Sakina bint Husayn
Sakina was a young child in 680 at Karbala, where she witnessed the massacre of her father and his supporters by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid (r. 676–680).
Sakina was born to the first wife of Husayn, Rubab, who was the daughter of Imra' al-Qays ibn Adi, a chief of the Banu Kalb tribe.
[3] After remaining childless for some years,[3] Sakina was the first child of the couple and possibly Husayn's eldest daughter,[3] although some have reported that his eldest daughter was Fatima,[4][5][6][2] born to Umm Ishaq bint Talha, the widow of Hasan ibn Ali (d. 670), whom Husayn married to fulfil the last wishes of his brother.
[9] The Islamicist Wilferd Madelung places her birth sometime after the 661 assassination of her grandfather Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shia Imam.
When pressed by Yazid's agents to pledge his allegiance, Husayn first left his hometown of Medina for Mecca and later set off for Kufa in modern-day Iraq, accompanied by his family and a small group of supporters.
[8] Their small caravan was intercepted and massacred in Karbala, near Kufa, by the Umayyad forces who first surrounded them for some days and cut off their access to the nearby river Euphrates.
[17] Out of modesty, Sakina may have asked Sahl ibn Sa'd, a companion of Muhammad, to convince the soldier carrying his father's head to walk at some distance to avoid the gazes of the onlooking crowds in Damascus.
[2] The prominent Twelver traditionist Majlesi (d. 1699) describes in his Bihar al-anwar a dream he attributes to Sakina, in which she saw her grandmother Fatima (d. 632), daughter of Muhammad, mourning in the heaven while holding the blood-stained shirt of Husayn.
[2] In particular, only this childless marriage to Abd-Allah is mentioned by the Twelver scholars al-Mufid (d. 1022) in his biographical Kitab al-irshad and by Tabarsi (d. 1153) in his E'lam al-wara'.
[2][1] While it was not uncommon among her tribe of Quraysh for a woman to marry several times, the modern linguist Albert Arazi suggests that the reports of her many marriages are tendentious.
[23] Some have similarly argued that such reports are defamatory and contradictory, possibly fabricated by those opposed to the Alids, who are the descendants of Ali ibn Abi Talib.
[24][23][2] Her social standing was high,[23] and she is listed as a trustworthy (theqa) narrator of hadith by the Sunni traditionist Ibn Hibban in his Kitab al-Thiqat.
[23][22] The Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi (d. 2015) thus considers Sakina as a symbol against forced hijab,[29] while the Egyptian biographer Aisha Abd al-Rahman (d. 1998) regards such reports fabricated by the anti-Alids; among them were the Umayyads.
[30][2][23] She is said to have hosted at her house poets whom she listened to and offered her feedback and monetary reward (sela) from behind a curtain or through a maid.
