Banu al-Mustaliq

The Banu al-Mustaliq, allies of the Quraysh who had fought against the Muslims at Uhud, lived at the pond of al-Muraysi' between Makkah and Madinah. After hearing that their chieftain al-Harith ibn Abi Dirar was planning a surprise attack, the Prophet ﷺ sent Buraydah ibn al-Husayb RA to confirm the rumor by posing as a Bedouin wanting to join the raid; Buraydah then slipped away by night to report back. The Prophet ﷺ rallied over 700 sahaba, 30 of them fully mounted and armed, and launched a complete surprise dawn attack while the tribe was unprepared: women collecting water, children playing outside. The tribe surrendered almost immediately. Because the expedition looked so safe, many munafiqun, including Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, joined for the first time, having stayed away from Badr and Uhud.

Al-Harith ibn Abi Dirar came to Madinah to ransom his people, not yet aware his daughter Juwayriyya had married the Prophet ﷺ and that the Ansar had freed all the captives. The Prophet ﷺ told him it was Juwayriyya's own decision whether to return with her father. When al-Harith saw his daughter willingly choose to remain with the Prophet ﷺ over him, he was so affected that he embraced Islam.

Juwayriyya bint al-Harith, daughter of the chieftain of the Banu al-Mustaliq, was captured at al-Muraysi' and given to the Ansari Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas RA, with whom she agreed to purchase her own freedom. She came to the Prophet ﷺ's door asking for help raising the money. The Prophet ﷺ offered instead to free her himself and marry her, making her freedom her mahr, and she agreed.

The Prophet ﷺ visited Juwayriyya RA on a Friday and found her fasting. He asked whether she had fasted the day before or intended to fast the day after; when she said no, he taught her not to single out Friday alone for fasting.

The Prophet ﷺ went to pray Fajr from Juwayriyya RA's house and found her in her musalla doing dhikr. Returning later in the day, he found her still sitting in the same place. When she confirmed she had remained there since Fajr, he taught her a short dhikr equal in reward to all the dhikr she had done that morning.

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.

