Aisha bint Abu Bakr was the third wife of the Prophet Muhammad, called by Islamic sources “Umm al-muminin“, that is, “Mother of Believers”, and the first great scholar in Islamic history. Aisha, daughter of Abu Bakr1, would not only be a great wife for Muhammad, but would also have a fundamental role for the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet for about 44 years in the formative period of Islam.

The year 619 is known in the Islamic tradition as “The Year of Sorrow”, as the Prophet would lose his first wife, Khadijah bint Khuwaylid2 and also his uncle who was his great protector, Abu Talib.

Daughter of Umm Ruman and Abu Bakr, two companions (sahaba) of extreme importance and confidence for Muhammad, Aisha’s date of birth is uncertain, since the ancient Arabs did not have an organized calendar system, assigning the dates to events of importance (noteworthy) for the community3. Despite this, there are estimates of when she was born and her age at the time of her marriage to the Prophet, ranging from 9 years old to the end of her adolescence and early adulthood (17 or 18 years, for example)4.

When the Prophet lost his wife Khadijah, he later decided to remarry. In this way, he chose a Muslim widow from the Quraysh tribe named Sawda bint Zama, a poor and old woman.

According to Jonathan Brown (2011), shortly after the wedding, Abu Bakr offered his daughter’s hand to the Prophet, who had dreamed of Aisha in silk robes, also receiving an angel’s revelation that she would be his wife both in this life and on the next one. A while later the marriage would be consummated, and Aisha would play an important role in Muhammad’s life from that time on.

After Khadijah’s death, many of Muhammad’s marriages were for political or humanitarian reasons. In this sense, due to the context of the time, widowed women who lost their companions in battles were left without a protector, alien to their clan and family, as well as it was necessary to create or strengthen alliances with important and powerful clans to preserve the existence of the ummah (islamic community). In this sense, Montgomery Watt (1960) raises the claim that Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha served to strengthen his relationship with Abu Bakr. However, the Prophet certainly loved Aisha very much, being his favorite wife after the late Khadijah5.

There are several hadiths that tell a little about Muhammad’s relationship with Aisha, demonstrating the great affinity between the two and the mutual admiration they felt for each other. In one of them, when the Prophet was asked about who was the person he loved the most in the world, he answered Aisha’s name without hesitation. In other hadiths, we see the affinity of the two when they narrate their ability to discern each other’s moods, as well as the wide freedom the Prophet gave Aisha to express herself freely in her opinions and thoughts.

Not only, but it is said in the hadiths that Muhammad helped with household chores, cooking food, sewing clothes, repairing shoes and always leading a very humble life, sometimes going hungry, despite having become a powerful leader in the years of his life.

After the Prophet’s death in 632 AD, Aisha would have a key role in the ummah, sometimes assuming the leadership, as well as teaching Islam to the Muslims. As such, Aisha is one of the people who has narrated the most hadiths in Islamic history, with about 2,300 narrations attributed to her in the hadith books (BROWN, 2017).

In this way, because she was the wife of the Prophet Muhammad and lived with him daily, many of the narrations about the personal life of the Prophet and religious issues such as ablution, personal hygiene, domestic habits, etc., were narrated by her. Going beyond the narration of hadiths and the instruction of the faithful in religion, Aisha also played an important political role after Muhammad’s death.

The Prophet’s first successor was Abu Bakr6, who in turn had a great friendship with Muhammad and also being his father-in-law. Therefore, as the first successor, Abu Bakr was the first to raise the guidelines for this new position of authority: the caliphate.

Aisha, being both the wife of the Prophet and the daughter of the first caliph, held a certain prestigious position in the Islamic community, sometimes receiving honorary titles associated with her father, such as being called “al-siddiqa bint al-Siddiq” (the truthful woman daughter of the Truthful man), a reference to the title of Abu Bakr (Al-Siddiq / The Truthful), which came from the support given by the first caliph to the story of Isra and Miraj, two parts of the famous Night Journey of the Prophet.

Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, would spend only two years in the caliphate, being succeeded by Omar, who would be succeeded by Uthman when he also died. At first, Aisha did not have much involvement with Uthman and his government, until eventually she started to oppose the third caliph of Islam.

The reasons for such opposition are not certain, but it is usually said that this rejection of the caliph by Aisha was born after Uthman’s way of treating Ammar ibn Yasir, one of the Prophet’s sahaba (companions) by beating him. Outraged, Aisha would have exclaimed:

How soon indeed you have forgotten the practice (sunnah) of your prophet and these, his hairs, a shirt, and sandal have not yet perished!

As time passed and Aisha’s antipathy for Uthman remained, one day some believers came to Aisha after the caliph refused to punish Walid ibn Uqbah (Osman’s brother)7. Therefore, a discussion between the two took place, and the caliph would ask why Aisha was there, since she had been ordered to “stay at home”, thus creating a division in the Islamic community where some would support Uthman and others would be by Aisha’s side.

Things would get even worse when Egypt was ruled by Abdullah ibn Saad, the milk brother of Caliph Uthman. During that time, Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfa of Egypt would forge letters in the name of Aisha to conspirators against the caliph.

Because of these falsifications, the indignant population (and believer in the veracity of the letters) decided to cut off Uthman’s food and water supply. When Aisha heard what was going on, she was perplexed by the attitudes of those protesting against the caliph, who in turn dragged one of Muhammad’s widows (Safiyya bint Huyayy) into the crowd.

