Ahl al-Bayt

Ahl al-Bayt, 'the People of the House', is the Qur'an's own term for the household of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. It is used of his household in the passage of Surah al-Ahzab that addresses his wives: 'Allah intends only to remove from you the impurity [of sin], O people of the [Prophet's] household, and to purify you with [extensive] purification' (Quran 33:33). In the hadith of the cloak, which Muslim records in his Sahih, Aishah reported that the Prophet gathered al-Hasan, al-Husain, Fatimah and Ali into his cloak and recited the same verse.

This collection holds only those whom the Qur'an and the sahih hadith identify as members of the Prophet's household. They are his wives, to whom that passage is addressed (Quran 33:28–34), whom the Qur'an places in the position of mothers to the believers (Quran 33:6), and whom the Prophet greeted in their dwellings as 'the people of the house' (Sahih al-Bukhari 4793); and Ali, Fatimah, al-Hasan and al-Husain, whom he gathered into his cloak as he recited the verse of purification (Sahih Muslim 2424) and of whom he said, 'O Allah, these are my family' (Sahih Muslim 2404). The wives are included as the Mothers of the Believers, the whole body of them, so that Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and Zaynab bint Khuzayma, who died before that passage of Surah al-Ahzab was revealed, stand with the rest.

The collection also holds the four households named in the report of Zayd ibn Arqam, which Muslim records. At a watering place called Khumm between Mecca and Medina the Prophet said that he was leaving among them two weighty things, the first the Book of Allah, and three times reminded them of God with regard to the people of his household. Asked afterwards who those people were, and whether his wives were among them, Zayd answered that his wives were among the people of his household, and that the people of his household were those to whom zakat was forbidden after he was gone: 'the family of Ali, the family of Aqil, the family of Ja'far, and the family of Abbas' (Sahih Muslim 2408). That enumeration is Zayd's own answer to a question put to him rather than a saying of the Prophet, and a second version of the same report has him exclude the wives and describe the household as the Prophet's origin and his male relatives to whom zakat was forbidden. It is therefore read together with the Qur'anic passage and the hadith of the cloak, and not as a definition standing on its own. From those households the collection holds the articles on the members whom the sources place in the Prophet's own household or among his immediate descendants: Ali, Fatimah, al-Hasan, al-Husain and Zaynab bint Ali; Ja'far ibn Abi Talib; and al-Abbas with his son Qutham. No article on a member of the family of Aqil exists at present, and the later dynasties descended from Ali and from al-Abbas are treated in the collections of their own periods.

The articles on his other daughters, Zaynab, Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, on his children as a whole, on his parents and grandfather, and on his other uncles and his aunts are found in the collections on the Life of the Prophet, the Companions of the Prophet and Women in Islamic History.

The scope of the term has been understood differently across the Islamic traditions. The texts above are the ground on which this collection is drawn, and each article sets out what the sources record of its subject's place in the household.