Hafsa bint Umar: Custodian of the First Qur'anic Compilation

Hafsa bint Umar was a daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab and a wife of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), and therefore one of the Mothers of the Believers. She is remembered above all for a documentary role: the written compilation of the Qur'an prepared during the caliphate of Abu Bakr passed into her keeping, and it was from her that Uthman ibn Affan obtained it when the text was standardised.

That custodianship is not a devotional detail. It is attested in Sahih al-Bukhari within the central report on how the Qur'an came to be collected, and it places Hafsa at a documented point in the transmission of the text.

Family and Early Life

Hafsa was the daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab and Zaynab bint Mad'un. Her mother's brother was Uthman ibn Mad'un, an early Muslim of standing in the community. Her brother Abdullah ibn Umar was among the most prolific transmitters of hadith of the following generation.

The biographical literature places her birth in Mecca some years before the beginning of the revelation. She accepted Islam in the Meccan period, in the years when her father's household came into the faith.

Of her childhood the sources record nothing of substance, and nothing is supplied here.

First Marriage

Hafsa's first husband was Khunays ibn Hudhafa al-Sahmi, of the Quraysh, an early Muslim who migrated to Abyssinia during the Meccan persecution and later to Medina. He took part in the Battle of Badr and died in Medina.

The marriage produced no children, and Hafsa was widowed young.

Marriage to the Prophet

The circumstances of her second marriage are preserved in a report in Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Nikah, transmitted from Abdullah ibn Umar. After Hafsa was widowed, Umar offered her in marriage to Uthman ibn Affan, who declined, and then to Abu Bakr, who gave him no answer. Umar was distressed by the silence. The Prophet then married Hafsa himself. Abu Bakr afterwards explained to Umar that he had heard the Prophet mention Hafsa and had not been at liberty to disclose a confidence; had the Prophet not married her, he would have done so. The report is graded sahih.

The episode is of interest beyond the family history. It records the ordinary mechanics of marriage negotiation among the leading Muslims of Medina, and it shows Abu Bakr declining to act on private knowledge of the Prophet's intention — a point the classical commentators, including Ibn Hajar in Fath al-Bari, discuss in the context of the keeping of confidences.

The marriage took place in 3 AH.

Literacy

Hafsa is among the small number of women of the earliest Muslim community whom the sources describe as able to write. Literacy of this kind was uncommon, and the biographical literature notes it as a distinguishing characteristic. Modern scholarship on women's participation in the transmission of religious knowledge, in particular the work of Asma Sayeed, treats Hafsa's literacy as one of the better-attested instances for the period.

The practical significance is direct. The object entrusted to her keeping was a written text, and she was capable of reading it.

Custodian of the Qur'anic Compilation

The compilation under Abu Bakr

The principal report on the collection of the Qur'an is transmitted from Zayd ibn Thabit and preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab Fada'il al-Qur'an. It is graded sahih.

According to that report, after heavy losses among those who had memorised the Qur'an at the battle of Yamama during the Ridda wars, Umar ibn al-Khattab urged Abu Bakr to have the Qur'an gathered into a single written collection. Abu Bakr was initially reluctant, on the ground that the Prophet had not done so, but was persuaded. He charged Zayd ibn Thabit with the task. Zayd, who describes his own reluctance in the same terms, collected the text from written materials and from those who had memorised it, and produced a set of written leaves, the suhuf.

These leaves remained with Abu Bakr during his lifetime, then passed to Umar, and after Umar's death they passed to Hafsa.

The standardisation under Uthman

The same body of reports in Sahih al-Bukhari records the next stage. During the caliphate of Uthman, differences in recitation among the garrisons prompted the preparation of an authoritative written standard. Uthman sent to Hafsa requesting the leaves in her keeping; copies were made from them by a commission that again included Zayd ibn Thabit; and the leaves were returned to her.

The sequence is worth stating plainly because it is often compressed in secondary accounts. Hafsa did not compile the Qur'an, and the reports do not describe her as editing or arranging it. What they establish is that the single authoritative written compilation of the first caliphate was held in her house, that the caliph had to ask her for it, and that it was returned to her afterwards. For the period between Umar's death and the completion of Uthman's copies, the physical text of the Abu Bakr compilation was in her custody.

After her death

The classical account of what became of the leaves is given by Ibn Abi Dawud in Kitab al-Masahif, a specialist early work on the codices. He reports that after Hafsa's death the leaves were obtained by Marwan ibn al-Hakam, then governing Medina, and destroyed, his stated reason being that the standardised text had superseded them. This is recorded on the authority of that work rather than of the canonical hadith collections.

The episode is treated in modern scholarship on the history of the Qur'anic text, including the study by Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami.

Transmission of Hadith

Hafsa transmitted hadith from the Prophet. The biographical literature places the number of reports attributed to her at approximately sixty, a figure that reflects the counts in the classical collections rather than a precise total.

