The one whose hand reached furthest

He told his wives that the first of them to follow him would be the one whose hand was the longest.

They took it literally. The reports have them measuring their hands against one another, and the tallest of them coming out ahead.

Then he died, and one of them died before the others — and it was not the one with the longest arm. It was Zaynab.

And at that point, Aishah says, they understood what had actually been meant. The long hand was giving. Zaynab worked with her hands, and what the work earned did not stay with her.

There are two things worth taking from this, and the first is easy to miss because the second is more satisfying.

The first is that the Companions did not always know what they had been told. They heard a phrase, took the obvious reading, acted on it, and were wrong — and the correction only arrived years later, from events. The reports keep that in. They do not tidy the misunderstanding out of the story to make everybody look perceptive.

The second is the shape of the praise itself. It was not a compliment anybody could have claimed at the time, and it was not paid to the wealthiest of them. It was paid to the one who made things with her hands and gave the money away, and it was only legible once it had been settled by her death.

The report appears in both Sahih collections. Sahih Muslim preserves the identification as Zaynab; the Bukhari route contains an acknowledged narrator substitution naming Sawdah.