Boreal

From Merchant to Messenger

Wives of the Messenger

and revelations they inspired

Zaynab b. Khuzayma (5)

God’s Messenger took Zaynab b. Khuzayma into his household in 624 after her husband was killed at the battle of Badr. He generosity earned her the appellation "Mother of the poor".

She died only eight months after her marriage to the Prophet and was buried in Medina's Baqi cemetery.

Umm Salama (6)

Umm Salama, or Hind, her name before she gave birth to a son during her first marriage which they named Salama and, in the Arabic tradition, took the name Umm Salama, meaning “Mother of Salama”.

Tamam Kahn writes that it was Umm Salama asking her husband about “Revelations lack of reference to women” which prompted God’s Messenger to deliver the first revelation in which women are mentioned:

33:35 Men and women who have submitted, believed, obeyed, are truthful, steadfast, reverend, giving in charity, fasting, guarding their private parts and remembering Allah often, Allah has prepared for them forgiveness and a great reward.

Umm Salama was thirty when she accepted an offer of marriage from God’s Messenger after her husband died from wounds sustained in battle.

The Prophet is said to have gone to Aisha’s room to take a bath after the battle of the Ditch (also referred to as the battle of the Trench, read Allah’s War Against the Unbelievers - Battle for Medina) when he was interrupted by the angel Gabriel who demanded he immediately march against the last remaining Jewish tribe of Medina; but it was Umm Salama, whom Tamam Khan writes, looked after God’s Messenger during the actual battle:

During the clash, Umm Salama stayed in the tent set up for the Prophet near the battle. She took care of her husband while the sounds of swords and axes rattled her bones.

“[Umm Salama] died at the age of eighty-six.” Before she died “Muhammad appeared to her in a dream and was very upset. He told her that his last grandson Husayn had been murdered”; and he had, at Karbala.