Hazrat Khadija (RA): The First Believer

Hazrat Khadija (RA) was standing beside a trade caravan ready to leave Mecca for Syria, its camels loaded down with goods. Most of what it carried belonged to her alone – and by the accounts of the time, her share alone was said to equal the combined merchandise of everyone else in the caravan put together. She was, by any measure, one of the wealthiest people in Mecca. But it wasn’t her fortune that people talked about first when they spoke of her. It was her character – her honesty, her intelligence, her generosity – which is why Mecca knew her simply as Tahira, “the Pure.” History remembers Hazrat Khadija as the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the first human being to believe in him.

By the time she met Muhammad ﷺ, Khadija had already been widowed twice. Her first husband, Atiq ibn A’idh al-Makhzumi, and her second, Abu Hala al-Tamimi, both came from respected Meccan families, and her marriage to Abu Hala had given her two children, Hind and Hala. Losing two husbands in succession, while still raising a family and running an expanding trading business largely on her own, is part of what made her later reputation for competence and independence so well earned by the time Muhammad ﷺ entered her life.

Hazrat Khadija: A Businesswoman Looking for an Honest Man

Hazrat Khadija’s trading network stretched from Syria to Yemen, and running it required people she could genuinely trust – not just capable traders, but people whose word meant something. That was harder to find than capable traders were. So when she heard of a young Meccan already known across the city by two nicknames, Al-Amin, “the Trustworthy,” and As-Sadiq, “the Truthful,” earned through journeys he had made with his uncle, she decided to test that reputation herself. She sent word offering to double the usual wage if he would lead her trade caravan to Syria, and sent her own trusted servant, Maysara, along with him to see how he handled the responsibility.

The young man was Muhammad ﷺ, not yet forty and not yet a prophet. The journey was a resounding success, and Maysara came back with more than good sales figures – he came back full of praise for the young caravan leader’s character, his fairness, and the sheer competence with which he had managed the trip. Hazrat Khadija paid him exactly what she had promised, and then added personal gifts on top of it, a gesture reserved for someone who had genuinely impressed her.

A Proposal From a Woman Who Had Said No to Everyone Else

Hazrat Khadija had been widowed twice already, and in the years since, several of Mecca’s most prominent men had asked for her hand. She had turned every one of them down. Now in her forties, she found herself more struck by the character of the young trader who had just returned from Syria than she had been by any of the wealthy suitors who had come before him. She sent a marriage proposal of her own – through the proper channels, to his uncle and guardian, since his father had died before he was born. His uncle approved, Khadija set the date herself, and the two married with his family’s elders present, as custom required.

It was a marriage built on genuine mutual respect between a woman roughly fifteen years his senior and a much younger husband, and it lasted twenty-five years, until her death. He married no one else while she was alive. Together they had six children who are agreed upon across the historical record: four daughters, Zainab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum, and Fatima al-Zahra, and a son, Qasim, with some early biographers recording two further sons, Tayyib and Abdullah. Every one of his children except his youngest son, Ibrahim, born much later to Maria, was born to Khadija.

The Night Everything Changed

As he grew older, Muhammad ﷺ developed a habit of retreating to a cave called Hira, roughly three miles outside Mecca, to spend days at a time alone in reflection. Hazrat Khadija would prepare provisions for these retreats and send him off with what he needed, and when the food ran out, he would come home, restock, and go back.

One day he came home from Hira in visible distress. “Cover me, cover me,” he told her, and she wrapped him in blankets until he calmed enough to speak. What he described was this: a being had appeared to him in the cave and commanded him, “Read.” He had answered that he did not know how to read. The being had then embraced him so tightly he felt his strength give out, released him, and repeated the command – three times in total – before finally reciting words that fixed themselves permanently in his memory: Read, in the name of your Lord who created – created man from a clinging form. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know.

Shaken, he told Khadija he feared for himself. Her response, preserved in the hadith literature and repeated for fourteen centuries since, is one of the most quoted passages in Islamic tradition: “Be glad. By Allah, He will never disgrace you. You maintain family ties, you speak the truth, you bear the burdens of the weak, you help the poor, you are generous to guests, and you assist people in times of hardship.” It was not blind reassurance – it was the testimony of a woman who had watched this man’s character for fifteen years and had already decided, long before that night in the cave, exactly who he was.

Confirmation From an Old Scholar, and the First Person to Believe

Hazrat Khadija didn’t stop atcomforting him. She knew someone who might actually understand what had happened: her cousin Waraqah bin Nawfal, an elderly Christian scholar, blind by then, who had studied scripture closely and had translated the Gospel into Arabic from Syriac. When Muhammad ﷺ described the encounter to him, Waraqah didn’t hesitate. “This is the same Namus that came down to Musa,” he said, using the term for the angel of revelation, and identified it with the same messenger who had come to Moses. According to some accounts he went further still, telling Muhammad ﷺ that he recognized him as the prophet Jesus had foretold, and warning him, with real sorrow, that his own people would eventually turn against him and drive him from his city – a fate, he said, that had met every messenger who came before him with the same call. Waraqah died not long afterward.

For three years after that night in the cave, no further revelation came, and Muhammad ﷺ spent the time quietly sharing his message with those closest to him rather than preaching openly. The very first person to believe him, without hesitation and without needing to be convinced, was Khadija. Among men it was Ali, still a boy in his household; among those enslaved, it was Zaid bin Haritha. But Khadija came first, ahead of all of them – the first human being in history to accept Islam. In the years of open persecution that followed, when Meccan society turned hardest against the new faith, Khadija spent a substantial part of her own fortune keeping the small Muslim community fed and protected, underwriting the movement financially at precisely the moment its survival was least certain.

“Khadija Is Excellent”

Islamic tradition holds that Khadija received a greeting from Allah Himself, conveyed to her through the angel Jibreel, an honor mentioned for no one else in quite the same way. The Prophet ﷺ himself, asked once to rank the finest women who had ever lived, placed her alongside Maryam, the mother of Jesus: “Mary, the daughter of Imran, was the best woman of her time, and Khadija is the best woman of her time.” He never remarried while she lived, and by every account that survives of their marriage, the devotion ran in both directions – from a woman who trusted his character before the world knew what that character would become, and from a man who never stopped speaking of her, long after she was gone, with a depth of feeling he showed for no one else.

Hazrat Khadija died in 619 CE, at around sixty-five years old, and was buried at Jannat al-Ma’la, Mecca’s own cemetery, since her death came a full three years before the migration to Medina and its cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi even entered the community’s history. Her death fell in the same year as that of Abu Talib, the uncle who had raised Muhammad ﷺ from childhood and shielded him politically through the worst of Meccan hostility, and losing his wife and his protector within months of each other left him grieving so heavily that he named that year, in his own words, Aam al-Huzn – the Year of Sorrow. It marked, by every account, the hardest single stretch of loss in his entire life, and it closed the chapter of the marriage that had carried him from an unknown caravan leader to the first years of his prophethood, never once wavering.