The Killing of Umm Qirfa: Between Two Camels? The Sources and the Dispute

Fifty Swords in One House

The old books of Arabic proverbs preserve a strange measure of honour: a'azzu min Umm Qirfa — "mightier than Umm Qirfa." In this one woman's house, the transmitters explain, hung fifty swords, every one belonging to a close relative. Her name was Fatima bint Rabi'a ibn Badr, matriarch of the Banu Fazara. When the Arabs wanted to describe a person no one dared touch, they measured him against her.

Yet the earliest biographies of the Prophet of Islam report that this woman — "a very old woman," in the words of those same books — was killed during a raid led by Zayd ibn Haritha: a rope tied to her legs, the rope fastened between two camels, the camels driven apart. The report sits in the Sira of Ibn Ishaq as it reached us through Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari. From the other shelf, scholars of hadith method answer: this detail has no authentic chain of transmission and cannot stand as established history. One woman, one raid, two columns of books that have never agreed.