Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib

Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib was a paternal aunt of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and a full sister of his father, Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib. She belonged to the generation of the Prophet's family that stood between the old order of Mecca and the beginning of his mission. The sira names her among the daughters whom Abd al-Muttalib summoned to compose elegies as he lay dying; she married into Banu Makhzum, the clan that would supply the mission's most determined opponents, and bore two sons who took opposite paths — Zuhayr, whose kinship to his mother's people was the lever used to break the boycott of Banu Hashim, and Abdullah, who mocked the Prophet to his face. Three nights before the Battle of Badr she saw a vision of coming disaster which she reported to her brother al-Abbas, which spread through Mecca within a day, and which Abu Jahl ridiculed in public before the events of the third morning appeared to confirm it. Verses commemorating Badr are attributed to her.

The Household of Abd al-Muttalib

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. The sons were al-Abbas, Hamza, Abdullah, Abu Talib — whose given name was Abd Manaf — al-Zubayr, al-Harith, who was the firstborn and after whom his father took his own kunya, Hajl, nicknamed al-Ghaydaq for his generosity, al-Muqawwim, Dirar, and Abu Lahab, whose given name was Abd al-Uzza. The daughters were Safiyya, Umm Hakim al-Bayda, Atika, Umayma, Arwa and Barra. Elsewhere Ibn Kathir lists the Prophet's aunts in the same six names, describing Umm Hakim as al-Bayda, "the white woman".

The maternal detail matters more than a list of names suggests. Ibn Hisham records that the mother of Abdullah, Abu Talib, al-Zubayr and every one of the daughters except Safiyya was Fatima bint Amr ibn A'idh ibn Imran ibn Makhzum. Atika was therefore not merely a half-sister of the Prophet's father but his full sister, born of the same mother, and her maternal line ran into Banu Makhzum — the clan into which she would later marry, and which in the following generation produced Abu Jahl, who would ridicule her in the precinct of the Kaaba.

She should not be confused with an earlier Atika of the same lineage. Ibn Ishaq, in a report also preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, names Atika bint Murra ibn Hilal as the mother of Hashim, Abd Shams and al-Muttalib, which places that woman two generations above the subject of this article: she was Abd al-Muttalib's own grandmother, and her sons were the brothers after whom Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib were named.

The Elegies for Her Father

The first act the sources attribute to Atika belongs to the end of her father's life. Ibn Ishaq relates that when death approached, Abd al-Muttalib charged Abu Talib with the care of his grandson, and that he summoned his daughters — Arwa, Umayma, Barra, Safiyya, Atika and Umm Hakim al-Bayda — and told them to compose elegies for him. The circumstance Ibn Ishaq records is a striking one: the verses were spoken while their father listened, before he in fact died, and Ibn Ishaq judged their words of mourning extremely eloquent. Abd al-Muttalib then died and was buried at al-Hajun, when his grandson was about eight years old.

The episode is the earliest indication that Atika belonged to a household in which women composed formal verse and were expected to. The text of the verses, however, is doubtful: Ibn Hisham, transmitting Ibn Ishaq's account, added that he had never met any scholar of poetry who knew them. The occasion is therefore reported on Ibn Ishaq's authority, while the elegies themselves carry a caution from the editor who preserved them, and they are not reproduced here.

Marriage into Banu Makhzum

Atika married Abu Umayya ibn al-Mughira ibn Abdullah ibn Amr of Banu Makhzum, and the sira names two of their sons, Zuhayr and Abdullah. The marriage placed a daughter of the chief of Banu Hashim inside the household of the clan that would become Hashim's principal rival, and both sons are remembered for how they handled that divided inheritance.

Her position in that household is often confused with another woman's. A good deal of secondary literature makes Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib the mother of Umm Salama, later a wife of the Prophet. Umm Salama's mother was a different woman of a similar name: Great Women of Islam gives her as Atikah bint Amir ibn Rabi'ah, of Khuzaymah. Both women are connected to the house of Abu Umayya of Makhzum, which accounts for the confusion, but the two are distinct, and the sons named below are Atika bint Abd al-Muttalib's rather than Umm Salama's mother's.

Zuhayr and the breaking of the boycott

When Quraysh confined Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib to an enclave under the terms of a written boycott, forbidding trade and marriage with them, the man who set about dismantling it was Hisham ibn Amr, who had close ties to Banu Hashim and was highly regarded among his own people. Ibn Ishaq relates that at night he would bring a camel loaded with food to the entrance of the enclave, slip its halter and strike its flank to send it down to them, and return another time with a camel loaded with wheat.

Hisham then went to recruit allies, and the first man he approached was Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayya — whose mother, the sira states plainly at this point, was Atika, daughter of Abd al-Muttalib. The appeal Hisham made was built entirely on that kinship:

"Zuhayr, does it please you to eat and dress well and to marry women while your uncles are where you know them to be, engaging in no buying nor selling, arranging no marriages, nor having any arranged with them? For my part, I swear that if they were the uncles of Abu al-Hakam ibn Hisham and you were to ask him to treat them as you have been asked to do, he would never have agreed to your request."

