending.
So that's really quite a different
understanding,
the shift in the way these stories are
told between the
sometimes quite concerning biblical archetypes and the the
Quranic's
correct Quran
correct correction of the stories tells you or
not
about the Quran's
agenda
when it comes to,
women. Even the Virgin Mary.
Everybody's singing away in a manger at the
moment. Christmas isn't a couple of days. Well,
in John's gospel,
Jesus doesn't really treat Mary very nicely.
The wedding of Cana,
the wine runs out,
and she comes saying, what can be done?
And he says, woman, what have I to
do with you?
Which however you translate it is kind of
not very respectful to your own mother. This
is an issue again for the Christian feminist.
Well, one of the first things
that
Satan Aissa says is just born,
when he says,
oh, good to my mother,
And those
negative stories about women are simply not present
in our scripture. That
has to mean something significant, that this new
dispensation
is not going to say gender is whatever
you feel like at a particular moment.
But neither is it going to say,
that that woman is a particular stereotype of
being a temptress and authoress of original sin
and the one who brought John the Baptist's
head to Herod or whatever these biblical stories
are. We don't get those stories.
We don't get them. And that, you know,
has to
be significant.
So it's not feministic in the modern sense,
but it's not anti women at all. And
the fact that we have the the mothers
of the believers
is very significant. Another aspect, of course, which
is kind of part of the prophetic mystery,
is the fact that
whereas in all traditional
societies women were overwhelmingly
valued for
having children.
What would the Virgin Mary be without Christ
and so forth.
That's their principal function.
With the mothers of the believers, we don't
get that, do we?
Khadija
has the 4 daughters.
Amazing.
What a household that must have been.
Only one of them outlives
him and only by 6 months.
Otherwise this corner in the mosque and Medina
where they're all living, it's not kind of
kids crying all the time.
It must have been quiet and prayerful.
Why?
We don't know.
Arquard kind of looks at this and speculates
why have you got these women, many of
whom are young, not all of them.
There's no children.
Although there is an account in some of
the Muslim historians that says to Aisha,
has a miscarriage.
The boy is well enough for him to
be given a name,
But that's it. And we know that was
a great source of sorrow for her.
But this is part of the divine
arrangement
of the lives of these mothers, of the
believers, that they they don't have children.
And Akkad,
he goes around to a lot of doctors
and he says, well, what's going on?
And he thinks, well, maybe the stress of
the Hijra
or maybe
the the malaria,
which is endemic in Medina, which we know
that Siedad Nai'esh suffers from, maybe maybe it
kind of disappears in a cloud of
speculation. It doesn't take you very far. But
the important thing from this, whatever the divine
purpose might might have been, whatever whatever that
means,
is
that here you have a valorization of the
women which has nothing to do with the
fact that they have the son who is
the one who it's all about.
They are in themselves
esteemed as mothers of the believers. They're matriarchs
of everyone.
The Sahaba would say,
mother, when they passed one of them.
They were the mothers of
all of them.
Quran says Muhammad is not the father of
any of your men, but he is Allah's
messenger and the,
seal of the the messengers.
It's kind
of anticipated and dispersed that this is something
he wants, but it's not
in Allah's
taqdir.
So again, we have and this can be
very beneficial for a lot of modern women
for reasons that are usually not their fault
at all,
don't get married.
Infertility is more common now. All kinds of
issues. We have this kind of population
of Muslim women
and non Muslim women, certainly,
who can't find husbands.
The Atlantic Monthly did a story recently where
of all the husbands gone or something they
called it. It's a phenomenon, childlessness,
husbandlessness.
And there's a certain kind of way in
which the story of these women is a
way of giving them role models
and allowing them to feel that, you know,
the important things of life are still what
they have achieved.
The the purpose of woman is not just
to be somebody.
Purpose of woman is to be, you know,
herself and to follow the prophet and to
be virtuous and to feed the poor, to
be al Masakin or that and Netatain or
whoever it was to acquire these amazing titles.
So that, it seems to me, is another
interesting gift of this
enigmatic,
curious,
but inspiring scenario.
Another aspect of it,
I promised that it wouldn't be a lecture
on gender, but kind of you can't escape
it when you're thinking about the mothers of
the believers,
is that
one of the
shattering revolutions which Islam introduced into the wider
Near East
was the idea that it's okay
to get married,
which Christianity
had said well only for
emergency situations.
But the elites and the saints and the
bishops and the priests and the apostles, they
don't get married,
not really.
And it's still a big issue in the
Catholic church.
The Orthodox church, the priests can get married
but the bishops can't because the bishops have
to be monks. The whole monastic tradition.
The Quran says, of monasticism,
they didn't observe it correctly.
It's not easy
to abandon the most fundamental human biological hormonal
impulse
to get married,
to say goodbye to loneliness, to have children,
to be part of the web of life,
that's difficult.
It doesn't work particularly well. And all of
these scandals which are tearing apart the church
in the western
Movement to do with the fact that you
can't really defeat biology. Not really, because you're
part of biology.
Some people may do it, but to make
it a kind of rule as part of
their sharia for priests,
not working particularly well.
And it also
generates a lot of loneliness.
You talk to catholic priests, as I do
sometimes, the worst thing about celibacy is actually
the loneliness.
It's kind of you go back to your
single bed at night in the monastery or
the priest's house and there's just kind of
nothing, there's no woman's touch in the house.
It's not easy for your whole life and
knowing that there's no prospect of that ever
changing.
And we now have, of course, a Ministry
of Loneliness in the UK, don't we? Most
of the victims or the patients diagnosed as
a medical condition by the NHS. Most of
them are women.
So one of the things, and again this
takes us out of
the cultural
possibilities of 2020
3 is that polygamy actually is the solution
to that.
Polygamy is the solution to that. It's a
primordial human institution.
Most native Americans before the Europeans
rolled up accepted polygamy as a matter, of
course.
In a traditional
hunter gatherer situation,
the men are more at risk, they're more
likely to be eaten by wild beasts while
hunting in the desert, more likely to be
speared by other tribesmen. You always have a
surplus of women. Polygamy is the obvious way
of
preventing them from being lonely. It's kind of
a fitri, normal institution.
Even amongst the ancient Israelites, nevirate marriage
was was an aspect of that.
So this is another
way in which as we get into our
time machine to visit those times,
we have to leave behind the kind
of boy meets girl scenario and get into
a space where it was understood
boy meets girl
could also work.
So it's kind of overcoming
the Christian
inhibited
loneliness
courting
environment
of Egypt, Syria, the Christian world, which Islam
came to
supplant.
So Friedrich Nietzsche,
the idea of 2 fundamental
principles,
the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which is like
the linear and the curved, the mineral
and the organic,
the rational and the ecstatic,
which he finds in early Greek culture, and
then he finds the 2 separate out.
And,
he blames
the modernity of,
the Europe of 19th century for being apollonial,
enlightenment, scientific, rational,
and the ecstatic,
organic,
chthonic,
feminine,
nonlinear
principle, he says,
is being lost. And he's
trying to figure out, is there a form
of life in which these two things can
be
brought together again?
