علوم قرآن و حدیث

Only child of Muhammad and his first wife, Khadīja (q.v.), to survive their deaths. Fātima is not mentioned by name in the Qurān but the classical exegetical tradition (see exegesis of the quran: classical and medieval) has associated certain verses with her and with her husband and children. Particularly in Shī'ī Islam, the figure of Fātima as the closest blood link (see blood and blood clot; kinship) to the Prophet himself, generated a hagiographical literature as well as practices of devotion and supplication (see shi'ism and the qur'an)

Of the qurānic verses that commentators have linked to Fātima, the most important are q 33:33 and 3:61. The first of these makes reference to the “people of the house” (q.v.; ahl al-bayt), which has ordinarily been understood in the more specific sense of “the family of the Prophet” (q.v.), namely, Muhammad, Fātima, her husband Alī b. Abī Tālib (q.v.), and their sons al-Hasan and al Hussein (Tabarī, Tafsīr, xxii, 6-8 who also includes a tradition attributed to 'Ikrima that interprets ahl al-bayt as the Prophet’s wives [see wives of the prophet]; Ibn al-Jawzī, Zād, vi, 381, reverses the order of these options.) Traditions which depict the Prophet sheltering his family, actually or symbolically, under the expanse of his cloak (see clothing) have provided another title for this group of five: “the people of the cloak” (ahl alkisā', Tabarī, Tafsīr, xxii, 7-8; cf. Spellberg, Politics, 34-7, for the relation of Fātima and the Prophet’s wife Āisha; see also 'Aisha bint abu Bakr). q 3:61 contains the challenge: “Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves; then let us invoke God’s curse (q.v.) on those who are lying (thumma nabtahil fa-naj al la'nata llāhi alā l-kādhibīna). Muslim exegetes have depicted as the “occasion for the revelation” (sabab al-nuzūl, see occasions of revelation) of this verse an episode in which the Prophet proposed to a delegation of Christians (see christians and christianity) from Najrān (q.v.) an ordeal of mutual adjuration (mubāhala). To underscore the veracity of his theological claims, Muhammad offered his family, including Fātima, as witnesses and guarantors. The exegetical tradition on q 3:42, “Then the angels (see angel) said: ‘O Mary (q.v.), truly God has chosen you and purified you and chosen you over the women of the world (al- ālamīna)’,” has linked this qurānic praise of Mary, the mother of Jesus (q.v.), with the Muslim veneration of Fātima (McAuliffe, Chosen, 19-24). Key to this linkage is one or another variant of the hadīth (see Hadith and the quran) in which Muhammad lists the outstanding women of all time as: Mary, Āsiya (the wife of Pharaoh [q.v.]), Khadīja and Fātima (Tabarī, Tafsīr, iii, 263; Rāzī, Tafsīr, viii, 46; but cf. such Shī'ī commentaries as those of Abū l-FutūhRāzī, Rawh, iii, 36-7 and Mawlā Fath Allāh Kāshānī, Minhaj, ii, 224, who insist upon the absolute superiority of Fātima). Shī'ī literature elaborates the connection of Mary with Fātima, viewing both as women of suffering (q.v.). Fātima endured the death of her father and both mothers experienced, actually or proleptically, the violence inflicted upon their sons. So entwined is their hagiographical connection that one of the epithets born by Fātima is Maryam al-kubrā, Mary the Greater (McAuliffe, Chosen, 27; Stowasser, Women, 80)

This connection between Fātima and Mary has been given a spiritually esoteric interpretation by the modern French Islamicist Louis Massignon. Other appropriations of the figure of Fātima can be found in such diverse sources as contemporary devotional writings (Biographie de Fâtima az-Zahrâ, 109-18; Rahim, Fatima, 16-8), the corpus of traditional Malay literature (Wieringa, Does traditional) and the revolutionary writings of the Iranian ideologue Ali Shari'ati (d. 1977)

Jane Dammen McAuliffe