She Who Is Called the Radiant

She was the Prophet's daughter. She ground grain before dawn. She argued in public. She refused to forgive. She died at twenty-seven, and her grave has never been found.

Fatima al-Zahra - daughter of Muhammad, wife of Ali, mother of Hussayn - is the most significant woman in Islamic history. She is venerated across the Sunni-Shia divide, mourned in annual rituals attended by millions, invoked by name in daily prayers across fourteen centuries.

Most of the world has never heard of her.

She Who Is Called the Radiant tells the story of Fatima's short, compressed, extraordinary life: the child who cleaned the dirt off her father when Mecca's elites attacked him; the young woman who married the Prophet's cousin with a dowry paid in a sold shield; the mother who raised four children in a household of poverty and prayer; the widow who stood in the Prophet's own mosque, weeks after his death, and accused the new caliph of theft - in a speech that Islamic scholars still call one of the great works of Arabic rhetoric.

She was wronged. She said so. She died in her anger. And she asked to be buried in secret, at night, in a location no one would be allowed to mark.

She is still unfound.

In the tradition of Karen Armstrong's Muhammad and Reza Aslan's No god but God, Narin Hikma brings Fatima al-Zahra out of the devotional literature and into vivid, page-turning narrative nonfiction - honoring both the historical record and the human being behind it. This is the story of a woman who was fully faithful and fully fierce, who did not separate her prayer from her argument, her grief from her truth.

She is called the Radiant One.

She earned the name.