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

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 Mariyah, Muhammad cut himself off sexually from all of his wives:

As the Encyclopedia of Islam states, other narratives exist around these verses, but considering how bad they look for Muhammad it is unlikely that they were the most primordial narrative; rather, the above narrative would appear to be the oldest, and the others were later fabrications meant to save the reputation of the prophet.

The use of Mariyah 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 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. 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.  

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 narratives lifted from the Hajar narrative. 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. In giving birth to "Ibrahim" Mariyah brings the entire circle around full of the connection of the narrative to Ibrahim and Hagar. 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) gave his daughter Mariyah in marriage to the Persian shah Khusraw Parviz (590-628). 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. 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." Considering the literary and biblical allusions, it seems that Mariyah in fact either never existed or the major details of her stories were literary embellishments meant to strengthen the connection of Muhammad to Ibrahim, provide a link with Muhammad to the people of Egypt, underline the doctrine of the seal of the prophets and reinforce the idea that Muhammad "Is not the father of any of your men."