(died 213 A.H.)
have not made any mention to this effect. It is only Mohammad bin Sad,
the Secretary to Wakidi, who narrates the tradition,--firstly through
Wakidi, Abd-ul-Hamid, and Jafar, and secondly through Wakidi, Yakoob bin
Mohammad, and Abdullah bin Abdur Rahman bin Abi Sasata. These both
ascriptions are apocryphal. I have already quoted my authorities against
Wakidi and Abd-ul-Hamid. Yakoob bin Mohammad has been impeached by Abu
Zaraa, a critic in the Science of Traditions.[359] Jafar and Abdullah
both flourished after the first century. Their evidence to the supposed
fact about a century ago is inadmissible.

In the Biographical Dictionaries of the contemporaries of the Prophet,
there are three persons named Maria.[360] One is said to have been a
housemaid of the Prophet; the second was a housemaid whose _kunniat_
(patronymic) is given as Omm Rabab (mother of Rabab). The third is
called Maria the Coptic. It appears there was only one Maria; she may
have been a female servant in the household of the Prophet. The
narrators have, by citing different circumstances regarding them, made
them three different persons, and one of them a concubine-slave, as they
could not think a house or family complete without a slave-girl or a
concubine-slave. The biographers often commit such blunders. In giving
different anecdotes of really the same persons, they make as many
persons as they have anecdotes. That anyone of the Marias was a
concubine-slave is a mere conjecture, or a stereotyped form of
traditional confusion in mixing up maidservants with slaves or
concubine-slaves.

[Sidenote: Maria had no son.]

12. (4) Those who have converted Maria into a slave or a concubine-slave
have furnished her--the creature of their own imagination--with a son.
There are various traditions as to the number and names of the Prophet's
sons, all of whom died in infancy. Some traditions give different names
to one, and others give as many sons as the names are reported. There
might have been a son of Mohammad by the name of Ibrahim, but that he
was born of Maria the Coptic is a perfect myth. This piece of the story
is the continuation of the traditions of Ibn Sad, which I have already
criticized in paras. 9 and 11. Ibn Sad has related another tradition
through Omar bin Asim and Katada to the effect that Mohammad's son
Ibrahim was born of a captive woman. Asim has been condemned by Abu
Hatim, a doctor and critic in the Mohammadan traditional