Even Fatima's birth year splits Muslim historians by a decade
Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad and Khadija, is honoured by Sunni and Shia Muslims alike, and her name is still a favourite for girls. Yet the two traditions disagree about when she was born, how old she was at marriage, whether she had sisters, and how she died in 632.
Mainstream Sunni tradition puts her birth in Mecca in 605, when Khadija was fifty; Twelver Shia sources prefer about 612 or 615. Sunnis say she had three sisters, while many Shia hold that those girls were Khadija's nieces, adopted by Muhammad, which would make Fatima his only biological daughter. Her three brothers all died young. As a child in Mecca she once ran to help her father when an enemy had filth thrown over him, and she lost her mother early.
In Medina, perhaps shortly after the Battle of Badr, she married Muhammad's cousin Ali, reportedly after her father refused earlier suitors including Abu Bakr and Umar. When the proposal was put to her she said nothing, and that silence, read as consent, became the basis for the rule that a woman must agree to her marriage in Islamic law. Ali was so poor he was told to sell his shield to pay the bridal gift. Reports of her age at the wedding range from nine to twenty-one. The couple did hard manual work for years, and a short prayer of praise Muhammad taught them survives as the Tasbih of Fatima.
Through her sons Hasan and Husayn, Muhammad's line runs to the Shia Imams and to the many Sayyids alive today; hence the Twelver title Mother of the Imams. Another honorific, Mother of her Father, reflects how she cared for Muhammad. Her best-known epithet, al-Zahra, means the radiant one, and canonical Sunni collections join Shia ones in naming her a mistress of the women of paradise, often compared with Mary.
She died in Medina within six months of her father and was buried secretly at night. Shia accounts say she was hurt and miscarried when Umar's party came to her house demanding Ali's allegiance to Abu Bakr; Sunnis firmly reject this and attribute her death to grief. Her presumed grave lies in Baqi Cemetery, where the shrine over it was demolished in 1806 and again in 1925.
Source: Fatima
