Talk:Asma bint Abi Bakr

message: ===Asma’s Date of Birth===
Recent changes have altered Asma's birthdate to 592. This is apparently because Asma died in 692, and according to her grandson Hisham ibn Urwa, she was 100 years old.
However, Hisham would have calculated this in lunar years. The solar year is about 11 days longer than the lunar, and 100 x 11 days is about three years. Therefore Asma would have been only 97 solar years old, giving her a birthdate of 595 CE (as the original form of this article stated).Petra MacDonald 04:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Note: I have edited my original statement above because I had attributed the quote to the wrong person. Dhahabi (same person as Zahabi) was only quoting Ibn Abi Zinnaad (a different person). The link to the secondary source was broken so I have removed it. I have how seen the primary source (Dhahabi vol. 2 entry #143) with my own eyes.Petra MacDonald 10:22, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Petra here doesn't seem to be a competent person and her claims are false.--5.107.81.93 (talk) 16:45, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  5.107.81.93, please stop making personal attacks against other editors. You have been warned about this before.  Edward321 (talk) 22:06, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Edits in April 2014

message: Recent changes have altered Asma's birthdate to 592. This is apparently because Asma died in 692, and according to her grandson Hisham ibn Urwa, she was 100 years old.
However, Hisham would have calculated this in lunar years. The solar year is about 11 days longer than the lunar, and 100 x 11 days is about three years. Therefore Asma would have been only 97 solar years old, giving her a birthdate of 595 CE (as the original form of this article stated).Petra MacDonald 04:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Asma’s Date of Birth

message: Several versions of this article have included the claim that Asma was “ten years older” than her sister Aisha. Since this information is of minimal interest to the article, it seems to be an unsubtle attempt (for polemic reasons) to suggest that Aisha was much older than nine when she married Muhammad. In particular, it is odd that this alleged age-difference was mentioned next to the statement about Asma’s age at death instead of in its natural place, the beginning of the article, where Asma’s family-members are listed.
The “almost all historians” who say that Asma was ten years the elder are all quoting a single narrator, Abdul Rahman ibn Abi Zinnaad. He was born too late to be an eyewitness, did not cite his sources, and is considered a weak narrator on technical grounds. Important historians like Al-Dhahabi, Ibn Kathir and Ibn Hajar quote Ibn Abi Zannaad, but they never say they agree with him. For example, Al-Dhahabi quotes on the same page another tradition stating that the age-difference was “a few more than ten years.” Since it is very well attested that Aisha was born in 614, and there is no serious doubt that Asma was born in 595, it would appear that Ibn Abi Zinnaad’s “ten years” calculation was incorrect.
While we could insert a paragraph in the main article explaining all this, it really doesn’t seem to be of sufficient importance to the life of Asma. In an article of this length, surely it is sufficient to give her dates of birth and death and the fact that she was Abu Bakr’s firstborn?Petra MacDonald 04:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Note: I have edited my original statement above because I had attributed the quote to the wrong person. Dhahabi (same person as Zahabi) was only quoting Ibn Abi Zinnaad (a different person). The link to the secondary source was broken so I have removed it. I have how seen the primary source (Dhahabi vol. 2 entry #143) with my own eyes.Petra MacDonald 10:22, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Petra here doesn't seem to be a competent person and her claims are false.--5.107.81.93 (talk) 16:45, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  5.107.81.93, please stop making personal attacks against other editors. You have been warned about this before.  Edward321 (talk) 22:06, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Ten Years Older than Aisha?

message: An anonymous editor removed two references to slavery. The hypothetical one (“Asma did not own a slave”) was removed completely, and the factual one (“Abu Bakr gave Asma a slave”) was altered to “servant”, with Asma’s personal commentary (“I felt set free”) removed.
The truth is, the early texts did not always distinguish between “servant” and “slave”. For example, a free female servant who did a slave’s work could be indiscriminately referred to as a jariya, the everyday word for a “female slave”. So without more information, we do not know this person’s legal status.
However, the referenced translator, Aisha Bewley, used the English word “slave”. It should not be changed unless there is clear evidence from the Arabic original that “servant” would be more appropriate. The fact that Abu Bakr “gave” this person (as a gift?) suggests slavery (but does not prove it). Of course, Asma might have freed the slave later; that is a completely separate issue.Petra MacDonald 04:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Servant or Slave?

