7 women in the Prophet’s life who shaped Islam

Desert sunset over a camel caravan and tents in Jaisalmer, India, showcasing serene arid landscapes.
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The early sources are full of women, and not as background. They advise, narrate, teach, fund and, in one case, decide the fate of the written Quran. Here are seven in the life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), in roughly the order they enter it.

The picture comes from the biography of the Prophet (the sira) and from the hadith, the reports of what he said and did. Both were written down by men, and both preserve the names, words and decisions of women with a frankness that a later age might have trimmed. Where a report is disputed, or a reading has been questioned, the entry says so.

Aminah bint Wahb was widowed before Muhammad was born. She took him, about six years old, to Medina to visit her husband’s relatives, and died on the way back at a place called al-Abwa, where she was buried.[1]

He lost his father before birth and his mother in childhood. The Quran addresses it later: “Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?” The same surah commands him not to oppress the orphan.[2] Muslims count his own childhood as part of why the sources are so insistent on the care of orphans. A hadith has him saying that he and the one who sponsors an orphan will be together in Paradise, and he held two fingers side by side to show how close.[3]

Years afterwards, the sources report, he visited her grave and wept, and those with him wept as well.[4] The account records the grief and makes no attempt to soften it.

Khadija bint Khuwaylid was a respected businesswoman of Mecca who hired Muhammad to manage her caravan and later proposed to him. The sources give her age at the marriage as about forty, though the accounts differ. When he came home trembling from the cave of Hira after the first revelation, she said: “You keep ties of kin, you bear the burdens of the weak, you help the poor and you support those struck by calamity. God will never humiliate you.”[5]

She was the first person to believe, and she spent her wealth on the cause. He took no other wife while she lived. She died in 619, and the year is remembered as the year of sorrow.

His love for her outlasted her. Aisha, who never knew Khadija, said she was never as jealous of another wife, because the Prophet spoke of her so often. In the same chapter of Sahih al-Bukhari, Gabriel brings her a greeting of peace from her Lord.[6] Her reassurance in the cave was the first act of faith in the message, and it came from a woman who knew him better than anyone.

Fatima was the youngest and best known of his daughters. She married Ali, and their sons were Hasan and Husayn. The Prophet said, “Fatima is a part of me.”[7] She died within months of her father.

Her place in Islamic memory is as much for character as for descent. The Prophet called her one of the leading women of Paradise.[8] In a report Aisha gave, he whispered something to Fatima during his last illness that made her weep, then whispered again and she laughed. She explained afterwards that he had first told her he would die of that illness, then that she would be the first of his family to follow him.[9]

Another report shows her ordinary life. When the work of grinding grain left her hands sore, she and Ali went to ask the Prophet for a servant, and he taught them a phrase of remembrance to say each night instead.[10] The sources do not make her an abstraction. She appears as a daughter, a wife and a mother with the same daily labour as other women of Medina.

After the treaty of Hudaybiyya, the Prophet told the Muslims to sacrifice their animals and shave their heads, and nobody moved. They were upset at the terms of the treaty. He went to his wife Umm Salama, and she advised him to go out, say nothing, sacrifice his own animal and call his barber. He did, and the Muslims followed.[11]

Scholars cite the episode as a case where a woman’s counsel resolved a crisis at the highest level.

The terms that day included the return to Mecca of any Meccan who came to the Muslims without permission, and even Umar protested. A critic could say that this was private advice from a wife at home and no public office. That is true as far as it goes. The report still shows that the Prophet took the advice in front of an army in a moment of danger, and that the sources record it openly, with the names of the men who had hesitated, and with credit to the woman who saw what to do.

Aisha bint Abu Bakr is credited with over two thousand hadith, and senior Companions came to her with questions on law. Abu Musa al-Ashari is reported to have said that whenever the Companions were unsure about a hadith, they asked Aisha and found she had knowledge of it.[12] She corrected others when she thought they had remembered the Prophet wrongly, and later scholars collected her corrections in a book of their own.[13] Her later student Urwa ibn al-Zubayr said he never saw anyone more learned in law, medicine or poetry than she was.[14]

Her life included a false accusation, answered by the Quran with ten verses clearing her name.[15] She also took part in the battle of the Camel in 656 and is reported to have regretted it. She has her own article: Questions about Aisha.

Hafsa bint Umar was a wife of the Prophet and a literate woman. A report in Abu Dawud has the Prophet asking another woman, Shifa bint Abdullah, to teach Hafsa a healing formula just as she had taught her to write.[16] After the Prophet’s death, the sheets of the Quran that Abu Bakr had had collected were kept by Umar and then, after his death, by his daughter Hafsa.[17]

When Uthman wanted to produce standard copies, he asked her for the sheets, and returned them after they were copied. The care of the written Quran passed through a woman’s hands.

