Khawla bint Thalaba was an ordinary woman of Medina during the time of Muhammad. Khawla’s only claim to fame is that she enters the Quran as “the woman who argued.”

The Quran’s 58th chapter, whose traditional name, “al-Mujadila,”may be translated as “She Who Argues,” begins:
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Khawla was married to a crotchety old man, Aws, whom she loved, and who apparently loved her.

In one ornery moment, Aws blurted a pre-Islamic oath that he henceforth would not have sex with her. This particular oath had the unattractive name, “the backside” oath.
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Or, in Arabic, zihar. He swore, that is, that she would henceforth be to him as his mother’s backside.

This oath left the couple in an unhappy predicament, having neither a proper divorce, nor a proper marriage.
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It took only a few minutes for both to realize that neither he nor she wanted to end the marriage.

Yet zihar, like any oath, particularly to seventh-century Arabs who had an oral culture and lived and died by the word, was irreversible: no take-backs.
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Khawla beelines it to the Prophet Muhammad, finds him at the hut of his wife Aisha, and explains it all to him.

Stumped, Muhammad sees no way out of the oath, except divorce, which Khawla & Aws both don’t want. Khawla is dismayed.

Ibn Sa’d reports that she says:
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The Prophet is sympathetic, but at a loss, seeing nothing in the new faith to countenance breaking the oath, a dangerous precedent, even if this ancient and obscure Arab oath was unfair.

He reaches the limit of the action he feels authorized to take. He is stuck.
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Khawla refuses to live in a dead-end. Let me repeat: she refuses the Prophet’s answer and disputes it again and again.

Finally, going over his head, she prays:
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She demands a juster answer. She goes on:
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This is the “complaint unto God” to which the opening verse of this Quranic chapter refers.

At that, Aisha says:
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(It is through Aisha’s narration that the chronicler has the entire story at all, by the way. Aisha is a tireless narrator of hadith, the sayings of Muhammad.)
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Tied to the railroad tracks of the predicament is where we left Khawla’s husband Aws, with Khawla battling the bonds heroically to save him, demanding a more just answer.

Suddenly, the Prophet goes into a state of inspiration, trance-like.
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These states are variously described. Often, for example, the sweat beads on his forehead.

When he returns from this state, Muhammad utters the opening verses of what will become this sura (chapter) of the Quran, which will come to be called “She Who Argues.”
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Non-Muslims, and Muslim skeptics, may find the issue of Muhammad’s inspiration to be convenient, may find this responsiveness of the Quran to human dramas around the Prophet to be rather rolled out on cue.
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For believers, this itself is a comfort, bringing a dialogic quality into the Quran, making it a text interacting with individuals & communities. It is for believers, if I may put it this way, as if God cared enough to send his Book to live among humans on earth for 23 years.
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Here is the whole cluster of Quranic ayas* (verses) that open up the zihar impasse, following up on the first verse cited above:

*roughly translated into English
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Nonetheless, that did not solve Khawla’s problem.

Aws should free an enslaved person? She counters, “He’s poor. No way can he afford to manumit an enslaved person.”

Okay, says the Prophet, then use the more affordable substitute: he should feed sixty poor people.
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“He can’t afford that either,” Khawla rejoins. “He’s poor, I tell you!”

Here, the Prophet suggests that Aws use the bargain-basement, cheapest, on-sale, 70% off, substitute: he should fast for two months.

“He’s too feeble to fast sixty days!” Khawla retorts.
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Finally, the Prophet chips in thirty meals’ worth, and Khawla chips in the other half, and the two of them, finagling together, get the poor guy off the hook.
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Khawla did for him what the heroine Draupadi did for the Pandava brothers in the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharata: saved him from the law, by disputing the law, and appealing to a higher dharma, higher law, to Justice itself.
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The term mujadila, “she who argues,” the traditionally ascribed name of the sura, comes from the verb jadala, which means to “coil” or “braid.”

Many Quranic Arabic words have very tangible ancient meanings, then acquire more abstract meanings as Arabic develops.
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The verb jadala means “maneuvering left and right,” as one does in braiding hair; later it came to mean “to debate.”

In medieval Islamic discourse, jadal came to mean dialectics (debating theology), a method used in the field of classical theology.
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There is one last bit of that story that Ibn Sa’d’s chronicle records about Khawla.

Years pass. The Prophet Muhammad is long gone; Omar is the caliph.

Omar is walking one day when an elderly woman addresses him unceremoniously by calling out, “Hey there, you, Omar!”
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Having got the attention of the head of state and raised the ire of the man walking next to him, she goes on:

"I knew you when you were little Omar [a diminutive form of his name, used for children], running about the Ukaz Market steering your sheep with a stick."
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"The days barely passed, and you started to be called Omar. And the days barely passed, and you started to be called Commander of the Faithful.

So you’d better revere God with your flock. And know that whoso fears the Promised Day, people draw near to him from far away."
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The man walking with Omar waves her away. Omar intervenes in this attempted dismissal, saying:
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Already, in this footnote to the story, Khawla is almost obscure, recognized only by Omar. Yet she does not look on his authority as the highest.

Instead, she reminds him that he was once small, and that higher justice awaits him no matter how big he has grown.

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FOOTNOTES:
–Ibn Sa’d, Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, Volume 8 (Beirut: Dar Sader, 1957), 378–380.
–‘Umar Rida Kahhala, A’lam al-Nisa 10th Edition (Beirut, 1991), 382–384.
–Ibn Sa’d, Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, Volume 8 (Beirut: Dar Sader, 1957), 378–380.
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FOOTNOTES:
–Ibn ‘Abd al-Birr (Abu ‘Umar Yusuf bin ‘Abdullah al-Nimri al-Qurtubi), Al-Isti’ab fi Ma’rifat al-Ashab, ed. Ali Muhammad al-Bakhawi, 4th volume (Cairo: Nahdat Misr, 1969), 1831.
–She Who Argues: A Homily on Justice and Renewal, Mohja Kahf
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