Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar

On one of his trading journeys between Makkah and Syria, Hashim passed through Yathrib and met Salma bint Amr, an energetic and dynamic businesswoman of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar (Khazraj). He proposed through her father, and she set conditions: that she would remain in Madinah, keep all her children, and continue her work as a businesswoman. Hashim agreed, and they married, though the couple were only able to be together for a short time before he continued his travels.

The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA arrived at Quba, the outermost settlement of Madinah facing Makkah, entering on a Monday in the 14th year of the dawah (the 1st year of the Hijrah). Each day beforehand, the Ansar had gone out toward Quba to await him, staying until the midday heat forced them back, until word spread that he was near and they rushed out in throngs, hundreds of them, to receive him; a Jewish man of Yathrib, sighting the two travelers from atop a palm tree, was first to call out, "O Arabs, your king has arrived!" Al-Bara' ibn Azib RA, an Ansari eyewitness, recalled that over 500 armed and dressed Ansar came out, with women climbing onto rooftops and children thronging around to see. The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA then waited about a week at Quba for Ali RA, Aisha RA, and Asma RA to arrive, before entering central Madinah together, reportedly on a Friday. The Prophet ﷺ let his camel walk freely, saying it should be left alone because Allah had taken charge of it; wherever it sat down would be the site of his masjid and house. It sat on an open plantation-drying ground. He asked whose relatives among his family were closest by, and Khalid ibn Zayd (Abu Ayyub al-Ansari), of the Banu al-Najjar, came forward (the Prophet ﷺ's great-grandmother was of that same clan, making Abu Ayyub roughly his sixth cousin), so the Prophet ﷺ chose to stay with him until his own house was built. The poem Tala'al-badru alayna is popularly said to have greeted him on this arrival; scholars differ over whether it belongs here or to his return from Tabuk.

The Prophet ﷺ lived at the two-storey house of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari RA for about six months while his own house and Masjid al-Nabawi were built. Abu Ayyub and his wife moved upstairs, giving the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA the ground floor, though out of respect the couple later insisted the Prophet ﷺ take the upper floor instead, spending only the first few weeks below him.

