Maria the Copt (Mariyah Al-Qibtiyyah): Difference between revisions

Mariyah Al-Qibtiyah (Arabic: مارية القبطية‎), also known as Maria Qubtiyya, or Mary the Copt was one of the concubines/sex slaves of the prophet Muhammad. Although she is considered an "umm al-mu'minin" أم ألمؤمنين she was never actually the wife of the prophet according to the accepted historical sources by orthodox Sunni Islam.<ref>{{Cite web| title = Maria, the Copt: Prophet Muhammad's Wife or Concubine? {{!}} ICRAA.org| author = | work = ICRAA.org| date = | access-date = 18 November 2021| url = https://www.icraa.org/maria-copt-muhammad-wife-concubine/| quote = }}</ref><ref name="seek_WasM">{{Cite web| title = Was Mariya al-Qibtiyya Ever a Wife of the Prophet Muhammad? - SeekersHub Answers| author = | work = SeekersHub Answers| date = | access-date = 3 March 2016| url = https://seekersguidance.org/answers/general-counsel/was-mariya-al-qibtiyya-ever-a-wife-of-the-prophet-muhammad/| quote = }}</ref> According to the [[sira]] she was sent to Muhammad as a gift from the Christian Patriarch of Egypt. According to the [[hadith]] and the [[sirah]] her beauty and Muhammad's lust for her incited the jealousy of Muhammad's wives, in particular Hafsa and [[Aisha]]. The jealousy they had of her and Muhammad's response was actually the [[Asbab al-Nuzul (Revelational Circumstances of the Quran)|cause]] of the "revelation" of several Qur'an verses according to the tradition. Although she converted to Islam and bore the prophet a son who later died, she remained a slave of the prophet until he died, according to most of the traditional scholars. The traditional sources compare her concubinage to that of Hajar to Ibrahim, and the son that Mariyah bore was named Ibrahim. According to classical Islamic sources, had her son Ibrahim lived, he too would have been a prophet.  

The entire scandal of Muhammad sleeping with Aisha is explained in the tafsir of al-Jalalayn on surah 66 (at-tahrim) verse 1-3:

The use of Mariyah sexually by the prophet, like every aspect of the prophet's life, provides an example for later Muslims and the religious justification for the sexual exploitation of slave women by Muslim men <ref name="GordonHain2017_1">{{cite book | editor1 = Matthew Gordon | editor2 = Kathryn A. Hain | date = 2017 | title = Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History | publisher = Oxford University Press | pages = 327| isbn = 978-0-19-062218-3 | oclc = 1014474115 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=F3QzDwAAQBAJ}}</ref>. Her sexual exploitation by Muhammad was in continuity with the practice of the pagan Arabs and was continued by later Islamic empires and movements<ref name="Bosworth1989">{{cite book | author = Clifford Edmund Bosworth | date = 1 January 1989 | title = The Encyclopedia of Islam, Volume 6, Fascicules 107-108 | publisher = Brill Archive | pages = 575| isbn = 978-90-04-09082-8 | oclc = 60063572 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=tPsUAAAAIAAJ}}</ref>, up to the very current day with the ISIS terrorist organization taking Yazidi girls in Iraq as sex slaves on the prophetic model. Since Mariyah also bore Muhammad a son, and was this an umm-walad أم ولد or mother of a boy for the prophet, her story was integral to later Islamic discourse about the place of the sons of slave women in Islamic societies (although the classical jurists of the 4 traditional Sunni madhabs do not usually invoke her example as a "proof text")<ref name="GordonHain2017_2">{{cite book | editor1 = Matthew Gordon | editor2 = Kathryn A. Hain | date = 2017 | title = Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History | publisher = Oxford University Press | pages = 225| isbn = 978-0-19-062218-3 | oclc = 1014474115 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=F3QzDwAAQBAJ}}</ref>. Since the raiding for sexual slaves formed a large part of the wealth-building enterprise undertaken by later Islamic caliphates and empires such as the Umayyads, Abbasids and many others the number of children born to slave women quickly proliferated in Islamic society. There were so many children of concubines in Islamic society that several contenders for the throne of the caliphate ended up being the children of slave women. The rightly guided-caliphs and the early Umayyads were all free-born Arab men, but in 740 Zayd bin Ali made an unsuccessful bid for the caliphate, and he was the mother of a slave women. His opponent used his lineage as the son of a sex slave to mock and belittle him, claiming that his birth to an un-free woman disqualified him from the throne<ref name="GordonHain2017">ibid, 238</ref>. Yet by 744, Yazid III became the first caliph born of a slave mother; thereafter, the next 3 Umayyad caliphs and most of the Abbasids caliphs were the sons of concubines. Zayd bin Ali in his arguments for why the son of a slave woman such as himself should be eligible for caliph made great reference to Isma'il and Hajar. Hajar's biography bears many resemblances to Mariyah's; both were from Egypt, both were the concubines of prophets, both suffered the jealousy of the rightful wife(wives) of the prophet, both bore sons for the prophet, with the name of the son of Mariyah being the name of the husband of Hajar. Later caliphs and other sons of concubines would invoke the legacy of Mariyah and her son Ibrahim, who might have been another prophet, to justify their place in Islamic society<ref>Ibid, 230</ref>.