The Participation of Muslim Women

Number four: the extent of the participation of Muslim women is evident here, and it may be contrasted and balanced with what is discussed elsewhere regarding the role of the Muslim woman as a wife and a mother. Islam is somewhere between the two extremes. In every matter there are two extremes — ṭarafāni wa wasaṭ, in Arabic it says, two extremes and a middle. Islam is the middle of everything, it's the middle way. So for every situation there are two extremes, and the fiqh and the wisdom is to know where the exact middle is, because there are a lot of points on a spectrum, but only one point — one — is the middle. So it's very easy to hit everything but the middle ground, but it's not easy to hit the exact target of middle ground, and that is where the fiqh and wisdom comes into play.

It's very evident in the early Muslims' history that the Muslim sister had a very important role to play. The first Muslim was a woman. The first shahīdah in Islam was a woman — the first martyr was Sumayyah. The participation of Muslim women is evident: in the hijrah to Abyssinia, in the hijrah to Madīnah, in jihad, in jamāʿah, in teaching and learning. So some of the artificial barriers that we have erected now didn't exist in the time of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). Among us today are people who are carrying it to both extremes. One extreme is that men and women can mix and laugh and joke, and without no barriers, ḥijāb is optional; and then on the other extreme, even the voice of women isn't allowed to be spoken in public. We might as well just have them live in a different planet. So these are two extremes, but we need to find the middle ground.

An example shows the relationship that men and women had in the time of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), and this account is relevant to the immigration to al-Ḥabashah. When the Muslims came back to Madīnah in the seventh year of Hijrah, the wife of Jaʿfar ibn Abī Ṭālib, Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays, went to visit Ḥafṣah, the daughter of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, who was the wife of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). So Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays went to visit her. ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb came to visit his daughter, and he came in and saw this woman sitting in her room. He told her, "Who's this woman?" She said, "This is Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays." Is this the Abyssinian woman? — not that she's from Abyssinia, but he was referring to the fact that she has been in Abyssinia for so long. Is this al-baḥriyyah, the Abyssinian woman — is this the woman who came from the sea, because they had to cross the sea to get into Madīnah? Ḥafṣah said yes.

ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb told her, in effect, that they had made hijrah before her, and so had more rights to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) than she did. He went to her and said, "We made hijrah before you, therefore we are closer to the Messenger of Allah than you, and we have more rights to him than you do." Asmāʾ was quite angry at that statement, and she said, "No, you're not closer to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) than us. You were with the Messenger of Allah — he was feeding the hungry among you, teaching the ignorant among you — while we were in a distant, despised land. We were in a faraway land and despised. We weren't very comfortable over there. We didn't like it, being far away from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). We were feeling homesick to the Messenger of Allah, not to Makkah — it was to the Messenger of Allah. We wanted to be with him." And then she said, "I'm going to go and tell the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) what you're saying now, and I'm not going to add anything to it or subtract anything. I'm going to say it as you said it." And she went to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and said, "This is what ʿUmar told me." The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said, "And what did you say?" She said — and she repeated the same statement. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said, "No — ʿUmar and his companions do not have more rights than you do to me. They're not closer to me than you. They have the reward of one hijrah, and you have the reward of two hijrahs; you get double the reward that they do."

As Asmāʾ said, when the Messenger of Allah mentioned this hadith to her, the Ṣaḥābah who were in Abyssinia — Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī and his friends — would come to her in large groups, all trying to learn this hadith of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) from her, and she said there was nothing better for them in the world than this hadith. This hadith was so valuable to them, it was worth the world and everything in it. What is evident here is that, first of all, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb is speaking to this woman, and they're having a conversation, and it was a straightforward conversation. And then Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays is teaching the Ṣaḥābah, Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī and the other men, about this hadith. So this was the nature of the relationship that existed. Obviously, looking at all the references available that deal with the relationship of men and women, there is an element of formality in their dealings — no incident is found where they would joke and laugh with each other. So they knew their limits, but at the same time, it wasn't that extreme, as we might see among some Muslims now.

An example of the participation and the strength of the early Muslims would be Ḥabībah — yaʿnī Umm Ḥabībah, raḍiya Allāhu ʿanhā. The following factors show how difficult it was for her. Number one, she's the daughter of the unrivalled leader of Makkah, Abū Sufyān. So for her to leave that comfortable life, wealth, nobility in her society, and go and live as a foreigner in an alien land, is not easy. So number one, she was the daughter of Abū Sufyān. Number two, she's living in a foreign land. Number three, which was disastrous: when her husband reached Abyssinia, he apostatised and became Christian. He was one of the Ṣaḥābah who made hijrah; when he got there, he changed his mind. ʿUbaydullāh ibn Jaḥsh went through different stages in his life — he kept on flipping back and forth, before Islam, changing his mind and going into different religions, so this was his personality. So when he got there to al-Ḥabashah, he just changed from being a Muslim into being a Christian. And the most influential person on a woman is her husband, and it was very difficult for Ḥabībah to deal with this situation, her husband apostatising and becoming Christian. Obviously, after that, they had to separate. Taken together, these factors show how strong she was, how steadfast she was, and how she was able to hold firm to her religion.