Some Western historians question details of this account and argue that the text settled more gradually. Muslim scholars answer that the Quran was memorised by many Companions and recited daily in prayer, so the written sheets served as a check on a living text, and the text never depended on one woman’s keeping. The report matters for what it records about trust: the document was left with a woman who could read it.

Mariya was a Christian from Egypt who came to the Prophet in about 628 as a gift from the ruler of Egypt, and became a Muslim.[18] She gave birth to his son Ibrahim, who died as an infant. At his death the Prophet wept and said: “The eyes shed tears and the heart grieves, and we say only what pleases our Lord.”[19]

Her status needs plain statement. The classical accounts do not count her among the wives called the Mothers of the Believers, and describe her as a concubine, which is how the law of the time treated a woman given in this way. The same law made the mother of her master’s child unsaleable and free at his death. A modern reader may find the arrangement hard, and the sources do not hide it.

On the day Ibrahim died there was an eclipse of the sun, and people said it marked his death. The Prophet corrected them: the sun and moon are signs of God and do not eclipse for the death of anyone.[20] He refused a miracle in the middle of his own grief.

The bottom line

The seven women differ in rank, age and station, and the sources treat each as a person with a voice. Khadija believed first, Umm Salama gave advice that ended a crisis, Aisha taught the Companions, and Hafsa kept the sheets of the Quran. The reports give them these roles in the Prophet’s own lifetime and in the generation after him.

A careful reader should note the limits. The sources were compiled by men, they concentrate on women close to the Prophet, and they say little about ordinary women. They also record hard facts, such as the status of Mariya. The evidence supports a narrower claim than perfect equality: women in the early community advised, taught and transmitted, and the sources credit them by name.

Notes

  1. Ibn Ishaq, Sira, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham.
  2. Quran 93:6; 93:9.
  3. Sahih al-Bukhari 6005 (Book of Good Manners, the chapter on the merit of one who sponsors an orphan), the report of Sahl ibn Sad. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 10, p. 436 (Shamela text).
  4. Sahih Muslim, Book of Funerals, the hadith on visiting the grave of his mother. Sahih Muslim 976b (Book of Funerals, chapter “The Prophet asked his Lord for permission to visit his mother’s grave”), report of Abu Hurayra, in which he wept and moved those around him to tears; 976a gives the permission to visit. Checked on sunnah.com.
  5. Sahih al-Bukhari 3 (Book of the Beginning of Revelation), the report of Aisha through Urwa ibn al-Zubayr. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 1, p. 22 (Shamela text).
  6. Sahih al-Bukhari 3817 and 3818 (Aisha on her jealousy of Khadija) and 3820 (Abu Hurayra on the greeting of peace from her Lord), in the chapter on the Prophet’s marriage to Khadija. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 7, p. 133 (Shamela text).
  7. Sahih al-Bukhari 3714, the report of al-Miswar ibn Makhrama. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 7, p. 78 (Shamela text).
  8. The chapter heading in Sahih al-Bukhari on the merits of the Prophet’s relatives and of Fatima, which gives “Fatima is the leader of the women of Paradise” as a report the author connects in a separate chapter (Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 7, pp. 77–78, Shamela text); also al-Tirmidhi.
  9. Sahih al-Bukhari 3623 and 3715, the report of Aisha. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 6, p. 627 and vol. 7, p. 78 (Shamela text).
  10. Sahih al-Bukhari 3113, the report of Ali on Fatima and the grinding stone. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 6, p. 215 (Shamela text).
  11. Sahih al-Bukhari 2731 and 2732, the conditions of Hudaybiyya and the advice of Umm Salama. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 5, p. 329 (Shamela text).
  12. Al-Tirmidhi, the chapter on the merits of Aisha. Jami al-Tirmidhi 3883 (Chapters on Virtues, the virtue of Aisha), report of Abu Musa al-Ashari, graded hasan (Darussalam), checked on sunnah.com.
  13. Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi, al-Ijaba li-irad ma istadrakat-hu Aisha ala al-Sahaba.
  14. Reported of Urwa ibn al-Zubayr in the biographical dictionaries, for example al-Dhahabi, Siyar a’lam al-nubala’.
  15. Quran 24:11–20.
  16. Abu Dawud, Book of Medicine, the report of Shifa bint Abdullah. Sunan Abi Dawud 3887 (Book of Medicine, chapter on ruqya), report of al-Shifa bint Abdullah, graded sahih by al-Albani, checked on sunnah.com.
  17. Sahih al-Bukhari 4986, the report of Zayd ibn Thabit on the collection of the Quran. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 9, p. 10 (Shamela text).
  18. Ibn Sad, al-Tabaqat al-kubra, the entry on Mariya.
  19. Sahih al-Bukhari 1303, the report of Anas ibn Malik on the death of Ibrahim. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 3, p. 172 (Shamela text).
  20. Sahih al-Bukhari 1043, the report of al-Mughira ibn Shuba on the eclipse. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 2, p. 526 (Shamela text).