The Cost of Staying

Sawdah bint Zam'ah was old, old enough, to fear that the Prophet would divorce her. She offered a trade, "keep me among your wives, and give my allotted day to 'A'ishah."⁹¹⁰

Her motive may have been devotion, or self-preservation, or some mixture the sources don't untangle. What the sources do is something else entirely: they fasten the episode to Qur'an 4:128 and convert a private concession into a transferable rule.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Qur'an 4:128 names a marital failure mode most people recognize. A wife fears her husband's nushūzHigh-handedness, ill-treatment, or arrogant refusal to fulfill marital obligations. In classical jurisprudence, the term carries different legal weight depending on whether it describes a husband's or a wife's conduct. or iʿrāḍTurning away, emotional withdrawal, or neglect. Distinguished from active harm, it describes the passive abandonment of a spouse's rights to companionship and attention.. It does not command renewed affection. It permits ṣulḥSettlement or reconciliation - an ending of dispute through mutual agreement. In the context of 4:128, classical commentators interpret this as the wife conceding some of her rights in exchange for remaining in the marriage., settlement, terms of peace negotiated between them. The verse caps the permission with what sounds like reassurance: "settlement is best."¹

Then the verse complicates its own permission. It warns that human souls are "inclined to selfishness" in exactly these negotiations. And it closes by calling for something higher than the deal itself: graciousness, restraint, taqwāOften translated as "God-consciousness" or "piety," taqwā is better understood as a vigilant awareness of the moral weight of one's actions. In this verse, it represents the ethical ceiling the Qur'an holds above the pragmatic floor of settlement..¹ The text permits the bargain, flags the moral hazard, and gestures toward an ethic that might transcend it.

What follows is not a verdict on every modern attempt to reinterpret this verse. It is an examination of what the mainstream legal-exegetical tradition, the one that shaped court rulings, sermons, and household expectations for centuries - actually did with it. The question is not whether settlement is permitted. It is what "settlement is best" becomes when one party bargains with structurally worse alternatives.

The tradition gives "settlement" a workable meaning. Al-Jalalayn, a widely used classical commentary, describes reconciliation as an agreement "in terms of shares and maintenance expenses," where the wife concedes something "in return for continuing companionship." If she refuses the concession, the husband must either fulfill what he owes or let her go.²

Ibn Kathīr is more blunt. A wife fearing desertion may "forfeit all or part of her rights", provision, clothing, dwelling, time, etc. in which the husband may accept. He notes an alternate reading, attributed to Ibn 'Abbas, in which the verse simply describes a husband giving his wife a choice between staying and leaving. But he concludes that the apparent wording points to something more specific: the wife surrenders rights, the husband accepts, and the marriage continues.³

What turns this from a domestic arrangement into a norm is what Ibn Kathīr does next. He treats the Prophet's handling of Sawdah bint Zam'ah as precedent, and writes that by keeping her among his wives after her concession, "his Ummah may follow this kind of settlement."³ The tradition confers template status on a specific marital bargain.

A modern Sunni commentary, Ma'arif al-Qur'an, adds a technical detail that matters ethically. If a wife waives rights already owed, those claims can lapse. But for future rights, she can later declare she will not forgo them, at which point the husband has the option to release her.⁴ The fine print is revealing: even nominally reclaimable rights bring her back to the divorce horizon the moment she reaches for them.

The Hadith Record

The tradition also supplies the story that animates the verse.

In Sahih al-Bukhari, 'A'ishah reports that Sawdah gave up her allotted day with the Prophet, and that day was given to 'A'ishah instead.⁵ Sahih Muslim records the same arrangement under a chapter heading that generalizes it immediately: "It is permissible for a wife to give her turn to a co-wife."⁶ Some Bukhari narrations frame Sawdah's act as devotional, done to please the Prophet, born of sincerity rather than coercion.⁷⁸

But other narrations state what was at stake. Sunan Abu Dawud reports that when Sawdah grew old, she feared divorce and offered her day to 'A'ishah; 'A'ishah adds that they believed Allah revealed 4:128 regarding this or similar cases.⁹ Jami' at-Tirmidhi preserves a report from Ibn 'Abbas in which Sawdah's proposal is rendered as speech: do not divorce me; keep me and give my day to 'A'ishah. The narration links the arrangement to 4:128 and concludes that whatever the parties agree upon is permissible.¹⁰

Then there is 'A'ishah's own testimony, preserved in Bukhari. She explains 4:128 as the case of a man who dislikes his wife and wants to divorce her. The wife responds by saying, in effect, "I make you free as regards myself." 'A'ishah adds: "So this verse was revealed in this connection."¹¹ Whatever that phrase entails in legal detail, the direction is clear. She keeps her place by releasing her claims.

