Maria the Copt (Mariyah Al-Qibtiyyah): Difference between revisions

Mariyah Al-Qibtiyah (Arabic: مارية القبطية‎), also known as Maria Qubtiyya, or Mary the Copt was one of the concubines/sex slaves of the prophet Muhammad. Although she is considered an "umm al-mu'minin" أم ألمؤمنين she was never actually the wife of the prophet according to the accepted historical sources by orthodox Sunni Islam.^[1][2] According to the sira she was sent to Muhammad as a gift from the Christian Patriarch of Egypt. According to the hadith and the sirah her beauty and Muhammad's lust for her incited the jealousy of Muhammad's wives, in particular Hafsa and Aisha. The jealousy they had of her and Muhammad's response was actually the cause of the "revelation" of several Qur'an verses according to the tradition. Although she converted to Islam and bore the prophet a son who later died, she remained a slave of the prophet until he died, according to most of the traditional scholars. The traditional sources compare her concubinage to that of Hajar to Ibrahim, and the son that Mariyah bore was named Ibrahim. According to classical Islamic sources, had her son Ibrahim lived, he too would have been a prophet.

Life Before Muhammad

Not much is known of Mariyah's life before she was gifted to the prophet as a sex slave. According to the traditional sources, she was the son of a certain Sham'un from the town of Hafn in the region of Ansina. According to the traditional sources, she was gifted to Muhammad with her sister Shirin; but since the shari'ah prohibits a man having concurrent sexual relations with a woman and her sister, Muhammad was forced to choose between the two, and chose Mariyah for her exceeding beauty, while giving her sister to the poet Hassan bin Thabit ^[3].

Gifting to Muhammad and Conversion to Islam

According to the traditional sources, after the treaty of Hudaybiya, the prophet Muhammad sent letters to the heads of various Middle Eastern powers inviting them to convert to Islam. One of these letters went to a certain Al-Muqauqis, who is not immediately identifiable with any historical person but seems to be the Melkite Patriarch Cyril of Egypt.^[4] He did not, apparently, accept the call to Islam but in response sent Mariyah and her sister Shirin as sex slaves to Muhammad. That a Christian patriarch in Egypt would send Christian girls as sex slaves to this strange, obscure, and previously unknown heretic in Arabia was a question that apparently never arose on any side; there is no confirmation of any part of this story in contemporary Muslim or non-Muslim accounts from the 7th century, and the narrative itself only appears in Muslim sirah, tafsir and hadith literature written over a hundred years after the fact. On the way to Medina, she converted to Islam. When she and her sister arrived in Medina, since Muhammad could not have concurrent sexual relations with both sisters as per Islamic law, Muhammad chose Mariyah for her exceeding beauty. The prophet did not wed her, but rather kept her as his jaariyah or surriyah, that is his sex slave. The prophet was very stricken with her gave her a house in the upper portion of Medina, which purportedly still exists to this day.^[5]

Scandal with Muhammad's Wives and Quranic Revelation

According to multiple tafsir and hadith traditions, the first 6 ayyaat (verses) of surat-at-tahriim (surah 66) were revealed to Muhammad in regards to a sexual scandal within his household. According to the traditional reading, the verses admonish Muhammad's wives and command him to fulfill his desires as Allah has allowed to him:

The entire scandal of Muhammad sleeping with Aisha is explained in the tafsir of al-Jalalayn on surah 66 (at-tahrim) verse 1-3:

As the above tafsir lays out, according to the story preserved over many hadith and tafsir traditions Muhammad was caught in flagrante delicto having sexual relations with Maria in the house of Hafsa. Muhammad told Hafsah he would not do this again and begged her not to tell Aishah, but she disobeyed his wish and told her anyway. God sent down Qur'an 66:1 in order to chastise Muhammad for forbidding himself Mariyah. Not satisfied with having allowed Muhammad to have sex with their servant in Hafsah's house, Allah further chastised his wives and threatend them with hell fire for disobeying them.

