The Daughter in Makkah
Fāṭimah was the youngest of the Prophet's ﷺ four daughters and the only one whose descendants survived him. She grew up through the worst of the Makkan persecution, and the sīrah preserves her in it as a child confronting grown men: when Abū Jahl's associates threw the entrails of a slaughtered camel onto her father's back while he prostrated at the Kaʿbah, it was Fāṭimah who came and pulled the filth off him, weeping and cursing them, while he continued his prayer.1
She lost her mother Khadījah at about fifteen, in the Year of Sorrow, and the classical biographers note that from then she kept house for her father.2
The Household of ʿAlī
She married ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib in Madīnah in the second year after the Hijrah. The marriage settlement was raised by ʿAlī selling his shield, and the household goods, as the sources list them, were a sheepskin, a leather cushion stuffed with palm fibre, a hand-mill, a waterskin, and two jars.3
The best-attested scene of their married life is a request refused. Worn out from grinding grain and carrying water, Fāṭimah went to ask her father for a servant from among the captives. She did not find him and left the message with ʿĀʾishah. He came to them that night after they had gone to bed, sat between them, and said: “Shall I not tell you of something better than what you asked for? When you go to your beds, say 'Subḥān Allāh' thirty-three times, 'al-ḥamdu lillāh' thirty-three times, and 'Allāhu akbar' thirty-four times — that is better for you than a servant.”4
She bore al-Ḥasan, al-Ḥusayn, Zaynab, and Umm Kulthūm. Every descendant of the Prophet ﷺ traces through her.2
“A Part of Me”
The Prophet's ﷺ statements about her are unusually strong. “Fāṭimah is a part of me; whoever angers her angers me.”5 ʿĀʾishah said she never saw anyone more like the Messenger of God ﷺ in manner, character, and way of speaking; when Fāṭimah came in he would stand for her, take her hand, kiss her, and seat her where he was sitting — and she would do the same when he came to her.6
In his final illness he called her and whispered something, and she wept; then whispered again, and she laughed. Asked afterwards by ʿĀʾishah what had been said, she would not tell while he lived. After his death she explained: he had told her first that the angel had been reviewing the Qur'an with him twice that year and he did not think but that his time had come — so she wept. Then he told her she would be the first of his family to follow him, and that she was “the mistress of the women of this community” — so she laughed.7
She died six months after her father, at about twenty-seven, and was buried at night at her own request. Her son al-Ḥusayn was killed at Karbalāʾ half a century later; through al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn her line continues.28