Freud, of course, had understood that,
the Dionysian
chthonic, earthly is a kind of
subconscious,
above which is
ratio,
reason.
But, Nietzsche wanted to see them combined in
a single form of life.
Well, that's another thing to think about.
Another thing to bear in mind is the
the strength
that women in traditional societies had to have.
The men were out
spearing gazelles or whatever or each other.
The women were dealing with certain biological realities,
which in those
more or less paleolithic circumstances
were really
dangerous, life threatening,
excruciating.
So here's an account from 1 woman from
that time,
which indicates
that the female thing was not a kind
of soft and easy option.
Most modern Arabs will struggle with this, but
here's the translation.
So she's saying she was actually lucky with
her children.
Which of your births and babies was easiest?
I don't know.
I didn't give birth to any of them
at the wrong time of the month or
as a breech birth,
nor did I become pregnant when still breastfeeding,
nor did I breastfeed a thirsty child in
a time of great heat,
nor did I have to make a baby
sleep on a hard and stony place,
nor did I have to feed a baby
with meat from the lungs or the liver
which are difficult to digest,
nor did I have to put him to
sleep at night when I was angry and
exhausted.
Traditional maternity,
really difficult.
And as a result, the women tended to
be really quite resilient and strong.
If you look at the image of these
women in the theater,
they tend to be they're not pussycats. They're,
strong,
determined
women.
And that is the result of the fact
that the the feminine state in the biology
leads them to
have to make huge sacrifices.
To be a mother, especially then,
required tremendous
resources
of
resilient
pain control,
sorrow control,
dealing with hormones, dealing with
postnatal
depression, and so forth, all of the sacrifices
that women as part of the
womanly nature
are,
heir to as a result of the biology.
And back then it was much more intense
because
there was no kind of daycare center you
could go off to, no nice midwife from
the NHS who could give you a shot
of something.
Midwives.
So that's one explanation for why so many
of the women in this period seem to
be really forceful.
But the jahiliya
also, because of the culture, tended to victimize
women a lot. In a place where there
is no proper law or legislation or state,
women tend to suffer most.
They're the ones who get abducted.
They're the ones who are the victims of
anger, of a revenge culture, of the vendetta
culture.
And again, this is one of the things
that was
transformed
by the replacement of the old feuding culture
of the Arabs with the
idea of
the the sharia.
Aisha is well, and her father, Abu Bakr,
from the clan of Taim, Bani Taim,
who are
famous kind of aristocrats
in the sense of being
people with
noble qualities.
They tend not to be warriors. They're more
into the kind of trade
and animal husbandry
business.
And you find generally, Abu Bakr's family, his
sons and his daughters,
really quite
dignified and strong people. You may recall
when we were looking at the the Hijra,
the story of Ayesha's sister, Asma bint Abi
Bakr,
and how she was the one who kept
the holy prophet and a siddiq
fed and watered in their cave when Quraysh
was out looking
for them and she had to do it
by night, going out on her own with
considerable
quantity of supplies,
finding
her way to the cave. She was
really,
really courageous.
So, yeah, these are
these are strong women and the women from
Beniteim
particularly
well known from this. Incidentally, when I was
talking about Sorcana,
one of her best friends, Aisha bint Talha,
a literary figure,
another kind of aristocratic woman, a very strong
personality,
was also from Bani Taima
and connected to the great early poet, Umar
bin Abi Rabi'ah, the great love poet of
of of early Islam.
So she's from this good family. She learns
to read.
Aisha can read.
And
because of the transformations that Islam is bringing,
women are able to get into the mercantile
space a little bit more fully because
they have the complete
legal autonomy to buy and to sell and
to inherit the Jahiliya. Generally, it seems, insofar
as
we can read between the lines of the
sources,
women generally didn't inherit.
The Jahiliya woman could even be inherited
in the sense that
when somebody died,
the women folk could be distributed
in a will to
surviving
male relatives,
which is specifically banned by a Quranic
verse. It's not permitted to you to inherit
women against their will,
Which was a Jahili practice but also a
kind of practice in some old testament religion,
the levirate marriage, which is in Deuteronomy,
which says that if a man dies,
then his widow is married to his brother.
It's one of the basis for polygamy
in ancient Jewish law.
There's nothing like that in Islam. Of course,
you can marry your brother's widow, but it's
just an ordinary nikah. It's not something that's
presumed naturally to happen or something that
she should be resigned to.
Also, these women
so Aisha
is had a strong personality
from an early age,
but she's also
in a space where that is enabled more
by the new
religious dispensation,
where women are making independent
kind of cultural and political decisions.
So look at this verse.
O prophet, if the believing women come to
you to pledge their allegiance,
baya,
on the basis that they will not associate
anyone with Allah and will not commit theft
or adultery
and will not kill their children
and will not bring,
some slander which they invent
and do not disobey you in anything that
is good, then give them the pledge of
allegiance
and seek forgiveness
of Allah
for them.
Allah
is. We tend to pass over such verses,
kind of, the men are doing, the women
are doing. But this is strange for the
ancient world because at no point does the
verse say, well, look, where is the where
is the maharam? Where is the husband? Where
is the one who is speaking on her
behalf? The women are coming to the holy
prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, some of them
from families who are not yet believers,
and independently
taking this decision and making the
of
the chosen one.
The verse also, of course, indicates the Wat
del Banette, the
prohibition on female infanticide,
which
famously
is forbidden
in, in the Quran.
And,
again, we underestimate
the radicalness of these verses in the context
of the time.
And when one of them is given the
good news of a baby girl,
his face turns black and he is furious,
hiding from other people because of the unpleasantness
of the good news that has been given.
Will he keep her in a humiliated state
or bury her beneath the dust? Evil is
their judgment.
Female infanticide
still goes on today.
It's a feature of many premodern
societies.
Matteo Ricci is a,
Italian
traveler. When he goes to China in 16th
century, he has some quite horrifying descriptions of
what he found
that women, because they really didn't want
female babies, would take them to the local
rubbish heap. They just leave them there until
they died. He saw this a lot.
Or there would be baby towers,
specifically for this purpose,
attached to Buddhist
monasteries and nunneries.
So if you had a female baby,
you would take it and put it on
a shelf in this tower, and it would
last a couple of days and then it
would die.
He was
quite appalled by this. In India, in the
colonial period, of course, the British had to
decide, do we get involved
in the local culture or not? But they
found, for instance, that,
in the family of the rajas of Minpur,
there had been no living daughter
for several 100 years
because the female princesses would all be killed
at birth. And so the British Empire and
its
kind of maybe it's more well meaning,
aspects started to intervene. So 18/70,
at Westminster was passed a new law, the
female infanticide
prevention act.
But it still goes on. The subcontinent, India
in particular, is kind of the center of
this.
UN calculated that the number of female babies
killed in the 20th century
was the same as the number of casualties
in
the, 2nd World War.
That's the how widespread it is. So there's
a documentary, which I think you can see
on YouTube, It's a Girl, the 3 deadliest
words in the world,
which is why in India, you have a
100,000,000 more males than females.
