Khadijah Bint Khuwaylid The Best Women of Mainkind May Allah be pleased with her

Khadijah Bint Khuwaylid is The Best Women of Mainkind (May Allah be pleased with her)

“Give Khadija the

good tidings that

she will have a palace

made of pearls in

Paradise and there

will be neither noise

nor trouble in it”

(Sahih Bukhari 27:19).

Khadija bint Khuwaylid, may Allah be pleased with her, was a woman of

the ages, from whom we can learn much. The first wife of the Prophet

Muhammad, peace be upon him, she is considered in popular thought

on the historical roles of women in Islam, as a symbol of women’s piety, chastity

and belief in God, as well as a model wife who unconditionally supported her

husband. She embodied these attributes, and so much more, to which we can

relate today.

If we understand Khadija’s life from a vantage point that respects her station,

her relationship to the Prophet and her own relationship to God, we will make

sense of her life as an empowered woman in a deeply patriarchal world in which

Islam was just beginning to bring about the revolution of human equality.

While the Prophet remains for both women and men a model human being,

the model believer in God, the stories of his life as a man who lived more than

1400 years ago, can at times be inaccessible to today’s women. If the Prophet is

al-insan al-kamil (the perfect, complete human being) then the figure of Khadija

can function as the complete woman.

She is certainly not a parallel female prophetic figure; however, on the level

of women’s expression of faith, when we read Khadija’s life story holistically

we are presented with a uniquely female way of being Muslim. It is a way that

is inspirational, not merely because of Khadija’s piety, wealth and role as a wife,

but also because she faced and overcame numerous obstacles that are familiar to

women in our own 21st century context.