The men in the enclave were Zuhayr's maternal uncles because Atika was his mother. Zuhayr replied that he was only one man, and that if another would join him he would set about abrogating the document; Hisham answered that he had found such a man in himself, and Zuhayr told him to find a third. Hisham then recruited al-Mut'im ibn Adiyy, Abu al-Bakhtari ibn Hisham, and finally Zam'a ibn al-Aswad, each in turn asking for one more man than the last, until five had agreed. They met by night on the promontory of Mount al-Hajun above Mecca and resolved to defy the document until they could revoke it. It was Zuhayr who claimed the most exposed part: "I will begin and be the first to speak out."

The next morning he did. He came to the assembly wearing a ceremonial robe, made seven circumambulations of the Kaaba, and then addressed the gathering:

"O people of Mecca, shall we eat all kinds of food and dress at will while the Banu Hashim are in distress, unable to engage in any trade? By God, I won't take my seat until this damnable boycott document is torn up!"

Abu Jahl, from one side of the mosque, retorted that it would not be torn up. Zam'a ibn al-Aswad called him the worst of liars and said they had never been pleased with the document when it was written; Abu al-Bakhtari agreed; al-Mut'im ibn Adiyy declared that both were right and that he was innocent before God of the document and its contents; Hisham ibn Amr said the same. Abu Jahl observed sourly that this was something decided at night and discussed elsewhere. Abu Talib sat to one side of the mosque throughout. When al-Mut'im rose to tear the document up he found that worms had already consumed it, all but the words "In your name, O God."

Atika does not appear in this scene, and no act of hers is recorded in it. Her significance is structural, and the sira makes it explicit: Zuhayr was approachable because of who his mother was, and the argument that moved him was an argument about her brothers. The relief of Banu Hashim turned on a marriage tie running back into Abd al-Muttalib's house.

Abdullah and the rejection of the message

Her other named son took the opposite course. During the Meccan years, when a group of Quraysh pressed the Prophet with demands and he rose to leave them, Abdullah ibn Abi Umayya ibn al-Mughira rose with him — and Ibn Kathir identifies him at that moment precisely by this descent, as the Prophet's cousin, being the son of his aunt Atika, daughter of Abd al-Muttalib. What he said was among the most contemptuous rejections the sira records:

"O Muhammad, your people have made certain offers to you that you have not accepted. Then they made requests for themselves so that they could discover your status with God, but you did nothing. Then they asked you to send promptly some punishment that would scare them. By God, I'll never believe in you until you put up a ladder to heaven then climb it, with me watching, until you reach there, bring back with you a copy of a document accompanied by four angels who testify that you are as you claim! And yet, by God, even if you did that, I think I'd not believe you!"

The closing clause is the point of the speech: he concedes in advance that no evidence would persuade him. Taken with Zuhayr's stand at the assembly, the two brothers illustrate how little the Meccan conflict respected household boundaries. One son of Atika staked his standing on relieving Banu Hashim; the other told their most prominent member that proof was irrelevant to him.

The Vision Before Badr

The episode for which Atika is chiefly remembered belongs to the days immediately before Badr, in the second year after the Hijra, and it is the most fully narrated thing the sources preserve about her.

When Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, bringing the Meccan caravan north, learned that Muhammad had readied a force against it, he sent Damdam ibn Amr al-Ghifari racing ahead to Mecca to rouse Quraysh to defend their property. Ibn Ishaq reports that three nights before Damdam's arrival Atika had a dream that terrified her. She sent for her brother al-Abbas, told him she was afraid some harm would come to him or to his people because of it, and asked him to keep it confidential. When he asked what she had seen, she described this:

"I saw a man arrive mounted on a camel who came to a halt in the valley then shouted out at the top of his voice, 'Come forth to your deaths in three days hence, you people of perfidy!' I saw people gather around him. He then entered the mosque, with the people following. While they were there around him, his camel took him to the top of the Kaaba. Once there he called out as before: 'Come forth to your deaths in three days, you people of perfidy!' His camel next took him up to the top of Mount Abu Qubays where he shouted the same. Then he picked up a rock, flung it away and it came on down, bursting into fragments when it reached the bottom of the mountain. And no one house or building in Mecca escaped being pierced by one of its fragments."

The final image is the one that gave the vision its force: a destruction from which no household in the city would be exempt.

Al-Abbas told her it was a considerable vision and to tell no one — and then, by the sira's own account, failed to keep it himself. He told his friend al-Walid ibn Utba in confidence; al-Walid told his son Utba; and the story was soon all over Mecca, with all Quraysh discussing it.

What followed is preserved as al-Abbas's own recollection, and it is the fullest surviving picture of how a woman's reported dream was handled in the politics of pre-conquest Mecca. He rose early to circumambulate the Kaaba and found Abu Jahl sitting with a group of Quraysh leaders discussing Atika's dream. Abu Jahl called him over and asked:

"How long has your family of Abd al-Muttalib had this prophetess? … Aren't you Abd al-Muttalibs satisfied with having your men become prophets? Has it got to be your women too? Atika claims that in her vision a man said, 'Come forth in three days!' We're going to watch you closely for these three days and if what you say is true, so be it. But if three days pass with nothing happening, then we'll judge you the biggest liars of all the temple-worshippers among the Arabs!"

