The hand she left at Yamama

At the Battle of Yamama, the last stand of Musaylima the false prophet, Nusaybah fought alongside her son. Her son was killed. Her arm was cut off. She kept fighting.

Almost ten years after Uhud, in the year 12 AH, Nusaybah bint Ka'ab was in her fifties. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had died. Abu Bakr was caliph. The false prophet Musaylima ibn Habib had gathered forty thousand men in Yamama and stood in open rebellion against Islam. Khalid ibn al-Waleed marched against him with thirteen thousand Muslim veterans.

Nusaybah asked to go. She was told she was too old. She insisted. Her son Habib had been recently murdered by Musaylima, in a story that itself belongs in this collection: Habib had been sent as an envoy to Musaylima, and Musaylima had asked him whether he believed Muhammad was the Messenger of Allah. Habib had said: yes. Musaylima cut off one of his hands. He asked again. Habib said: yes. Musaylima cut off the other hand. He asked again. Habib said: yes. Musaylima had him killed by inches. Nusaybah heard the news of her son's manner of death and swore an oath: she would fight at Yamama, and she would help kill Musaylima with her own hand.

She rode to Yamama with the army of Khalid. She fought in the front lines. Her other son Abdullah, the one who had been wounded at Uhud alongside her, was cut down and killed in the first day of the battle. Nusaybah, who had bound his wounds at Uhud a decade before, now buried him at Yamama.

On the second day of the battle, in the fighting inside the walled garden that has been called Hadiqat al-Mawt (the Garden of Death) ever since, Nusaybah's arm was struck. The blow was heavy. The arm came off. She took the sword in her remaining hand and kept fighting.

When the battle was over, she was carried out of the garden by other Muslim veterans. She was seen by Abu Bakr in Medina after her recovery, and Abu Bakr wept when he saw her one-armed and grieving for her son. She lived on for some years after Yamama. She died c. 634 CE, in Medina, an old woman with one arm, and was buried with the honours of the Sahabah.

Her story runs into the sirah at Uhud. It runs into the sirah of the Prophet's final year, when he received her again in Medina and prayed for her family. It runs into the Ridda wars at Yamama, when she took the field with her son and left one arm and one son behind. The Muslim tradition has never quite known what to do with her, in the sense that she does not fit neatly into any category it usually names. She was a Companion. She was a warrior. She was a mother. She was a nurse. She was a shield-bearer. She held all of these at once for the four decades from Aqabah to her death.

What the story teaches

The two Nusaybah stories, Uhud and Yamama, are usually told together because they show the arc of one Muslim woman's life over ten years of the founding of Islam. At Uhud she gave thirteen wounds to save the Prophet. At Yamama she gave her son and her arm to defend the ummah after him. She never asked for a position. She never asked for a title. What she took, she took: a sword when the line broke, a place in the front rank at Yamama, a share in the killing of a false prophet. The classical Muslim tradition, when it names women whose courage in war was equal to the courage of men, names Nusaybah first. Her name has been given to daughters, in the Muslim world, for fourteen hundred years, and every time it is given it carries with it a message about what a mother might expect her daughter to become.