The Gift of Maria al-Qibtiyyah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Today's lesson is a tangent, catching up on things in the life of the Prophet ﷺ that the five weeks of Tabūk and the years of delegations caused us to overlook. To reach the death of his son Ibrāhīm, we must first speak of Māriyah; and the topic of Māriyah is a sensitive one.

❧Why we speak of it plainly

It is better you hear these things from me than have them thrown at you by people who do not believe in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. Modern Sīrah books tend to gloss over such matters, which may have made sense in a pre-internet world, but not now. These are not lies about the tradition; they are things genuinely in it, quietly passed over, and when a young man or woman meets one for the first time on some website, it shakes them. Only last week the shaykh was asked to speak with a youth who had declared he was no longer a Muslim, quoting incidents from the Sīrah itself, learned not from any teacher but from Islamophobes who quote accurately from al-Ṭabarānī or Ibn Isḥāq, string five or ten hard incidents together, and ignore everything else. It is not my job to distort what happened, but to convey it; if people reject it, that is a rejection of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, not of me.

❧The Muqawqis of Egypt

Māriyah's name was Māriyah bint Shamʿūn, and she was sent to the Prophet ﷺ by the man the books call Jurayj ibn Mīnā, the Muqawqis of Egypt. Muqawqis, like Qayṣar and Kisrā, is a title, given to the patriarch of Egypt. The Sīrah books call him the ruler of Egypt, but that is not quite right: Egypt then was not independent but under Byzantine rule, and he was a patriarch appointed by Rome, in the histories, Cyrus of Alexandria, a Melkite Christian (the Melkites being pre-Catholic; they became the Greek and Roman Orthodox churches). He was no ignorant man but a known theologian who wrote on the nature of Christ, still admired in the Greek Orthodox tradition.

The Prophet ﷺ had sent him a letter calling him to Islam, around the eighth year. We have no report from Egypt of how he received it, unlike Qayṣar in Rome, but it is not far-fetched to assume he recognised the truth, for he neither tore the letter nor mocked it. He replied with great courtesy and sent a small fortune: a thousand mithqāl of gold, fine garments, honey, the mule that became the famous Duldul, a servant named Mābūr, and two slave-sisters, Māriyah and Sīrīn, daughters, it is said, of a noble family who had been given to the church, and so were the patriarch's to give. When the polite letter and the gifts arrived, Ibn Saʿd records that the Prophet ﷺ said: the wretch has preserved his kingdom by being polite to me, but his kingdom will not last, this is the last of it. And so it proved: Cyrus was the last Byzantine prefect of Egypt, for ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ conquered it within twenty years.

❧Milk al-yamin, not a wife

Because a man may not have two sisters at once, the Prophet ﷺ gave Sīrīn to the poet Ḥassān ibn Thābit, their son was ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ḥassān, and kept Māriyah for himself. No sugar-coating changes the reality: Māriyah and Sīrīn were not wives but milk al-yamīn. Māriyah is what the Bible itself calls a concubine, and she was not yet a Muslim when she came, in our Sharīʿah one cannot take a Muslim as milk al-yamīn, converting at some later time we cannot pinpoint. She was never a wife, never of the Ummahāt al-Muʾminīn; had a nikāḥ been contracted she would have been. If you believe the Prophet ﷺ was a prophet, then you accept that this was permitted for its time and place, even where the Ummah has since agreed to move on.

❧The rumour, and Ali's investigation

Māriyah was a stranger in a strange land, likely without Arabic and quite alone, and rumours began that the servant sent with her, Mābūr, said in some reports to be a distant cousin of hers, was visiting her. The ḥadīth is in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no obscure source: the Prophet ﷺ commanded ʿAlī to take his sword and go to Mābūr, for anything touching the household is given to ʿAlī, who is Ahl al-Bayt.

ʿAlī asked an intelligent question: shall I go as one who simply obeys the command, or as one who sees and hears what the absent does not?, do you want me to act, or to investigate? Go, he ﷺ said, as one who sees and hears. It is on this phrase that Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Ḥazm and others hold that ʿAlī was not sent to execute Mābūr but to frighten and to find out; the other view is that he was sent to execute him. The fiqh weight is real, Mābūr was given no trial, no two witnesses were produced, so one camp says this was a right particular to the Prophet ﷺ alone, and the other, Ibn al-Qayyim's, says it was never judge, jury and executioner at all, which is why he was told to use his eyes and ears.

ʿAlī found Mābūr, in a date grove, by one report, and the man, terrified, either fell from a tree he tried to climb or deliberately uncovered himself; either way his ʿawrah was exposed, and it was plain that he had been mutilated: he had not the organ of a man. Some civilisations did this to slaves; our tradition forbids it absolutely, even to a lawful slave, ever. So the rumour was impossible, and ʿAlī returned and told the Prophet ﷺ so.

❧Umm al-walad

In Dhū al-Ḥijjah of the eighth year Māriyah bore a son, and the Prophet ﷺ was especially glad. Of her he said: أَعْتَقَهَا وَلَدُهَا, her child has freed her, and this is a ruling that shows how differently slavery ran under Islam. When a concubine bears her owner's child, the child is fully legitimate, equal to every other in inheritance and name and standing, most of the caliphs of the Umayyads, ʿAbbāsids and Ottomans were sons of slave women, and Hājar and Ismāʿīl are of this same pattern, and the mother is upgraded to umm al-walad: she can no longer be sold or transferred or treated as a slave, and she goes free the moment her owner dies. Islam is edging the institution towards its own dissolution: how, humanely, could you sell the woman who bore your child? (The wider question of slavery, the modern objection, and why our scholars hold it a thing of the past, is taken up separately.)