Asiya binti Muzahim, the wife of Firaun was one such woman. Her strength and her status will forever remain an example for all of mankind. She was a woman who never allowed herself to be defined or limited by her painful circumstances. Instead, she carried in her such a deep faith and knowledge of who she really was that she was willing to die for what she believed in. It was perhaps for this reason that the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w mentioned her as one of the greatest women of all time.
Asiya was a queen. She was the wife of one of the most powerful man to walk the earth. She lived a life of unparalleled luxury and wealth. Yet, Asiya knew that her true home was in Paradise. She had no attachment to this life.
Now, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from Asiya’s life and from this in particular. But one of the really beautiful lessons for me particularly, from her story, is the fact that despite all the persecution that she was going through, Allah s.w.t made it easy on her so much so that when she was being tortured she actually smiled. And the reason why she smiled was because Allah s.w.t answered her dua and allowed her to actually see her home in Jannah.
The reason why I find this particularly moving is because if Allah is with you, even your hardest struggles can become light. If you can see your home with Allah s.w.t in Jannah, no matter what you are going through in this life can become easy. And what better example of that than this woman who’s being tortured by the worst man ever to walk the earth? Yet, she was able to bear it and she even smiled because Allah s.w.t was with her and He made it easy for her. And she had a greater attachment to her home in Jannah than to her home here. And because of that, everything that she dealt with, regardless of how difficult it was, was made easy for her.
The second lesson which I think is very important is that she was married to a very tyrannical man who claimed to be the Lord yet, she was not defined by him. Although he was her husband and although that was her circumstance, she was not defined or limited by those circumstances.
Now, this is an important lesson for us because all of us will have different things in life that are thrown at us. The question is: What are we going to define our self-worth by? So, we go through society and society tells you that you are supposed to get your self-worth, if you are a woman, by the way you look usually. By how many people think you are attractive, by how thin you are. There’s different places you are supposed to get your self-worth. But that’s one of the places society teaches women to get their self-worth. As men, they are told, a lot of times to get their self-worth by status, by wealth, how powerful you are.
The point here is that our self-worth should only come from one relationship. Only one relationship. And that’s the relationship with our Creator. Our relationship with our Creator should define how we feel about ourselves and who we are.
For Asiya, that’s how it was. It was her relationship with her Creator. It wasn’t her relationship with the tyrannical person that she happened to live with or by her circumstances. In the story of Asiya is an everlasting example of a woman who chose the Hereafter over all of the glitter of this world. It is the story of a woman whose love of Allah and the home with Him was greater. It is the story of a woman whose faith inspired her to take on the greatest tyrant of all time. And to give her life in the process.
