t Anas.
Despite this implied criticism, Anas held great status and was able to give Sirin and his spiritually and intellectually precocious children the best opportunities for success. Through her father and mother’s connections, Hafsa, her two sisters Umm Sulaym and Karima, and her brothers Muhammad and Yahya–not to mention her half-siblings, some of whom also transmitted hadith–would have grown up in the deeply intertwined social, scholarly, and devotional circles of the Companions and Followers in Medina and Basra. Because her family had access to these elite social circles, Hafsa had the opportunity to memorize the Qur’an by the age of twelve as well as sit with companions such as Umm ʿAtiyya, Abu al-ʿAliya, and Salman b. ʿAmir from whom she transmits hadith. Ultimately, she became known as a reliable scholar and a woman of great piety and was taken seriously in influential circles (as we saw when she argued the legal status of women’s right to pray the ʿeid prayer at the mosque).
Later Anas contracted a second marriage for Sirin to one of his former slaves, then, again decades later, to one of his nieces as a third or fourth wife, thus elevating Sirin from client to family. Given Sirin’s multiple marriages, Hafsa grew up around many siblings in what was likely to have been a bustling compound of rooms. Her father tried to make space for his children’s devotional needs. It is said that he built separate prayer spaces of wooden planks for her, Muhammad, and Yahya. But such quiet spaces devoted to piety did not keep Hafsa from family drama arising from Sirin’s marriages.
When Anas offered Sirin his niece in marriage, Hafsa was supportive of the match despite her mother’s clear objection. Hafsa may very well have accepted the multiple marriages. She may have felt some advantage to them given her close relationships with her siblings and the social ties it further afforded them. Marriage was primarily a social arrangement for families, not solely a matter of legitimating desire or love. Or she may simply be portrayed this way to promote what male transmitters would consider a proper pious response highlighted against that of her mother. Whichever the case, it is reported that when given the news, she congratulated her father for a tie that would raise them from a clientage relationship to family with Anas. But when Hafsa delivered the news to her mother, Safiyyah insulted Hafsa for supporting her father and retorted, “Tell your father, ‘May you be distant from God!”’
To be continued…
(Accounts are taken from Ibn Saʿd’s Tabaqat al-kubra, her transmissions of hadith, and Ibn al-Jawzi’s Sifat al-safwa). Thanks goes to Yasmin Amin for clearing up a few matters, including the nature of Safiyya’s message to Hafsa’s father [literally, may God keep you young, but meaning, may you be delayed in meeting God and so distant from God]).
Laury Silvers is a Muslim academic and accidental activist. She is a sessional professor at the University of Toronto for the Department for the Study of Religion. She writes on Sufism in Early Islam, as well as women’s religious authority and theological concerns in North American Islam. See her website for her publications.