Ibn Kathir also recounts how Qur'an 66:1-6 were revealed to Muhammad by Allah because, in response to Hafsa and Aisha's complaints about Muhammad sleeping with Mariyah, Muhammad cut himself off sexually from Mariyah:

The slave in this case is usually said to be Mariyah. In response, according to the tradition, Allah sent down surat-at-tahreem, the surah of making things off limits. Hafsa was highly aggrieved by this and told Aisha who also rebuked the prophet for his sexual appetite and cruelty to Hafsa.

As the Encyclopedia of Islam states, other narratives exist around these verses, but considering how bad the original narrative looks for Muhammad it is unlikely that the any of the alternatives were the most primordial narrative; rather, the above narrative would appear to be the oldest, and the others were later fabrications meant to protect the reputation of the prophet^[6].

Son She Birthed to the Prophet

According to the sirah and hadith, Mariyah is an umm-walad أم ولد of the prophet, that is to say she bore him a male child. The son she bore him was named Ibrahim, after the prophet. The child died very young, within a year and a half of his birth, and the prophet is said to have shed tears over his death. According to the traditional sources he died during an eclipse, which combined with the fact that he died only 5 months before his father would put his death on the 10th of Shawwal 10 AH or the 27th of January 623 CE ^[7]. Multiple ahadith tell that he would have been a prophet had he grown to adulthood. The hadith also speak of his death being necessary due to Muhammad being خاتم النبيين"khaatam al-nabiyyin'" or the "seal of the prophets^[8]." This is also in line with the famous Quranic verse surat-al-ahzab (surah 33) verse 40:

As such, according to this verse, Ibrahim could not have lived since Muhammad is not the father of any of the men of the believers.

Influence on Islamic Law and Society

The use of Mariyah sexually by the prophet, like every aspect of the prophet's life, provides an example for later Muslims and the religious justification for the sexual exploitation of slave women by Muslim men ^[9]. Her sexual exploitation by Muhammad was in continuity with the practice of the pagan Arabs and was continued by later Islamic empires and movements^[10], up to the very current day with the ISIS terrorist organization taking Yazidi girls in Iraq as sex slaves on the prophetic model. Since Mariyah also bore Muhammad a son, and was this an umm-walad أم ولد or mother of a boy for the prophet, her story was integral to later Islamic discourse about the place of the sons of slave women in Islamic societies (although the classical jurists of the 4 traditional Sunni madhabs do not usually invoke her example as a "proof text")^[11]. Since the raiding for sexual slaves formed a large part of the wealth-building enterprise undertaken by later Islamic caliphates and empires such as the Umayyads, Abbasids and many others the number of children born to slave women quickly proliferated in Islamic society. There were so many children of concubines in Islamic society that several contenders for the throne of the caliphate ended up being the children of slave women. The rightly guided-caliphs and the early Umayyads were all free-born Arab men, but in 740 Zayd bin Ali made an unsuccessful bid for the caliphate, and he was the mother of a slave women. His opponent used his lineage as the son of a sex slave to mock and belittle him, claiming that his birth to an un-free woman disqualified him from the throne^[12]. Yet by 744, Yazid III became the first caliph born of a slave mother; thereafter, the next 3 Umayyad caliphs and most of the Abbasids caliphs were the sons of concubines. Zayd bin Ali in his arguments for why the son of a slave woman such as himself should be eligible for caliph made great reference to Isma'il and Hajar. Hajar's biography bears many resemblances to Mariyah's; both were from Egypt, both were the concubines of prophets, both suffered the jealousy of the rightful wife(wives) of the prophet, both bore sons for the prophet, with the name of the son of Mariyah being the name of the husband of Hajar. Later caliphs and other sons of concubines would invoke the legacy of Mariyah and her son Ibrahim, who might have been another prophet, to justify their place in Islamic society^[13].

