Khadija bint Khuwaylid

Khadija bint Khuwaylid of the Asad clan of Quraysh was a wealthy merchant of Mecca in her own right — the sira literature calls her al-Tahira, the pure, already in the jahiliyya. Twice widowed, she employed the young Muhammad to lead her caravan to Syria, and — Ibn Hisham and Ibn Sa'd record — was so struck by his probity that she proposed marriage herself, through her friend Nafisa. She was then a woman of standing around forty by the most transmitted account (other early reports give twenty-eight); he was twenty-five. For twenty-five years she was his only wife.

She bore him — by the dominant account — six children: al-Qasim and Abdallah, who died in infancy, and the daughters Zaynab, Ruqayya, Umm Kulthum, and Fatima. When revelation first came in the cave of Hira and Muhammad returned trembling, saying "cover me," it was Khadija — Sahih al-Bukhari preserves the scene — who steadied him: "Never! By God, God will never disgrace you. You keep the ties of kinship, bear the burdens of the weak, earn for the destitute, honor the guest, and help against the blows of fate." She then took him to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who affirmed what had come. She was the first person to believe in his message, and she died in 619, three years before the hijra, in the year tradition names the Year of Sorrow.

Khadija's faith cost her a fortune and, by the reckoning of the sources, her life's comfort. When Quraysh imposed their boycott on the clans of Hashim and al-Muttalib, she entered the blockade in the ravine of Abu Talib with the Prophet's family, and her wealth — spent on food smuggled at exorbitant prices — sustained the besieged through nearly three years. Ibn Sa'd transmits that little of her fortune remained at her death, which followed close upon the boycott's end.

Hers was also the quieter struggle of the first believer: the years when the entire community of Islam was one household, when public preaching brought mockery and violence upon her husband, and when she — as the collections record the Prophet himself saying — "believed in me when the people disbelieved, trusted me when the people called me liar, and shared her wealth when the people withheld theirs."

Khadija transmitted no body of doctrine — she died before Islam's law took shape — but the tradition made her its archetype of faith preceding proof. The words with which she answered the trembling of Hira became, in the tradition's telling, Islam's first act of belief and its model of consolation: reasoning from a man's known character to the trustworthiness of what had come to him.

The Prophet's own testimony fixed her rank. Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim transmit that Gabriel brought her greeting from her Lord and the tidings of a house in paradise; that the Prophet named her among the perfected women alongside Maryam and Asiya; and that years after her death he would send portions of any slaughtered sheep to her friends — an ongoing loyalty Aisha's own transmitted jealousy attests: "I was never jealous of any wife of the Prophet as I was of Khadija, though I never saw her."

Khadija died before Badr, before the hijra itself, and fought in no battle; her wars were the boycott and the Meccan persecution, which she met with wealth and steadfastness rather than arms. The sira records her role as the refuge to which the Prophet returned from every public wound of the Meccan years — the counterpart, inside the house, of Abu Talib's protection outside it. Their deaths in the same year stripped him of both shields at once and precipitated the search for support beyond Mecca that led, within three years, to Medina.

Khadija is among the least disputed figures of early Islam — revered without reservation across Sunni and Shia tradition alike, and in Shia devotion especially exalted as mother of Fatima and grandmother of the Imams. The debated questions around her are scholarly rather than sectarian, and the sources themselves carry them: her age at marriage (forty in the most cited report of Ibn Sa'd; twenty-eight in others, including a report via al-Hakim — the divergence is simply preserved); the number of her sons who died in infancy (one or two, under differing names); and whether all four daughters attributed to her were daughters by birth or, as some Shia scholarship holds regarding the elder three, kin raised in her house — a position tied to later questions about Uthman's marriages. Each is a documented divergence of transmission, reported here as such.

Khadija stands at the head of every reckoning of Muslim believers: the first of them all. The tradition's honorifics — Umm al-Mu'minin, Mother of the Believers; al-Tahira — and the Prophet's transmitted grief and loyalty made her the permanent standard of the believing spouse and of wealth spent without reserve for conviction. Through Fatima she is the ancestress of the entire line of sayyids and of the Shia Imams — every descendant of the Prophet descends from her. Her ruined house in Mecca was long a place of visitation, and the year of her death is still named, in every sira, the Year of Sorrow: the tradition's own measure of what was lost.