Академия Корана:Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān/ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr

Denise A. Spellberg, "ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr" in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: J. D. McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

The woman thought by the majority of Muslims to be the Prophet Muḥammad’s favorite wife. Although ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr (d. 58/678) is never explicitly named in the Qurʾān, she was consistently defined with reference to the sacred text in the formation of her historical and symbolic standing in Islamic history. Through ʿĀʾisha, Muslim scholars, who historically were almost exclusively men, struggled with questions central to the formation of communal identity and gender roles. Her persona focused debate and determined the nuances of Islamic identity in its formative phase. These intertextual exchanges, particularly in the early and medieval periods of Islamic history, allowed male scholars to establish for Muslim women the parameters of their social behavior, political participation and the feminine models endorsed for them as ideals. In this process, ʿĀʾisha acted as a prism for the focus and refraction of shared and sharply divided Islamic interpretations. At the heart of these significant debates — prompted by her actions as an historically attested figure — was the Qurʾān, the verses of which would be used both to defend and criticize her.

Three pivotal themes invoked important sacred precedents in ʿĀʾisha’s depiction: her vindication from adultery (see adultery and fornication); her participation in the first civil war; and the attempt to idealize her as an exemplary female in relation to Mary (q.v.), the mother of Jesus (q.v.). ʿĀʾisha’s role as the wife of the Prophet Muḥammad conferred upon her and her co-wives an exalted status, but also a heightened visibility in the realm of sacred praxis and symbol. These additional responsibilities were outlined in the Qurʾān, which implicitly defined ʿĀʾisha as one of the mothers of the believers: «The wives of [Muḥammad] are the mothers of [the believers]» (q 33:6), a unique female élite unlike other women (q 33:32). Special conditions applied exclusively to the wives of the Prophet, including the injunction in q 33:53 that they stay behind a screen or curtain (min warāʾi ḥijāb; see veil). All women, including the Prophet’s wives, were instructed to wear cloaks (q 33:59), cover their bosoms and comport themselves with modesty in public (q 24:31). Yet the Qurʾān makes explicit that the wives of the Prophet were also held to a higher moral standard than other women since the punishment and reward for their acts in this life would be doubled in the hereafter (q 33:30-1; see reward and punishment). In q 33:33 the wives of the Prophet are specifically enjoined to stay in their houses, a restriction that was ultimately interpreted by religious scholars to include all Muslim women. Nearly twenty-five years after the Prophet’s death in 11/632, this one verse was repeatedly used to censure the widow ʿĀʾisha’s one foray into the politics of succession that culminated in the first civil war in 36/656.

The accusation of adultery

Sectarian division within the medieval Islamic world is nowhere more evident than in the interpretation of the Qurʾān regarding the accusation of adultery made against ʿĀʾisha in 5/627. The most direct linkage of ʿĀʾisha with the Qurʾān, found in q 24:11-20, does not refer to her directly by name or to the accusation of adultery made against her, historically referred to by Sunnī Muslims as the account of the lie or slander (ifk). Rather, the revelation explicitly concerns the dire punishments for those who spread slander without the four male witnesses required by q 24:13.

The affair of the lie was celebrated as an example of ʿĀʾisha’s divine vindication from the charge of adultery. According to the earliest written Muslim accounts, ʿĀʾisha accompanied the Prophet on a raid against a tribe called the Banū l-Muṣṭaliq. During a rest stop on the journey home, she found that she had lost her necklace and left the encampment to retrieve it. It was assumed by the other members of the party that she had remained seated in her covered litter. So they lifted the howdah on to the back of her camel and left with it. Stranded and alone in the desert, she was eventually found by a young Muslim named Ṣafwān b. al-Muʿaṭṭal al-Sulamī who returned her safely to the Prophet’s camp. The enemies of the Prophet claimed that in fact ʿĀʾisha had betrayed her husband with her rescuer before they rejoined the rest of the party, although there were no witnesses to this (Ibn Isḥāq-Guillaume, 493-9). This account — first recorded in written form one hundred and fifty to two hundred years after the events described — represents the narrative frame for the explication of q 24:11-20, which the majority of Muslims regard as supporting ʿĀʾisha’s exoneration from the charge of adultery.

The famed Sunnī exegete al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) declared in his qurʾānic commentary on these verses that the people of Islam as a religious community were unanimous on ʿĀʾisha’s vindication (Tafsīr, xviii, 96). Even as he wrote these unqualified words about this position in his exegesis, he surely knew that Shīʿī commentators, like his fourth/tenth-century contemporary al-Qummī (fl. fourth/tenth century), explicated the same verses quite differently. Al-Qummī stated that they referred not to ʿĀʾisha but to when the Prophet’s Egyptian concubine Marya was slandered, an incident which the author dates to five years later (Tafsīr, ii, 99; cf. Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, xxii, 153-5; M.M. Bar-Asher, Scripture, 42-3). These contradictory interpretations reflect both the emergence of contested religio-political identities and the importance of interpretation in recreating the Islamic past. The same revelation might, through sectarian explication, render two quite different readings. The Sunnī majority supported and defended ʿĀʾisha not just as the Prophet’s favorite wife but as the daughter of Abū Bakr (q.v.; r. 11/632-13/634), one of the Prophet’s closest friends and his successor as head of the Islamic community. Conversely, Shīʿī Muslims rejected and reviled ʿĀʾisha as an enemy of their political and spiritual leader, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (q.v.; r. 35/656-40/661), in a discourse consistent with their own vision of past events. Indeed, Shīʿī interpretation of these qurʾānic verses opened the way for their designation of ʿĀʾisha as an adulteress, in sharp contrast to the majority Sunnī Muslim vindication and ultimate praise of her chastity.

