In a city where almost no one could read, there lived a woman who could. In an age when the alphabet was the possession of a few, she held a pen with ease, treated the sick with skill, and carried in her head a kind of wisdom that the most powerful man of her time would later seek out before he made his decisions. Her name was not even her name. The people called her Al-Shifa, the healing, because that is what she brought to those who came to her, and the title stayed with her until the day she died and long after. We know her best for the role she played after the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had already left this world. But her story does not begin there. It begins much earlier, among the very first souls in all of Makkah to believe.
A rare woman in a city of few letters
Her given name was Leila. She was Al-Shifa bint Abdullah, daughter of Abdullah ibn Abd al-Shams and Fatima bint Wahb, and she belonged to Quraysh, to the clan of Banu Adi, the same clan that would later produce Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him). She married Abu Hathma ibn Hudhayfa, and together they raised two sons, Sulayman and Masruq (may Allah be pleased with them).
To understand what made her remarkable, you have to picture the Makkah of her day. It was a society that carried its poetry and its lineages in memory, not on paper. When the histories speak of Umar (may Allah be pleased with him), they note that the overwhelming majority of his people could neither read nor write. By the count of the biographers, there were perhaps twenty or thirty people in the entire city who possessed the skill of literacy. Al-Shifa was one of them, and she was one of the very few women among that small number.
She did not stop at reading and writing. She learned medicine, which is how she earned the name that would define her. And she was a calligrapher, an artist of the letter, someone who did not merely put words to paper but shaped them beautifully, and who taught others to do the same. In a world that prized the spoken word above all, she had quietly gathered the rarest set of skills a person could hold. Her reputation rested on two things above the rest: her hikma, her wisdom, and her command of the written word.
We do not know the exact day she embraced Islam, but we know it was early, within the first three years of the Prophet's call ﷺ, when belief still cost a person everything and the believers could be counted on a few hands. Her name often surfaces in connection with events that came after the Prophet's lifetime ﷺ, which can give the false impression that she was a latecomer. She was not. She was among the firsts. And when the believers left Makkah for Madinah, she was among the first women to make the Hijrah, leaving behind the only home she had ever known for the sake of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ.
The house between the mosque and the market
When she reached Madinah, a house was set up for her, and its location tells you something about who she was. It stood between the masjid and the marketplace. On one side, the center of worship. On the other, the center of trade. And Al-Shifa lived in between, which is exactly where her gifts belonged, for she understood both the things of the soul and the things of the world.
She had a particular understanding of commerce, of the marketplace, of what we might call the fiqh of finance, the rulings and the wisdom that govern how people buy and sell and deal fairly with one another. This was not a small thing. The Prophet ﷺ himself trusted her judgment. He took her into his confidence and sought her advice in many matters, and especially in matters of money and the market, because she saw clearly where others did not. Think about that for a moment. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who received revelation from the heavens, still honored this woman by consulting her on the affairs in which Allah had given her understanding. Wisdom was wisdom, and he recognized it and drew it out.
Her literacy left a mark on the religion itself in a way she may never have fully seen. Among her closest companions in Madinah was Hafsa (may Allah be pleased with her), the daughter of Umar and a wife of the Prophet ﷺ, and a relative of Al-Shifa through their shared clan. Al-Shifa taught Hafsa to read. She taught her to write. She taught her calligraphy. And here is why that matters: when the Qur'an was gathered and preserved in written form, it was kept in the house of Hafsa. Some of the scholars connect this directly to her literacy, to the fact that she was among the few who could read and guard a written text. The skill that Al-Shifa passed on, letter by letter, became one of the threads in the preservation of the Book of Allah. A teacher rarely knows the full reach of what she plants.
The blanket she kept for the Prophet ﷺ
There is a detail from her life in Madinah that says more about love than any speech could. Because her home sat so near the center of things, the Prophet ﷺ would visit her family from time to time. And Al-Shifa lived in a state of anticipation, always waiting for the next visit, always hoping he would come again. So she prepared for him. She set aside a particular izar, a particular blanket, particular things kept ready and reserved for him alone, so that whenever the Messenger of Allah ﷺ entered her home, everything he might need was already there, cut and folded and waiting.
