Shii Studies Seminars III: Zahra Azhar

“Who Will Buy from Me My Umm Walad?”: A Ḥadīth-Based Study On Imāmī Traditions On The Status Of Umm Walad

This study investigates the legal and social construction of the umm walad within early Imāmī Shīʿī ḥadīth literature, challenging prevailing scholarly narratives that reduce the Shiʿi–Sunni divergence on this issue to a simple opposition between ʿUmar’s prohibition of selling ummhāt al-awlād and ʿAlī’s alleged later permissiveness. Through a close reading of the earliest Imāmī sources, including the four canonical ḥadīth collections and pre-canonical works such as Qurb al-Isnād, this study argues that the formative Shiʿi tradition preserves a far more nuanced and internally diverse discourse than is often acknowledged. In these texts, early Imams articulate definitions of umm walad that extend beyond childbirth to encompass pregnancy, miscarriage, and the broader integration of enslaved women into the intimate sphere of the household. Several early reports attributed to al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq link both istīlād and manumission not to the survival of the child but to the fact of conception itself, suggesting that emancipation could occur even in cases of miscarriage. These early positions contrast with later juristic attempts to reconcile the ḥadīths with evolving legal norms that tied manumission to the master’s death and the child’s inheritance share.

Examining testamentary documents attributed to ʿAlī and al-Kāẓim, the study shows that early Imāmī thought distinguished among multiple categories of enslaved women, granting specific legal rights—including marriageability and emancipation—to ummhāt al-awlād even when their children had died. The paper further reassesses the oft-cited claim that ʿAlī permitted the sale of ummhāt al-awlād, arguing that the relevant Imāmī reports present these sales as exceptional measures undertaken to redeem the women from outstanding debts, rather than as evidence of a general permissibility.