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The Firsts (Sahaba Stories) | The Forerunners of Islam
Fatima bint Qays (ra): She Preserved Hadiths About Dajjal and Divorce | The Firsts
A woman of elite status, beauty, and intellect.
Her home became the setting for one of the most pivotal moments in Islamic history. It was in her house that six companions of the Prophet ﷺ gathered to decide who would become the third khalifah after Umar (ra) was assassinated.
Discover the story of Fatima bint Qays (ra), her narrations about Dajjal, her marriage to Usama ibn Zayd (ra), and a life that is a testament to what it means to be well-respected by the most respected in the ummah.
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
So, this is one of those occasions where you have a rare person that shows up in the seerah
of the Prophet ﷺ who, while her mention is not much, the consequences of what happened
with her is actually huge to the dimension that we have today of our fiqh, of our jurisprudence.
So the Prophet ﷺ, as we said, he wanted to marry Usama ibn Zayd to someone of a higher
class and this goes along the same lines of how the Prophet ﷺ tried to marry Zayd to people of a higher class so he could break through those barriers.
So the wife of Usama is a woman by the name of Fatima bint Qays al-Qurashiyya al-Fihriyya.
And she's actually one of the earliest of the Muhajireen. She's one of the first of the Muhajireen. She alongside her brother, Ad-Dahhak ibn Qays. Ad-Dahhak was about 10 years younger than her so she's actually the older one.
Her and her brother embraced Islam in Mecca and they're from Banu Fihr so they're from a powerful tribe and she married, at that time she was married to her first husband,
a man by the name of Abu Amr ibn Hafs ibn al-Mughira al-Makhzumi. And this is the first cousin of Khalid ibn al-Walid.
So Khalid ibn al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, he is Abu Amr ibn Hafs ibn al-Mughira. It's the same family. Banu Makhzum is the tribe that we were talking about in the story of Usama ibn Zayd (رضي الله عنه)
the tribe of Abu Jahl which just shows you again the status of these people. So she's someone who embraces Islam alongside her husband, alongside her brother and one
of those Muhajireen that we don't have too much information on but the description of
her in the books of seerah is that she was a woman with supreme beauty, with supreme intellect and completeness.
Like she was the total package. A woman of elite status, a woman of elite beauty, a woman of elite intellect. So everyone would have wanted to be married to this woman Fatima bint Qays because of the tribe that she comes from as well.
Her mother was also from Banu Kinana, Umayma bint Rabi'a and she makes the hijrah to Al-Madinah.
Now she narrates the hadith, if you remember when we talked about Tamim ibn Aws al-Dari. Tamim al-Dari (رضي الله عنه) was the hadith of al-Jassasa, the hadith of the beast.
The one who came from a far away land to the Prophet's Islamic assembly told him the story of encountering that island where he saw certain alamat, certain signs that the Prophet ﷺ
had spoken about. This is her hadith. She narrates this hadith because she says that I was sitting in, there's a visual here, I was sitting in the front row of the women when the Prophet ﷺ stood on the minbar and
he said, Tamim just came to me and the Prophet ﷺ recounted what Tamim ibn Aws al-Dari had shared. So we get that hadith from her. It's a very long account which is known as hadith al-Jassasa.
But we also get a lot from her divorce. Her divorce and her subsequent remarriage are full of some of the most consequential discussions that happen in Islam.
So she says, talaqani zawji thalatha, that my husband divorced me three times.
So she becomes sort of like the touch base of, the touchstone of how we deal with talaq and how we deal with iddah. It's one of the earliest cases of divorce that we have between the sahaba, where you actually have some of these issues being litigated.
So to give you context, she's not with her tribe in Banu Makhzum. She comes from a powerful family but she's not with that powerful family right now. At the end of the day, these are refugees that are married to each other that both come from powerful families.
And the husband divorces the wife and it gets to a point of irrevocable divorce. And he does not provide for her anything in terms of sakin or in terms of nafaqah, in terms
of housing or maintenance. So the Prophet ﷺ, I guess that's the outrage, right, of the situation. The Prophet ﷺ, she says,
amarani rasulullahi ﷺ an a'tadda fi bayti ibni ummi maktum al-a'ma The Prophet ﷺ ordered me to observe my iddah in the house of Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum. Very interesting by the way.
Early refugee problems. Number one, what was she entitled to? She said that my husband had only given me five containers of barley and five containers of wheat and that was it. And the Prophet ﷺ approved of that.
So she didn't have any nafaqah, she didn't have any spending on her, she had no kids, and she had no house to stay in. Okay? Typically, the iddah is done in the house of the house where it happens, right?
