Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib

Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib was a paternal aunt of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, one of the six daughters of Abd al-Muttalib, chief of the Quraysh. Ibn Ishaq's genealogy of the household, transmitted through Ibn Hisham and preserved in Ibn Kathir's Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya, records that Abd al-Muttalib had ten sons and six daughters, and names his daughters as Safiyya, Umm Hakim al-Bayda, Atika, Umayma, Arwa, and Barra, born to his wife Fatima bint Amr. The Sealed Nectar independently lists the same six sisters.

What the Approved Sources Establish

Beyond her place in this genealogical listing, the approved sources consulted for this article — The Sealed Nectar and the volume of Ibn Kathir's Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya covering the pre-Hijra period — do not give a developed account of Atika's life: no marriage, no report of when she accepted Islam if she did, and no narrative of her own words or actions is established in them. This is stated plainly rather than filled in, in keeping with the project's sourcing standard: where the approved base does not establish a fact, the article does not supply one.

A Note on Wider Literature

Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib is credited in a good deal of popular and secondary literature with a vivid dream, said to have come to her three nights running shortly before the Battle of Badr, warning of a coming disaster for the Quraysh. This narrative is traced in that literature to the transmissions of Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi. It could not be located in the approved source library consulted for this article, in either the Ibn Kathir translation of the sira or The Sealed Nectar, nor in the canonical hadith collections, which is unsurprising for material of this kind, since it belongs to the historical sira literature rather than to a hadith with a graded chain. Because the dream narrative cannot presently be traced to a source within the approved base, it is not narrated as established fact in this article.

A further point is worth flagging precisely because it is a common error in circulating accounts of her: some sources describe Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib as having married Abu Umayya ibn al-Mughira and as the mother of Umm Salama, a wife of the Prophet. This appears to conflate her with a different woman of the same given name, Atikah bint Amir ibn Rabi'ah of the Khuzaymah, whom the approved source Great Women of Islam identifies as Umm Salama's actual mother. The two women are kept distinct in this article, and the marriage and motherhood are not attributed to Abd al-Muttalib's daughter.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Ibn Ishaq, as transmitted by Ibn Kathir — the genealogy of Abd al-Muttalib's household, within which Atika is named as one of his daughters

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya [English translation]. [Compiled c. 1373 CE]
• Ibn Hisham, recension of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. [Compiled c. 845 CE]

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum). Riyadh: Darussalam, 1996.
• Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Further Reading

• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983.