The canonical compilations do not treat Sawdah's case as private or exceptional. Bukhari's chapter heading generalizes it. Muslim's heading generalizes it further. Ibn Kathīr holds it up as a model the community may follow. This is a load-bearing example.

The Structural Asymmetry

The currency of settlement in these commentaries, time shares, maintenance, dwelling, etc., sits inside a household structure shaped by adjacent Qur'anic passages. Qur'an 4:3 permits polygyny up to four wives, conditioned on justice.¹² Qur'an 4:129 concedes that perfect emotional equality between wives is unattainable, but forbids the obvious failure mode, total neglect, leaving one wife "in suspense."¹³ The text sees the problem coming. And one of its authorized responses is 4:128, settlement by agreement, which, in practice, can mean the threatened spouse surrendering the very rights designed to protect her from the problem the text anticipated.

The leverage behind these negotiations is structural, not incidental. In classical jurisprudence, the dominant form of divorce is ṭalāqUnilateral repudiation by the husband. In the classical schools, a husband may dissolve the marriage by pronouncement, requiring neither cause nor the wife's consent. This is the default mechanism of marital dissolution in traditional Islamic law., unilateral repudiation by the husband, requiring no consent from the wife. Wife-initiated divorce typically takes the form of khulʿDivorce initiated by the wife in exchange for financial compensation, usually the return of her mahr (dower). In most classical schools, khulʿ requires the husband's agreement, making it structurally dependent on the very party the wife seeks to leave., divorce for compensation, which traditional schools commonly treat as requiring the husband's agreement; judicial dissolution for cause exists but varies sharply by legal school.¹⁴

This asymmetry does not by itself prove moral failure. But it means that any "settlement" takes place in the shadow of a power the tradition grants overwhelmingly to one party.

Legal-moral theory calls one version of this distortion undue influence, assent shaped by vulnerability, dependency, or relational pressure that falls short of overt coercion.¹⁵ I am using the term diagnostically, not claiming Islamic marriage is a common-law contract. The concept matters here because Sawdah's case, and every case modeled on it, involves a spouse choosing between relinquishing rights and risking expulsion from a household she depends on, under a framework in which the other party holds the stronger exit card.

The Modern Defense and Its Limits

The strongest modern defense reads 4:128 as triage. On this view, ṣulḥ is permitted to avert the greater harm of divorce, and "settlement is best" means best among bad options. The verse's warning about selfishness becomes a built-in caution against exploitation. Read this way, the permission is grudging, a concession to human frailty, not a celebration of it.

The difficulty is that the tradition's major interpreters did not treat it that way. They treated it as a model. Ibn Kathīr made it followable. The canonical hadith compilations generalized it in their chapter headings. And when later commentary tried to soften the framework, Ma'arif al-Qur'an noting that forfeited future rights can be reclaimed, it simultaneously confirmed the pressure: reclaiming means returning to the divorce horizon.⁴

Perhaps the most instructive response comes from Egypt's Dar al-Ifta. The institution cites Sawdah's case as precedent, affirms that such arrangements are "entirely up to the parties," and then inserts a caveat: there should be no pressure on a wife to forgo what is due to her by right.¹⁶ The caveat is the tell. It is an institutional voice acknowledging that the structure it endorses predictably generates the very thing the Qur'anic verse warns against. The caveat is not a rebuttal of the critique. It is the critique, arriving from inside.

Ma'arif al-Qur'an highlights a genuine alternative embedded in the verse: instead of divorce or bargain-by-concession, a husband can simply keep fulfilling his wife's rights with grace, despite diminished desire.⁴ This is the verse's highest aspiration, the taqwā option, where generosity replaces calculation. But aspiration is not architecture. The question that runs through the entire tradition is what the system legitimizes as its default settlement when the predictable failure arrives, and whether the consent it generates under those conditions can bear the moral weight placed on it.

The Qur'an calls settlement "best." The tradition shows what that "best" has often meant: a threatened spouse preserving her place by surrendering rights meant for her protection, under conditions the verse itself identifies as morally hazardous. Whether that deserves the name is the question the sources raise, and do not resolve.

Notes