You're supposed to stay together and there's supposed to be a whole process that takes place here. She says that the Prophet ﷺ initially told me to do my iddah in the house of a woman
by the name of Umm Shareek. And then what ended up happening is the Prophet ﷺ said, inna bayta ummi shareek baytun yakhshahu al-muhajiroon
wa lakin i'taddi fi bayti ibni ummi maktum fa'asa an tulqi thiyabaki fala yaraki So he says to her, (رضي الله عنها) ﷺ, he says, look Umm Shareek's home has a lot
of foot traffic. This kind of shows you the early hijrah elements. There are a lot of men that are coming to her house constantly. So instead, we will allot for you a place where Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum lives.
He's blind and he will not be able to see you and you'll be secured and you go ahead and you complete your iddah over there. So this is a very different type of divorce, marriage, iddah situation that's taking place here.
And it becomes a source of contention later on in terms of like what are the rights after a divorce and how are the sahaba supposed to make judgments and how are the imams supposed to make judgments in this regard.
This is also, mind you, before many of the ayat of hijab were revealed. The ayat of hijab are four years into the hijrah. So the hijab has not been made mandatory yet.
Many of the laws of how genders should be were not yet revealed. So this is a case in early Islam that happens here. But I don't want to stop there. I'll get back to how this comes up later on in her life. But we come to her marriage to Usama.
The way that her marriage to Usama happens is actually powerful. So Abu Bakr ibn Abi Jahm, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Jahm, he narrates this hadith.
He says that I heard Fatima bint Qays say that the Prophet ﷺ said to me to go and complete my iddah in the house of Ibn Umm Maktum and when you become lawful, tell me.
Meaning the Prophet ﷺ is saying tell me so I can find you a husband. So I told him. And then the Prophet ﷺ said to me has anyone sent a proposal to you?
So I said Mu'awiyah and Abu Jahm. Now this shows you her status. That before she's even done with her iddah, two men already have their proposals.
I mean she's beautiful. She has a lot of intellect. She has a lot of status, tribal lineage, all that is there. And she's getting two proposals from these two men. So the Prophet ﷺ responds and he says,
amma mu'awiyah farajulun taribun la mala lahu So as for Mu'awiyah, he's a poor man who doesn't have money. Pause here for a moment.
Some of the ulema say is this Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan or another Mu'awiyah? Because Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan comes from wealth. So is this Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan or is this another Mu'awiyah?
It could honestly be both. But one of the narrations actually says Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan and we'll make that assumption for a moment. What the Prophet ﷺ might mean is what he meant when Hind bint Utbah came to the Prophet
ﷺ and complained about the father of Abu Sufyan, I mean the father of Mu'awiyah being Abu Sufyan and said that Abu Sufyan is rajulun shahih, he's cheap, he's stingy. He doesn't give me my basic rights.
So it might be, some of the ulema say it might be that the Prophet ﷺ is not saying that he's actually poor but that he lives a rough life that he's going to withhold from you. Or it could be that because of the political circumstances or social circumstances that
at that time, it's war time or whatever it may be, that Mu'awiyah actually did not have enough money. Allah knows best, right?
But take the maqsud, take what's being alluded to, the Prophet ﷺ said Mu'awiyah is a man
who's not going to spend on you and the Prophet ﷺ said as for Abu Jahm, he said ﷺ that
rajulun darrabun lil-nisa, he's a man who hits women. Some narrations, the Prophet ﷺ said he's a man who doesn't put down his stick.
So some of the ulema said it either means he travels all the time or he hits, right? He hits with a stick. In some narrations, the Prophet ﷺ says darrabun lil-nisa, like the Prophet ﷺ says he hits women, right?
So he carries his stick. So the Prophet ﷺ said I advise you to avoid both of them. The ulema take from this the ruling of the permissibility of warning someone of a harm that's coming their way, right?
So this is one of the exceptions to the rule of gheebah, right? The rule of backbiting. You don't talk about people for the sake of talking about them. You don't talk about it as a pastime. But if there is a legitimate concern to withholding information from someone, then you should share
that information with that person so that they don't find themselves in a bad situation. So if you read any book on, even if you go to Ihya Ulum ad-Din or you did Mukhtasar Minhaj al-Qasidin here, right? When you look at the permissible cases of gheebah, this is the hadith that will be used
as one of the forms of daleel. The evidence is that it's permissible to warn someone if a harm is coming their way. So the Prophet ﷺ said that look, Mu'awiyah is not going to spend on you or Mu'awiyah doesn't have money.
Secondly, as for Abu al-Jahm, then he's someone that is potentially abusive. The irony is that the hadith is narrated by who? The son of Abu Jahm. The son, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Jahm.
And I actually went into the books of rijal to make sure it's actually his son, not just someone named Abu Bakr ibn Abi Jahm. No, this is actually Abu Bakr ibn Jahm ibn al-Sukhair. So this is actually his son narrating the hadith about his dad's rejected proposal, okay, from the Prophet ﷺ.