The slander, al-ifk, was the last and most painful of three things that happened on the road home from the expedition of al-Muraysi' against the Banu al-Mustaliq in Sha'ban of 5 AH (most books of Seerah, following Ibn Ishaq, say 6 AH). It had been the largest concentration of hypocrites ever to march with the Muslims: the target was close, there was no harvest to keep men at home, and victory was certain, so Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul and his followers came along. On the way back a scuffle at a well between a Muhajir and an Ansari became a stand-off between the two halves of the army until the Prophet ﷺ dismissed the old tribal war-cry as rotten. Ibn Ubayy, who had hoped for a fight, said in his tent that the honourable would expel the inferior once they reached Madinah; the boy Zayd ibn Arqam RA reported it, Ibn Ubayy swore he had said no such thing, and that morning Surah al-Munafiqun came down quoting his words back at him. The Prophet ﷺ then marched the army twenty hours without a halt so that the gossip had no time to breathe. Exposed by the Qur'an itself, Ibn Ubayy looked for revenge, and found it in the Prophet ﷺ's own household. Aisha RA told the whole story herself, in narrations in Sahih al-Bukhari that run to pages. The Prophet ﷺ drew lots among his wives before a journey, and hers had come up; the verses of hijab had already been revealed, so she travelled inside a howdah on her camel. On the last night before Madinah, when the order came to make camp, she walked out beyond the army to relieve herself, felt at her neck on the way back and found that her necklace of Yemeni onyx had broken. She went back to look for it. While she searched, the order came to move; the men who carried her howdah lifted it onto the camel without noticing she was not inside, because, as she said with characteristic gentleness towards them fifty years later, she was a slight young girl who ate little, and the army moved off. She found the necklace under the place where her camel had knelt, returned to an empty camp, and, certain they would miss her and come back, wrapped herself up and fell asleep. She woke to a man saying "la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah". It was Safwan ibn al-Muattal RA, who had fallen behind the army and overslept its departure. He had seen her before the hijab and recognised her; she covered her face; he said nothing more, knelt his camel, turned his back while she mounted, and led it on foot until they caught the army where it had halted in the heat of the day. At the tail of the column, where the hypocrites always rode, was Abdullah ibn Ubayy, and that was when the talk began. Out of respect for her the books of Seerah never record what was said; they call it simply "the slander". Aisha herself heard none of it. She fell ill with a fever on reaching Madinah and spent a month in bed, noticing only that the Prophet ﷺ was not as tender with her as usual, and not knowing why. When she recovered she went out one night with Umm Mistah bint Abi Ruhm RA, her father's cousin, to the open ground the Arabs still used before they built latrines in their houses. Umm Mistah tripped on her cloak and cursed her own son, Mistah RA. Aisha rebuked her for cursing a man who had fought at Badr, and Umm Mistah asked whether she truly had not heard. Then she told her. Aisha went home more ill than before, asked the Prophet ﷺ's leave to go to her parents, and asked her mother Umm Ruman RA what people were saying. Her mother tried to soften it: a beautiful woman loved by her husband, with co-wives, will always be talked about. Aisha understood that it was all true, and wept through the night until she thought her liver would burst. The ones who had set the story going were Ibn Ubayy and some of his Khazraj followers; the only believers who had repeated it were Mistah, the poet Hassan ibn Thabit RA, and Hamnah bint Jahsh, sister of Aisha's one real rival among the wives, Zaynab bint Jahsh RA. Zaynab herself, when the Prophet ﷺ asked her, said she would not sully her ears or her eyes and knew nothing but good of Aisha; her religion protected her, as Aisha put it, while her sister was ruined for her sake. Meanwhile the Prophet ﷺ, to whom no revelation had come in a whole month, took counsel with the two young men closest to his household. Usama ibn Zayd RA, born and raised in his house, said flatly that it was impossible. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA answered that Allah had not confined him to one woman, and that he should question her maidservant Barirah RA, who would know. Barirah, terrified, could find no fault with her mistress except that she sometimes fell asleep over the dough and let the family goat eat it. The Prophet ﷺ then stood on the minbar and asked who would excuse him against a man who had wounded him through his own family, when he knew nothing but good of his wives and of the man they named. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA of the Aws answered that if the man were of his tribe he would behead him, and if of the Khazraj, he needed only the order; Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA of the Khazraj, a righteous man in whom, as Aisha said, the old tribal feeling flared for a moment, called him a liar who would never dare; Usayd ibn Hudayr RA called Sa'd ibn Ubadah a hypocrite defending hypocrites, and the two tribes were on their feet before the Prophet ﷺ quieted them. The next day he came to her at her parents' house, where an Ansari woman sat weeping with her, sat down, praised Allah, and said that if she was innocent Allah would clear her, and if she had slipped she should ask His forgiveness, for He forgives whoever repents. Her tears dried on the instant. She asked her mother to answer for her, and her mother did not know what to say; she asked her father, and Abu Bakr RA did not know what to say. So she answered for herself with the words of the father of Yusuf, whose name she could not recall in her distress: "Patience is beautiful, and Allah is the One whose help is sought against what you describe" (Qur'an 12:18). Then she turned to face the wall. She had hoped Allah might show her innocence in a dream; she never imagined He would send down Qur'an about her. But the Prophet ﷺ had not left the room when the signs of revelation came over him, the heaviness and the sweat on a cold day, and when it lifted he was laughing: "O Aisha, Allah has declared you innocent." The opening of Surah al-Nur had come down, from 24:11, calling the affair a lie, promising its ringleader the worst of punishments, fixing eighty lashes for anyone who accuses a chaste woman without four witnesses, and asking the believers why they had not simply said what Abu Ayyub al-Ansari RA had said to his wife when she asked him whether he had heard: glory be to You, this is a monstrous slander. Her mother told her to rise and thank the Prophet ﷺ; she would rise, she said, and thank only Allah. The three believers who had repeated the story were flogged; the hypocrites who had invented it were left to the Hereafter. Abu Bakr, who had been supporting his poor kinsman Mistah, swore never to give him another coin, and a verse came down asking whether he did not wish Allah to forgive him; he swore then to support Mistah for life. Before the matter was settled Safwan had struck Hassan with the flat of his sword for repeating the talk, and the Prophet ﷺ ruled for Hassan, since no man takes the law into his own hands, then asked Hassan to forgive; Hassan forgave, for his sake, and was given a garden. Safwan swore he had never lifted the veil of any woman; he married afterwards and died a martyr in the time of Umar RA. Aisha, who made excuses for everyone in the story as she told it, would never allow anyone in her presence to speak ill of Hassan.

