CHAPTER I A Tradition Invented: The Female Companions Abu ‘Abd Allah Salim Sabalan, whose honesty pleased ‘ A’isha and whom she used to employ, said that she showed him how the Prophet used to perform the ablution. “She rinsed her mouth three times and washed her face three times. She then washed her right hand thrice then her left hand thrice. She placed her hand toward the front of her head and passed it to the back once. Then she cleaned her ears and passed her hands over her sides.” Salim said, “I used to go to her as a contracted slave; she did not veil herself from me. I would sit in front of her, and she would speak with me. Until one day, I went to her and said, ‘Invoke blessings for me, O Mother of the Believers.’ She said, ‘For what?’ I said, ‘Allah has freed me.’ She replied, ‘May Allah bless you,’ and drew the partition [bijab) in front of me. I did not see her again after that day.”1 For Muslim jurists, this report answers a rather prosaic question: how should a woman wipe her head for ablution? For social historians, it’s a gem of a different sort. Traditions that so clearly evoke the milieu of the first decades of hadith transmission and capture the complexities of male-female interaction are not common. While Salim was a slave, ‘A’isha had used his help and admitted him into her company. In the process, he became a repository for her teaching. The authoritativeness of Salim’s report derives from his eyewitness encounter: he actually saw ‘A’isha performing the ablution. Attentive to protocol, Salim clarifies that his direct access to ‘A’isha was terminated upon his manumission. With its 1 Ahmad b. Shu‘ayb al-Nasa’I, Sunan (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, n.d.), 1:72-73. For the biography of Salim, see Yusuf b. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-MizzI, Tahdbib al-Kamal ft Asma ’ al-Rijal (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risala, 1992), 10:154-56. 19