message: The same anonymous editor removed the reference to Asma being beaten by her husband. The reason given was that this is “not in Tabari,” whose book “Tahthib al-Athar was never finished.”
In fact the incident was referenced to a secondary source, the Iranian scholar Ali Dashti, who cited two early sources for the story. One was Zamakhshari, and no reason was given for discrediting this reference. The other was the Tahthib al-Athar, with no explanation of how its unfinished nature implies that Dashti could not have accessed the information from the part that was finished.
The expression “X was harsh towards women,” here referenced to Ibn Saad, is a euphemism that means “X beat his wives”. So I see nothing implausible about Dashti’s assertion that he found a more specific reference to Al-Zubayr’s wife-beating twice over.Petra MacDonald 04:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Wife-Beating

message: Al-Dhahabi has his own Wikipedia article, which links to the text of his book Siyar a‘lam al-Nubala’ (The Lives of Noble Figures). His article about Asma bint Abi Bakr is number 143 and it is in volume 2. The full text is here.
https://ar.wikisource.org/wiki/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B1_%D8%A3%D8%B9%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A1/%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D8%A8%D9%86%D8%AA_%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%8A_%D8%A8%D9%83%D8%B1
The article begins with her name, then a long list of the people who narrated hadith from her. The next words are:
وكانت أسن من عائشة ببضع عشرة سنة
This means something like:
:She was older than Aisha by ten years plus a few.
The word "few" is precise in Arabic: it means "three to nine". So it could be translated:
:She was thirteen to nineteen years older than Aisha.
Then he goes on to talk about her emigration to Medina and her participation at Yarmouk. There is no reference for any of these basic facts about Asma. Probably Dhahabi assumed them to be so well attested that no reference was required (similar to "Muhammad was born in Mecca and he died at Medina"). From our point of view, of course, we are left with the disadvantage that we don't know what the source was.
However, he does cite sources for the less well-known information later in the article. After a narration from Asma on another topic, we read:
قال عبد الرحمن بن أبي الزناد كانت أسماء أكبر من عائشة بعشر
This means something like:
:Abdulrahman ibn Abi’l-Zinaad said that Asma was older than Aisha by ten.
Then he moves on to the next narration. He makes no comment about the contradiction with the previous tradition, let alone on the reliability of either narration.
One fact should be obvious to us without further research. It is not true that "all the historians agree that Asma was ten years older than Aisha". Dhahabi does not agree with it because he cites two contradictory narrations with no comment on which one to prefer.Petra MacDonald (talk) 06:38, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: First response - just the facts

message: These three historians are authorities: unlike, say, Discovering Islam, which just seems to be someone's blog and an unsuitable resource for Wikipedia, they should be taken seriously.
However, it is not correct to pin a whole case on two citations of a single source plus a third anonymous citation that may or may not be independent while ignoring the body of evidence that states something different. The overall case seems weak when we consider that we are dealing with three claims, one of which must be false.
# Asma was born in 595.
# Aisha was born in 614.
# The age-difference was ten years.
The assertion most likely to be correct is the one about Aisha because it is multiply attested and derives from Aisha herself. It could only be wrong if Aisha were mistaken or lying; it is not possible that so many different witnesses all misrepresented her identically. The assertion of Asma's age is not as strong because (as far as I know) there is only one tradition, deriving from Asma's son. If there is a mistake about either sister's age, it is more likely to be Asma's than Aisha's. The weakest assertion is that of the ten-year age-difference because it derives from a weak narrator who was not a contemporary. It also contradicts an alternative tradition that the age-difference was 13-19 years, although that is only important if the strength of this tradition can be established.
You can cut and paste any or all of this to Asma's talk page if you think it would help.Petra MacDonald (talk) 12:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Third response - general observations

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello, @Contentofbook. A recent contribution to this article has resulted in a harv-error and multiple citation errors due to named references without an actual reference. Please add the following in its respected areas: "Regan 2003" in a work cited/bibliography section, "auto", "auto1", "Nicolle70" "Nicolle71". Thank you! Thecowboygilbert -  (talk) ♥ 18:10, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sfn/Harv error due to missing work and citation errors.