After being asked by Malik al-Ashtar8 whether she would kill Uthman or not, as well as about the conspiracy letters, Aisha replied that she would never “order the bloodshed of Muslims and their Imam”, claiming that the letters were not hers.

In 655, just over 30 years after the Prophet’s death, Uthman would be murdered after a siege with about 1000 people around his house. After his death, there would be a remarkable episode in the early years of Islam known as “The First Great Fitna” (al-fitnah al-kubrah)9.

As with Uthman’s accession to the caliph’s throne, it would have to be succeeded by someone, and Ali, the Prophet’s nephew, was chosen to succeed him in leading the Rashidun Caliphate.

Many were concerned that Ali ibn Abu Talib (r. 656-61) should be elected as Uthman’s successor. Until then, Ali had not been appointed as Muhammad’s successor to the first or second caliph due to his age, after all he was still very young (KUNG, 2007). However, now, one of the first converts still in Mecca would become the new caliph.

Ali was an energetic man and proved to be very capable, even going so far as to depose some rulers who had been honored by Uthman. However, there was a problem of extreme importance in his caliphate: he was elected receiving the support of Uthman’s killers, and Ali did nothing to punish them, which created the conflict with Aisha, who demanded that Ali should punish the killers of the third caliph of Islam.

The first response against Aisha came from Abdullah ibn Aamar al-Hahdrami, ruler of Mecca in the Uthman period, a prominent member of the Banu Umayya tribe.

Despite this, Aisha would embark on a raid against Ali’s caliphate. Together with Zubayr ibn al-Awam and Talha ibn Ubayd-Allah, Aisha would face Ali’s army under the banner that Uthman’s assassins should be punished and entering the city of Basra.

When Aisha and her armies captured Basra, 600 Muslims and 40 others were ordered to be executed. There is also a mention that the ruler of Basra, Uthman ibn Hunaif, was arrested.

In 656 Ali would battle Aisha’s forces near Basra in a battle that was named after the “Battle of the Camel” because Aisha would have led her army over a howdah on the back of a camel. With the outcome of Aisha’s defeat in the battle and the loss of about 10,000 Muslim lives, this was the first conflict in which Muslims fought against other Muslims.

Months later, Ali and Aisha would meet again, this time to reach a reconciliation agreement. Thus, the fourth Rashidun caliph would send Aisha back to Medina under military escort led by the brother of the Prophet’s widow, Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr, who by the way was also one of the commanders of Ali’s troops.

Aisha would even receive a pension from Ali, but despite the reconciliation between the two, The First Fitna would not see its end with Aisha’s return to Medina and the agreement between the caliph and the widow of the Prophet Muhammad. However, after that incident, Aisha would no longer get involved in state affairs, reserving herself until the end of her life in 678 when she was about 64 years old10, being remembered as an energetic and extremely intelligent woman, someone who taught many Muslims about religion and narrated thousands of hadiths about the Prophet.

Aisha was not only always at Muhammad’s side, but later contributed intellectually to the development of Islam, known also for her mastery of matters related to the Qur’an and her knowledge of Islam’s legal issues, as well as poetry, Arabic literature, history and even medicine.

After returning to Medina, Aisha would teach Muslim women in her own home, also teaching men (separated from women, obviously) and also many orphan children. In addition, she would be the most reliable source of hadiths, whose impact is still alive today in the daily lives of the almost 2 billion Muslims around the world.

Notes

[1] Abu Bakr would be the first caliph of Islam, succeeding the Prophet after his death.

[2] Also called the Mother of Believers, since she was the first person to convert to Islam after she received the First Revelation.

[3] To exemplify: an important date for the Quraysh Arabs at the time was the Year of the Elephant, so many would say that something happened in a near or distant period of time of the occurred.

[4] The theme of Aisha’s age is a complex debate involving the study of hadiths (ilm al-hadith) and other specialized studies from Islamic sources. For a brief overview of the debate, see two articles from Iqara Islam: Maomé era pedófilo? [Was Muhammad a pedophile?] and Muhammad e Aisha.

[5] Interesting to note that Aisha was jealous of Khadijah, even though they had never met, due to the various mentions the Prophet made about her.

[6] This being a controversial succession for Shia Muslims, who believe that Muhammad had appointed Ali, his nephew, to be his successor.

[7] Uqba’s punishment would probably be due to his immoral behavior, as he was known to be a great wine drinker, something considered illegal in the Islamic religion.

[8] One of Ali’s main allies.

[9] Fitna is an Arabic word used to designate “division”, “conflict” and synonyms. Thus, “First Fitna” can also be read as the “First Division” or the “First Conflict”.

[10] We refer to note 4, that is, this date will depend on which tradition and the age is attributed to Aisha.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARMSTRONG, Karen. Muhammad. HarperOne. 2007.

BROWN, Jonathan. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oneworld Publications. 2017.

BROWN, Jonathan. Muhammad: A very short introduction. Oxford. 2011.

KUNG, Hans. Islam: Past, Present and Future. Oneworld Publications. 2007.

WAGNER, Cayla. Aisha: A Life and Legacy. Eiu. [n.d].

ABBOT, Nabia. Aishah The Beloved of Muhammad. University of Chicago Press. 1942.  

WATT, William Montgomery. ʿĀʾis̲h̲a Bint Abī Bakr (2nd ed.). Encyclopaedia of Islam Online.  1960.