Safiyyah was a girl in Madinah on the day the Prophet ﷺ arrived there, the favourite of her father Huyayy ibn Akhtab, chief of the Banu Nadir, and of her uncle Abu Yasir. She ran to them when they came home from seeing him and they walked past her, shoulders down, and she heard her uncle ask, is it him? and her father answer, by the Lord of Moses, it is him; and what then? we will oppose him as long as we live. She was exiled with her tribe and married in Khaybar, and when the Banu Nadir threw themselves into the front of Khaybar's defence more of them died than of Khaybar's own, her husband Kinana among them. She was a widow when the fighting ended, and a captive, and in the division she fell to Dihyah al-Kalbi. Companions said to the Prophet ﷺ that the daughter of the chief of the Banu Nadir should be his and not left to Dihyah, so he paid Dihyah her price and took her. No one knew at first whether he had taken her as a servant or a wife, so they watched. When it was time to leave Khaybar he couched his camel, knelt, and made his thigh a step for her to mount by, and she, out of respect, set her knee on it rather than her foot. Then he covered her with his cloak, and the Companions understood, for that veil was for his wives. Safiyyah did not yet know what it meant. When he went to her on the first night she refused him, and he let her be; a night's journey from Madinah she agreed, and he asked Umm Sulaym to make her ready. Umm Sulaym hung two cloths between trees and the women did what they could with what little they had, fretting that they had no perfume or jewellery for her, and when they had finished they smelt a scent finer than any they knew. When he entered he said the hard thing first: her father Huyayy had been the most open of the Jews in his enmity until Allah took him. It was a test of what was in her heart, and she answered from the Qur'an, that no soul bears the burden of another. Then he gave her the choice as she understood it, to accept Islam and stay with him, or to keep her faith and perhaps be freed and returned to her people. She said she had inclined to Islam before he offered it and had already believed in him; she had no people to go back to, her father and brother were gone; and Allah and His Messenger ﷺ were dearer to her than her own kin. He freed her, and her freedom was her dowry, and he married her. He had seen a bruise on her face and asked about it: her husband had struck her when she told him of a dream in which the moon rose from Yathrib and fell into her lap, and asked whether she expected the king of the Arabs to marry her. He had read the dream rightly. Asked afterwards why she had refused the first night, she said that so close to Khaybar she had feared the Jews would retaliate, and he loved her the more for it. Abu Ayyub al-Ansari stood outside the tent all night with his sword drawn, afraid of what a woman whose family had died at Muslim hands might do, and when the Prophet ﷺ found him there in the morning he laughed and prayed for him. The wedding feast was whatever anyone had, dates, a little clarified butter and barley mixed together. On the road, when the walls of Madinah came in sight and the riders whipped their camels forward as Madani custom was, the Prophet ﷺ's camel stumbled and threw them both; every Companion turned his face away, and only Abu Talha cried out to ask whether he was hurt. He was not, and he was on his feet at once with his cloak over her. In Madinah the wives came to look at her and Zaynab bint Jahsh said to Juwayriyya that this one would be trouble. She belonged to neither camp among them, having no family of her own, and perhaps that is why he was so tender with her. When Hafsa called her the daughter of a Jew and she wept, he asked why she had not answered that her father was a prophet, Harun, and her uncle a prophet, Musa, and her husband a prophet; on the Farewell Hajj he stopped speaking to Zaynab for refusing her a camel; and in his last illness, when Safiyyah wished she could take his fever on herself and the other wives murmured, he told them to rinse their mouths, for she had spoken the truth. She died in 52 AH.