The proposal and the cloak

Khadijah was a twice-widowed merchant of Mecca, fifteen years his senior, when she employed Muhammad ﷺ. He returned from her caravan trip having doubled her profits. She sent Nafisa bint Munya to sound him out about marriage. Fifteen years later she wrapped him in her cloak when Jibreel came.

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid was one of the wealthiest merchants in Mecca. She had inherited a modest fortune from her father and had built it into a large one by managing caravan trade to Syria and Yemen. She was twice widowed. She had children. She had a household. She had, by the standards of pre-Islamic Meccan society, no need to remarry, and had rejected multiple offers from Meccan aristocrats over the years.

She had a reputation for judgment. She had a reputation for insight into the men she hired. She had heard of a young man of the Banu Hashim, nephew of Abu Talib, orphan, called al-Amin ("the trustworthy") by every Meccan who knew him, and she hired him to lead a trade caravan to Syria for the season.

She sent her freedman Maysara with him as an assistant and, quietly, as an observer. Maysara returned with a report she had not expected. He described a young man of complete honesty in every commercial transaction. He also described strange scenes: a monk they met at a resting-place who took Maysara aside and said this young man he was travelling with was the one they awaited. Clouds that seemed to shade the caravan by day where none shaded the other caravans. Prophecies of the coming of a prophet in Arabia.

The caravan returned with double the expected profit.

Khadijah sat with what Maysara had said and made her decision. She was 40. Muhammad ﷺ was 25. The gap was significant in a Meccan society that expected women to marry younger men and never significantly older. She did not care.

She sent her friend Nafisa bint Munya to sound him out. Nafisa came to Muhammad ﷺ and asked him why he had not yet married. He answered that he did not have the means. She asked him: what if you were offered a wife of wealth and beauty and status? He answered: who? She said: Khadijah. He was silent. He said: how can that be? Nafisa said: leave that to me.

Nafisa returned to Khadijah and reported the conversation. Khadijah sent word to Muhammad ﷺ formally. He consulted his uncles. Abu Talib, his guardian, delivered the wedding sermon. Muhammad and Khadijah were married in about 595 CE.

They were married for twenty-five years. During her lifetime he took no other wife. She bore him six children: two sons who died in infancy (Qasim and Abdullah), and four daughters who lived, Zaynab, Ruqayya, Umm Kulthum, and Fatimah.

In the fortieth year of his life, in 610 CE, in the last ten days of Ramadan, Muhammad ﷺ came home from the cave of Hira trembling. He was covered in sweat and pale. He came into their room and could not speak for a moment. Then he said: zammiluni, zammiluni, wrap me, wrap me. He was shaking.

Khadijah did not ask questions. She took her cloak, a heavy Meccan mantle, and wrapped him in it. She held him. She said nothing until he was quiet. Then she asked him what had happened.

He told her. He said he had been sitting in the cave when a being had come to him and had squeezed him to the point of near-death and had said iqra, read. He had said he could not read. The being had squeezed him again and said iqra. He had said ma aqra, what shall I read. The being had recited to him: iqra bismi rabbika alladhi khalaq, read in the name of your Lord who created. He had come home trembling. He said to her: I fear for myself.

Khadijah's answer is one of the most-remembered speeches of a Muslim woman across fourteen centuries. She said to him: "By no means. By Allah, Allah will never disgrace you. You keep good ties with your relatives, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guests generously, and assist the afflicted." She was telling him, in that instant, that a man who had done these things all his life could not now be abandoned by his Lord.

She then took him, the same night, to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, an old Christian scholar of the Meccan aristocracy who knew the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Waraqa listened to what Muhammad ﷺ described. He wept. He said: this is the same being who came to Musa. If I am alive when your people expel you, I will support you with all my strength. Waraqa died shortly after. Muhammad's people did expel him. But that first night, at 40, terrified in his own house, wrapped in his wife's cloak, he had someone who believed him.

Khadijah lived for another ten years. She died in 619 CE in what the Prophet ﷺ called am al-huzn, the Year of Sorrow, the same year that his uncle Abu Talib died. He was 50. He had lost the two people in the world who had unconditionally protected him.

He never spoke of her without emotion. Fifteen years after her death, in Medina, Aisha said she felt jealous when he spoke of her. He answered Aisha: "Allah has not given me a better wife than her. She believed in me when the people disbelieved. She trusted me when the people belied me. She spent her wealth on me when the people withheld from me. And Allah blessed me with children by her when He did not do so with anyone else."

What the story teaches

The story of Khadijah is remembered because it settles a question about Islamic marriage that later Muslim commentators have sometimes muddled. The first Muslim marriage in history, the model that Muhammad ﷺ himself chose and honoured for twenty-five years, was between a strong, wealthy, independent, twice-widowed woman fifteen years the elder and a young man of good character with no wealth of his own. Khadijah did the proposing. Khadijah did the financing. Khadijah, when the moment of prophecy came, did the believing before anyone else and did the calming when the Prophet ﷺ himself was afraid. The Islamic tradition's first Umm al-Muminin, Mother of the Believers, is the model by which every other Muslim woman is remembered. She was not a shadow. She was the first believer in the world.