A History of Islam in 21 Women

Hossein Kamaly

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786076328
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia islamica

The story of Islam as never presented before Khadija was the first believer, to whom the Prophet Muhammad often turned for advice. At a time when strongmen quickly seized power from any female Muslim ruler, Arwa of Yemen reigned alone for five decades. In nineteenth-century Russia, Mukhlisa Bubi championed the rights of women and girls, and became the first Muslim woman judge in modern history. After the Gestapo took down a Resistance network in Paris, British spy Noor Inayat Khan found herself the only undercover radio operator left in that city. In this unique history, Hossein Kamaly celebrates the lives and achievements of twenty-one extraordinary women in the story of Islam, from the formative days of the religion to the present.

1

Khadija

(ca. 560–619)

The First Believer

Khadija was the first believer, the very first mumin. She made her mark on the history of Islam very early in the seventh century CE. She believed the message of her husband, Prophet Muhammad, even before he openly started to call the people in the Arabian town of Mecca to the one and only God. With unwavering faith in his vocation, she stood by him in the hardest times, to her dying breath. She witnessed the Prophet’s sincerity of heart and nobility of spirit, offered him genuine human love, and bolstered his resolve. Today more than ever, it is important to highlight that the first person to receive the Prophet’s message was a woman.

Prophet Muhammad often turned to Khadija for advice. She knew him well and he trusted her. Up to the moment when he accepted his vocation of delivering God’s message to his people, marriage to Khadija had been his greatest good fortune. And when that decision shook him to the core, he relied on Khadija’s calming compassion and wisdom.

The bustling town of Mecca, a center for regional and long-distance trade, distressed the young Muhammad with its pervasive injustice, moral decay, and spiritual emptiness. He labeled all that he disliked about it as the darkness of ignorance and folly, al-jahiliya. By contrast, Khadija was his lodestar, providing love, light, and support. With her backing, he committed himself to good deeds and for a month at a time immersed himself in contemplation and devotional practices, fasting, praying, and helping the poor in and around his hometown.

Sometimes Muhammad withdrew to a cave in a nearby hill. On his return he would first visit the holy site at the heart of Mecca: the Kaaba, and walk round it seven times or more, chanting the mantra, “Here I come my God, here I am. All praise and power is yours.”

The Kaaba, also called Bayt-Allah, or the House of Allah, stood as a tribute to God in Mecca and was less than an hour’s walk from Khadija’s home and workplace. Locals believed that the biblical patriarch Abraham and his first son, Ishmael, had erected it in honor of the God of heaven and earth and the God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac. However, by the seventh century, that cube-shaped monument built for the one and only God functioned like the Pantheon in ancient Rome – as a temple for multiple gods. Inside at least one large statue carved out of reddish-brown stone, maybe carnelian, sat behind a curtain. Outside stood scores of other statues, idols, and effigies. A consecrated well named Zamzam was sunk some forty paces to the east of the Kaaba.

During the seventh century, toward the end of the period that historians call Late Antiquity, a variety of religious beliefs and practices coexisted in the Arabian Peninsula. In the northwestern parts of Arabia, the region known as Hijaz, Christianity and Judaism had followers. However, sources compiled retrospectively by later Muslim writers identify the majority of the population as pagans or polytheists who worshipped multiple deities, often in the form of wooden or stone idols. Many Arab tribes kept a representation of their favored deity inside or outside the Kaaba. At regular times of festival, they gathered at the site, performed various rituals, and asked for protection and good luck. Beyond the Kaaba, natives considered many other sites as holy, including wells, springs, and streams in desert valleys. People came to Mecca from distant parts of the Arabian Peninsula, as far south as Yemen and as far east as the rims of the vast desert aptly known as the Empty Quarter.

Although Mecca was far from the current centers of political power and commercial wealth in Constantinople and Ctesiphon, it was still important, especially at the turn of the seventh century CE, when Arabia was about to witness the birth of what became known as Islam.

One summer night in 610 CE, when Khadija’s husband was about forty years old, he cut short his habitual period of seclusion in a cave near Mecca. Something inexplicable had happened. The archangel Gabriel had visited him with a message from the one and only God. Still in shock, he stumbled home. Comforted by Khadija’s presence, he confided in her what he had experienced:

Gabriel appeared to me in a dream-vision. He was carrying a scroll sealed in a brocade with some writing on it. He told me, “Read!” I asked, “What shall I read?” He pressed me in a crushing embrace, like death. Then he let go and commanded, “Read!” I implored, “What shall I read?”¹

The wording of the original account in Arabic sounds puzzling and the English translation is hardly clearer. After a third such exchange, the angel instructed:

Read! In the name of your Lord who created,
Who created humans from a clot.
Read! And your Lord is most Munificent,
Who taught by the pen,
Taught humans what they knew not.²

Muhammad told Khadija, “Finally, I recited the writing, and the Angel Gabriel left. Coming through, I felt those words were inscribed on my heart.”³

Muslim tradition records this momentous epiphany, this encounter with the ineffable and transcendent reality, as the start of Prophet Muhammad’s mission as God’s messenger – the mab‘ath. The Angel Gabriel’s instructions became part of the Quran, the Muslim Holy Scripture. Accounts of how exactly the Quran was compiled vary, but within a generation after the Prophet Muhammad, the majority of his followers recognized it as a closed and complete record of God’s spoken word. These early elements from revelations in the Quran encapsulate some of the fundamental elements of what later became known as Islam: an emphasis on God, the creator; the mystery of creation; the utter dependence of humans on their creator; the creator’s absolute generosity; as well as the weight given in the Islamic tradition to knowledge, reading, and writing.