No one knows the year. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas says the ninth year of the Hijrah; others say the fourth, fifth or sixth. That the Prophet ﷺ was by then married to all nine of his wives, Sawda, Aisha, Hafsa, Umm Salama, Juwayriyya, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Umm Habiba, Safiyyah and Maymunah, and that Umar was at the time worrying about an attack by the Ghassanids, which was no longer a fear after Tabuk, point to a late date; that Umar went in to Aisha points to a time before the verses of hijab; that the verses revealed about it sit in Surah al-Ahzab proves nothing, since a surah's verses need not come down together. The cause is easier to state than the date. The Prophet ﷺ had never lived well: a shepherd for pennies as a boy, a lodger in Abu Talib's crowded house, without a riding animal of his own until the Hijrah. Wealth came to the community rather than to him, in the ransoms of Badr, the fields of Khaybar and the gift of Fadak that fed his household, and then, greatest of all, the spoils of Hunayn, of which he kept nothing, though the law allowed a ruler his share. This was a choice. An angel who had never before descended had once offered him, from his Lord, to be a king and messenger or a slave and messenger, and at Jibril's sign to humble himself he had chosen to be a slave; after that day, the narrator says, he was never seen eating with his back against a wall. His wives watched the standard of living rise around them in Madinah as it did not rise in their own rooms, and at some point, most likely in the eighth or ninth year, they asked him together for more. What exactly they asked no book records, and rightly; it was a matter of the household. What is clear is that it was a joint effort, led by Aisha and Hafsa, and that what they wanted was lawful. He answered with an ila', an oath before Allah to stay away from his wives, which the law permits for up to four months when a marriage needs time to cool. He swore for one month, and withdrew to a small loft reached by a ladder, close by the mosque. Umar told the story to Ibn Abbas, who had waited more than a year for the chance to ask him about the two wives Surah al-Tahrim addresses, and began it with the affair of Maria. The men of the Quraysh, he said, had ruled their women; in Madinah they found a people whose women ruled them, and their own wives learned it. One day at his house in al-Awali his wife answered him back, and when he rebuked her she told him that the Prophet ﷺ's wives answered him back, and left him for a whole day when angry. He went straight to Hafsa and asked whether it was true, and it was. He told her that whoever did that had lost everything, warned her never to answer the Prophet ﷺ again or trouble him for anything but to bring her needs to her father, and told her not to be deceived by what her companion could do: Aisha was more graceful than she, and dearer to the Prophet ﷺ, and would be forgiven what Hafsa would not. Umar and an Ansari neighbour used to take turns, one working the land while the other spent the day with the Prophet ﷺ and brought back what he had heard, and in those days their talk was of a Ghassanid army said to be shoeing its horses to march on them. One night after Isha the neighbour hammered on his door. Have the Ghassanids come? No, something worse: the Prophet ﷺ has divorced his wives. Umar went at first light and found the mosque full of men sitting silent, turning pebbles in their hands. In one telling he went first to Aisha and asked whether the daughter of Abu Bakr had gone so far in troubling the Prophet ﷺ that he had left them all, and was told to see to his own vessel; then to Hafsa, whom he found weeping, and said he had warned her, and that she knew the Prophet ﷺ did not love her, and that were she not his daughter he would have divorced her long ago. She did not know whether they were divorced; he had gone up to the loft. At the foot of the ladder stood a servant, Bilal in one version, and Umar asked him to seek leave for him to enter. The servant came back: he had mentioned him and the Prophet ﷺ had said nothing. Umar went and sat by the minbar, came back, and was refused again. The third time he called up loudly that he thought the Prophet ﷺ supposed he had come on Hafsa's account, and that by Allah, had he been told to strike off her head he would have done it; and he was let in. He found a room with some barley, a half-tanned water-skin, a chamber pot and a few hides, and the Prophet ﷺ lying on a mat of palm fibre that had printed its weave on his side. Had he divorced his wives? He had not. Umar said the takbir, and then, seeing the tension, told him the whole story of the women of Madinah and the warning he had given Hafsa not to measure herself against Aisha, and the Prophet ﷺ smiled, and smiled again, and gave him leave to sit. He looked round the room and could see nothing else in it. He asked why the Prophet ﷺ did not pray for his people to be given wealth as Persia and Rome had been given it, when they did not even worship Allah, and began to cry; and when asked why, said it was because the mat had marked the side of Allah's chosen one while Kisra and Caesar lay in silk. The Prophet ﷺ sat up. Are you in doubt, son of al-Khattab? Are you not content that they should have this world and we the next? Umar asked him to seek forgiveness for him. In another version Umar added that if the Prophet ﷺ wished to divorce any of them, Allah, Jibril and Mika'il, Abu Bakr, he himself and all the believers were with him; and he used to say he hoped Allah would confirm what he had said, and He did, in the fourth verse of Surah al-Tahrim, one of the three times the Qur'an came down in agreement with Umar. After twenty-nine days the Prophet ﷺ came back down. Aisha reminded him that he had sworn a month and it was only twenty-nine days; a month, he told her, may be twenty-nine. He went first to her room and told her he was going to put something to her, that she was not to answer in haste, and that she should consult her parents before she replied. Then he recited the verses Allah had sent down: O Prophet ﷺ, say to your wives, if you desire the life of this world and its adornment, come and I will provide for you and release you graciously; but if you desire Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Home of the Hereafter, then Allah has prepared for those of you who do good a great reward. She understood that he had told her to consult her parents because he knew they would never tell her to leave; and she asked what there was to consult about, for she chose Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Hereafter. Then she asked him not to tell the others what she had chosen, and he refused: Allah had sent him to convey, not to make things hard. He put the same choice to each of his wives in turn, and every one of them chose as she had. The whole city had known of the quarrel, and Allah put it in the Qur'an; the fault line it exposed was not in the wives but in a standard of living that a messenger-slave could not share. It is the source of the law of ila' and of the husband's right to hand his wife the choice of divorce, and of the plainest picture the Companions left of how the Prophet ﷺ chose to live.

Juwayriyya RA died at around 65 years of age, in the 50th year of the Hijrah, the same year as Hasan RA.