Her transmissions concern the ordinary religious practice of the household: matters of prayer, including the Prophet's voluntary prayer, and matters of fasting. One report preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, transmitted from Hafsa through her brother Abdullah ibn Umar, records that the Prophet would pray two light rak'ahs after the dawn had become clear and before the congregational prayer was begun — a report cited in the juristic discussion of the regular prayers attached to Fajr. Reports from her appear across the canonical collections, including Sahih Muslim, and those who transmitted from her include her brother Abdullah ibn Umar, himself among the major transmitters of the following generation.

She is counted among the women of the first generation whose reports entered the legal literature, a group treated in modern scholarship on the transmission of religious knowledge by women.

Surah al-Tahrim

Surah al-Tahrim, the sixty-sixth chapter of the Qur'an, opens by addressing the Prophet concerning an incident within his household in which a confidence was disclosed. Verses 1 to 5 address the matter and its resolution.

Reports in the canonical collections, including Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, identify Hafsa and Aisha bint Abu Bakr in connection with the incident. The Qur'anic passage itself is the primary evidence for what occurred, and it concludes with an address to the two concerned and an affirmation of the standing of the believing wives.

This encyclopaedia states the matter at the level the Qur'an and the sound reports establish and no further. The exegetical literature contains a range of accounts elaborating the incident; those elaborations are not uniformly attested and are not carried here.

Later Life and Death

Hafsa lived through the caliphates of Abu Bakr, her father Umar, Uthman and Ali, and into the caliphate of Mu'awiya. The sources record little of her activity in this long period beyond the custodianship of the suhuf and her transmission of hadith.

She died in Medina in 45 AH. Marwan ibn al-Hakam, then governor of the city, led the funeral prayer, and she was buried in al-Baqi cemetery.

Assessment

What the sources establish

Hafsa's place in Islamic history rests on documented fact rather than on tradition alone. She was the daughter of the second caliph and a wife of the Prophet. She was literate at a time when few women were. And the written compilation of the Qur'an made under the first caliph was in her keeping, sought from her by the third caliph, and returned to her — a sequence recorded within the central sahih report on the history of the text.

Her sixty or so hadith transmissions place her among the women of the first generation whose reports entered the legal tradition.

What they do not

The sources preserve very little of her personality, her views, or her relations within the household beyond what the Surah al-Tahrim material addresses. Accounts of her temperament, her inner life, or her opinions on the political events of her long later life are not established, and this article does not supply them.

Her role in the history of the Qur'anic text should also not be overstated. She held the leaves; she did not compile, edit or arrange them. Descriptions of her as an author or editor of the text are not supported by the reports.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Qur'an, Surah al-Ahzab 33:6 — "The Prophet is more worthy of the believers than themselves, and his wives are in the position of their mothers"
• Qur'an, Surah al-Ahzab 33:32–33 — the address to the wives of the Prophet
• Qur'an, Surah al-Tahrim 66:1–5 — the passage addressing the incident in the Prophet's household
• Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab Fada'il al-Qur'an (Book of the Virtues of the Qur'an) — the report of Zayd ibn Thabit on the compilation under Abu Bakr, the passage of the leaves to Umar and then to Hafsa, and Uthman's request for them; graded sahih
• Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Nikah (Book of Marriage) — the report from Abdullah ibn Umar on Umar's offer of Hafsa in marriage and Abu Bakr's silence; graded sahih
• Sahih al-Bukhari 618, Kitab al-Adhan (Book of the Call to Prayer) — Hafsa's report, through Abdullah ibn Umar, of the Prophet's two light rak'ahs before the Fajr congregational prayer; graded sahih
• Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Talaq and the books of prayer and fasting — reports transmitted by Hafsa; graded sahih

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. Vol. 8, the women. Edited by Eduard Sachau. Leiden: Brill, 1904–1940. [Compiled c. 845 CE] — the principal early biography
• Ibn Abi Dawud, Abdullah. Kitab al-Masahif. Edited by Arthur Jeffery. Leiden: Brill, 1937. [Compiled c. 928 CE] — the account of the fate of the leaves after Hafsa's death
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Fath al-Bari bi-Sharh Sahih al-Bukhari. Cairo: al-Matba'ah al-Salafiyyah — the commentary on the marriage report and on the compilation reports
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Al-Isabah fi Tamyiz al-Sahabah. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1995. [Compiled c. 1449 CE]
• Al-Dhahabi, Shams al-Din. Siyar A'lam al-Nubala'. Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 1981–1988. [Compiled c. 1348 CE]
• Ibn Abd al-Barr, Yusuf. Al-Isti'ab fi Ma'rifat al-Ashab. Cairo: Nahdat Misr, 1960. [Compiled c. 1070 CE]

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Al-Azami, Muhammad Mustafa. The History of the Quranic Text: From Revelation to Compilation. Leicester: Islamic Academy, 2003.
• Sayeed, Asma. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. — on Hafsa's literacy and on women transmitters of the first generation
• Motzki, Harald. "The Collection of the Qur'an: A Reconsideration of Western Views in Light of Recent Methodological Developments." Der Islam 78 (2001): 1–34.
• Stowasser, Barbara Freyer. Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Further Reading

• Nadwi, Mohammad Akram. Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface Publications, 2007.
• Bewley, Aisha, trans. The Women of Madina (from Ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kubra). London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1995.
• Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition. Leiden: Brill — entry on Hafsa bint Umar