a herald to announce, “Let no one accompany her unless he is a mahram.”
Bint ʿUmays said, “Commander of the Believers, shall I not show you something I saw the Abyssinians do for their women?”
She fashioned a bier and draped it with a cloth. ʿUmar exclaimed, “How excellent this is—how completely it preserves modesty!”
He then told a herald to call out, “Go forth to your mother.”
It was narrated by ʿĀrim; Hammad related to us, from Ayyub. (1)
She was the one about whom the Prophet ﷺ used to say, “The quickest of you to catch up with me will be the one with the longest hand.” By “longest hand” he intended the greatest reach in charitable giving.
ʿĀʾishah said, “So we would all stretch out our arms to see whose hand was longest.” Zaynab would earn with her own hands and spend in charity.
This ḥadīth is recorded by Muslim. (2)
It is also related from ʿĀʾishah that she said, “Zaynab bint Jahsh used to rival me for standing with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; I never saw a woman better in religion than Zaynab, or more God-fearing…"
(1) Sound chain of transmission. Also recorded in Ibn Saʿd, al-Tabaqat, vol. 8, p. 111, although Ibn ʿUmar is omitted from the isnad there; the present version restores him.
(2) No. 2453 in Fadaʾil al-Sahaba, chapter “Merits of Zaynab, Mother of the Believers,” transmitted through ʿAʾisha bint Talha from ʿAʾisha: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “The first of you to follow me will be the one whose arm is the longest.” ʿAʾisha adds: “So the wives began stretching their arms to see which of us was the longest.” She concludes: “The longest-armed among us was Zaynab, for she used to work with her hands and give much in charity.”
Al-Bukhari (3/226) narrates, again from ʿAʾisha, that some of the Prophet’s wives asked him, “Which of us will join you first?” He replied, “The one whose arm is the longest.” They then measured a cane, and found that Sawdaʾ’s arm was the longest. Only later did they realise that ‘long arm’ meant generosity in almsgiving; Sawdaʾ was indeed the first of them to die after him, and she loved giving charity. Ibn al-Jawzi judged this report defective, wondering how al-Bukhari, his abridgers, and even al-Khattabi failed to point it out; al-Khattabi even took Sawdaʾ’s early death as a prophetic sign.
All of this, however, is a mistake: the hadith truly concerns Zaynab, whose “long arm” was her abundant charity, as Muslim relates on the authority of ʿAʾisha.