Not just because they're killed following birth, but
selective abortion used modern technology to determine the
gender. It's a girl.
Sorry.
So, yeah, this is a big change for
the Arabs. We tend to say, well, obviously,
still an issue today.
Also, verses to do with kindness.
Live with them in kindness,
And if there is something in them that
you dislike,
it may be
that you dislike something in which Allah has
placed much good.
So this is clearly part of the revolutionary
agenda of the new tradition. It's not some
kind of modernist attempt to find modernity
magically anticipated in 7th century Arabia. It's just
a reading of the text and it's
Oran itself.
The fact that the new religion's concern from
the outset was really with the weak,
with the ethnically marginalized,
with those who didn't have a family, with
the orphans,
with the poor.
Most of the early converts were like that.
Women were generally weak in that society. Also
meant that they were included
in this. And very many of the first
converts to Islam, of course, were women. Some
of the first martyrs like Surmayer
Radiullah Anher. So this is the
the context. We've been setting the scene for
this extraordinary story of a world in which,
really, that which defines Arab identity is being
upended and negated
by this new thing, that you're all equal
as Muslims,
brethren.
That genetic term now applied to somebody who's
from a tribe that you've been
firing arrows at for 100 of years and
you're in the mosque and shoulder to shoulder
and feet to feet and kind of
really radical
demonstration
of that abolition, but also these new attitudes
to,
you know, respect for women. It's not really
equality in the contemporary enlightenment sense. It's a
very new word and which tends to be
problematic because
how do you equate to principles that are
really quite different?
Instead, you know, honor,
respect,
affection, these are more likely to be practical
terms that that you're going to be
finding beneficial.
The date of her birth, just to go
through the biodata,
Historians are really not clear about the birth
date of very many of the Sahaba. Some
of them vary by about 10 years.
In those days, nobody had birth certificates,
Didn't really matter very much.
But we obviously know who her parents were,
Abu Bakr Sadir
and the mother Umbruman.
Her actual name was Zainab or possibly Det
From the tribe of Kinana,
a widow who'd been married to his friend,
Abdullah bin Al Harith, and already had a
son
by him. Abdullah dies and Abu Bakr
marries her. And in her conversion, her struggles,
in the very early days of Islam, she
made a lot of sacrifices, and the holy
prophet specifically praised her.
Whoever would like to see a woman from
the horis of paradise,
let him look at.
We're not quite sure when she died. There's
a hadith in Bukhari. It seems to suggest
that it's in Othman's caliph.
Arteshia, we have some accounts as to what
she looked like. Fair skinned, it seems. One
of the holy prophet's pet names was, Por
her, was Homeira,
which means kind of
pinkish,
pinky.
Fairly tall.
Her voice similar to her father's
determined manner of speech. So whenever she was
saying something that was really kind of strong
and
definite,
holy prophet would say ibnakih ibnat Abi Bakr.
You're really Abu Bakr's daughter.
We also know or we can presume from
the story of the battle of the camel,
which comes later where she's directing an army
from within a kind of palanquin on top
of her camel.
Must have had a pretty strong voice to
have been heard
under those
circumstances.
We also know this is part of her
Banitamim
background. Banitam background,
that she's really
very literate.
She's one of the great experts on poetry
amongst the Sahaba.
Whenever anything happened to her, it said she
would come up with a line of poetry
that was appropriate to that situation
situation.
She had a nephew, Orua Ebenezer Zubayr, who's
also gonna have a significant role later on,
who is one of the great experts, kind
of encyclopedic
memorises and catalogues of
the poetry, Jahidi poetry and Islamic poetry amongst
the Arabs. He would go to her for
instruction and valued
her greatly. And we have some poetry which
is by her and poetry which she would
recite at appropriate
moments.
She also becomes remembered as a Hadith scholar,
Muhanditha,
narrates more than 2,000 hadith,
tend to be in Sharia
and related matters.
Some of them are to do with hittan,
akhirazaman,
eschatological
kinds of matters.
Sometimes tafsir
hadith have explicate particular verses,
sometimes in the explanation of particular words
in the Quran, which are difficult.
And she becomes,
quite early on, but certainly after the holy
prophet's death, a kind of scholar figure in
Medina.
Abu Musa al Ashari used to say,
Never were we confused by something and then
went to ask Ayesha,
but that we found that she had some
knowledgeable thing to say about that subject.
She was the most learned of people in
Miq
and
the most erudite and
her opinions were the best opinions.
Masruq said these were major names in earlier
Islamic law and Hadith scholarship.
I saw the best and the most learned
companions of the holy prophet asking her questions
about inheritance.
Onua again.
I never saw anybody who knew Fiqh better
or medicine better or poetry better than Aisha.
These are quite major testimonies
from people who are beginning the science of
hadith narration
and whose
knowledge of Arabic poetry and literature is already
pretty huge and oceanic.
And they're all testifying to her
eminence in this regard
as a hadith.
Not everybody believes it's the sound hadith, but
it indicates,
a widespread early opinion.
Take half of your religion from this little,
pale skinned girl or this little pink
girl. One reason why she is regarded as
a major Hadith narrator and reliable is
that people can see that even though she
is right at the heart of many of
the early
kind of civil wars and difficulties and tribal
legitimate disputes.
There isn't a single hadith amongst these hadith
that she transmits from the holy prophet, which
condemns her rivals.
So that gives people confidence. She's not somebody
who concoct things. So she's classified by the
hadith rate as a thicka,
reliable.
So,
generally, the scholars record about 2,210
hadith on her authority, second only to Abu
Horeyra. She's really very
prolific as a narrator
and,
trustworthy.
Also well known as a public speaker, also
well known as a historian,
used to love,
histories of the nations.
In any case, this is what she grows
into
in the holy prophet's house.
Yeah. He's kind of encouraging all of this.
So let's rewind.
Talk about the marriage.
It seems to have been something of a
surprise.
He's been married for 25 years to Khadija.
He's born him. He has only four daughters,
which was,
by all accounts,
an amazing marriage.
And then one day he said,
I saw you, he's talking to her,
in a dream twice.
I saw you wrapped
in a piece of silk,
and a voice was saying,
this is your wife.
So I
took off the silk,
and I saw your face.
And then I said, if this comes from
Allah,
he will bring it to pass.
It's known that the holy prophet
was
devastated by the loss of Khadija.
And the woman
Khaula bint Hakim,
having seen this,
has the idea of bringing about this union.
It seems, according to most of the historians,
that she had already been betrothed
in those ages when life expectancy was short,
people generally married very young.
She'd already been betrothed by somebody called Shubaib
on Mortaim, who wasn't yet a Muslim.
And Abu Bakr
has never in his life broken a promise,
but finds this difficult that he can marry
his daughter to somebody who's not a Muslim.
So
she goes to Jubei'ra's parents. The mother says,
I'm afraid that
if this young girl marries you,
you'll leave your religion. You'll become Muslim.
And he kind of agreed. So Abu Bakr,
hearing this,
knew that
the kind of promise,
the betrothal was at an end.
So according to most of the historians, the
chitba, the proposal
to the holy prophet was completed
about 3 years before the hijrah at a
mahar of 400 dirhams.
