The Choice
Zayd was a boy of the Kalb tribe, taken in a raid while travelling with his mother and sold at the fair of ʿUkāẓ. He came into the household of Khadījah, who gave him to the Prophet ﷺ. His father and uncle searched for him for years, heard at last where he was, and came to Makkah with ransom money to buy him back.1
The Prophet ﷺ offered a different arrangement: call the boy, let him choose, and if he chooses you take him without ransom. Zayd was called and recognised his father at once. Then he was asked, and he answered: “I would not choose any man over you. You are to me as my father and my uncle.” His father said, “Woe to you, Zayd! Do you choose slavery over your father and your family?” He said, “Yes — I have seen something from this man that means I will never choose anyone over him.”1
The Prophet ﷺ took him out to the Ḥijr, and announced before Quraysh that Zayd was his son, inheriting from him and he from Zayd. His father and uncle went home satisfied. From that day the Makkans called him Zayd ibn Muḥammad, until the Qur'an later forbade attributing adopted sons to other than their own fathers — and the community began calling him Zayd ibn Ḥārithah again.12
Named in the Book
Zayd was among the first four or five people on earth to accept Islam. He was with the Prophet ﷺ at Ṭāʾif, taking blows meant for him; he emigrated to Madīnah; and he was given command of expeditions repeatedly — more often than any other Companion.3
The Prophet ﷺ married him to his own cousin Zaynab bint Jaḥsh, a Qurayshī noblewoman; the marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce. What followed is the reason Zayd's name is in the Qur'an: the Prophet ﷺ was commanded to marry Zaynab himself, to break by his own example the pre-Islamic taboo that treated an adopted son's former wife as forbidden. The verse names Zayd directly — the only Companion so named anywhere in scripture — and states the purpose plainly: “so that there would not be upon the believers any discomfort concerning the wives of their adopted sons when they no longer have need of them.”4
ʿĀʾishah remarked on the weight of the passage: “Had the Messenger of God ﷺ concealed anything of what was revealed to him, he would have concealed this verse.”4
Muʾtah
In the eighth year after the Hijrah, three thousand Muslims marched north to Muʾtah against a vastly larger Byzantine and Arab force. The Prophet ﷺ appointed Zayd to command, and named the succession in advance: if Zayd falls, then Jaʿfar ibn Abī Ṭālib; if Jaʿfar falls, then ʿAbdullāh ibn Rawāḥah.5
All three were killed in that order. The Prophet ﷺ announced their deaths in Madīnah as they occurred, and his eyes were filled with tears. He went to Zayd's house afterwards, and when Zayd's daughter saw him she burst out weeping — and he wept until he sobbed. Saʿd asked him what this was; he said, “This is the longing of one who loves for his beloved.”6
Zayd's son Usāmah, whom the Prophet ﷺ also loved, was appointed at eighteen to command an army against the Byzantines that included Abū Bakr and ʿUmar in its ranks — an appointment some questioned, and which the Prophet ﷺ defended from the pulpit in one of the last speeches of his life.7