Khawlah bint Thalabah

Khawlah bint Thalabah (dates uncertain, lived into the caliphate period) was a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ from the Ansar of Medina whose personal dispute with her husband became the direct occasion for the revelation of an entire surah of the Quran. She is honored in the Quran itself as "she who argued" (al-mujadilah), giving her surah its name. Her husband was Aws ibn as-Samit ibn Qays al-Ansari, a companion of the Prophet.

Her husband Aws pronounced against her the pre-Islamic formula of zihar: "You are to me like my mother's back" (anta alayya ka-zahri ummi). In pre-Islamic Arabia, this declaration was treated as an irrevocable form of divorce that simultaneously prohibited the man from living with his wife. The tragedy was that zihar left a woman in a state of legal limbo — neither properly divorced and free to remarry, nor living with her husband as a real wife. The practice was a severe injustice to women.

Khawlah refused to accept this unjust situation and went directly to the Prophet ﷺ to complain and seek a ruling. She argued her case with great persistence and emotion, repeatedly returning to make her plea even when the Prophet indicated that he did not yet have revelation on the matter. She appealed to Allah directly during her conversations with the Prophet, expressing her distress about the plight of her children and her situation. Aisha, who was present, recalled that she could hear Khawlah's voice but not all her words, as she moved between audible pleas and quiet supplication to Allah.

Allah then revealed the opening verses of Surah al-Mujadilah (chapter 58): "Indeed Allah has heard the statement of her who argues with you concerning her husband and directs her complaint to Allah. And Allah hears your dialogue; indeed, Allah is Hearing and Seeing." The revelation abolished the pre-Islamic effect of zihar, declaring it wrong and imposing a substantial expiation (kaffarah) — freeing a slave, fasting two consecutive months, or feeding sixty poor people — if a man wished to return to his wife after uttering it. Khawlah's courage in seeking justice from Allah is permanently inscribed in the Quran, making her one of the few women whose story is directly honored in the divine text.