A Woman of Fire

She was eighteen when he died in her arms. She spent the next forty-six years making sure the world would never forget what he taught.

Aisha bint Abi Bakr was the Prophet Muhammad's youngest wife and the most prolific transmitter of Islamic knowledge in history. More than 2,200 narrations preserved in the canonical hadith collections trace back to her - more than any other single source. She corrected senior companions who misremembered. She challenged rulings she knew to be wrong. She taught from behind a curtain in Medina for decades, and the voice that came through the cloth shaped the legal and spiritual foundations of a civilization.

She was also a girl who kept toys in her room. A woman who wept at every meal because she could not stop missing him. A political actor who rode a camel to Basra at the head of an army, made a catastrophic error of judgment, and came home to say so plainly before returning to her teaching life. She was, in every dimension, too large to be contained in any single story the tradition has tried to tell about her.

A Woman of Fire is the first literary narrative nonfiction account of Aisha's complete life - from her childhood in Mecca to her decades of scholarship in Medina, from the intimacy of the prophetic household to the first civil wars of Islam. Drawing on the primary hadith collections, the Sira literature, and the best contemporary scholarship, Narin Hikma brings Aisha into full human dimension: the grief and the fire, the precision and the love, the error and the long work of recovery.

This is the story of the woman who held the tradition together when it was most fragile - and who has been holding it ever since.