Asma bint Marwan: A Night Killing, a Broken Chain, and Two Columns of Scholars

A Question Before the Dawn Prayer

It is the last week of Ramadan, nineteen months after the migration to Medina — as one early book dates it. A man of Banu Khatma crosses the dark lanes of the city and enters a house where a woman lies asleep, her children around her, an infant at her breast. By morning she is dead. The man walks to the dawn prayer. A question is asked. An answer is given. And a sentence about two goats enters the history books forever.

The books record her name as 'Asma' bint Marwan — a poetess of Banu Umayya ibn Zayd, married to Yazid ibn Zayd of Banu Khatma. Her story appears in the oldest biographies of the Prophet of Islam, written in the second and third Islamic centuries. It does not appear in Sahih al-Bukhari. It does not appear in Sahih Muslim. And for more than a thousand years, two columns of Muslim scholars have disagreed about whether it happened at all.