The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

‘A’isha (ca. 614–78)

‘A’isha was the most prominent of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives. Daughter of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close companion and the future first caliph of the Muslim community, she was born in Mecca and was married to the Prophet at the age of nine or ten in a union that some early sources attributed to divine arrangement by the angel Gabriel. Her youth gave her a special status during the Prophet’s life, although it did occasionally cause uneasy relations within the Prophet’s extended household, such as an accusation of adultery (al-ifk), of which she was fully exonerated by a Qur’anic revelation (Q. 24:11–20) containing a sharp rebuke of her accusers.

When the Prophet was ill toward the end of his life in 632, ‘A’isha, only 18 and with no children, was acknowledged as his favorite wife, and thus she nursed him in her quarters, where he died and was buried beneath the house. Like all the Prophet’s surviving wives, she was forbidden by Qur’anic injunction to remarry (Q. 33:53) and became part of a new female elite known as ummahāt al-mu’minīn, or “the Mothers of the Believers.” This unique status elevated the Prophet’s widows to higher standards of conduct than other women, including the unique command that they speak to men not of their immediate family from behind a ḥijāb, or curtain (Q. 33:53).

‘A’isha seems to have led a quiet life during the successive caliphates of her father, Abu Bakr, and ‘Umar b. al-Khattab. She criticized the policies of the third caliph, ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan (d. 656), however, claiming that they deviated from her husband’s. Muslims heatedly disagreed about ‘A’isha’s right to publicly criticize the caliph, and ‘Uthman rebuked her, reminding her of the Qur’anic verse commanding the wives of the Prophet to “stay in your houses” (Q. 33:33), a reference meant to silence her. This injunction, although never followed literally by the wives of the Prophet, echoed later in the rhetoric of those who condemned ‘A’isha.

When ‘Uthman was assassinated by Muslim rebels in 656, ‘A’isha demanded that his murderers be punished, thus pitting her against the newly elected fourth caliph, ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 661). ‘Ali had been one of her vocal critics during the incident of the ifk (adultery) and had suggested that the Prophet divorce her, but her reasons also included a belief in the importance of establishing iṣlāḥ, a final peaceful resolution between ‘Ali’s party and her own allies (Q. 49:9–10). ‘A’isha was supported in her quest by two brothers-in-law and aspirants to the caliphate: her cousin Talha b. ‘Ubaydallah and Zubayr b. al-‘Awwam (both d. 656).

Speaking in Mecca from behind the curtained sanctuary of the Ka‘ba, ‘A’isha rallied her male followers to march to war against ‘Ali in Basra, Iraq. There, she watched as ‘Ali’s more numerous forces defeated hers in 656. As Zubayr and Talha perished, ‘A’isha did not wield a sword in the conflict but instead urged her troops on to victory from a curtained palanquin. The fiercest fighting took place around her camel, where 70 men are said to have died defending her. When her camel was hamstrung, the conflict, known thereafter as the Battle of the Camel, ended. ‘A’isha was treated with respect by ‘Ali and was returned by his troops to Medina, where she retired from politics.

‘A’isha became a major conduit for her husband’s sunna, the precedent that later became a source of Islamic law; about 300 of the “sound,” or most authentic, prophetic traditions preserved in the canonical work of Muslim (d. 875) and Bukhari (d. 870) were narrated by her, although the full corpus of her transmission is much larger—more than one thousand traditions.

In medieval Shi‘i historiography, ‘A’isha is portrayed consistently as the leader of the opposition, a headstrong but powerful woman and ultimately the antithesis of ideal Muslim womanhood. Sunni historians praised her as the Prophet’s favorite wife but shifted the blame for her political involvement to her male allies, emphasizing her lack of leadership. Both Shi‘i and Sunni accounts, authored exclusively by men in the premodern period, found in ‘A’isha’s defeat a precedent to exclude all women from politics.

In the seventh century, ‘A’isha’s age prompted only praise, which is recorded in the earliest sources. Contemporary non-Muslims, however, often use ‘A’isha’s marital age in broader critiques of Islam. Many websites, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have focused on ‘A’isha’s youth as a vexed issue. As a result, her original seventh-century political importance has been overshadowed in contemporary Western debate by what some believe are anachronistic readings of the era in which she lived.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, some Sunni Muslim women found a positive political model in ‘A’isha. She left no first-person defense of her political motivations. In only one early account, displaying grief for the dead after her defeat, did she admit “wrongdoing.” This suggests that, until her defeat, ‘A’isha assumed it was her prerogative to participate in the political life of the first Muslim polity.