The Merchant Who Proposed
Khadījah bint Khuwaylid of the clan of Asad was a widow twice over, wealthy in her own right, and running a trading business that hired men to carry her goods. The Quraysh called her al-Ṭāhirah, the pure. Hearing of the young Muḥammad's ﷺ reputation for honesty, she engaged him to take a caravan to Syria with her servant Maysarah, and the venture returned an unusual profit and an unusual report about the man who had led it.1
It was she who proposed the marriage, sending her friend Nafīsah bint Munyah to sound him out. He was about twenty-five; she is most widely reported as forty, though other early reports give twenty-eight. For the twenty-five years of their marriage, until her death, he took no other wife.12
She bore him six children: al-Qāsim and ʿAbdullāh, who died in infancy, and four daughters — Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthūm, and Fāṭimah.2
The First to Believe
When he came down from Ḥirāʾ shaking and saying “cover me, cover me,” it was Khadījah he came to. She covered him, listened, and answered before he had finished doubting himself: “No, by God, God will never disgrace you. You maintain the ties of kinship, you bear the burden of the weak, you help the destitute, you honour the guest, and you aid those stricken by calamity.” Then she took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, who had studied the earlier scriptures, and Waraqah told him that what had come to him was the same nāmūs that had come to Mūsā.3
She was the first human being to accept Islam — before Abū Bakr, before ʿAlī, before Zayd. For the ten years that followed she spent her fortune on a persecuted community until it was gone, and endured with him the three-year boycott in the ravine of Abū Ṭālib, which broke her health.14
Jibrīl came to the Prophet ﷺ with a message for her: “Give Khadījah greetings of peace from her Lord,” and glad tidings of “a house in Paradise of hollowed pearl, in which there is no clamour and no fatigue.”5
After Her
She died in the tenth year of the mission, shortly after Abū Ṭālib, in what the sīrah calls the Year of Sorrow. He was about fifty, and left without both his protector and his wife in the same season.4
He did not stop speaking about her. ʿĀʾishah, who never met her, said, “I was never jealous of any of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ as I was jealous of Khadījah, because of how often he would mention her.” He would slaughter a sheep and send portions to her friends; when her sister Hālah once asked permission to enter and he recognised the voice, he was visibly moved.6
Once ʿĀʾishah pressed the point — that Khadījah was only an old woman, and God had given him better. His answer is preserved: “No, by God, God has not given me better than her. She believed in me when the people disbelieved me; she declared me truthful when the people called me a liar; she shared her wealth with me when the people withheld from me; and God granted me children by her and by no other.”7