The sectarian differences between the Sunnīs and Shīʿīs emerged through contested interpretations of the Qurʾān and captured contradictory visions of a shared past as refracted through female as well as male historical figures (see shīʿism and the qurʾān). The dual interpretations work, in part, because ʿĀʾisha is not explicitly named in the Qurʾān in the verses in question and the name of Marya, the Copt, is also not present in the sacred text. In interpretation, the commentators attempted to clarify to whom these verses refer and in interpretation there remained latitude for contradictory human readings of the divine revelation and its gendered import. Historicizing such internal debates, undermines monolithic and static truth claims within Islam articulated by male Muslim scholars in the medieval period. Their divisive, co-existent religious interpretations may assume an exclusive right to clarify an eternal and timeless Islam, but these same assertions of exclusivity are undermined by their attachment to a time-bound, very human struggle for definitional control over a shared faith and its political applications. Such fissures, once found, suggest the possibility that the history of an ostensibly religious discourse may reveal precedents for a multiplicity of present-day ideological interpretations of Islam by Muslim women as well as men.

The anthropologist Erika Friedl more recently recorded the voice of one Shīʿī woman from an Iranian mountain village who tells a story of the charge of adultery made against one of the Prophet’s wives. Although ʿĀʾisha is not named and the rescuer of the early Arabic account, Ṣafwān b. al-Muʿaṭṭal al-Sulamī, is replaced with an anonymous caravansary owner, the details of this accusation reveal an alternative sectarian reading which eliminates the very existence of the Sunnī heroine and the centrality of divine revelation. Instead, this probably illiterate female Shīʿī interpreter proposes a distinctly human and logical outcome of the tale, which emphasizes the power of rumor and the ever-present threat of divorce in the lives of women, whose chastity (q.v.) is the object of communal gossip.

Although E. Friedl’s anthropological work is exemplary, in this instance the broader implications of the modern female narrative remain subsumed within the ethnography. By privileging the voice of her Shīʿī source, the anthropologist did not make the critical contextual connections that characterize this modern interpretation as the distinctive outcome of a contested, exclusively male, classical Arabic Sunnī and Shīʿī sacred commentary. The ahistorical presentation suggests an implicit timelessness which undermines the source’s gendered distinction in the history of religion. It is not simply an Iranian folktale told to a foreign anthropologist, but rather a modern oral interpretation of the Qurʾān expressed by a Shīʿī Muslim female in a clearly demarcated continuum of Islamic interpretation of the sacred.

The battle of the camel

The battle of the camel in 36/656 was the first military conflict in the first Islamic civil war (Ṭabarī, History, xvi, 122-3). Both the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth recording the words and actions of the Prophet were used by authors who, hundreds of years after the bloody conflict, were still trying to make sense of the event. All histories, whether Sunnī or Shīʿī accounts, had to consider the central presence of ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr in this conflict. Her opposition to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and his partisans (shīʿa) was personal, political and ultimately military. Her forces, led by her two male allies, were defeated by ʿAlī in his successful bid to defend his position as the fourth leader of the Muslim community after Muḥammad’s death.

The central presence of a woman in the struggle for political succession did not escape censure by either the Sunnī or Shīʿī Muslim community. Indeed, although both communities would read this event differently in retrospect, both shared common tactics in their condemnation of ʿĀʾisha. The Sunnī and Shīʿī sources alike utilized the same qurʾānic verses and ḥadīth to buttress their criticism. The verse central to their shared arguments is found in q 33:33. Specifically directed to the Prophet’s wives in the plural, the verse enjoins them: «Stay in your houses». There are no extant written sources contemporary with the first civil war, but ʿĀʾisha is reminded in a later biography that had she stayed at home the carnage of the battle of the camel might not have occurred. Ibn Saʿd (d. 230/ 845), an early Sunnī biographer, records that, when ʿĀʾisha recited these verses of the Qurʾān years after the event, she wept until she soaked her veil with tears (Ṭabaqāt, viii, 81). The Shīʿī chronicler al-Masʿūdī (d. 354/956) allows ʿAlī, his Shīʿī hero and the victor, to reproach ʿĀʾisha directly by reminding her that the Prophet had once revealed that she should stay in her house, a reference to q 33:33 (Murūj, iv, 102-19, nos. 1628-57, esp. no. 1644). Actually, the Qurʾān emphasizes that all of the Prophet’s wives should stay, using a plural verb, in their houses, which also appears as a plural, but al-Masʿūdī is not troubled by the grammatical exactitude of the sacred verse. Later Shīʿī sources utilize this same verse of the Qurʾān even more pointedly to condemn ʿĀʾisha’s political motives (M.M. Bar-Asher, Scripture, 40-1).

