mad, well-known for his trustworthiness, to trade
goods for her in Basra. It is reported that she sent
Nafisa bint Umayya to propose marriage to the
Prophet, who agreed to this, his first marriage.
After marrying him (when her age was 40 and
his was 25) she bore their sons al-Qasim and Abd
Allah, and their daughters Zaynab, Ruqayyah,
Umm Kulthum, and Fatima. Only the daughters
survived infancy.
Traditional accounts recall that after Muham-
mad received the first revelation of the qUran, he
sought refuge with Khadija, fearing that he had
gone mad. She pacified and encouraged him, and
consulted her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, possibly
a Christian, who affirmed Muhammad’s prophet-
hood. Offering Muhammad comfort and strength
in his uncertainty and during his persecution,
she is remembered for providing him with crucial
moral and financial support.
Khadija was Muhammad’s only wife at the
time of their marriage. It was not until after her
death that he married other women. She bore
all his children except Ibrahim, son of Mariya
al-Qibtiya. Khadija herself, a widow, was married
twice before her marriage to the Prophet.
She shares the title of “mother of the believ-
ers,” along with the other wives of the Prophet.
In the hadith she is remembered as an exemplary
and ideal Muslim woman, as a pious and honor-
able wife and mother. She has been held in high
esteem by both Sunnis and Shiis. Khadija died
roughly nine years after the emergence of Islam,
precipitating a crisis in the life of Muhammad
and his early followers that led to the hiJ ra
to Medina about three years later in 622. She
was buried in Mecca’s main cemetery, Hajun.
Muhammad continued to live in her house until
the Hijra. During the reign of Muawiya, the first
Umayyad caliph (r. 661–680), her house was
converted into a mosqUe and continued to be
regarded as a shrine by pilgrims until destroyed
by the Saudis in the 1980s.
See also ahl al-bayt; Women.
Aysha A. Hidayatullah
Further reading: Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in
Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Muhammad ibn
Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s
Sirat Rasul Allah. Translated by A. Guillaume (London:
Oxford University Press, 1955); Muhammad ibn Saad,
The Women of Medina. Translated by Aisha Bewley
(London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1995); Denise A. Spellberg,
Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha
bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994); Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Quran:
Traditions and Interpretation (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1994).Khadir (Khidr, Khezr, Hizir) legendary man
believed to be immortal, to possess divine wisdom, and
to have inspired Sufis
At the time of Islam’s appearance in the seventh
century there was a large pool of myths and leg-
ends in the Middle East from which Muslims soon
drew to enrich their understandings of the past,
of life and death, and of the sacred. Khadir was a
figure who seems to have been a kind of magnet
for such stories in the early Muslim community.
His name means “the green one,” which gave
rise to attempts to explain why a man would be
associated with this color. Some accounts say it
derives from belief that his color was a result of
having gained immortality by drinking water from
the miraculous spring of life. They also associated
his color with plant life and fertility, and that the
earth turned green wherever he stood or prayed.
By some accounts he was among only four men
believed to have ever attained immortality, the
other three being Elijah, idris, and JesUs. Stories
that he lived on a distant island or at the meet-
ing place of two seas and of his ability to assist
people far from home made him a patron saint of
sailors living on the shore of syria or a deity for
those traveling in the Indian Ocean region. An
ambulance service in tUrkey today is named after
him, in honor of his ability to assist others in time
of need.K 428 Khadir