When he came, he would put on that garment, rest under that blanket, and take a nap in their home. Picture the honor of it: to host the Prophet ﷺ under your roof, to learn from him, to sit in his company, to have him sleep peacefully in your house because you had made it a place of rest for him. To us it would be the event of a lifetime, a moment never to be forgotten. To her it was something she longed to repeat, again and again, and so she kept everything ready in the hope that he would visit more often.
The truest measure of what those things meant to her came at the end of her life. When she died and left an inheritance, the most precious of all she left behind was not the wealth she had earned in Makkah, not what she had gathered in Madinah, not anything passed down from her husband. The most precious of her belongings were the clothes and the blankets and the simple things the Prophet ﷺ had used when he came to her home. She left these to her sons, Sulayman and Masruq, as the dearest part of her estate. A whole life of trade and learning and standing, and what she treasured above it all was a folded garment that had once warmed the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. That is where her heart was.
Teach her, as you taught her to write
There is a narration preserved by Abu Dawud that draws together the two halves of her life, the healer and the teacher, in a single scene. The Prophet ﷺ entered upon Al-Shifa while she was sitting with Hafsa, and he turned to her with a request. Will you not teach Hafsa, he said, the cure for ant bites and the infections that come from them, the same way you taught her how to read and how to write?
Al-Shifa knew medicine, and she knew a form of healing through ruqya, the recitation of words of remedy over the sick. The Prophet ﷺ permitted her to continue this healing, so long as it was grounded in what came from the Qur'an and the Sunnah and was kept clean of the practices of jahiliyya, the superstitions of the age before Islam. He did not ask her to abandon her craft. He purified it and blessed it and asked her to pass it on.
Notice the beauty of his request. He set her teaching of the written word and her teaching of healing side by side, as two gifts of equal worth, both of them things she possessed and others needed, both of them worth handing down. And notice who he asked her to teach: Hafsa, in whose home the Qur'an would be preserved. The same hands that Al-Shifa trained to write the letter would help guard the words of Allah, and now those same hands would carry the knowledge of healing too. She was a woman whose gifts kept multiplying through the people she taught.
A grandmother's memory, and the name of a Khalifah
The Prophet ﷺ passed from this world, and Al-Shifa kept her home and her place in the city. When Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) became the Khalifah, he honored the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ in everything, including this: he continued to visit her house between the masjid and the market, just as he had seen the Messenger of Allah ﷺ do. He consulted her frequently on the affairs of the marketplace, on business and the rulings of trade, and some accounts say he formally placed her in charge of overseeing the market, though what is certain at the least is that the commander of the believers came to this woman's door for her counsel.
The most famous thing she ever narrated came out of one of those visits, and it concerns the very title by which Umar is remembered. When Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) had been the Khalifah, his name was simple: he was the successor to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. But you could not go on forever calling each new leader the successor of the successor of the successor. So when Umar took charge, there was a question in the air about what he should be called.
Al-Shifa was there for the answer, and she passed the story to her grandson, who passed it onward until it reached Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, the great-grandson of Umar himself. She said that Umar once wrote to his governor in Iraq, asking him to send two of his best men so that he could question them about Iraq and its people. The governor sent Labid ibn Rabia and Adi ibn Hatim (may Allah be pleased with them). When they arrived in Madinah, they entered the mosque and found Amr ibn al-As (may Allah be pleased with him), and they said to him, seek permission for us to enter upon Amir al-Mu'minin, the commander of the believers.
Amr was struck by the phrase. By Allah, he told them, you two have been granted success by Allah in the very name you have called him, for he is indeed the commander, and we are the believers. He went to Umar and greeted him with it: peace be upon you, O commander of the believers. Umar asked him why he had said it, and Amr explained what the two men had called him. And from that day, this is the name Umar carried, Amir al-Mu'minin, the commander of the believers. It came to us through a quiet conversation between an elderly woman and her grandson, a memory she kept and chose to pass down, and now it belongs to the whole history of this ummah.
What she carried to the end
Al-Shifa's sons grew into men of substance under Umar. Masruq was appointed an amir, a man of knowledge and standing. Sulayman was a man of the Qur'an, a hafiz known for reciting through the long nights and leading the people in prayer. There is a story in him too. One morning Umar asked Al-Shifa why Sulayman had not been present at the Fajr prayer. She explained that her son had stood in prayer the whole night through and had fallen asleep only just before dawn, so he had missed praying Fajr in congregation. And Umar gave his famous reply: that to pray Fajr in congregation was more beloved to him than to stand the entire night alone. For the Prophet ﷺ had taught that whoever prays Isha in congregation, it is as if he has prayed half the night, and whoever prays Fajr in congregation, it is as if he has prayed the whole of it.
