Birth of Zaynab bint Muhammad

A year or so after the firstborn son, in about the year 599 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was about twenty-nine years of age, the house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) received its second child, and the child was a daughter. She was named Zaynab. The believer who comes to this birth from the birth of al-Qasim must pause at the threshold of the event, for the world into which this little girl was born did not, as a world, want her. The Arabia of that age had turned the arrival of a daughter into a humiliation; and the house that received her with rejoicing was standing, quietly and without any declaration as yet, against the whole moral gravity of its civilization. What follows in this record is therefore more than a family event: it is the first stone of a revolution in the estimation of women, laid down in a cradle in Makkah before any revelation had come.

The dark background must be told honestly, because the light against it cannot be measured otherwise. Among the tribes of the Jahiliyyah the birth of a daughter was received in many houses as a catastrophe; fathers' faces, as the later teaching of the scholars recorded, would darken with anger and gloom at the news; and in the harder customs of the age there was the practice the Arabs called wa'd, the burying of infant daughters alive, by which a man rid himself of what he reckoned a burden upon his honor and his purse. It is this practice that the Quran itself was later to lay bare with an unbearable question, telling of the father who, when one of them is announced to him as a daughter, keeps his face darkened, overwhelmed with grief, withdrawing from his people because of the evil of the tidings; and telling again of the Day when the buried infant girl herself is asked, for what sin she was killed. Those verses were sent down long after this year; but the practice they condemn was in the ground and in the custom of the age when Zaynab was born, and every Arab of that generation knew of some pit at the edge of some settlement where a daughter had been laid.

Into such a world the Prophet ﷺ received a daughter, and the sources that remember the event remember joy. He named her Zaynab, a name the Arabs gave to a goodly tree that flowers in beauty and fragrance; and the naming was done, as the naming of the firstborn son had been done, within the order and dignity of the household's customs. There is in the entire record of the Prophet's ﷺ life not one word, not one gesture, not one shadow that ever treated the birth of a daughter as other than a blessing; and this at a time when men of standing in his own city were performing what the coming revelation would call the very loss of their own souls in the burying of their little girls. The father of Zaynab held her as he had held her brother. The mother who bore her, the lady whom the Jahiliyyah itself had already surnamed at-Tahira, the Pure One, for the excellence of her character, tended her infancy and watched her grow; and Salma, the faithful midwife of the household, who had delivered Khadijah of all her children and who considered herself one of the family, stood over this birth as over the first.

The sources are at one upon the child's name and station, and their small differences are the differences of sequence, not of substance. Martin Lings, following the earliest material, relates that after the eldest son al-Qasim, the next child was a daughter whom they named Zaynab, and that she was followed by three other daughters, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah, and finally by another short-lived son. Ibn Kathir transmits the report of Mus'ab ibn Abdullah al-Zubayri to the same effect, placing Zaynab directly after al-Qasim; and he gathers from Abd al-Razzaq, quoting Ibn Jurayj, the plain testimony of several authorities that Zaynab was the oldest of the daughters of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Ibn Hisham's list, by contrast, makes Ruqayyah the firstborn of the girls; and the fuller sections of the great compilations preserve nearly every possible sequence of the four sisters. The master record of this chronicle has fixed its arrangement upon the agreement of the preponderant reports and of the received retellings: Zaynab, born in about 599, is the first daughter, the second child of the house; and the variants are carried beside that arrangement as the honest scholarly record they are, disturbing nothing of the count, the paternity or the faith.

There is a further testimony to Zaynab that the believer should hear, because it shows the guardians of the tradition guarding her very name. Hisham ibn Urwa, the great Medinese scholar, transmitted a report in which it was claimed that the names al-Tayyib and al-Tahir were late inventions, and in which the list of the Prophet's ﷺ children omitted Zaynab entirely. Ibn Kathir, passing upon this report with the severity that makes his compilation a trust, declared it objectionable, affirmed that what Hisham denied was what is commonly accepted, and added that he had left out any reference to Zaynab, which is obligatory. The scholar's phrase is exact: obligatory. The eldest daughter of the Prophet ﷺ is not a detail of the sacred biography that a transmitter may lose by the way; her place in the record is a duty upon the record itself. And so she stands, named by the unanimity of the faithful compilations, the first daughter of the best of fathers and of the purest of mothers.

How the Prophet ﷺ regarded daughters, the events of his later teaching would seal in words the whole ummah memorizes. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) related that a poor woman came to her with her two daughters, and that she found nothing in the house to give her but a single date; the woman divided the date between the two girls and went away; and when the Prophet ﷺ heard of it he taught the principle for which this birth stands at the fountainhead: whoever is tested by these daughters and treats them generously, they will be a shield for him from the Fire. In another transmission he joined his blessed fingers together and promised that the man who brings up two girls until they are grown will come with him on the Day of Resurrection as close as those two fingers. These sayings were uttered long after this year, over other people's daughters, in Madinah; but they are the harvest of a heart that had already, in Makkah, under the roof of Khadijah, treasured four daughters of its own; and the believer hears in them, beneath the law of the teaching, the memory of the teacher's own house.