The gibe locates the vision exactly within the Meccan quarrel: Abu Jahl treats it as a second prophetic claim from the same house, and stakes the family's public credit on whether the three days pass without incident. Al-Abbas, by his own admission, retreated — he repudiated what Abu Jahl said and denied that his sister had seen anything at all, remarking that he had never had trouble with the man before.

That night the women of the Abd al-Muttalib clan came to him and refused to accept it. Their reproach, as he reports it, was that he had let "that dirty old reprobate" attack first the men of the family and then its women while he stood and listened, and they asked whether nothing he had heard had offended him. He answered that he would confront Abu Jahl if he repeated it. Two things are visible in the exchange: the women of the household treated the public dismissal of Atika's vision as an insult to the family that required an answer, and the pressure they applied was enough to change al-Abbas's position overnight.

On the morning of the third day after the vision, al-Abbas went into the mosque angry with himself and made towards Abu Jahl to force a retraction. Abu Jahl instead hurried away towards the door — not, as al-Abbas first supposed, out of fear of him, but because he had heard something al-Abbas had not. Damdam ibn Amr al-Ghifari was standing in the middle of the valley beside his camel, its ears lopped and its saddle turned back to front, his shirt rent, shouting that Abu Sufyan's caravan had been waylaid by Muhammad and his men and calling for help. The quarrel between the two men was forgotten, and Mecca began preparing the expedition that ended at Badr.

Musa ibn Uqba, an early authority on the maghazi, related the vision in much the same terms as Ibn Ishaq and added a detail about its effect: when Damdam raised the alarm, the Meccans were badly shaken by Atika's vision, and went out to battle feeling insecure and fearing the worst. On that account her dream did not merely anticipate the defeat but contributed to the state of mind in which Quraysh marched to it.

Her Verses on Badr

After Badr, verses were attributed to Atika herself. Ibn Kathir cites al-Umawi's work on the maghazi for lines she is said to have spoken about the visions she saw and in commemoration of the battle. They are the only words attributed to her beyond her account of the dream, and their whole subject is her vindication:

"Were my visions not true, now that a fugitive fleeing from the force brings you its interpretation? He saw and brought you the certainty he had seen with his own eyes; swords striking do not lie. You spoke; I did not lie to you, rather it was those who lied who charged me with lying."

The argument is compressed but exact. The interpretation of her dream has been delivered to Mecca by a survivor fleeing the battlefield; what he saw with his own eyes is not open to dispute; and the charge of lying, which Abu Jahl had levelled at her family in the precinct, belongs to the accusers rather than to her.

A second passage attributed to her in the same account turns from vindication to reproach, addressing the Meccans on their conduct in the battle:

"Why could you not persevere against the Prophet Muhammad at Badr? Who is able to overcome, with true perseverance, the tumult of war? You did not respond to the thin sword blades sharp in the hands of the believers, You failed to stand firm against the swords, until you suffered but little at the hands of the Believers."

Both passages reach us through a single line of report and are best described as attributed to her rather than securely established as hers. What they show, if they are hers, is a woman who had been publicly called a liar by the leaders of Quraysh answering them in the traditional Arabian medium for settling exactly such a score — and it is on that note, rather than with any account of her later life, that the record of her closes.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, in the recension of Ibn Hisham — the genealogy of Abd al-Muttalib's household; the summoning of the daughters to compose elegies; Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayya's descent from Atika and his part in breaking the boycott; Abdullah ibn Abi Umayya's challenge to the Prophet; and the narrative of Atika's vision before Badr
• Musa ibn Uqba, al-Maghazi, as reported by Ibn Kathir — a parallel account of the vision, and the observation that Quraysh marched to Badr shaken by it
• Al-Umawi, work on the maghazi, as reported by Ibn Kathir — the verses on the visions and on Badr attributed to Atika
• Al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari — for Ibn Ishaq's report that Atika bint Murra was the mother of Hashim, Abd Shams and al-Muttalib

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya, English translation, Volumes 1 and 2 — the principal source for this article throughout
• Ibn Hisham, recension of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah — including his statement that he met no scholar of poetry who knew the daughters' elegies
• Ibn Ishaq, as transmitted within the above

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad — independently for Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayya's descent from Atika and the agreement to revoke the boycott
• Great Women of Islam — for Umm Salama's mother, Atikah bint Amir ibn Rabi'ah of Khuzaymah

Further Reading

These works were not consulted for this article and are listed for readers who wish to pursue the subject further. Nothing in the body text rests on them.

• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955 — the standard English Ibn Ishaq, in which the boycott, the elegies and the Badr vision may be read in their original narrative sequence
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, Volume 8, translated by Aisha Bewley as The Women of Madina. London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1995 — the classical biographical dictionary's treatment of the women of the Prophet's family, fuller on Abd al-Muttalib's daughters than the sira narratives are
• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983