Asma bint Abi Bakr (RA): The Woman With Two Belts

Asma bint Abi Bakr was born in Mecca around 595 CE, roughly a decade before her younger half-sister Ayesha, making her one of the eldest members of a family that would sit at the very center of early Islam. She was among the first eighteen or so people to accept the Prophet’s ﷺ message, embracing Islam while it was still a small and dangerous thing to do in Mecca, years before most of the city had even heard of it. She would go on to live longer, and more eventfully, than almost any other companion of her generation.

Asma bint Abi Bakr: The Woman With Two Belts

Asma’s defining moment came in 622, on the night the Prophet ﷺ and her father slipped out of Mecca to begin the migration to Medina, hiding along the way in the cave of Thawr while Meccan search parties combed the hills for them. Asma was the one who brought them food and news under cover of darkness. When she realized she had nothing to tie the provisions with, she tore her own waist-sash in two, using one half to bind the food and keeping the other for herself. The Prophet ﷺ was so struck by her resourcefulness that he gave her a title that stuck for the rest of her life: Dhat al-Nitaqayn, “the woman with two belts.” Her contribution to the migration did not end there – when a Meccan search party led by Abu Jahl confronted her and demanded to know where her father had gone, she refused to give him up, even facing a slap from Abu Jahl for her silence.

A Marriage Built on Hard Labor

Asma bint Abi Bakr married Zubair ibn al-Awwam, one of the ten companions the Prophet ﷺ promised paradise during their lifetimes, but their early married life in Medina was one of real poverty rather than comfort. Zubair owned only a horse and a small plot of land, and Asma took on the physical work of the household herself: she fetched water from wells outside the city, ground grain by hand, cared for the horse, and famously carried date stones from Zubair’s land on her own head across long distances, until the Prophet ﷺ, seeing her struggle, once offered to let her ride behind him on his camel – an offer she declined out of modesty, deciding instead to bear the hardship in her husband’s absence rather than accept help that might trouble him. She later said that period of manual labor never once diminished her sense of the honor of the household she had married into.

She and Zubair had several children, but her most historically significant son was Abdullah ibn Zubair, born in Medina shortly after the migration and celebrated by the Muslim community as the first child born to the Muhajireen, the emigrants, in their new home – a birth that carried real symbolic weight for a community that had feared, on leaving Mecca, that it might not survive to raise a new generation at all.

Asma’s toughness in the physical demands of daily life ran alongside a matching intensity in worship. She became one of the more prolific narrators of the Prophet’s ﷺ own sayings among the women of her generation, with roughly fifty-six hadith attributed to her preserved across the major hadith collections, including both of the most authoritative compilations. Her seriousness in prayer was itself remembered as a story in its own right: during a solar eclipse prayer that the Prophet ﷺ extended far longer than an ordinary prayer, standing and prostrating for an unusually long stretch, Asma fainted from the sheer strain of it and had to be revived with water poured over her head.

Watching Her Son Become a Caliph, and Die One

Asma bint Abi Bakr lived to an extraordinary age, well past a hundred by most accounts – reportedly without losing a single tooth or any real clarity of mind even at that age – retaining her memory and her composure into her final years even as her eyesight failed her. Her son Abdullah ibn Zubair grew into one of the most formidable political and military figures of the generation after the Prophet ﷺ, and in the turmoil following the death of the Umayyad caliph Yazid, he was recognized as caliph across much of the Muslim world, ruling from Mecca for close to a decade before the Umayyads moved to reclaim the caliphate by force.

In 692, Umayyad forces under the general Hajjaj ibn Yusuf laid siege to Mecca itself, bombarding even the Kaaba in the course of the fighting. With his support collapsing and his position hopeless, Abdullah went to his mother, by then blind and over a hundred years old, to ask her counsel on whether he should surrender or fight to the end. Asma told him plainly that he knew his own conscience better than she did, but that if he believed his cause was just, he should meet death rather than live under humiliation forced on him by an unjust enemy – adding that death was coming for him regardless, and that how he faced it was the only thing still within his choosing. Abdullah fought on and was killed in the siege; Hajjaj had his body publicly displayed as a warning to others.

Asma, despite her age and blindness, insisted on being taken to see what remained of her son. She is reported to have touched his body and spoken of him with grief but without regret for the counsel she had given, reaffirming that he had chosen the harder and, in her view, the more honorable path. She died not long afterward, in Jumada al-Awwal of 73 AH, the same year as her son, closing out a life that had opened with a torn sash outside a cave near Mecca and ended with the same unbending resolve at well over a century old.