وفاة خديجة بنت خويلد

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid died in Ramadan of the tenth year of prophethood (approximately 619 CE) at approximately sixty-five years of age. She was the first Muslim — the first person to hear the Prophet's ﷺ account of the initial revelation and affirm it without hesitation — and the woman who had sustained the mission from its terrifying first moment through twenty-five years of marriage. The Prophet ﷺ said of her: 'She believed in me when people denied me, she accepted my truthfulness when people called me a liar, she offered me wealth when people deprived me, and Allah gave me children through her when He gave me none through other wives.' Khadijah had been a prosperous merchant and twice a widow when she proposed marriage to the twenty-five-year-old Muhammad ﷺ, whom she had observed as the manager of her trading caravans. She was approximately forty. The marriage lasted twenty-five years and was, by every account in the classical sources, one of genuine love and partnership. The Prophet ﷺ did not take other wives while Khadijah lived. She bore him six children: two sons who died in infancy and four daughters. During the three-year boycott of Banu Hashim in Shi'b Abi Talib (617-619 CE), she spent the remainder of her accumulated wealth providing for the community — a sacrifice that contributed directly to her physical deterioration. When the boycott ended, she did not recover. Jibril had conveyed the greetings of Allah Himself to Khadijah while she was alive — a distinction given to no other of the Prophet's ﷺ wives. She was buried in Jannat al-Mu'la in Mecca. In the years after her death, the Prophet ﷺ spoke of her with consistent love: he would send portions of sacrificed meat to her friends, and the sound of her sister Hala's voice would move him visibly. Aishah reported that she was jealous of no one as she was jealous of Khadijah, despite Khadijah having died before Aishah married the Prophet ﷺ — testimony to how completely Khadijah lived in his memory. Her station in Islamic tradition is among the highest of any woman: the Prophet ﷺ named her among the four greatest women of all time.