ʿUmar and the month the Prophet ﷺ withdrew from his wives

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

At some point in his life, and the timing is genuinely unknown, the Prophet ﷺ swore an oath before Allāh to withdraw from all of his wives for one full month. Scholars range across the fourth, fifth, sixth, and ninth years; Ibn Sayyid al-Nās favours the ninth, which would place it just about now. When it happened he was married to all nine: Sawdah, ʿĀʾishah, Ḥafṣah, Umm Salamah (who is Hind), Juwayriyah bint al-Ḥārith, Zaynab bint Jaḥsh, Umm Ḥabībah Ramlah bint Abī Sufyān, Ṣafiyyah bint Ḥuyayy, and Maymūnah bint al-Ḥārith al-Hilāliyyah. The likelier late date fits the cause. A person only wants more when everyone around him is gaining more; so long as all live at one level, no one asks. And when did living standards in Medina begin to rise? After Khaybar, after the Conquest, exactly the years the wealth started to flow. So the wives of the Prophet ﷺ, quite naturally, began to ask for a little more as well.

❧A request that was entirely lawful

What exactly they asked was never recorded, and it is right that it was not, this was an internal matter of their homes, and it was completely ḥalāl: a bigger house, better furnishings, whatever it might have been. There is nothing wrong in wanting it, and let no one imagine, as we tell this, that we diminish one atom of the noble rank of the Mothers of the Believers, I seek Allāh's refuge from that. What appears to have happened is a coordinated appeal, a group effort, to make the case stronger; if all of them press together it is far more persuasive than one asking alone. And the two who led that effort were ʿĀʾishah and Ḥafṣah, which is precisely why ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb is woven so deeply into the story, for Ḥafṣah is his daughter.

❧"Our women learned it from the women of Medina"

Ibn ʿAbbās says he had wanted for over a year to ask ʿUmar about the two women concerning whom Allāh revealed a verse, and he waited, out of respect for ʿUmar's time, never barging in, until on one journey he found ʿUmar alone and helped him pour his wuḍūʾ. ʿUmar told him: "We of Quraysh were a people who dominated our women, naghlibu nisāʾanā (نَغْلِبُ نِسَاءَنَا). But when we came to Medina we found a people whose women dominated them, and our women learned it from theirs." One day he grew angry with his wife and she answered him back; when he rebuked her for daring to, she said: "Why are you shocked that I answer back? The wives of the Prophet ﷺ answer him back, and one of them will even abandon him for the whole day." ʿUmar was stunned, stunned that the Prophet ﷺ tolerated this, that he did not impose the old Meccan custom, and stunned that the private life of his household was known even to the ordinary women of the city; for every community half-knows such things, this one is strict, that one lax, and the Prophet's ﷺ way with his wives was known too.

❧ʿUmar rebukes Ḥafṣah

He went straight to his daughter: "Do you answer him back? Do you leave him for the day?" She said yes to both. He was furious, khāba wa-khasira (خَابَ وَخَسِرَ), "are you a fool, have you lost your mind? Do you not fear Allāh's anger if His Messenger is angered with you?" He was behaving exactly as any Muslim other than a wife must behave, for the wives have a latitude no one else has: to be angry at the Prophet ﷺ would be a kind of kufr for anyone else, yet it is permitted between him and his wives. He warned Ḥafṣah never to answer back and never to press him for her needs, "come to me; I will give you anything extra," though the Sharīʿah did not oblige a father to provide for a married daughter, and he added, "do not let your companion's standing deceive you about your own," hinting at ʿĀʾishah: "she is more graceful and more beloved to him than you, and will get away with what you will not." It is human nature, this, the one we love most is forgiven most; our own children get away with everything and still we give to them. He knew, too, that Ḥafṣah had once already been divorced and taken back only because Jibrīl came down to say she was ṣawwāmah qawwāmah (صَوَّامَة قَوَّامَة), a woman of much fasting and prayer, and would be his companion in Jannah, and ʿUmar feared it might happen again.

