The Quran's portrait of marriage: tranquility, affection, and mercy between spouses — often read over the Prophet's first marriage.
Figures in the Quran
Khadijah bint Khuwaylid in Islam
Merchant of Makkah, employer turned wife, and the first person on earth to believe the messenger — a marriage of twenty-five years.
Khadijah bint Khuwaylid of the clan of Asad was a merchant of standing in Makkah who ran her own caravans and, by the reports of the seerah, had been married twice before she employed a young man of twenty-five known in the city as al-Amin. Impressed by his honesty, she proposed; the marriage lasted some twenty-five years until her death, and the Prophet ﷺ had no other wife while she lived. When he came down from the cave of Hira trembling, she was the first to believe him and the first to comfort him — which makes her, by most accounts, the first Muslim. Her wealth carried the early community through its poorest years. The Quran does not name her; the passages below are those it speaks to her situation.
Timeline
- A merchant of Makkah of the clan of Asad of Quraysh, managing trade caravans of her own.
- Employed the young Muhammad ﷺ to lead a caravan to Syria on the strength of his reputation for honesty.
- Married him; the union lasted about twenty-five years, until her death.
- When he returned trembling from the cave of Hira, she comforted him and was the first to believe in his prophethood.
- Supported the early community with her wealth through the hard Makkan years.
- A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari records glad tidings conveyed to her of a house in Paradise.
- Died in Makkah around 619 CE, in the year the tradition calls the Year of Sorrow, before the Hijrah.
Key Quranic passages
Note: The Quran does not name Khadijah directly; her life is known from the seerah and hadith. The passages above are those the Book speaks to marriage, the Prophet's household, and the reward of believing women.
The Prophet's wives are described collectively as mothers of the believers; Khadijah is counted first among them.
Allah states He does not let the work of any worker be lost, 'male or female' — cited across her generations of service.
Whoever does righteousness, male or female, while believing — a good life in this world and a fine reward in the next.
Lessons readers draw
The value of these lives in the Quran is not ornament. Each narrative is framed as instruction — patience tested and kept, trust justified late, forgiveness extended from strength. Read the passages above in their full surahs through the links; a biography in the Quran is meant to change the reader, not only to inform them.
Related duas
The figures of the Quran prayed in nearly every scene above. Niyat's dua library collects source-cited supplications — including the prayer of Musa for an eased task and the dua of Yunus from the darknesses — with Arabic, transliteration, and translation.
More figures
The final messenger
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
Merchant, messenger, and final seal of the prophets — the life the Quran addresses more often than any other after the prophets of old.
Read the life → Part of the Prophet ﷺFatimah bint Muhammad
The Prophet's youngest daughter — raised through the hardest Makkan years, and remembered in a famous hadith as 'a part of me.'
Read the life → All figuresFigures in Islam
Twelve figures the Quran tells its story through — prophets, Maryam, and the first believers of the Prophet’s household.
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