Umm Awf, wife of Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali

Umm Awf was the wife of Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali; Kahhala in A'lam al-Nisa' counts her among the women of eloquence and tells of her dispute with her husband before Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. ^{1 2}

She came before Mu'awiya while the notables of the Arabs sat with him, opened with greetings and prayers for him, and said that a matter in which every way had grown narrow for her had driven her to him; she asked him to give her justice against her adversary, and when he asked who that was she said, "Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali." ²

Abu al-Aswad said she spoke part of the truth: he had divorced her not for any suspicion but because he disliked her ways, and he went on to describe her as noisy and quick to spread ill. She answered that it did not become a free woman to revile a husband, but when Mu'awiya pressed her to reply she described him as miserly and cowardly in a flood of rhymed prose; Mu'awiya marvelled at her rhyme, and Abu al-Aswad said, "She is a divorced woman — and who talks more than a divorced woman?" ^{2 3}

Mu'awiya told her to come back in the evening for judgement. She came holding her son, and Abu al-Aswad rose to take him, saying, "I carried him before she carried him, and set him down before she set him down." She said: "He is right — he carried him light, and I carried him heavy; he set him down in desire, and I set him down in pain; my womb was his vessel, my breast his drink, my lap his courtyard." Mu'awiya told Abu al-Aswad she had beaten him in speech. ³ In Kahhala's account the story ends with Mu'awiya awarding her the child. ³