Here we have the familiar controversy,
how old was she?
And Akkad has a whole thing in which
he deals with this
quite
competently.
It's only been an issue really in the
20th century
because before the 20th century, child marriages were
kind of normal. Richard the second of England
had a queen who was 6 years old.
William of Orange,
and a wife of 9. It was
normal in the premodern
world.
Catholic canon law until about a 100 years
ago said you could marry the age of
12. Now I think the age is 14
in Catholic law. Of course, they followed the
law of the land, which is usually later
than that. But in principle,
Catholic marriage is valid at that time.
The Roman Empire, girls married at 12, etcetera.
It's kind of an anachronism to say, oh,
nowadays, you can't get married until you're 18.
So the whole idea of child marriage is
kind of strange to us.
It's also the case, and Akkad does this
pretty well,
that, as we mentioned, people didn't have birth
certificates,
and the sources do differ.
So Alqadd's
theory is that
Abu Bakr would not have betrothed her to
a polytheist
after he'd become Muslim.
Very unlikely.
And therefore, she must have been in this
world
before his conversion.
In other words, there's accounts in Ibn Saad
and elsewhere that suggest she was actually older
than some of the the other hadiths,
do carry some weight.
And actually, she might have been about 14
when she was married.
If you accept this view that Abu Bakr
would not have betrothed his daughter to
a pagan. Here's quite an interesting chapter on
that. Jonathan Brown in his misquoting Mohammed has
probably the best general,
description of this issue, pointing out how silly
and anachronistic
it is.
In any case, Artesho
absolutely gets into this new role,
never says that she misses her father's house,
certainly never regrets
the marriage.
And her childishness
is kind of part of
the the the betrothal and would have been
understood as normal at the time. So
famous
account to
So a hadith that the Ethiopians were once
playing on the day of their Eid
with
their weapons. They were kind of having mock
fights.
And so,
he asked her,
do you want to take a look? And
she said yes.
And he said, so he
placed me behind him, we were very close,
and he was saying, clearing one side, dunakomya
bani arfida, which is
an Arab way of referring to Abyssinians.
Until finally I got bored
And then he said, have you had enough?
And I said, yes. He said, off you
go.
She's still playing with dolls,
still playing with her little friends
in the period in Mecca,
when it's just a betrothal
and
the formal
consummation has not yet taken place.
There's a lot of stories of kind of
fun at that time.
Jokes
that the holy prophet would would play
with with all of his wives.
Once he said,
when I die, the one of you who
joins me soonest will be the one with
the longest
hand.
So then the wives started to compare hands
with each other to see who's got the
longest hand and they all hoped that they
would have the longest hand.
Then they realized that what he meant was
sadaqa. It's a metaphor. It means giving sadaqa
most to the envied Zaynab bin Jash,
the mother of the poor, for her famous,
generosity.
But one thing that
we do see in this world, and we've
left the 21st century behind, we're looking at
that world in terms
of the realities of that world and the
reality
of how these two people
were growing close.
That she was,
his beloved.
From an early age, there was actual love
there.
Okay. Montgomery Watts says, well, this connected the
holy prophet to the tribe of Tainz or
Abu Bakr
and then, Hafsa connected him to Umar's tribe,
etcetera. And you can see how that works.
But,
there's also
love going on.
You would say, Aisha is the person I
love most.
And they
obviously, much of their married life and
their close life we
don't know about,
but there's plenty of clues.
So,
they had a name for their
understanding, their intimacy, their mutual
knowledge.
They called it an orwet al wuthqa,
the thermost bond that which bound them together,
which made them close.
So sometimes you would ask him,
How is the bond?
And he would say, as it always was,
it hasn't changed. This
is the idea that women need reassurance.
Do you love me? Do you love me?
I told you 5 times this morning already.
Do you love me?
Yeah.
So this was the word that they had
for the
special mutual
understanding, which seems to have been very profound
and very deep. And she's 53 and she's,
whatever she is, a teenager.
Hard for us to imagine, but it's just
a different world.
And it seems to have been real. It
was a very real and profound love and
fondness that they had
for each
other. This,
in the context of the battle against the
the Christian cult
of celibacy
and loneliness
and the absence of this kind of unique
closeness with another person that's possible in a
marital relationship,
closer
convergence of souls than is possible in any
other human situation.
That
this is one of the triggers for what
becomes the most
profound
overthrowing
of really the literature of the world,
which is the introduction of the the principle
of love or Mahaba
into Islamic literature.
Omar bin Abi Rabi, who I've mentioned,
is the the first great poet
in newly Islamized
Arabia,
And it's all love poems.
They took the ancient Qosida, which was the
standard long
ode
of the ancient pre islamic poet, much of
which is boasting about how fast his camel
is and about how his spears chase away
the rabble of the rival tribe.
But it begins with a kind of what
they call nasibes which is an amatory or
a romantic
preface about his beloved,
beauty of his beloved, eyes like gazelles etc.
And the first great transformation in Arabic literature
that happens as a result of Islamization
is that that
Naseeb
becomes the razzal.
It becomes a love poem in its own
right,
which the ancient Arabs had never done. And
Omer bin Abi Rabiya's poetry is basically all
about that. It sometimes talks about how fast
is my camel, he does that. But the
focus now is shifted
and it's about his beloved
Leila, Salma,
Noam.
And a lot of
outsider scholars find this strange.
Isn't Islam terribly stern and puritanical and inhibited?
And why is it that suddenly Arabic poetry,
when Islam comes, turns into love poetry and
this kind of
doesn't compute with them. But for us, looking
at these relationships,
it's kind of obvious,
that in the prophetic household, there is this
this incredible love.
The love that is not
well, in a sense, there isn't profane love.
But, because love is the perception of perfection,
which perfection comes from God. If you perceive
beauty, if you perceive goodness, those are things
that
point you towards the divine.
It's platonic love, if you like.
And
this overthrowing
of the
severe
Christian penitential
view about attraction
and marriage,
one of the big transformations that, Islam affects
in the Near East.
And what we're seeing is
with the prophetic household,
not not parenting,
but a
very remarkable combination
of domesticity
with spiritual guidance.
The kind of living together is helping with
the cooking or the sewing or whatever it
is that that he does
according to the to the hadith and his
kind of
household chores being done
together. But, basically, he's teaching them Quran.
He's teaching them thiq.
He's teaching them forms of tasbih.
This corner of the mosque,
which is for the women, is kind of
like a zawiyah and it's right next to
the sofah.
Soffa, which is where the male companions were
there just
for dhikr and for Allah
and have renounced the world, is the veranda
which is outside the
apartments of
the the prophetic wives,
which are
small.
You can see old
plans of the mosque and Medina, and you
can see this is the room of Zainab,
this is the room of Aisha and so
forth.
They're pretty small.
So the the famous hadith where he's doing
tahajjud at night, and she said, I would
have to move my legs up for him
to do sujood.
These rooms are small.
Some haordi said they don't have windows.
The ceiling is so low that you can
just stand up in it, but it doesn't
even have that added kind of
rest or relaxation coming from having a higher
ceiling.