❧The night the rumour broke

ʿUmar had an arrangement with a neighbour of the Anṣār: they took turns attending the Prophet ﷺ, one working the fields while the other went to learn, then trading the next day, for the Ṣaḥābah had livelihoods to earn, they did not simply sit in the masjid all day. In those days there was also anxious talk of a Ghassānid attack, a detail that places the whole affair before Tabūk. One night, after ʿishāʾ, when people slept early, there being no light, his neighbour came pounding on his door, alarming at that hour. ʿUmar rushed out: "What is it? Have the Ghassānids attacked?" "No," said the man, "something worse, the Prophet ﷺ has divorced his wives." Think of that: a foreign army at the gates is war, and yet to this Anṣārī a personal grief was worse than war, because it would wound them, and wound ʿUmar, more deeply than any communal calamity. That is how they loved him.

❧The masjid full of weeping men

At Fajr ʿUmar hurried to the Prophet's ﷺ houses; he was not there. He found Ḥafṣah weeping. "Has he divorced you?" "Lā adrī (لَا أَدْرِي), I do not know; he has withdrawn to an upper room." In the masjid ʿUmar found the whole community sitting, turning pebbles over in their hands, waiting, the rumour of a mass divorce having spread through the city. He went first to ʿĀʾishah: "O daughter of Abū Bakr, have you gone so far in troubling the Prophet ﷺ that he has left you all?" She gave back as sharp as he gave: "O son of al-Khaṭṭāb, go and see to your own vessel, meaning Ḥafṣah; your daughter is as much a cause of this as I am." He had assumed ʿĀʾishah was the culprit; now he saw his own daughter was as guilty, and he returned to Ḥafṣah and rebuked her harshly, even, in his sternness with his own child, saying, "you know he does not love you as he loves ʿĀʾishah, and were I not your father he would have divorced you long ago", at which she only wept the more.

❧The bare room

The chamber was a small loft in the masjid, reached by a ladder, a place of occasional privacy holding only a mat and a water-skin, so rarely mentioned in the Sīrah that this is nearly the only time we hear of it. An Abyssinian servant of the Prophet ﷺ (in one report Bilāl) stood outside. ʿUmar asked permission to enter and was met with silence, twice the servant came back with no answer, until the third time, when ʿUmar called out loudly, so the Prophet ﷺ would hear, that he had not come as a father-in-law pleading for Ḥafṣah: "by Allāh, if the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ ordered me to strike her neck I would obey", he came as a friend, to learn what had happened. Then he was let in. He found the Prophet ﷺ lying on a bare rope mat that had pressed its marks into his side; in the room a mere handful of barley, a tanned water-skin, and some hanging hides, nothing else. "A-ṭallaqta nisāʾak (أَطَلَّقْتَ نِسَاءَكَ), have you divorced your wives?" "No." "Allāhu akbar!", for the Sunnah, on hearing good news, is to say Allāhu akbar.

❧"Are you in doubt, O ʿUmar?"

To ease the tension ʿUmar told the whole tale of his own household, Quraysh and the bold women of Medina, and the Prophet ﷺ smiled, and smiled again; for men, when they gather, joke about their wives, and it comforts a man to know his own is not the only one. Emboldened, ʿUmar even asked leave to sit, astaʾnisu yā Rasūlullāh (أَسْتَأْنِسُ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ), and here we glimpse the gentler, wiser ʿUmar beneath the stern reputation. Then, looking round the bare room, he wept, and said, "O Messenger of Allāh, ask Allāh to give your Ummah provision, Persia and Rome enjoy the world, though they do not even worship Him." The Prophet ﷺ sat up: "Are you in doubt, O son of al-Khaṭṭāb? Are you not content that Allāh has chosen for us the Hereafter and given them this world?" In another wording: "they have been given their good things in this life", every good deed of a disbeliever repaid here and now, in wealth and ease, because they await no reckoning. And ʿUmar said, "Ask forgiveness for me, O Messenger of Allāh", the request for more had been the mistake.

❧Success is not measured in wealth

This, the shaykh notes, is the timeless answer to the modern anxiety, why are the Muslim nations behind, why is the technology theirs and not ours? It may well be true that Allāh grants this world to others; but success was never GDP. True success is the Hereafter, earned by a moral and virtuous life, and what the believer holds of correct belief and ethics is worth more than everything the disbelievers were ever given of the dunyā.