Khadijah bint Khuwaylid

Khadijah appears in the sources first as a businesswoman. She belonged to the Quraysh, the ruling tribal confederation of Mecca, had been married before, and financed caravan trade to Syria, engaging agents to travel with the goods and take a share of the profit. Mecca's position depended on that trade, and a woman conducting it on her own account was unusual without being unheard of.

She hired Muhammad, then a young man of good family and no property, to take a caravan north. The accounts have her servant Maysara returning with a favourable report of his conduct in the dealings, and the marriage proposal following, initiated by her through an intermediary. He is generally given as about twenty five at the time. Her own age is reported as forty in the best known account, and other early reports give twenty eight, so the figure is not fixed.

The marriage lasted until her death, roughly twenty five years, and he took no other wife while she lived, which is a fact both traditions note and to which later discussion returns often. Their children included several daughters, among them Fatimah, and sons who died in infancy. Her household also included Zayd ibn Haritha, whom she had given to her husband and who was subsequently freed and adopted, and their young cousin Ali, who was brought into the house during a period of hardship in his own family.

The central episode is the aftermath of the first revelation on Mount Hira. The accounts describe Muhammad returning to the house in distress, asking to be covered, and fearing for himself. Khadijah's response, as the sira preserves it, is not a theological argument but a character reference: that God would not disgrace him, because he kept ties of kinship, bore the burdens of others, was generous to the poor and hospitable to the guest, and helped people in their troubles.

She then took him to her paternal cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, an old man who had become a Christian and knew the scriptures, and Waraqa identified what had come to him with the namus that had come to Moses, and warned him that his people would drive him out. Both Sunni and Shia tradition hold Khadijah to have been the first person to accept the message, and the disagreement between them concerns which man was first, not her.

Her material support mattered as much as her assent. When the clans of Hashim and Muttalib were placed under boycott in Mecca and could not trade or intermarry, her wealth carried the household through it. She died in about 619, in the same year as the Prophet's uncle Abu Talib, and the year is remembered in the tradition as the year of sorrow.

The sources for all of this are the biography of Ibn Ishaq as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, the campaign histories, and the later biographical dictionaries, all compiled well over a century after the events they describe. That distance applies to everything known about the period and is stated here once.