The doors are not made of wood but
of sackcloth.
It's really kind of austere monastic stuff. It's
like a monastery, but
not a monastery. It's a very unusual thing
in the world's religious history, and it's all
Quran
and Tilawah
and Dhikr and the holy prophet giving them
guidance, and it's like a kind of
zawiya, a tekke, a spiritual
retreat.
So the husband is the murshid.
And
beauty and love, which become the great themes
of our sacred literature,
seem to be
first cultivated
in Islam in that environment.
The idea of
the the shahid and the shahida,
the human being whose beauty and whose purity,
recalls
the divine qualities.
The idea of the shahid, the human witness
is very standard in the Sufi poetry.
Appreciating the lover as somebody who draws you
towards the sublime and the transcendent.
Also the proleptic libidinal,
in other words, the idea that there will
be love and romance and intimacy in paradise,
also makes this something
sacred.
Some Muslims nowadays find this a bit edgy
and difficult because of what some would call
the Victorianizing
of Muslim sensibilities, following the appearance of disapproving
Victorian missionaries in India and Egypt and places
in 19th century. Everybody became very kind of
puritanical
and a shame culture developed.
You don't find a shame culture in early
Islam at all or in very traditional parts
of the world. This kind of inhibited anxiety
about the body
and its natural functions,
something that absolutely is not there in early
Islam.
Because all of these things are not just
about the principle of life,
but they're also about, you know, paradise itself.
It's a lived anticipation of the life of
the blessed.
So love and closeness as the context for
the revealing of signs,
and also the closeness to the soul of
the other.
The qalb or the ruh is where
the divine mysteries appear.
The Ruoh is the great mystery.
You've been given only a little bit of
knowledge about it.
Even he, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, is told.
As with intimacy,
married intimacy, you get so close to another
person in a way that's not possible otherwise
that you start to see certain spiritual signs.
And a lot of people in very good
religiously oriented marriages have reported that kind of
thing.
So
Islamic literature from that time really becomes focused
on love,
beauty, love, life, its celebratory. It's what Nietzsche
would identify as the Dionysian
principle
and not the Apollonians.
Before
he died,
he was already putting her,
in a kind of public position
as what Akkad calls his ambassador to the
women.
So, when women came to him for bey'ah
or to ask questions about religion, she would
be present.
Sometimes when they were shy about certain women's
issues,
they would come to her rather than to
him for
advice.
Or if he felt shy, something very kind
of technical about some women's thing was being
asked
out of his
shyness. He didn't necessarily want to speak about
it,
but she would answer on his
behalf of this guru until men came to
ask her questions as well.
Sometimes they would write to her, and we
have some
little bits of letters
that she would send to people in
response to their
request for advice
about religion. So there's a famous one,
a letter that came to her from Muawiya
asking for some naseih, some religious advice.
And so she says,
This is the Hadith that you choose to
send back to him.
Whoever hopes to please God
by annoying the people,
God will protect him from the annoyance of
the people.
And whoever
hopes to please the people
by annoying Allah,
Allah will hand him over to the people.
Okay. So I'm sure when he got that
letter he thought,
okay.
Yeah. So the aesthetic life, these really small
apartments, that heat must have been
pretty difficult.
He would eat from the rough bread of
barley,
but wouldn't eat enough to
satisfy
his fatality. He wouldn't eat his fill.
And never in a single day did he
have both
bread
and oil together. So this is this is
the monastic life.
They're different from a monastic life.
It's the monastic life except that he has
responsibilities
towards the public welfare
and that he has a family life as
well. It's a very new form of existence.
We should talk about what we can learn
about this famous sun notorious episode called the
incident of the lie,
Hadith Al Ifq.
The holy prophet is building this new form
of uniting the tribes of Arabia,
and, of course, there's a lot of pushback
against this.
The leader of the opposition in Medina
is the notorious Abdullah ibn
Ubayy ibn Salul,
chief of the Munafiqeen
in Medina, who is a leader of the
Khazraj tribe, which is one of the the
the 2 biggest tribes in Medina. It can't
be disregarded.
Like a lot of people
whose positions feel a little bit undermined by
this new reality in Medina, he's kind of
looking
to reestablish himself, maybe even calling himself
king of Medina.
And one way always in which
you can undermine
rivals
is through gossip,
through the manipulation of stories,
through claims to having compromising information,
exaggerating things. So many people in Medina are
looking for ways of undermining and destroying the
new order. There are conspiracies to kill the
holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. It's very
tense.
Quite apart from the fact that there's Quraysh
in the other tribes who want to come
and wipe out the Muslim community.
So, the leader of the other main tribe
in Medina, Usayd bin Hodayr,
tells the holy prophet about
the leader of the Khazraj
and that he wants to be king of
Medina.
And this event happens on the return from
a campaign called Hazrat Banil Mostolek,
which is a hurried return
because
they know that Medina's
truce with 1 of the hostile Arab tribes
has expired. So they want to get back
to defend the city,
before that tribe might melt and attack.
And everything
is,
hurried and chaotic.
During this return, some of the different Arab
tribes, even though they're all Muslims now, they
kind of get tribalized when they're disputing over
a busy well.
Ibn Ubayi
speaks up
and tells his Madinan friends, his Ansar
friends, this is what happens when you get
immigration, basically. These people are anti immigration, they
don't like the Mujahideen, these immigrants.
He says, this is what you've done. It's
almost like Nigel Farage talking. Okay. This is
what you've done to your own country.
You've allowed them into your land and you've
shared your wealth with them.
If you stop supporting them, they'll go.
They'll go to somebody else's country.
And when the holy prophet hears this, and
again he's always aware of the danger of
people backsliding into
Medina versus Mecca tribes versus each other.
He summons him
and Ivan Orbei says,
swears an oath by Allah saying he never
says such a thing.
It's all slander, of course not. He's a
good Muslim.
So the return
from the Ghazwa continues,
and they're in a hurry. There's also a
sandstorm which wipes out the trail that kind
of makes it even more difficult
to get back. And quite close to Medina,
they camp for the night.
Aisha goes off to fulfill a need of
nature.
It's dark, obviously,
And she's lost her necklace.
You know, it can be quite a thing
if it's a sentimental value. Somebody precious gave
it to you. It's important. You remember things,
buy it. It's my wedding ring, whatever. I'm
going to call the best plumbers in the
world to get down to the bottom of
the sump to see if it's there.
You don't leave it alone.
So she's kind of going around in the
darkness looking for it. It takes some time.
She finds it, she returns.
The caravans gone,
they thought she was in the Palenquin, the
howder, where she would be
shielded
on the camel. She's so light that they
thought she was there
and off they went. So she's on her
own in the
former campsite. So she sits down in the
desert. It's quiet.
Nobody's there waiting for them to come back.
Sooner or later they'll spot that she's not
there, surely they'll come back for her. And
then, one of the Sahaba, Safwan ibn al
Muwatil, who's a very respected Sahabi, had been
riding behind the army partly to guard it
as a kind of rearguard but partly also
to pick up anything that might have been
dropped.
