Banu Khuzayma

Zaynab bint Jahsh (born Barrah) (a Qurashi through her mother Umayma bint Abdul Muttalib, first cousin of Muhammad ﷺ, of Banu Khuzayma through her father) had been married and widowed in Makkah, then migrated to Madinah with her brother Abdullah ibn Jahsh RA and was available for remarriage. The Prophet ﷺ sent a proposal on her behalf on behalf of his adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah RA (then known as Zayd ibn Muhammad ﷺ, before Qur'an [33:5] restored him to his father's name). Zaynab and her brother initially objected that Zayd, a freed slave, was not her equal, but after Allah revealed Qur'an [33:36], that believers have no choice once Allah and His Messenger ﷺ have decided a matter, both consented and the marriage went ahead.

Around the beginning of Dhu al-Qa'dah of the 5th year of the Hijrah, the verses of hijab were revealed: on the very night of the Prophet ﷺ's marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, per Anas ibn Malik RA's report in Sahih al-Bukhari.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ married Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, his cousin and the former wife of his adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah RA, in the beginning of Dhu al-Qa'dah of the 5th year of the Hijrah. After Zayd divorced her, the Prophet ﷺ sent Zayd to convey his own interest in marrying her; while she prayed istikhara, Allah revealed Qur'an [33:37], directly declaring the marriage, "We married her to you", without any wali, mahr, or witnesses, the only marriage in history contracted by Allah Himself. Its purpose, per the same verse, was to establish that there is no wrong in marrying the ex-wife of one's adopted son, since an adopted son is not a blood relation. The verses of hijab were revealed the same night (see Legislation of Hijab). The walima was the most lavish the Prophet ﷺ ever held for any wife: he had Anas ibn Malik RA invite the Muhajirun, the Ansar, the People of Suffa, and all he met, and a small dish of food fed more than seventy guests.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ overstayed at Zaynab bint Jahsh RA's house, where he had eaten a type of honey. Aisha RA and Hafsa RA RA agreed between themselves to tell him, when he next entered upon either of them, that they smelled something bad on him, meaning the honey. When he did, the Prophet ﷺ said he would not eat at Zaynab's house again.

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.

The wives of the Prophet ﷺ once discussed among themselves who would be the first of them to pass away after him. The Prophet ﷺ told them the one with the longest hand would be the first to meet him again. For years afterward they would measure their hands against each other, until Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, who gave the most in charity, was the first to die, and they understood he had meant generosity, not literal hand length.

Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, known as the Mother of the Orphans and the Mother of the Poor for her generosity, was the first of the Prophet ﷺ's wives to die after him. During Umar ibn al-Khattab RA's caliphate, when he instituted stipends for the Muslims and set the wives of the Prophet ﷺ at the highest rate of 12,000 dirhams annually, Zaynab gave her entire stipend away to the needy before nightfall, and did the same with an extra 1,000 dirhams Umar later sent her in praise of her generosity. She died in the 20th year of the Hijrah before her next stipend arrived.