The Marriage of Zaynab bint Jahsh: A Nikah from Above the Seven Heavens

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧THE MOST SENSITIVE STORY IN THE SĪRAH

The marriage of Zaynab bint Jaḥsh is a topic the shaykh admits to having postponed for a long time. It is, in some ways, even more sensitive than the incident of the so-called Satanic Verses, because non-Muslim polemicists have dressed it up as a love story. Many later scholars simply refused to discuss it, and it survives only in the earliest books. But living in a climate where the Prophet ﷺ is attacked from every direction, it is better to hear the accounts from a sympathetic teacher, in academic detail, than to first meet them on a hostile website.

❧WHO WAS ZAYNAB?

Zaynab was not born Zaynab, she was born Barra. The shaykh notes she was of the Quraysh through the tribe of Banū Khuzaymah, not of Banū Hāshim; but her mother was Umaymah bint ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the paternal aunt of the Prophet ﷺ, making Zaynab his first cousin. She was probably more than a decade and a half younger than him, most books place her around thirty-five at the time of her marriage to him. She had been married and divorced back in Makkah, and she emigrated to Medina with her brother.

❧THE MARRIAGE TO ZAYD

The Prophet ﷺ sent Zaynab a proposal on behalf of Zayd, who at that time was still known as Zayd ibn Muḥammad, his adopted son. Zaynab balked: she was, in her own estimation, the most eligible widow of the Quraysh, and Zayd, a freed slave, was beneath her station. Her brother objected as well. According to one early interpretation, it was over this refusal that Allah revealed the verse of Sūrat al-Aḥzāb (33:36): وَمَا كَانَ لِمُؤْمِنٍ وَلَا مُؤْمِنَةٍ إِذَا قَضَى اللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُ أَمْرًا أَن يَكُونَ لَهُمُ الْخِيَرَةُ مِنْ أَمْرِهِمْ, it is not for a believing man or woman, once Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter, to have any choice in their affair. When the verse came down, both Zaynab and her brother said: we are content with Zayd.

The marriage, however, never worked. Zaynab had felt from the first that Zayd was not of her caliber, and Zayd complained repeatedly to the Prophet ﷺ of her sharpness of tongue. For at least three years the Prophet ﷺ answered him with the words preserved in the Qurʾān: أَمْسِكْ عَلَيْكَ زَوْجَكَ وَاتَّقِ اللَّهَ, keep your wife, and fear Allah. Eventually, without ever being told to do so, indeed having been told the opposite, Zayd divorced her anyway.

❧THE PROPOSAL AND THE MARRIAGE FROM ABOVE THE HEAVENS

When Zaynab's waiting period ended, the Prophet ﷺ said to Zayd, in Ibn Saʿd's wording, "I trust no one more than you", go to Zaynab and mention my name to her. Zayd found her grinding barley. He later related that the moment he saw her, knowing the Prophet ﷺ had mentioned her, a shyness overcame him: he turned his back to her and spoke facing the wall, though they had been married for years. Zaynab's answer was a model of composure: "I will not respond until I seek my Lord's guidance," and she stood to pray istikhārah in her prayer corner.

The answer to that istikhārah came from above the seven heavens. While the Prophet ﷺ was sitting with ʿĀʾishah, the signs of revelation overcame him, and he recited the newly revealed verse of Sūrat al-Aḥzāb: زَوَّجْنَاكَهَا, We married her to you. A messenger carried the verse to Zaynab. No walī was appointed, no witnesses were summoned, no mahr was negotiated and no separate contract was ever performed, the nikāḥ of Zaynab is written in the Qurʾān itself, recited by the Muslims to this day. It is, the shaykh observes, the only marriage in history contracted directly by Allah. ʿĀʾishah later confessed, in her own words, that she was struck with jealousy from every angle, because of what she knew of Zaynab's beauty, and worse, because of the unrepeatable manner in which the marriage had taken place.

Zaynab never let her co-wives forget it. Anas relates that she would say to them: as for you, your fathers and your brothers gave you in marriage, but زَوَّجَنِي اللَّهُ مِنْ فَوْقِ سَبْعِ سَمَاوَاتٍ, Allah married me to him from above the seven heavens.

❧THE NIGHT ḤIJĀB CAME DOWN

The strongest opinion dates the marriage to the beginning of Dhū al-Qaʿdah of the fifth year of the Hijrah, and the dating rests on something momentous: by unanimous agreement, the verses of ḥijāb were revealed on the night of Zaynab's wedding. Before that night there was no ḥijāb in the Sharīʿah at all. The marriage also certainly preceded the slander of ʿĀʾishah, since ʿĀʾishah herself describes Zaynab's restraint during that ordeal.

❧THE GREATEST WALĪMAH

The wedding feast for Zaynab was the most lavish the Prophet ﷺ ever gave for any wife: meat and bread, the height of luxury in a society that never saw rice, until the people were full. He sent Anas ibn Mālik to invite Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī by name, then the people of the Ṣuffah, then whoever was in the masjid, then whoever he met in the pathway. Anas thought the small dish before them might feed two or three; by Allah, he said, more than seventy ate from it, and when they finished it held as much as when they began.