And he sees her and of course what
he says is,
immediately the
difficulty of the situation, which he can't now
escape, is evident to him and he says,
Ummah,
Ummi Farkami,
mother,
arise and ride.
They have to go by camel or they'll
never catch up.
And so only a few hours later, they
catch up with with the army.
It seems like an obvious thing to have
happened. Even Orbein again gets going
and starts
to
say Look, wife of your prophet spent the
night with a man.
And then in the morning,
he turns up leading her on the camel.
And starts very cleverly through his contacts to
put this
this gossip, this salamah slander around.
And she goes back to Medina, and she's
sick. She has her,
malaria again. It's really bad.
I'm in back in Medina, back at home,
and I'm really suffering for a month from
this fever and not knowing that around me
everybody is dealing with this gossip, this claim.
Her mother is nursing her. She doesn't know
what's being said.
And then a female relative tells her and
she says, has dead to Maradan, alla Maradi,
then I felt even sicker.
She went back to her room. She couldn't
sleep all night. The Munafiqorn
have created a very clever, complex,
lifelike story, spread it around the city.
Ayesha goes to her parents
who don't really know how to deal with
this.
There's no cameras. There's no GPS on people's
mobiles and how you track people's movements nowadays.
It's just
what what it is.
It's clear though that she's been set up.
The holy prophet is also unhappy, but he
refuses to accuse her.
But he has a difficulty here because he
can't just,
on his own initiative, say, I excuse her.
She's innocent.
Not possible.
Because ibn Obey
is hoping for him to do that because
then he could say, oh, there's abolition of
tribalism and kinship ties and so forth.
When it's his wife that's involved, he's going
to disregard all of that. If it was
some other woman, he wouldn't do this. So
this is all nonsense.
Come to me. This idea of equality,
amongst the tribes isn't going to work. And
the holy prophet kind of understands that.
He's establishing an order in which everybody is
equal ethically and before the law and just
to override that and say, well, if he's
innocent,
go away.
He can't be guilty of favouritism
even though it
is it is beloved,
the woman he trusts more than anybody
else.
So,
how is he to deal with this? How
is she to deal with this?
Again, she's in tears and then
And then,
when the holy prophet doesn't know what to
do, he can't say she's innocent
because that's overturning
the normal judicial and ethical
processes. But he's not gonna say she's guilty.
This kind of situation is a stalemate.
Divine revelation comes.
That came to Allah's Messenger, that which would
come to him at the whenever the revelation
descended.
And when that revelation was lifted from him,
he was laughing,
smiling,
and the sweat was pouring from him.
The first thing he said was, you Aisha.
Allah has declared that you are innocent.
So that was kind of the end of
one of the big crisis moments. But kind
of again, it's this tribal thing having to
be suppressed, but
putting, you know, the new leadership in extraordinarily
difficult situation. And then there's a divine revelation,
which indicates
her value
and which also indicates, you know, that this
was
the new religion actually breaking this kind of
stalemate.
But it did hurt her, certainly, very difficult,
very difficult time for her.
Holy prophet dies,
and it's an indication of his particular
love for her, that he dies in her
room
with his head on her lap.
This is a great catastrophe of her life.
And really the great catastrophe of Muslim history
and of all history.
And it was her test.
He was no longer there, but he had
taught her the sacred virtues,
the characteristically Islamic virtues which is the opposite
of the Jahili
virtues of
emoting,
the virtues of rida and sabr and teslim.
Islam is all about accepting the divine decree
and not
overreacting
or becoming excessively emotional. That doesn't mean that
you don't weep and you don't do the
normal human mourning things,
but it does mean that you can't
defy Allah's decree.
It's profoundly consoling,
of course, to people to know that this
is for a divine wisdom which we can't
understand. That's the best way of consoling the
bereaved Priscilla.
She's
his beloved and she's
shattered.
So she said,
Holy Prophet's head was in my lap and
I felt it becoming heavier.
And I looked at his face
and his eyes were turned up and he
was saying,
rather the highest companion in paradise.
And I said, you've been given the choice
and you have made the choice
by him in,
by him who sent you with the truth.
He died in my lap, she said. I
was not wronging anybody.
And then I placed his head on the
pillow
and stood to grieve with the other women
and slapping my face.
That's normal. Certain forms of grieving and
mourning are kind of natural spontaneous things and
shouldn't be suppressed because it's almost a biological
reflex. But it's the rebellion against Allah's decree,
which the Holy Prophet had warned against.
He wasn't present at his burial.
Again, you can always see these tribal things.
They're kind of even though this momentous thing
has happened, they're already discussing,
do we dig the grave the Medinan way
or the Meccan way? The Medinan way is
flat at the bottom, the Meccan way has
a little curve. They're still thinking about this.
In the end, their wisdom prevails and it's
a kind of combination
of the 2.
Women were saying, we didn't know that he
was being buried until we heard the
shovels
in the darkness of the night.
Then after his death,
even when the treasury becomes full and she's
given a pension,
she doesn't leave that place.
He's buried
in her room.
She could have gone off to some nice
villa in some of the more affluent sub
suburbs of Medina like Al Aqih, a sunnah,
but she stays there.
Feeling that he is still in her house,
feeling that he's still with him.
And when they saw this,
people realized why the holy prophet's wives could
never marry again. He was still there in
some way
in dreams. She would do tasbihah. She would
be reading Quran.
And then when Abu Bakr, 2 years later,
is buried by his side, of course, she's
got her father and her husband
in her house, in her bedroom basically, although
there's a small screen. And when Omar is
buried, she moves into
the next room because Omar is not Lahram.
So she really felt a kind of ongoing
presence.
We don't know what the spiritual connection was
because generally in Islam these things are regarded
as incommunicable, but she certainly didn't want
to
leave. So in the day, she would be
in the mosque teaching
behind a screen with all these hadiths and
fiqh,
and then she would go to the grave
and offer her tasbih and prayers or do
some housework.
We grew very close to Hafsa during the
first caliphs.
And then
we've got time for,
sort of, political
events
before we finish.
Of course, Othman's reign is a time of
unease for many.
We've done a class on Othman
and what we saw was that he's one
of the most beloved
companions to the holy prophet who marries
2 of his daughters, one after the other
one dies and he marries the other, Ruqaiya,
I think. Dun Louren, early prophet calls him
the man of the two lights.
Ofman's
political strategy has been,
I'm now controlling this enormous new country.
Most of the population are not Muslim.
Most of them are different kinds of Christian
or Zoroastrian.
This is not easy. The Arabs are coming
out of their Jahiliyyah but a lot of
the tribesmen are still kind of tribal rather
than thinking in terms of Islamic equality.
There are all kinds of different ideas as
to how I should be
and who I should appoint.
And his conclusion seems to have been that
the best thing to do is appoint people
who he really knew and who he was
related
to, even if they weren't
sort of pillars of piety because he knew
he could rely upon them to keep the
thing together.
