The shield at Uhud

Nusaybah went to the battlefield of Uhud in the third year after the Hijra to give the wounded water. When the Muslim line broke and the enemy reached the Prophet ﷺ, she saw him almost alone. She put down the waterskin, picked up a sword, tied her waist, and stood over him as his shield. She received thirteen wounds that day.

At the Battle of Uhud in the third year after the Hijra (625 CE), the Muslim army began the day with a great advantage. Then the archers, whom the Prophet ﷺ had ordered to hold their position on the ridge above the battle no matter what happened, saw the Meccans in flight and left their post to gather spoils. Khalid ibn al-Waleed, then still a Meccan commander, saw the empty ridge and led a cavalry charge around behind the Muslim line. The Muslim army was struck from both sides. The line broke. The rumour spread that the Prophet ﷺ had been killed. Panic ran through the Muslim army.

Nusaybah bint Ka'ab, known by her kunya Umm Umarah, was at the edge of the battle with a waterskin over her shoulder. She had come to Uhud, as many Muslim women had, to give water to the wounded and to nurse the injured. She was in her late thirties. She was not a professional soldier.

When the line broke and the Meccans began cutting toward the centre of the field where the Prophet ﷺ was, Nusaybah looked up and saw what was happening. The Prophet ﷺ was almost alone, defended by a small group of companions, and the Meccan swords were reaching him. She dropped the waterskin. She reached down and took a sword from the hand of a wounded Muslim. She tied her sash tightly around her waist so it would not restrict her movement. And she ran toward the Prophet.

She was struck first with a heavy blow to her shoulder. The blade cut down through the muscle. The Prophet, seeing her fall back a step, called to her son Abdullah, who was nearby, to attend to her wound. She bound the shoulder herself with a strip of cloth and returned to the position. She was struck a second time. She was struck a third time. The classical sources say she took thirteen wounds at Uhud, the deepest of them the shoulder blow that took months to heal. She stood over the Prophet through the worst of the fighting. When the Meccans finally withdrew, Uhud was a Muslim defeat but the Prophet ﷺ was alive.

Anas ibn Malik, who saw her that day, said: I saw her fighting more fiercely than any man I had ever seen. Ibn al-Athir records that the Prophet ﷺ said afterward: "The place of Nusaybah bint Ka'ab on the day of Uhud was better than the place of so-and-so and so-and-so", naming several men celebrated for their bravery.

Umm Umarah's son Abdullah was also wounded at Uhud. She stopped fighting only long enough to bind his wound. She returned to the line. Later, when Umar was caliph, he would send her clothing from the state treasury as a mark of respect, and he would tell his majlis: "There is not a woman on the earth whose shoes I would have carried but the shoes of Umm Umarah."

What the story teaches

The story of Nusaybah at Uhud is remembered for what it settles about the place of women in the founding scenes of Islam. She was not asked to fight. She was not commanded to fight. She was doing what a hundred other Muslim women were doing that day: carrying water for the wounded. When the line broke and the Prophet ﷺ was in immediate danger, she made her decision at the edge of the battlefield in the space of a second, took up a sword, and stood in the last ring of defense around him. She was one of the reasons he lived. Her thirteen wounds are as much a part of the sirah of the Prophet as the wounds of any of the male companions. Muslim mothers in the classical world named their daughters Nusaybah, and named them Umm Umarah, for a specific reason: they wanted their daughters to remember that when the Prophet was down and the men were scattered, it was a woman who stood over him with a sword and shielded him with her own body.