Khadija bint Khuwaylid

Khadija bint Khuwaylid was a wealthy merchant of the Quraysh — the leading tribe of Mecca — and the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. She belonged to the Asad clan of Quraysh and, according to the tradition, ran a substantial caravan trade in her own right; one widely repeated report holds that her caravan rivalled those of all other Quraysh merchants combined (a measure of esteem rather than an audited figure). She is said to have employed Muhammad to lead a trading journey to Syria and, impressed by his conduct, to have proposed marriage to him.

In the standard biographical tradition (sira), Khadija was the first person to accept Islam after Muhammad received his first revelation; she is reported to have reassured him and to have taken him to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian who is said to have affirmed his prophethood. (The separate question of who was the first male convert — Ali, Abu Bakr, or Zayd ibn Haritha — is debated chiefly along Sunni–Shia lines and does not concern Khadija's own precedence.)

Sources report that the couple had several children, including the daughter Fatima. Her age at marriage is disputed in the tradition, commonly given as forty but also as twenty-eight. Khadija died in Mecca, traditionally in the tenth year of Muhammad's mission (about 619 CE), roughly three years before the emigration to Medina — a year later remembered as the "Year of Sorrow." Her birth date (c. 555 CE) is a traditional estimate and highly uncertain.