So he would appoint family members to key
governorships in Egypt,
Basra,
and so forth. And this generated resentment. People
thought, no, it's the most pious who should
be in these positions, not people who he
can rely upon because they're cousins. Looked like
nepotism. To some, it looked like the recrudescence
of the old Arab tribal thing, and that
really triggered a lot of people.
So
here,
the sources
have been filtered by later generations so much
that we can't really tell exactly
what happened except that we know that,
that Ayesha also,
she went to Ofman, who's still in Medina,
of course, the capital hasn't moved to Damascus
yet. She goes to him holding one of
the sandals of the holy prophet,
telling him that in these appointments, he seems
to have departed from the sunnah.
Some people said, why are women getting involved?
Women in politics, certainly not. While others took
her side.
She's not saying he should be deposed, he's
just saying that these appointments of family members
might seem to make sense in terms of
the exigencies of realpolitik, but,
a lot of people are getting really unhappy.
And then in Egypt, Uthman's governor, Abdullah,
faces an accusation
that he's wrongly wrongly executed someone. So now
the Egyptians come to Ayesha's house to complain.
She's kind of the symbolic center of
probity and
authenticity in the city, and she's the one
who finds all of these people are coming
to her. So she writes to the caliph,
and she becomes, although she doesn't mean to
be, kind of the center of political opposition
in Medina. Some of Ofman's advisors think she's
the main troublemaker, she's the main enemy, even
though she's just trying to relay and process
and understand
complaints.
Darcyha is Islamic obligation.
Instability grows.
The empire is still expanding, but there's kind
of
a
division at the heart of it.
And famously, Ofmen's house is besieged. There's kind
of rioting in Modena. His food and his
water are cut off.
Her sister wife, Habiba, goes with a mule
and a skin of water and,
she's kind of almost attacked. Her mule is
kind of the the rein is cut with
one of the besiegers' swords and she falls
off.
So Aisha decides
to leave Medina,
goes to Mecca for the pilgrimage.
And again, exactly what happens in Mecca is
really difficult to discern,
because
the subsequent historians,
they're from the Bedi Umayyah or the Abbasids
or from different Shia groups or from all
from
and everybody is telling the story that they
have
heard,
and regardless
being most
valid.
And,
there's if you look at modern historians, they
take all kinds of different views. But, certainly,
Mecca is divided between the
followers of Othman and the followers of the
Banu Umayyah,
which she doesn't relate to either.
When she hears of Ofman's assassination and she
immediately says
these culprits
because even though she's been criticizing Ofman, she
really
can't stand this idea that he's been assassinated,
have to be dealt with.
And so she gains she she gathers
supporters in Mecca
and heads
north.
Ali has been declared
the new caliph.
She's not against him, but she does think
that he should be taking more
stringent steps to track down and punish the
assassins. So mostly tribesmen who vanished.
And Ali thinks that it would be divisive
to try and track them down. That seems
to have been
the the situation. And, of course, he's not
part of it because his own son, Imam
al Hassan,
has been one of the guards of Osman's
house and was wounded during the attack. His
loyalties are very clear. And he hadn't wanted
to be Khalifa at first but really had
to be pressed when told otherwise this whole
thing is going to fall to pieces. This
is like a civil war incipient, you have
to do it. So out of a duty
he reluctantly
accepts it. So
in Mecca there's people who are opposed to
Ali which he isn't really.
There's Talha and Zubayr, who's a brother-in-law.
Each of them thought perhaps they should be
Khalifa.
And again it's not really a matter of
ego, but a matter of it's my responsibility
to try and sort this out. Because
Umar had commended them both and said both
of them would be suitable
to be rulers.
The holy prophet had died, 'buhu anqumerad'.
Umar once in Aisha's house had brought Talha.
And Zubayr,
according to the historians, said: 'when Allah's Messenger
died, he was pleased with you.' So it's
a really disunited army with people from different
views and different factions.
All the only thing they did agree on
was that the killers of Othman should be
brought to justice.
So she sets out, almost turns back,
indecisive.
But she ends up in Basra,
year 36.
And,
again,
confusing stories. It's a fairly lawless
situation.
Ali has not arrived yet.
There's the 2 armies,
a tent pitch between the two where the
negotiations are taking place.
Ayesha wanted a council to decide
who was the right caliph. Would it be
Ali? Would it be Talha Zobayr?
Somebody else. She thought there should be a
renegotiation
of that.
Both sides,
certainly
Ali and Ayesha, wanted
a peaceful resolution,
but there were extremists on both sides. The
discussions seemed to have been going very well
when some extremists on both sides started trading
arrow shops with each other and
everybody felt confused, divided and a kind of
battle
ensued.
The battle of the camel, because she was
in the middle of it with her palanquin,
trying to direct things in this
chaotic world. And it's not a huge battle
by modern standards.
And it's not a huge battle by the
standards of, say, the battle of Yaramoko, or
the huge
battles that the Sahaba had been engaged with
against,
neighboring empires. But it's still very painful.
Ali's forces, which are larger and more united,
win.
Afterwards, he's startled when he goes around the
battlefield to see how many great companions have
been in her
army.
Ali orders her brother, Muhammad, to take her
back to Mecca.
And later on, all the sources agree that
she's kind of really sorry that she took
part in this battle that kind of was
a spontaneous conflagration in a chaotic situation.
So she'd say, 'Laytoni mituqablayomaljamal.'
If only I had died before the day
of the camel and she would not be
able
to suppress herself from crying whenever the battle
was mentioned.
So she dies on 17th Ramadan in the
year 58 of the Hijra.
Janazah is led by Abu Hurairah,
which is buried in Al Baqir.
Now I want to conclude just by going
back. I know this has been a long
session.
But I think you'll agree that there's a
lot that's important for Islam,
in this in terms of politics, in terms
of Islam's battle against tribalism, in terms of
gender,
a lot rides on on this story.
By looking again at
another of the books which we have hooray
in the CMC library,
In terms of this question of
what does it mean to be a mother
of the believers,
Allah is saying that they are the mothers
of the believers, although they don't have children.
What does that mean? So
different scholars historically, and sometimes this can seem
a rather artificial exercise, like to rank
the Sahaba.
So and so is better than this person
and he did this and they're kind of
like league tables
like Cardiff University is better in humanities this
year than University of York.
To me, it seems a little bit artificial
because how can you really compare
Abu Ubaydah ibn al Jarrah
to Az Zubaydah ibn al-'awwam. They had different
virtues, different drawbacks, different experiences. It's very hard
to put them in these kind of complicated
league tables. But,
interestingly,
even Hazen
has this book.
An epistle on the
grading, the mute the the different merits of
the sahaba.
Ibn Hazm is this 11th century Andalusian scholar
who's a Zaheri, very literalist, and that kind
of impels him to do this. I want
to see if all of these, he's got
several 100 Sahaba, if I can actually create
an exact list.
This all comes out of the initial dispute,
who is right, who is wrong In these,
you know, should you criticize the harbor?
The Sunni position is you love all of
them even though their ichdihad might not always
have been infallible.
But that's the Sunni ethical insight. You love
all of them.