Her symbolic presence at the first battle of the civil war struck a negative universal point of accord between Sunnī and Shīʿī Muslim authors. Through ʿĀʾisha’s example, all Muslim women were warned not to leave home or involve themselves in political matters. Medieval lessons derived from the first civil war and the example of the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾisha proved a memorable warning against the future participation of any Muslim woman in politics. Male religious authorities could not have attached such a potent precedent to ʿĀʾisha’s actions without their shared citation of the Qurʾān.

The definition of Islamic female ideals

Mary, the mother of the Jesus, whom Muslims regard as a prophet, is the only explicitly named female figure in the Qurʾān. She is highly praised in q 3:42 as chosen, pure and preferred above all other women of creation. In q 66:11-2, Mary and the wife of Pharaoh (q.v.), named Āsiya in the Islamic tradition, represent behavioral exemplars for all Muslim believers. Mary’s chastity and obedience (q.v.) are particularly extolled in the Qurʾān. In the ḥadīth and qurʾānic exegesis, ʿĀʾisha was often associated with Mary, but never with the latter’s divine selection, obedience and chastity. Indeed, references to her tended to underscore the particularly vexed aspects of her historical persona especially those attached to the accusation of adultery and the first civil war. Although ultimately exonerated according to the Sunnī interpretation of the affair of the lie, ʿĀʾisha’s chastity remained a point of sectarian confrontation. In this critical controversy over female sexuality, ʿĀʾisha’s comparison to Mary implied the accusation of sexual impropriety also lodged in the Qurʾān against the mother of Jesus in q 19:27-8. Such a parallel established a negative precedent for the idealization of ʿĀʾisha. Her perceived disobedience in the first civil war also allowed scholars to condemn her behavior with reference to the verse q 33:33, as they were cited in both Sunnī and Shīʿī spheres. Such a political precedent definitively excluded ʿĀʾisha as a potential Muslim female ideal of the obedience extolled in the qurʾānic Mary. Finally, ʿĀʾisha alone would be compared to the most negative female figures in the Qurʾān, the wives of the prophets Lot (q.v.) and Noah (q.v.), who are characterized in q 66:10 as examples for unbelievers. Their refusal to obey their husbands became a Shīʿī criticism directed at ʿĀʾisha, their disobedient equivalent in her refusal to follow the instructions of q 33:33.

Ultimately, examining ʿĀʾisha’s legacy, unlike that of the women chosen as the most exalted of the first Muslim community, reveals that her depiction consistently aroused conflicting responses within the Muslim community. In Sunnī support or Shīʿī criticism, the qurʾānic precedents of both positive and negative female figures were applied to ʿĀʾisha alone. Although praised by Sunnīs, ʿĀʾisha defied categorization as absolutely positive or negative in the Muslim search for her meaning. The interpretation of her active, controversial life revealed that the process of idealization in Islamic history would never admit her into the realm of perfection. Thus, while Islamic tradition asserted that there were no perfect women except Mary and the wife of Pharaoh in q 3:42, these two in qurʾānic exegesis would ultimately be joined by the Prophet’s first wife, Khadīja (q.v.) bint Khuwaylid (d. 619 c.e.) and their daughter Fāṭima (q.v.; d. 11/632). The consistently positive, unchallenged portrayals of these women established, through direct parallels to the qurʾānic Mary, their centrality as Islamic female models. Both Khadīja and Fāṭima represented an idealized vision of the feminine on which both Sunnī and Shīʿī Muslims ultimately agreed.

As further idealized within Shīʿī texts, Fāṭima finally transcended the precedent of Mary in the Qurʾān and challenged the Sunnī majority to defend ʿĀʾisha, not as an ideal female figure, but as one whose reputation was diminished by contrast. The impact of the dichotomy depicted between ʿĀʾisha and Fāṭima ultimately raises questions about the reaction of Muslim women to male interpretations of the Qurʾān. Until recently, the reaction of Muslim women to these male constructed ideal females has been missing from the written record. Although it has been argued that real Shīʿī women cannot hope to emulate Fāṭima’s sacred transcendence of her own sexuality in the matters of menses and motherhood, it is no more certain that the precedent of ʿĀʾisha’s persona will finally yield a more practical legacy for Sunnī women. Although ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr remains a model for the Sunnī majority especially with regard to her intelligence and prodigious memory in the transmission of the reports about the life of her husband, her biography remains securely attached to the qurʾānic precedent. The control of such sacred interpretations will continue to pose a challenge for those Muslims, whether male or female, who attempt to define ʿĀʾisha’s persona as a positive force in the present. See also wives of the prophet; women and the qurʾān.

Bibliography

Primary

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