Unsure of what his vision meant, Muhammad worried. He sought Khadija’s counsel. Could it have been sheer fantasy? In Mecca, it was the poets who had a reputation for telling tall tales based on their dreams and delusions, and most people thought they were possessed by demons who spoke through them. Crowds gathered to hear them but they were not respected. At home, Muhammad sat by Khadija’s side, leaning on her literally and figuratively. Lovingly, she wrapped him in a blanket and comforted him. Listening intently to his account of what had happened, she assured him that he was nothing like those poets. Surely God would never delude a man who helped debtors get out of debt, who fed the hungry, spoke only the truth, and always stood for justice. No, he was no poet. She believed him. She believed in him.

Khadija had married Muhammad more than a decade earlier. Everything about him had impressed her, so much in fact that contrary to custom she took the initiative and asked for his hand in marriage. What had she seen in him? As far as his looks went, the Islamic tradition remembers Prophet Muhammad as a well-proportioned man, neither stout nor skinny, neither short nor too tall. He had a broad forehead, with curved eyebrows, wide-set black eyes, and noticeably long eyelashes. He let his beard grow thick and his hair long. When he smiled, and he smiled often, his lips parted, and his white teeth showed. His face was always radiant. He walked with a spring in his step, leaning forward slightly as if he were walking downhill. People enjoyed speaking with him and found him charismatic. Khadija saw all this in him, and more.

According to the oldest written biography of the Prophet, from around the middle of the eighth century CE, when Khadija heard what had happened to her husband she immediately set out to investigate. She rose to her feet, gathered her garments about her – an expression that in Arabic signals determination – and went to seek advice from her cousin Waraqa, whose wisdom and great learning she admired. In Mecca Waraqa belonged to a small circle known as the hanifs, the purists. Regarding themselves as pure-hearted seekers of the truth, the hanifs rejected the religious beliefs and practices common in Mecca and instead embraced Abrahamic practices such as walking around the House of Allah and refusing to worship idols. Although no complete copy of the Hebrew Bible – the Mosaic scriptures – was available in Arabic, the hanifs knew at least parts of it. At the same time they revered Jesus, though they did not have access to the Gospels in Arabic and did not belong to a Christian church. One of the eclectic elements in the teachings of the hanifs was that they expected the advent of a prophet among the Arabs.

When Khadija related what her husband had told her, Waraqa exclaimed, “Holy! Holy! He must be the awaited prophet.” Perhaps recalling that the Lord’s chosen messenger would receive sealed scrolls and not be able to read them out, Waraqa identified Muhammad as the prophet announced in the Torah and the Gospels. In some lines of poetry that have come down to us, he expressed joy for the coming of this awaited prophet:

I persevered and persisted in a
Remembrance that often evoked tears.
Now confirming evidence comes from Khadija.
Long have I had to wait, O Khadija,
In the vale of Mecca in spite of my hope
That I might see the outcome of your words.⁴

Recognizing the signs of a prophet, Waraqa told Khadija to encourage and support her husband. He also warned her of inevitable opposition from the enemies of God, who would persecute Muhammad, accusing him of being an imposter, a poet, or a madman and driving him out of his homeland. Nevertheless, salvation was his and for those who followed him in the path of the one true God, the God of Abraham and Jesus. Waraqa’s words buoyed Khadija’s spirit but his warning worried her. Knowing Meccan society well, she resolved to protect her husband and keep him safe.

Like most of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, Meccan society was tribal. Social capital and standing derived primarily from tribal affiliation, and a person’s honor, property, and their life depended greatly on the tribe to which they belonged. A man abandoned by his tribe had much to fear, as did an orphan like Muhammad, even if he belonged to a powerful tribe. And so Khadija was Muhammad’s shield. As a wealthy woman with a distinguished tribal pedigree, Khadija in her forties was a force to be reckoned with in Mecca. She used her standing to back her husband at a time when he was most vulnerable. What does that say about Khadija?

Prophet Muhammad and Khadija both belonged to the tribe of Quraysh, whose chiefs controlled Mecca and surrounding areas. Some of the Quraysh were landowners and agriculturalists. The tribe was large and had many branches, two of which dominated the others. One of these was the Hashemites, the descendants of Hashem who held the honorable title of keepers of the keys of the Kaaba. The other powerful branch was the Umayyads, the descendants of Hashem’s nephew Umayya, who dominated the field of commerce. As rival cousins, the Hashemites and the Umayyads vied for resources and honors and were not always friendly with each other.

The Quraysh were not alone in Mecca, however. There were other, less important tribes in the region and Mecca became a hub for men and women from as far north as Syria and as far south as the Yemen, coming in pilgrimage to the spiritually potent Kaaba and the many holy sites in the surrounding desert valleys. Making a promise,...