This audio is brought to you by MuslimCentral.com

And all of this will of course be a build up in inshaAllah ta'ala to once we get back to our full episodes

Bidni l-Lahi ta'ala and we will go to the life of Aisha, well the Allah ta'ala and her mother Aisha in detail

Bidni l-Lahi ta'ala. Now the biographies that have been chosen for the next five episodes in inshaAllah ta'ala, there is a connection

between them they often feed into the next story but there is one particular question that as we covered the Qur'an, the reciders around the Prophet

Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam that came up a few times particularly from the sisters. Were there any female half-ilat, were there any women that

memorised the Qur'an alongside those luminaries that we mentioned that preserved the Qur'an? And to preface that answer you have to start off with the fact that literacy as a whole,

literacy as a whole was not common to the Arabs, right? So if literacy rates were poor as a whole, then naturally you're going to find that the literacy rates for women would be less than men in that society.

So there weren't many people that could read or write at the time, they were few, and those that could read and write ended up becoming scribes of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.

And from the women that number would even be much less of people that could read and write at the time. But there's one particular woman who was known to have gathered the Qur'an, to have memorised the Qur'an and to have been proficient in its memorization and its recitation.

And her name is Umwaraqa Bint Abdullah Ibn Al Harif. Now her story is that she was a very wealthy woman, a very noble woman from Al Khazraj in Medina, and she basically was the sought after woman at the time when Islam came to Al Medina.

And Subhanallah, when she embraced the Da'wa of Mushab ibn Umar al-Diyallahu alayhi wa sallam, she had unique circumstances that allowed her to excel in immediately memorising the Qur'an. For one, she was one of the few literate women that existed in Al Medina, one of the few literate people period, but she also was someone who was literate.

The second thing is that she inherited a huge amount of wealth. So she wasn't someone that had to worry about her wealth or her day-to-day, and she wasn't someone that was involved in the politics of Al Medina prior to the coming of Al Islam.

So she wasn't involved in Bo'ath, she wasn't involved in any of the wars that took place, so she really had the opportunity to immediately dedicate herself exclusively to the Qur'an, exclusively to the Da'wa of Mushab ibn Umar al-Diyallahu alayhi wa sallam.

Now when the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam came to Medina, she was one of those who dedicated herself amongst the mothers of the believers and among some of the female scholars at the time, with particular proficiency in the recitation of the Qur'an, and there is something that surrounds her of a controversy of sorts, which is that the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam told her to lead the people of her household in Salat, in prayer.

So when you have the controversy, and when I say controversy, it's not a controversy within the tradition, it's a controversy, obviously a modern controversy, that those that try to suggest, that the people that try to suggest, that the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam had allowed for a woman to lead a mixed congregation of men and women, men and women, used the narration of Umar al-Diyallahu alayhi wa sallam, that when she came to the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and she memorized the Qur'an and she was literate and she clearly became scholarly and distinguished pretty early on.

The Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam commanded her to lead her home in Salat, okay?

The problem is, is that there is no indication, it's such an ambiguous narration to use for something so extreme in terms of overturning the consensus in that regard, to say that Umar al-Diyallahu alayhi wa sallam had narration justifies that, the only thing we have is that the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam commanded her to lead the folk in her home,

that could have been children, that could have been servants, because again she was a very wealthy woman at the time, it could have met many things, it could have met unique circumstances.

But what we do know is that she was someone who was a distinguished reciter of the Qur'an and she used to teach the women of Medina the Qur'an and she used to recite the Qur'an amongst the most proficient of the reciders.

Now Subhanallah, the next several biographies we're going to cover, all of them have significant twists and turns, okay?

These stories are not all rosy, in the sense that there's a lot of difficulty these people encountered.

...