Was Ḥaḍrat Fāṭimah (A.S.) above the Imām and Prophet?
The Position
I want to examine this question from a Shii perspective. First of all, in the hierarchy of Zaydi Shiism, the hierarchy goes as follows: Angels > Prophets > Saints > Imams. Unlike the Twelvers and Ismailis, Zaydi imams do not have an esoteric and cosmological role in theology. Ismailis clearly assert that no human is above the angels, but the spiritual station of the prophets and imams are so lofty that they may occupy a position above the angels.
Šayḵ Mufīd’s Awa'il Al Maqalat cited three types of opinions on the supremacy of the imams juxtaposed to that of the prophets:
1. With exception to the Seal of the Prophets, Muḥammad (S.A.), the Imams are greater.
2. Imams are greater than messenger-prophets and regular prophets, but beneath the arch-prophets (a.k.a. ʾŪlūʾl-ʿAzm).
3. All prophets are greater than the imams.
The Ismailis, on this matter, do not have a consensus. Twelver consensus varied depending on whether one is an Akhbari or an Usuli. One of the most common Ismaili positions, both Mustaali and Nizari, is that the imams are greater or equal to regular prophets, owing to that figures like Hārūn (Aaron) was both a regular prophet and an imam of Moses (S.A.). But many texts would also elevate the imami station above the prophetic one. My personal view is that these are all truths, but truths can change with time and situation.
Interestingly enough, Ayatollah Khomeini considered Fāṭimah (A.S.) to be greater than all of the regular prophets despite having no prophetic status herself.
Fāṭimah
There is no one term for the occupation of Maryam (A.S.) or Fāṭimah’s (A.S.) role in Islam. They are given titles, attributes, but their actual position is never clear. Mustaali Ismaili writers gave them a specific term for their relationship with the arch-prophet and imam respective of their times: ʾaṣl. They are the foundation in which the prophet is established and are the linkage between the prophet and imam.
To understand Fāṭimah (A.S.) better, we must look at what various sources say about her.
The light of Fāṭimah was created before the creation of the Heavens and the Earth.
Mohammad Baqer Majlesi (d. 1699 A.D.) on a prophetic account:
When God created Paradise, They (I use ‘They’ instead of ‘He’) it from the light of Their Face, then They took that light and cast it. A third of the light touched me, a third touched Fāṭimah, and a third touched ʿAlī and his household…
It was quite common in Twelver narrations and even in the ʾUmm ʾal-Kitāb for Fāṭimah’s (A.S.) soul to be created before Adam, the first man, right after her father the Prophet Muḥammad (S.A.), even before her husband ʿAlī (A.S.). Her illumination in Shii sources is described as equal to that of the Moon and the Stars—the way her face lit the world as the full moon does, and her radiance unfurl from the firmament as the stars—brilliant, but underestimated in their greatness due to their distance and unattainability.
In the ʾUmm ʾal-Kitāb, she is no longer just ʾaz-Zahrāʾ (“the Radiant”), but explicitly entitled as ʾal-Fāṭirah (“the Creator/Originator”). Out of the five spirits (hearing, sight, smelling, speaking, taste), she is equally important as represented by the olfactory spirit.
ʿAbd ʾAllāh ʾaṣ-Ṣabbāḥ, receiving the visions of the ʾAhl ʾal-Bayt, saw the Prophet Muḥammad (S.A.) in godly essence, perfect and without attributes. He beheld ʿAlī (A.S.) as the being of glory that all created things praise. He witnessed Fāṭimah (A.S.) as the Creator/Originator of All. Ḥasan (A.S.) is the beautiful attributes of God, and Ḥusayn the saviour and deliverer who represent the totality of the ʾAhl ʾal-Bayt. From the light of Fāṭimah (A.S.) is a lion, and the face of the Soul of Souls is Fāṭimah (A.S.).
The five organs are the temperament of infinity of Muḥammad. The divine breath is ʿAlī. The image of the creator is Fāṭimah. The brightness of the Sun is Ḥasan. The divine reunion is Ḥusayn.
On Fāṭimah (A.S.):
There is no God beside me, neither in divinity nor humanity, neither in the Heavens nor on Earth, outside of me, who am Fāṭimah the Creator, it is I who created the spirit of the True Believers.
Twelver and Ismaili theologies are firmly apophatic, albeit in Ismailism it is elevated another level. God’s attributes cannot be described, be contained, be envisioned, so the Imamate is the cataphatic presentation of God’s attributes. This makes Fāṭimah (A.S.) impossible to grasp, for her being the representation of the Creator limits us from envisioning her at all. The Imam united the exoteric manifestation of God’s commands through the Prophet with the esoteric function of the Imamate, but esotericism ultimately takes supremacy over the exoteric, despite both being inseparable from the deen. Fāṭimah (A.S.) in this case is the esoteric of the esoteric. She and Maryam (A.S.) do not teach us, the believers, for that is the function of the prophethood and the Imamate; on the other hand, it is they who teach the Prophet and the Imam directly from God. The holy women of Shia Islam are talked not as often but still in the highest terms, for a shroud of mystery has unfurled around them, rendering us speechless about who they are.
Creativeness is not just limited to the Shiite traditions. ʾIbn ʿArabī and Rūmī prescribed the Maker (Ḵāliqah)—a attribute not given to any creation typically, but only God—to women. Ḥasan ʾal-Baṣrī, upon meeting Rābiʿah ʾal-ʿAdawiyyah, saw neither male or female in her—she had transcended both. Sufis talked and contemplates heavily on the beauty and feminine attributes of God, but in such a patriarchal and puritanical society, seeked male lovers with feminine attributes to realise that divinity. God’s two greatest attributes in Islam: Raḥmān and Raḥīm, are etymologically tied to motherhood.
The patriarchy also impact Ismaili views. The Universal Soul, which is grammatically feminine and represent the Ḥujjah (or “Proof”), second in command in the Imamate, is imperfect and feminine; it needs to seek the Universal Intellect. Though both are integral to one another, assigning femininity to the Universal Soul has denigrated the supremacy of the Divine Feminine. I cannot argue for conflating the Ḥujjah with the Universal Soul.
But Ḥasan ʾal-ʿAskarī, eleventh of the Twelver imams, broke this silence:
We are the Ḥujjah of God upon Creation. But our grandmother, Fāṭimah, is the Ḥujjah of God over us.
Scholar Henry Corbin saw that Fāṭimah’s (A.S.) role transcended majesty and beauty, exoteric and esoteric, temporal and eternal. It is her who bore those to the world in the first place, for she is the repository of divinity.
O Muḥammad! if it were not for you, I would not have created the stars. [And] if it were not for ʿAlī, I would not have created you. [And] if it were not for Fāṭimah, I would not have created either of you.
He who truly understands the Night of Power, then he has truly understood Fāṭimah. Yet she is named Fāṭimah (lit. “abstained, weaned”) because Creation has been weaned from knowing her.
'Abd al-Hakeem Carney asserted: “…she is not associated with any Sophia like figure. There is not really an analogy to Sophia as a Bride of God or as an archetype of divine wisdom in Islam. What we have instead is a feminine figure who is seen, above all else, as a creatrix and a manifestation of the Divine to the remaining members of the spiritual hierarchy.”
It is something after all, the great 19th Century Bengali mystic Shri Ramakrishna, after three symbolic days of immersing in Islam (like the three lights that Our Lady Ḥaḍrat Fāṭimah emitted with each of her three daily prayers), he saw the God manifest in Islam as another emanation of the supreme reality of the unmanifest and apophatic Divine Mother Kālī.


