As Mariyah was an umm-walad of the prophet, and as the concept took on greater importance in Islamic society as the children of concubines, the example of Mariyah was used in Islamic discourse to discuss the rights, privileges and duties of an umm-walad and her offspring in Islamic societies. Although the umm-walad is elevated above the rank of the normal slave, she is still a slave. The husband has the right to avail himself of her sexually whenever he wants^[14], as Muhammad continued to with Mariyah (and as Allah instructed him to do). There was some discussion in Islamic sources such as ibn Kathir as to whether the umm-walad must be freed ^[15]. There were ahadith to the affect that Muhammad freed Mariyah after she bore him Ibrahim; the conclusion of Islamic law is that this may or may not have happened but if it did this was done out of Muhammad's special love for Mariyah and is not applicable to slave women who bear children in general. The son of an umm-walad, though, was taken to be a free man, as Ibrahim would certainly have been free had he survived to adulthood^[16]. The umm-walad can also not be sold from her master or separated from her son. The prophetic example of Muhammad and Mariyah provides an example of the umm-walad in the biography of the prophet himself, and the exalted status of their son would prove a powerful rhetorical tool in the disputes over the places of the offspring of umm-walads in Islamic societies.

Historicity

As noted above, the story of Mariyah is deeply reflective of the story of Abraham(Ibrahim)'s concubine Hagar(Hajar) in the Bible. Like Hajar she is Egyptian, and the tradition associates a number of sayings of the prophet to Muhammad that the Muslims should treat the Copts of Egypt well based on the prophet's love of Mariyah; similar hadith traditions exist about Hajar. Like Hajar Mariyah provided a son to the otherwise son-less Muhammad. The fact that Muhammad had so many wives but so few children in an age when it was considered a sign of god's favor for a man to have many children must have caused suspicion to arise--which is likely why the Qur'an verse above specifically mentions Muhammad by name, which is unusual in the Qur'an, and states that he is not the father of any of the men of the believers (and the verse itself is likely an interpolation into the text after the death of the prophet). Like Hajar Mariyah became a devout believer in the message of her prophet, and like Hajar Mariyah aroused the jealousy of the prophet's household due to her youth and her fertility in bearing a son for the prophet. These parallels, as well as the convenient connection of her to some otherwise hard-to-explain verses in the Qur'an, have led some scholars to conclude that Mariyah either never existed or her story was embellished beyond recognition by elements lifted wholesale from the Hajar narrative^[17]. The constant pairing of Hajar and Mariyah in later Muslim debates about the concept of "umm-walad" in Islamic law underscore the close connection between these two figures.

In addition to the biblical connections to Hajar, the tradition closely associated Muhammad with Ibrahim. In the sirah of Ibn Hisham/Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad is said to remark upon meeting Ibrahim that he is the person that most resembles himself^[18]. In giving birth to "Ibrahim" Mariyah brings the entire circle around full in respect to the connection of her narrative to that of Ibrahim and Hajar. Even her name has antecedents--in the Shahnahmah (the epic poem describing the lives of the pre-Islamic shahs of Iran) the emperor Maurice (582-602 CE) gave his daughter Mariyah in marriage to the Persian shah Khusraw Parviz (590-628 CE). He ended up leaving her, though, for the love of his youth, Shirin. The royal antecedent for Mariyah is fitting, considering how at the time of the compilation of the Islamic narratives of the sirah and the hadith Muslim claimants to the throne of the caliph were claiming royal lineage through their slave mothers and citing the example of Mariyah^[19]. In addition to all of the above, the death of young Ibrahim serves to underscore the status of Muhammad as "khaatim al-nabiyyin" خاتم النبيين or the "seal of the prophets.^[20]" Considering the literary and biblical allusions, it seems that Mariyah in fact either never existed^[21] or the major details of her story were literary embellishments meant to strengthen the connection of Muhammad to Ibrahim, provide a link with Muhammad to the people of Egypt, justify the norms around the "umm-walad" in the Islamic shari'ah, underline the doctrine of the seal of the prophets and reinforce the idea that Muhammad "Is not the father of any of your men."

References