A Womanist Reading of African Women in Abrahamic Tradition

Support for this essay came from the Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

Yet, there was no absence of women who embraced Blackness within Abrahamic tradition in their political and artistic work, recovering glimpses of their own history and ancient representations of themselves. Moreover, though Abrahamic narratives of heroic male prophets and leaders became critical to male-dominated Black liberation movements, African women within Abrahamic narratives also became symbols of profound sacrifice and spiritual deliverance, catalysing powerful resistance and new cosmologies among masses of Black people fighting against erasure.

Embodying this spirit of sacrifice and spiritual deliverance, African women in Abrahamic tradition are often presented and re-presented through themes of divine maternity. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, African women (and women more broadly) are often responsible for literally birthing and nurturing new revelations, new nations, and subsequently new eras within Abrahamic tradition. Three African women in Abrahamic tradition in particular have historically been drawn on by Black leaders for physically embodying what Islamic scholar and activist, Shaykha Iesha Prime, described as the ‘meeting between the heavens and the earth,’ and ‘divine decree’: Hajar (Hagar), the Black Madonna (Mary), and the Queen of Sheba (Makeda/Balqis) (RA).

Though not the only African women in the Abrahamic tradition who represent this motif, their significance is marked by their direct bodily intercession and self-sacrifice to build new nations. Their roles inspired and are replicated through art and literature by Black women who identify with their struggles and triumphs, and through new interpretations of Abrahamic religion which recentre their roles as Black women. Their narratives are also replicated through other African cosmologies in both the ‘New’ and ‘Old’ worlds, which have historically integrated these Abrahamic traditions in the deification of motherhood and in the (re)building of narratives of the birth of a people.

Arguably the most critical narrative which links Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the story of Ibrahim (Abraham) (AS), Sarai (Sarah), and Hajar (Hagar) (RA). It would be Hajar and Sarai who give birth to the two most significant lineages in Abrahamic tradition, Isma’il and Ishaq (Ishmael and Isaac), respectively (RA). According to Abrahamic tradition, the former was an Egyptian woman, a daughter of the pharaoh gifted to Sarai as a servant while in Egypt. In order to fulfil the prophecy which foretold that Ibrahim would father nations, Sarai, unable to conceive, permitted Ibrahim to conceive a child either in or out of wedlock with Hajar—a point of departure between Islamic and Judaic/Christian accounts, respectively. From this union, comes Isma’il, and begins the story of divine matrilineality, which leads to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad (AS), and of Abraham and Sarah, the Christian Messiah, Jesus (AS) . With or without malevolence and abuse from Sarai, depending on the tradition, Hajar is cast into the desert with Isma’il, where God offers provisions and the promise that Isma’il, too, will be a father of nations. Despite this, in the Judaic and Christian tradition, Ishaq is the rightful firstborn protagonist of the Old Testament and Hagar and Ishmael fade away from the narrative.

Though Hagar endures on the periphery of Biblical and Judaic tradition, she remains critical throughout Black womanist readings of Abrahamic tradition, most famously among Christian theological scholars like Renita Weems and Delores Williams. Biblical scholar, Nyasha Junior, writes that Weems’ seminal work, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (1988), ‘was the first book within biblical studies identified as a womanist work.’ Williams’ work, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993), Junior added, ‘has become a standard text in theology,’ as it ‘brought renewed attention to biblical Hagar and to African American appropriation of Hagar.’ These pillars of a Black womanist reading of Abrahamic tradition themselves draw on historiography of other African women who have integrated her into works of narrative and artwork. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), features Hagar, the rejected lover of the main character Milkman; in 1902 writer Pauline Hopkins published a serial novel, Hagar’s Daughter, which follows an alleged slave-woman, Hagar, who also becomes rejected and estranged from her lover, eventually jumping seemingly to her death to save herself and her daughter. In 1895, Afro-indigenous artist, Edmonia Lewis, presented her sculpture, Hagar, in the neoclassical style, pictured without the young Isma’il, with her hands clasped in prayer, facing up towards her Lord, at her feet what assistant professor in Black religious traditions, Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, calls ‘Abraham’s filicidal parting gift, a water skin.’ What these interpretations have in common, Junior cites Dolores Williams, is the congruence ‘with many African American women’s predicament of poverty, sexual and economic exploitation, surrogacy, domestic violence, homelessness, rape, motherhood, single-parenting, ethnicity and meetings with God.’ The story of Hagar offers a spiritual catharsis of sorts, an ‘analogue for African American women’s historic experience.’

In her 2022 article, ‘Hagar’s Textual Agency: Diversifying Christian Womanist Sources of Interpretation,’ Oredein writes that ‘though not textually positioned as such, for marginalized communities, Hagar is a pivotal character within the Hebrew Bible.’ It is indeed ‘her minor status being precisely what most qualifies her importance,’ continues Oredein. ‘Hagar is a compass; a meaning-making agent within a text that has diminished or completely ignored the lives of sun-kissed communities of African descent.’ It is the very convergence of ‘hardship’, ‘survival’, and ‘contact with the divine’, that ‘inspires deep faith’ within the struggle of Black womanhood.

However, the rise of Islam through Prophet Muhammad (AS) reintroduces Hajar as a central figure in Abrahamic tradition and reframes Hajar’s rejected status to centring her legacy as the mother of the Ummah, or the people united by faith, who will in turn come to redemption through her lineage. In the Islamic tradition as told by Shaykha Iesha Prime, Ibrahim is commanded to take and leave her with her son in the desert, to which she responded, ‘then Allah (SWT) is sufficient for me and He will take care of me’. The moment defines her critical display of tawakkul or complete reliance on God, which adorns her the title ‘Our Mother Hajar’.

Through her perseverance in the harsh Arabian desert, she meets the messenger angel Jibril who ‘splits open the Earth and the well of Zamzam comes forth,’ which becomes the site of Makkah, or Mecca. A spiritual and genealogical mother to Islam, in a lecture entitled, ‘We Root Ourself in Beautiful Intentions Made in Our Heart,’ Shaykha Prime asserts that, ‘Literally, Allah (SWT) builds the holiest city around her,’ where the last revelation, in the Islamic tradition, is made by the Prophet Muhammad (AS) who was born there. She describes that if Hajar  ever expressed any doubt of God’s plan, the present moment would prove that because of ‘the seed of iman (faith), of tawakkul, of taqwa (God-consciousness)’ that was in her heart, ‘people are going to walk in [her] footsteps just to complete their faith.’ Shaykha Prime meant this quite literally, as one out of the five obligatory duties of every Muslim, otherwise known as the Five Pillars, is Hajj. The annual pilgrimage brings together Muslims from across the world to walk the path of Hajar and visit her grave.

Oredein points to three things within the Islamic tradition that can characterize the story of Hajar: water, abandonment, and wandering. Between abandonment and wandering, she describes, marks the ‘ground as fertile for new life,’ and ‘comes the possibility for new communal life.’ On the role of water and divine intervention in the narrative, Oredein writes, ‘the earth’s body holds something that Hajar’s body needs, and in this, revelation bombards bodily contact.’ Similarly, Shaykha Prime refers to the woman’s role in Islam and Abrahamic tradition more broadly as the vessel for ‘divine decree,’ as the hadith of the Prophet (AS) in Sahih Muslim states that the ‘womb is connected to the throne of Allah (SWT).’ However, this is not to say that women are simply machinery for revelation, but instead a guardian of the ‘Unseen’ before it is manifested on earth. Thus, women are the physiological and spiritual foundation of each pivotal moment for the beginning of a new nation and corresponding doctrine.