The Q 33:6 Variant — "And He Is a Father to Them"

Four Words in Two Companions' Codices

Every believer who has read Surah al-Ahzab knows how Q 33:6 opens. In a single weighty line it defines the bond between the believers and the Prophet, and between the believers and his wives. Yet according to some of the oldest surviving works of Quranic scholarship — the monumental tafsir of Ibn Jarir al-Tabari and the early Kitab al-Masahif of Ibn Abi Dawud — two of the most senior Companions, Ubayy ibn Ka'b and Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, are reported to have recited this same verse with four extra words after "his wives are their mothers": wa-huwa abun lahum — "and he is a father to them."

Four words. Not a doctrine, not a chapter — a short phrase. And yet those four words sit exactly on top of one of the most sensitive fault lines in the Prophet's biography: the abolition of adoption, and the marriage to Zaynab that followed the divorce of Zayd, the man once called "Zayd son of Muhammad." This article opens the books on that phrase and lays the two readings of it side by side.