Aisha · a Light

Senior companions came to her with their hardest questions

Aisha bint Abi Bakr was widowed in her early twenties and lived nearly fifty years more in Madinah, in a house attached to the mosque. Abu Musa al-Ashari said that whenever the companions found a report difficult they asked Aisha, and found knowledge with her. Her nephew Urwa ibn al-Zubayr said he had never seen anyone more learned in law, in medicine or in poetry. She corrected other narrators, including senior ones, when she judged that they had misremembered a ruling, and later scholars gathered those corrections into books of their own. Over two thousand reports are transmitted from her, which places her among the largest single sources for the practice of the Prophet ﷺ.

Aisha bint Abi Bakr · died 58 AH, 678 CE