For the house was filling now with girls, and would fill with girls, and the fact is itself a sign. In some six years from this birth Zaynab would have three sisters, and no son in the house would survive; and the man whom Allah had chosen to be the Seal of the Prophets was given, by the deliberate grant of his Lord, a household of women and girls. The age read daughters as deficits; the providence of Allah was reading them as the making of the man, for the tenderness that was being formed in that house of girls was the very tenderness that would make him, when the call came, the reformer of the world's treatment of the weak. The Quran was later to name the birth of daughters as one of the taunts of the ignorant, telling of the pagans who, in their blindness, ascribed to Allah what they themselves would not choose, female children, while claiming for themselves the sons they desired. Against that whole structure of contempt the Prophet's ﷺ fatherhood stood as the standing counter-witness; and the counter-witness began with the rejoicing at this birth.

Al-Buti, the modern jurist of the sirah, has left a reflection upon these years that the believing reader may carry through the births that follow this one. The society, he writes, gave sons a high status and buried daughters alive, and the fathers' faces were dark with anger and gloom on receiving the news of a daughter's birth; and the daughters of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ were born into exactly that reckoning, and were cherished in despite of it. The whole logic of the age pressed upon every father to want sons; and the father in this house was given, by the Lord he did not yet know he served, a flourishing of daughters, and he did not once press against the grant, but blessed it, and thanked for it, and built upon it. There are men in every generation who receive from Allah what their society has taught them not to want, and who spend their strength regretting it; and there is one man who received what his society despised, and transfigured, by the sheer quality of his reception, the value of the thing received. That transfiguration, which the ummah of history has been living upon ever since, began its work in the year of this event; and the believer who would change his own age's contempt for daughters does well to study not only the laws that were later revealed, but the heart that received this birth before any law had come.

The girl herself grew, and the tradition has kept her whole. Zaynab was the eldest daughter, grave and motherly, the little mistress of the sisters who came after her, learning at her mother's knee the management of a great house and at her father's side the speech of truth. The household she grew up in has already been described in this chronicle: the father in the service of his family when he was among them; the mother governing the estate with wisdom; Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her) the faithful second mother of them all; Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him) the elder brother of the adoption; and, in the famine years toward the end of the decade, Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), the small cousin brought in as a brother to the girls. Of Zaynab's earliest years the record preserves the environment rather than the incidents, and honesty keeps to the environment: a girl beloved, named with the name of a flowering tree, growing in the one house of Makkah where a daughter's birth had been greeted as a joy.

The mother who now had a daughter was herself the strongest argument in Makkah against the contempt of the age for women. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) was, before ever she was the wife of a prophet, a merchant princess who had built and governed a fortune of her own in a man's caravan world; she had been sought in marriage by the chiefs of Quraysh and had chosen as she judged best; her counsel was worth more to her household than the counsel of any man of her clan; and the whole city bore witness to her honor by the surname it had fastened upon her, at-Tahira, the Pure. A daughter reared in the shadow of such a mother was not being reared for the burial ground of the age's expectations but for a fullness of womanhood that Makkah in its blindness could not imagine. The school of Khadijah, in which the four sisters were formed, taught the management of wealth without ostentation, the dignity of the mistress who serves her own guests, and the gravity of the woman whose word is weight; and the believing reader should mark it well, that the first Muslim women of history, the mothers and teachers of the community to come, were formed in this school years before the first word of revelation descended, by a mother who would become the first of all the believers.

Nor should the believer pass without wonder over a small feature of the revealed text that touches this event at its very center. When Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, named the granting of children in the Quran, He named the daughters first: He bestows upon whom He wills females, and He bestows upon whom He wills sons. The order of the Arabic speech of the verse is exact, and the scholars of the language have noted across the centuries that the verse names the female before the male in the very act of describing the grant, so that the revelation itself folds into a single clause the correction of the age's whole reckoning of worth. The verse belongs, in the order of the sending down, to the years after the Hijrah; but the truth it teaches was being enacted in Makkah at the birth of this event, where a girl was received with thanksgiving in a city that received girls with graves; and the believers of every age who recite the verse are reciting, without always knowing it, the verdict of heaven upon the joy of the house of Zaynab's birth.

Her later story, which belongs to the events of the prophethood and beyond, is set down in this record at its own place, and is touched here with a single line for the completion of the picture: she grew to womanhood in Makkah, was among the first of her family to believe when revelation came, and was married to her maternal cousin Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi, the son of Khadijah's sister Halah, a marriage her mother had arranged with delight; and the historians record her steadiness in the years of separation and her death in the eighth year after the Hijrah. The daughter who was born in the year of this event would be the second of the four sisters to be called home; and the father who had received her birth with joy would receive her passing with the patience of one who says only what pleases his Lord. But all of that lies ahead. Here the record stands at the cradle.

The birth of Zaynab bint Muhammad holds its meaning for every generation of the believers, and not least for this one. It teaches that the value of a daughter is not a convention of society to be revised by the mood of an age but a decree of the Giver of daughters, whose grants are never humiliations. It teaches that the reform of a civilization begins not in declarations but in nurseries, in the quiet decision of one father and one mother to receive every child as a trust; and that the house which Allah purposed to make the cradle of the final revelation was, before ever the revelation came, already keeping the commandments it would contain. It teaches the believing father of today to search his own heart at the news of a daughter's birth, and to bring it to the standard of the best of fathers ﷺ, in whose eyes the little girl was a shield from the Fire, a coolness of the eyes, and, in the fullness of the divine economy, the very channel through whom his remembrance would continue among mankind. For it is one of the quiet ironies of providence that the Prophet ﷺ who was taunted for the sons he lost has, through his daughters, and above all through the youngest of them, a lineage that has never ceased upon the earth; and the first stone of that promise was laid in the year of this event, when a girl named Zaynab was born in Makkah, and her father rejoiced.