Khadīja bint Khuwaylid
The first of all people to believe in the Prophet ﷺ, his first wife, and mother of all his children but Ibrāhīm. He took no other wife while she lived, and spoke of her long after she died.
In brief
- Her name
- Khadīja bint Khuwaylid ibn Asad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿUzzā ibn Quṣayy, of Banū Asad of Quraysh; her lineage meets the Prophet’s at Quṣayy.
- Her title
- Al-Ṭāhira, the pure, even before Islam — and named by the Prophet ﷺ among the best women of the worlds, with Mary, Fāṭima, and Āsiya.
- Her marriage
- She married the Prophet ﷺ when he was twenty-five and she forty; they lived twenty-five years together.
- Her children by him
- Al-Qāsim · ʿAbdullāh · Zaynab · Ruqayya · Umm Kulthūm · Fāṭima.
- Her death
- In Mecca, in the Year of Sorrow, three years before the migration, aged about sixty-five.
- Her glad tidings
- Gabriel brought her greetings from her Lord and the news of a house in Paradise of hollowed pearl, with no clamour and no weariness. (Bukhārī and Muslim)
His story
She was a merchant of standing and wealth who hired men to trade on her behalf. What reached her of the Prophet’s honesty and trustworthiness drew her to him, and she offered him marriage.
When revelation first came and he returned with his heart trembling, saying “wrap me up,” she said the words that have been remembered ever since: “Never — by God, God will never disgrace you. You keep the ties of kinship, you carry the burdened, you give to the destitute, you honour the guest, and you help against the calamities of truth.” Then she took him to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal.
She believed him when people called him a liar, supported him with her wealth when they cut him off, and endured the siege of the ravine with him. He said: “She believed in me when people disbelieved, affirmed me when they denied me, supported me with her wealth when they deprived me, and God granted me her children when He withheld the children of other women.”