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

Mariya Al-Qibtiya was one of the concubines/sex slaves of the prophet Muhammad. According to the [[sira]] she was sent to Muhammad as a gift from the Christians of Egypt. According to the [[hadith]] and the [[sirah]] her beauty 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 [[Asbab An-Nuzul|cause]] of the "revelation" of some Qur'an verses according to the tradition. Although she bore the prophet a son who later died, the prophet never married her. The traditional sources compare her concubinage to that of Hajar to Ibrahim, based upon the fact that, according to the tradition, the closest person to Muhammad was the prophet Ibrahim. According to classical Islamic sources, had her son Ibrahim lived, he too would have been a prophet.  

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 Scham'un from the town of Hafn in the region of Ansina. According to the traditional sources, she was gifted to Muhammad with her sister; but since the shari'ah prohibits a man having sexual relations with a woman and her sister, Muhammad was forced to choose between the two, and choose Mariya for her exceeding beauty.  

According to ibn Kathir, this verse was revealed to Muhammad by Allah because, in response to Hafsa and Aisha's complaints about Muhammad sleeping with Mariya, Muhammad cut himself off sexually from all of his wives:

According to the sirah and hadith, Mariyahis an um-walad 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. 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." This is also in line with the famous Quranic verse surat-al-ahzab (surah 33) verse 40:

The use of Mariya sexually by the prophet was taken as an example for later Muslims. Her sexual exploitation by Muhammad formed part of the basis for later sexual slavery in various Islamic empires, up to the very current day with the ISIS terrorist organization taking Yazidi girls in Iraq as sex slaves on the prophetic model. Since Mariya 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. 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. 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 resemblences 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.