So then what happens? The Prophet ﷺ says, I have a better idea for you. Why don't you marry Usama? Faqalat biyadiha hakadha. Usama? Usama? She said, what? Usama? Usama? You want me to marry Usama?
Okay, why? Again, like, come on. Banu Fihr, Qurashiyya, you're telling me a minute. Mu'awiyah and Abu Jahm.
And by the way, what lends to the idea that this is the Mu'awiyah is that there's a whole story that goes on in Islamic history about Dahhak ibn Qays. Her brother becomes one of the generals of Mu'awiyah later on. So clearly there's a Banu Makhzum connection here.
Her first husband is there and there's a connection at that level, right? But she says, Usama? Usama? Prophet ﷺ said, listen.
Ta'atullahi wa ta'atu rasulihi khayrun laki. Obeying Allah and obeying the Messenger is better for you. So this is what I'm advising you. Like, I know what I'm saying.
SubhanAllah, with Zayd and Umm Ayman, right? You want to marry a woman from Jannah? This is that. So she says, my initial was like, no way.
So she said, she's saying about herself, bi amri Usama, like I was belittling Usama. Then I said, when the Prophet ﷺ said that, sam'an wa ta'atan lillahi wa li rasulihi
fa zawwajnihi, that I said, I obey, I hear and I obey Allah and the Messenger ﷺ, so marry me to him. She said, fa karramani allahu bi Abi Zayd, wa sharrafani Allah wa rafa'ani bihi.
So said, so Allah honored me with Abu Zayd. Usama named his first son Zayd. Zayd ibn Usama ibn Zayd. So she became Umm Zayd. So she said, karramani allahu, Allah honored me, karam, gave me karam through Abu Zayd
and he gave me nobility through him and Allah Azza wa Jall raised my rank through him. And so it actually became a very beautiful marriage and a marriage that subhanAllah succeeded,
right? Despite the class differences between the two. And she became, she remained sort of a reference point on issues concerning divorce and issues
concerning iddah and issues concerning nafaqah, the spending and the maintenance after a person is divorced. And there's a huge debate that took place because Umar (رضي الله عنه) in his khilafah did not want to rule by her situation.
He saw it either as maybe she made an error in her memory of how things went down or maybe there was some exceptional case to her. But Umar (رضي الله عنه) wanted to rule by what he knew of Allah and the Messenger
ﷺ's ruling in this regard of the woman staying in the house of the iddah and the certain junctures at which support is cut off and how pregnancy is taken into consideration, not taken into consideration.
So that does exist in the case of a discussion and dispute between Umar (رضي الله عنه) and her. But the last thing that we have about her (رضي الله عنها) is that when Umar (رضي الله عنه) was assassinated,
fi baytiha ijtama'a ashab al-shura 'inda qatli Umar ibn al-Khattab (رضي الله عنه) wa khatabu khutbatahum al-ma'thura. It was in her house that the shura actually convened.
The six companions convened in accordance with what Umar (رضي الله عنه) had decreed which shows you that she maintained a status in society and amongst the sahaba as well. She maintained a certain status amongst the companions as well and it was there that they
deliberated and that they debated about what would happen with the khilafah. So that discussion, the choosing of the third khilafah happened in her living room (رضي الله عنها) and as al-Zubayr (رضي الله عنه) says about her,
wa kanat imra'atan bakhudan wal-bakhud al-nabila. She was a woman of great nobility and that amongst those that narrated from her and it
became sort of Islamic history and fiqh and jurisprudence were al-Sha'bi and Abu Salama. So this was the woman that the Prophet ﷺ married Usama ibn Zayd to
and it is from them that you then have the children that come and all of this gets absorbed into the lines of the chains of narration. May Allah be pleased with Usama (رضي الله عنه), his beloved one, the son of his
beloved one and may Allah join us with our beloved one ﷺ. And may Allah allow us to implement and practice and act upon what we learn from these noble stories and to be noble like these people.
May Allah allow us to transcend the artificial divisions and demarcations of man. Allahumma ameen. Barakallahu fikum wa salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Al-Fatiha. Al-Fatiha.
Al-Fatiha.

























































































































































































