Rufayda's tent for the wounded

Rufayda al-Ansariyya al-Aslamiyya kept a tent in the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. There she treated the wounded and devoted herself to caring for Muslims in need. When Sa'd ibn Mu'adh was wounded at the Battle of the Trench, the Prophet had him placed in her tent so that he could visit him close by ². The TDV Encyclopedia of Islam calls it the first bimaristan (hospital) in Islam, a mobile war hospital. Al-Maqrizi, however, gives the first hospital in Islam to al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik ³.

It is a place for treating and caring for the wounded, not a machine or a tool. As the sources describe it, it had three parts:

• A tent known by its keeper's name, pitched in the mosque itself, at the heart of the town.
• A woman who gave her time to treating the wounded and to serving those in need.
• A wounded man carried there from the field, who stayed close by and was visited morning and evening.

²

The TDV encyclopedia explains that "bimaristan" is a Persian word: "bimar" means a sick person, and the suffix "-stan" means a place. It notes that the hospital and medical school of Jundishapur in Iran were known by this name. Al-Harith ibn Kalada, a well-known physician of the Prophet's time, studied there, so the Arabs knew the word early ⁴.

The encyclopedia dates the Jundishapur school to about 260 CE and its hospital to about 350 CE. It says the school was at its height under Khusraw Anushirvan, the years in which the Prophet was born. It was not, however, an Islamic institution ³.

In the year 5 AH the Confederates besieged Medina. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, chief of the Aws, was struck by an arrow at the Trench ¹. Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Hajar quotes it, says the Prophet told them: "Put him in Rufayda's tent in the mosque, so that I can visit him close by." He describes Rufayda as a woman who treated the wounded and gave herself, for the sake of God, to serving any Muslim who was in need ².

Al-Bukhari gives the same report by another chain in al-Adab al-Mufrad, from Mahmud ibn Labid. When the vein in Sa'd's arm was struck at the Trench, they moved him to a woman called Rufayda, who treated the wounded. When the Prophet passed by him in the evening he asked, "How are you this evening?", and in the morning, "How are you this morning?", and Sa'd would tell him ². Ibn Hajar adds that al-Bukhari also gives it in his Tarikh, in the account of Sa'd's death, and that its chain is sound ⁵.

Sa'd lived a month after he was wounded, long enough to give judgement on the Banu Qurayza. Then his wound reopened and he died, in the year 5 ¹.

Rufayda al-Ansariyya, also called al-Aslamiyya, was a Companion. Ibn Hajar gives her an entry, number 11222, in the women's section of al-Isaba ². The tent was hers and she was the one who treated the wounded in it. That is why she is recorded here as the maker, in the sense of the keeper of the place and the one who ran it.

The TDV encyclopedia says that the Prophet set up the first bimaristan in her tent, for Sa'd and the other wounded ³. The two sources agree on the facts: the tent was hers, and the order to move Sa'd there was the Prophet's.

The idea rests on nearness. A wounded man is carried from the battlefield to the mosque and laid in a tent kept by a woman who knows how to treat wounds. He stays at the centre of the town, and the Prophet visits him whenever he passes, morning and evening ².

The sources read for this record do not name the tools or remedies Rufayda used, or say how many people were treated in her tent. The diagram on this page shows the path from the Trench to the tent as the report tells it, and nothing more.

The sources read for this record do not trace the idea from this tent to any other. The TDV encyclopedia says that bimaristans began to be built under the Umayyads and had their first golden age under the Abbasids ³.

The sources do not say that Rufayda learned her work from anyone. The TDV encyclopedia places the Jundishapur hospital in the background of the history of bimaristans and notes that al-Harith ibn Kalada studied there. It does not link it to Rufayda's tent ⁴.

After the tent, the TDV encyclopedia lists larger and more lasting institutions:

• Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik's hospital, 88 AH / 707 CE. Al-Maqrizi reports in his Khitat that al-Walid appointed physicians there on salaries, ordered lepers to be kept apart, and gave allowances to lepers and the blind ³.
• Harun al-Rashid's bimaristan in Baghdad. It was modelled on Jundishapur and became a model for later hospitals in Baghdad and elsewhere ³.
• The mobile bimaristan. The Abbasid vizier Ali ibn Isa sent a mobile hospital with physicians to the villages of the Sawad of Iraq, where it treated Muslims and non-Muslims. The encyclopedia therefore divides the bimaristans of that age into mobile and fixed ones ³.

The encyclopedia does not show that any of these was copied directly from Rufayda's tent.

The wounded now had a known place to be carried to and a woman who gave her time to their care. The place was in the mosque itself, close to people, where a patient was visited every morning and evening ².

The TDV encyclopedia opens its history of bimaristans in Islam with this tent. It then moves on to the hospitals of the Umayyads and Abbasids and to the darussifas of the Seljuks and Ottomans ³. For many writers, the tent has become the starting point from which this history is told.

The facts are not in dispute. The tent was Rufayda's, it stood in the mosque, she treated the wounded in it, and Sa'd ibn Mu'adh was placed there after the Trench ⁶. The disagreement is about the name and about who came first:

• Ibn Hajar in al-Isaba, a Sunni source, describes the tent and Rufayda's work. He does not call it a hospital or say it was the first ².
• Al-Maqrizi, a Sunni historian, gives the first hospital in Islam to al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik in 88 AH. For him, "first" means a permanent institution with salaried physicians ³.
• The TDV encyclopedia, an academic reference, says the first bimaristan in Islam was set up by the Prophet as a mobile war hospital in Rufayda's tent. It relies on Ibn Hisham and on Ahmad Isa's history of bimaristans. It then quotes al-Maqrizi and does not reconcile the two ³.

If a hospital is a known place for treating the wounded, with someone to run it, Rufayda's tent comes first. If it must be a permanent building with salaried physicians, al-Walid comes first. The museum does not choose between them.

The tent itself did not survive. What it did now has another name: the TDV encyclopedia notes that the Arab world today uses the word "mustashfa" (hospital), after bimaristan, dar al-shifa and dar al-sihha in turn ⁴.

Nothing physical remains of the tent. What remains is the report itself, in books on the Companions and on hadith, such as Ibn Hajar's al-Isaba and al-Bukhari's al-Adab al-Mufrad as Ibn Hajar quotes it ².

The mosque where it stood still stands. The picture on this page shows it in 1908, from the book "Mir'at al-Haramayn" ⁷.

The sources read for this record give the tent no place in literature, art or popular culture. Anything a source confirms will be added ².

In Medina, about fourteen hundred years ago, a woman named Rufayda set up a tent in the mosque. There she treated people who were hurt and looked after them.

When Sa'd ibn Mu'adh was wounded in battle, he was carried to her tent. The Prophet passed by every morning and every evening and asked him: how are you? ²

• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Isaba fi tamyiz al-sahaba, al-Maktaba al-Asriyya, one-volume edition, p. 566 (Sa'd ibn Mu'adh) and pp. 1871–1872 (Rufayda, no. 11222). ⁶
• TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, "BÎMÂRİSTAN", online edition. ³
• Wikimedia Commons, photograph of the Prophet's Mosque in 1908 from "Mir'at al-Haramayn". ⁷