And their disputes, leave them to Allah because
Allah knows what their intentions are. The Hawarish
and the Shia, Ibadia and other traditions do
have ways of condemning some of the Sahaba,
which the sunnis have
shown their ethical mettle by saying, no. Koluhumu
o dol, all of them upright witnesses or
a 100000 of them. And that becomes characteristic
of what it is to be a Sunni.
A little sunnah wal Jama'ah. Anyway,
here is ibn Hazm.
And, of course, he has to deal with
the question of
He actually says it.
The superiority
of the prophet's wives
over
the other companions.
Alright.
And he has various, ways of
doing this.
Allah
makes them they have the fiqh position of
motherhood over every Muslim.
And that's in addition to their merit from
being companions of the holy prophet.
So they have the merit of the other
Sahaba but that they have the special virtue
of being particularly close to him, having kept
his close company
and having lived with him.
And being favored by him,
that which no other Sahabi
can
can rival. So
So he does this, his conclusion is that
they're Sahabas but also mothers of the believers
so they're better than the other Sahaba.
And then,
then of course, in his kind of logic
chopping way, he wants to know which of
the wives are the best wives.
And he concludes,
The
best of his wives were Aisha
and Khadija.
Because of the
great
merits.
And because he said Aisha is the most
beloved of people to me.
It's another famous hadith.
The merit of Aisha over other women is
like the merit of kind of meat broth
over other forms of food.
The best of its women, Mariam daughter of
Imran and the best of its women, Khadija
bint Khawelid.
Taking into account also,
Khadija is coming first in Islam and her
steadfastness.
And then he goes through the other
wives. So
we don't have to accept everything ibn Hazem
says, but it's interesting that this could have
been
a concept in medieval Islam, that you have
holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, and and
beneath him you have these 12
female apostles.
And then you have the rest of the
Sahaba. It's an indication of how the civilization
really
revered them. And then finally,
I wanted to read a few texts about
her kind
of devotional life
Because I've mentioned that these these apartments were
like a zawiyah.
They were there doing tasbih
and reciting Quran
and learning Fiqh.
So
last text today.
Abu Nu'ayim is Fahidi,
Died in 4:30 of the hijra.
Famous
student of Al Hakim and Nisapuri,
Ibn al Salah, one of the great Hadith
experts,
calls him
one of the 7 great scholars of Islam.
He has this
10 volume work.
The Adornment of the Saints,
in which he talks about
the great ones
of early Islamic history before his time
with all of his isnaads
and gives us
narrations about them to do with their kind
of spiritual life.
And he has a long section on art
issue
near the beginning.
Let's just read a bit of this before
we conclude.
And amongst the saints is the siddiqah, a
daughter of the siddiq.
Which
means the liberated one, daughter of the liberated
one, liberated from,
unbelief, liberated from
attachment to the world.
The beloved of the beloved,
the intimate
of he who is close to God,
the one who is declared to be innocent
of faults,
the one
from the doubts of people's hearts he was
declared to be innocent.
The one who actually saw
Jibril,
the messenger of the Noah,
of the Messenger who was the Noah of
the unseen worlds.
Aisha, Mother of the believers. So already we
get these titles.
She turned away from this world,
was indifferent to its
worldly pleasures
and wept
when
the ones who were closest to her
were lost to her.
Then he comes up with a Sufi saying
indicating what kind of mystical virtue she represents:
Sufism is to
embrace one's yearning
and to
abandon,
dismay or regret or moaning.
In other words, just to accept things as
they come.
And then he gives you a bunch of
isnads
and then stories about
devotion.
See if I can pick some out, oh,
what's the mass of
It's nerds. Okay. Here's one.
It's a hadith indicating that she experienced more
of the prophet's love than anybody except for
her father.
The holy Prophet
while I was spinning,
would be
fixing his own sandal.
At that moment I saw the sweat coming
and his
sweat, as it were, bursting into light.
There was a kind of light coming from
his face.
'qalat
fafbuth.'
And she said, 'I was astounded, dumbstruck.'
'qalat
fafnazara ilayya fafkal.'
And he looked at me and said,
'malakbuhd,
why are you so amazed?'
And she described what had happened. 'I saw
the light coming from your face and from
this sweat on your face.'
And then She says,
if Abu Kabir al Khudali, who was a
famous poet, saw you,
he would know that you were the one
to whom his poetry would most apply. And
then he said, and what does Abu Kabir
Khadali say?' Remember, she's the great poetry memorizer.
It's complicated but it's basically about a face
so beautiful that it shines like like the
lightning.
So the holy prophet put down that thing
that he'd been doing,
and he got up,
walked over to me and kissed me between
my eyes
and said,
and he said, may Allah reward you Aisha,
You make me happier,
than I make you.
Yeah. And then there's this hadith which indicates
that she actually saw Jibril when he came.
So a woman saying, 'Once I saw Aisha,
she had been sent
money in 2 large containers.
She said, 'I think it's 80 or 100,000.
This would be dirhams, silver coins.
So that day when she was fasting she
called for a dish.
And she sat down to divide it, the
money amongst the people. For Amset
by the time the evening had come not
a single coin remained.
And when the evening came she said:
'Please bring my Iftar.'
was 8 and she brought her a piece
of bread and some oil.
So the woman who'd come to her said
to her,
Couldn't you, with all the money that you
are distributing today, have spent one coin to
buy some
meat?
Cross to break our fast.
So she said,
don't be cross with me. If you'd reminded
me I would have done so.'
Here you can see these are really not
Dunya people.
Okay. So,
I've seen Aisha dividing up
70,000
coins of silver
and then
patching
the edge of her
garment.
Yeah. Then there's some other accounts about how
she became,
knowing about
medicine,
That she said
that towards the end of his life when
the holy prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, grew
sick,
the various delegations who came to Medina
would hear about this and their own kind
of medical
experts, their physicians, would come to try and
help him with what he had. She said
she was watching and she was learning from
that.
From Infam. And so I myself started to
treat him, so I learned it from that.
There's other things that, Abun Noaim,
Nuhaym
says about her, but I thought it was
appropriate to end
with this particular kind of
aspect
of this
life of the domestic
the domestic
zaviah,
where he was
alianandessi
dohakenobasama.
He was the best of people
in laughing and smiling, she used to say.
So it was kind of
evidently a very happy household, a very loving
household, a very unique household,
but one in which he was really being
transformed
into somebody who became a very formidable personality.
A person whose life was basically
devoted
during her 40 years or so of widowhood
to making sacrifices for the community.
Even becoming involved
through her own personal itch she had in
the political life of what was going on,
but also charity,
fasting,
Quran,
becoming what they call they call the turbedar,
the custodian of the grave of the chosen
one salallahu alaihi wa sallam.
So that is a bit of her story
and there is a lot more because she's,
you know,
private figure because she's his wife, but also
has this huge role in hadith transmission
and in the development of
early Arabic literature
and in
so many other aspects of the Muslim life.
We will be inspired by these examples
and inspired also to overcome some of the
prejudices that exist in our community about what
women can do and what they can't do
because the story of early Islam with the
women being at the center of things, the
holy prophet giving so much time and respect
to them is something that we need to
take, I think, a little bit more seriously
in our communities.