Al-Shifa lived to narrate other treasures as well. She is the one who reported that the Prophet ﷺ was asked what the best of deeds are, and he answered: belief in Allah, striving in His path, and an accepted Hajj. She narrated his words about the letter sent to the emperor of Persia. And like Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), she once described Umar himself, having seen some men walking slowly and learning they had been praying all night. She said of Umar that when he spoke, he made sure he was heard; when he walked, he walked fast; when he gave, he gave generously; and when he struck, he struck hard.
The only line of her descendants that survived was through Sulayman, who had two sons, and he named them Abu Bakr and Uthman. So this early believer, this relative of Umar, became the grandmother of two boys carrying the names of two Khalifahs, and both of them grew up to be narrators of hadith. That is how some of her words reached us at all: a woman from the first years of Islam, her memory preserved through grandsons who loved the names of the righteous.
She died during the rule of Umar, leaving behind the hadiths recorded by Bukhari, by Abu Dawud, by an-Nasa'i. And Umar, the commander of the believers, the man she had advised and whose title she had carried into history, led the funeral prayer over this great woman, Al-Shifa bint Abdullah al-Adawiya. May Allah be pleased with her.
What Al-Shifa's life asks of our faith
It is easy to read a life like hers and admire the skills: the literacy, the medicine, the calligraphy, the wisdom that drew kings of men to her door. Admiration is pleasant, and it costs nothing, and it changes nothing. Her life is asking for something harder than admiration. It is asking what we are doing with what Allah has given us.
She had been handed rare gifts, abilities that almost no one around her possessed. She could have hoarded them, traded on them, made herself important with them. Instead she gave them away. She taught what she knew, letter by letter, remedy by remedy, until her knowledge lived in other people and her students went on to guard the Book of Allah and heal the sick. This is the question her life puts to you: whatever Allah has placed in your hands, your knowledge, your skill, your time, your understanding of something others find difficult, are you holding it for yourself, or are you spending it for Him by passing it on? Knowledge that is taught for the sake of Allah does not shrink when you give it away. It multiplies, and it keeps working long after you are gone, the way her teaching of Hafsa still echoes in every preserved page of the Qur'an. Teach one thing this week to someone who needs it, and intend it for Allah, and you have stepped onto her road.
Look, too, at where she kept her heart. She was a woman of property and learning, consulted by the powerful, honored by the Prophet ﷺ himself. And when her life was tallied at the end, the thing she treasured above every coin and every honor was a worn blanket the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had once slept under. Her love for him reordered what she valued. She measured wealth differently than the world did, because the nearness of the Prophet ﷺ, and through him the pleasure of Allah, was worth more to her than anything that could be bought. Ask yourself honestly what you treasure most, what you would name if your whole life were weighed today. Her life invites you to love Allah and His Messenger ﷺ so truly that it quietly rearranges everything else, until the things that bring you closer to Him outweigh the things the world tells you to want.
And there is a gentle mercy hidden in her story for the ordinary believer. She is not remembered for one dramatic moment. She is remembered for a steady, useful, faithful life: teaching, healing, advising, preparing a place of rest for the Prophet ﷺ, keeping the memories that others would need. Most of us will never have a single grand scene either. But we can have her kind of life, made of small acts of service done sincerely, day after day, for the sake of Allah. The home set between the mosque and the marketplace is a picture of how faith is meant to be lived: not locked away from the world, but carried into it, so that worship and work and the service of people all flow from the same heart turned toward Allah.
So take one thing from Al-Shifa into your own days. Give away something you know, for His sake, expecting nothing back. Hold what draws you near to Allah dearer than what the world prizes. And serve quietly, faithfully, in the place where He has put you, trusting that nothing offered to Him is ever wasted. May Allah be pleased with Al-Shifa bint Abdullah, the healer and the teacher, and grant us a measure of her wisdom, her sincerity, and her love for His Messenger ﷺ, and gather us with the first believers who served Him with all they had.
This chapter follows the account of Al-Shifa bint Abdullah (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.