The Emigrant Twice Over
Hind bint Abī Umayyah, called Umm Salamah, was of the Makhzūm clan and was married to Abū Salamah, one of the earliest converts. The two emigrated to Abyssinia and returned, and then set out for Madīnah — where her own clan seized her, took her son from her husband by force, and separated the family three ways. She sat in the valley of Abṭaḥ weeping every morning for a year until a relative shamed her clan into letting her go, and she travelled to Madīnah with her child and a single escort.1
Abū Salamah was wounded at Uḥud and died of it. She had learned from him a supplication the Prophet ﷺ taught for affliction — “O God, reward me in my affliction and give me something better than it in exchange” — and she reported afterwards that she said it while thinking privately that no one could be better than Abū Salamah. She was then married to the Prophet ﷺ.2
The Counsel at Ḥudaybiyyah
She was with the Prophet ﷺ on the expedition to Ḥudaybiyyah, and she is the reason it did not end in disaster. When the treaty was concluded on terms the Muslims found humiliating — turned back from the pilgrimage, obliged to return anyone who came to them from Quraysh — the Prophet ﷺ told his companions to rise, sacrifice their animals, and shave their heads. “By God, not one of them stood.” He repeated it three times and not a man moved.3
He went into her tent and told her what had happened. Her advice was not to command them again: “O Prophet of God, do you want that? Go out, then do not speak a word to any of them until you have sacrificed your camel and called your barber to shave you.”3
He went out, spoke to no one, sacrificed, and called his barber. “When they saw that, they rose and sacrificed, and began shaving one another's heads until they were nearly killing one another in their grief.” The moment is cited by later scholars as the clearest instance in the sīrah of a leader taking a subordinate's counsel over his own instruction — and of a woman's judgement altering the course of a treaty that the Qur'an would call a clear victory.34
The Long Life After
She was among the most learned of the wives and transmitted 378 ḥadīth. It was she who narrated Jaʿfar's speech before the Negus in Abyssinia, preserving one of the earliest summaries of Islam ever given to a foreign ruler.5
She reported the verse of purification being revealed concerning the household, and the Prophet ﷺ gathering ʿAlī, Fāṭimah, al-Ḥasan, and al-Ḥusayn under a cloak — an episode transmitted through her that both Sunni and Shīʿī tradition preserve.6
She outlived every other wife of the Prophet ﷺ, dying in Madīnah at around eighty-four in 680 — long enough to receive the news of the killing of al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ, the grandson she had held.7