There is a moment in the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that almost no one in his lifetime knew about, and that he himself rarely spoke of. He was past sixty, the leader of a people, surrounded by companions who would have given their lives for him in an instant. They were walking a hard road outside Madinah when, without explanation, he turned off the path and began to climb through broken terrain. No one dared ask him where he was going. They simply gathered close and followed, mile after mile, in silence. At last he stopped at a quiet, gently marked grave, and he wept until his beard was wet with tears, and every man around him wept too, not one of them knowing whose grave it was. It was his mother's. He had not seen it in over fifty years.
To understand that grief, and the gentleness it produced, you have to go back to the beginning, to two women who carried him before the world ever knew his name. One gave him life and lost her own too soon. The other took him in when no one else would, and was repaid in a way she could never have imagined. Their names were Amina bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her) and Halima al-Sa'diyya (may Allah be pleased with her), and their two stories are woven through the childhood of the most beloved of all creation.
A marriage of a few days
Amina bint Wahb was a young woman of noble blood. Her father, Wahb, was a chief of Banu Zuhrah, one of the honoured houses of Quraysh. When Abd al-Muttalib, the chief of Banu Hashim, sought a wife for his youngest son Abdullah, the very son who had just been spared from sacrifice through the mercy of Allah, he chose Amina. So two chiefs married off their two young children. Abdullah was just past twenty, Amina still a teenager. They were, by every measure, at the very start of their lives together.
It did not last. Within weeks of the marriage, perhaps a few months at most, Abdullah set out on the summer trade caravan to ash-Sham. He left before he could even learn that his wife was carrying a child. Consider that for a moment: this young man had no idea what role he was playing in history. He rode away from a woman he thought was simply his bride, not knowing that the greatest of Allah's creation was already in her womb.
On the way home, somewhere near Yathrib, the city that would one day be Madinah, Abdullah fell ill. He did not realise the sickness was fatal. Not wanting to slow the caravan that was so eager to reach Makkah, he told his people to go ahead while he stayed with some uncles until he recovered. He never recovered. He died there, and no one to this day knows where his grave lies. The father of the Prophet ﷺ rests somewhere in the soil of the very city that would one day receive his son as a refuge.
The news travelled slowly. Amina waited for the caravan and asked after her husband. They told her he was a little sick, recovering, that he would come soon. Weeks later came the truth: he was gone. She had been a wife for, in some accounts, as few as four days. Now she was a widow, poor, with a child on the way who would enter the world already fatherless. Abdullah had never had the chance to earn anything. He left her a few camels, a small number of goats, and one servant, a woman named Baraka, known to history as Umm Ayman, who would go on to help raise the Prophet ﷺ and to love him to the end of her long life.
Born an orphan in a hard world
The aging Abd al-Muttalib stepped in as best he could. Near the end of his own life, he gathered the child to himself and refused to let him be overlooked. He gave him a name no one else in Makkah carried: Muhammad. When asked why, he said he wanted the boy to be praised in the heavens and on the earth. A child meant for praise, not a burden on the family.
But the world he was born into did not see it that way. In that society, no one was more exposed to neglect and exploitation than the orphan, who could be put to the hardest work while relatives seized whatever he earned. People would look at the boy, say "He is an orphan," and turn away, certain he would never amount to anything. Imagine how those looks must have landed on the heart of a child. And then remember how Allah chose to describe his Prophet's earliest condition, before anything else about him:
Did He not find you an orphan and shelter you? Did He not find you lost and guide you? Did He not find you in need and make you self-sufficient?
Qur'an 93:6-8
Of all the circumstances of his life, this is the first that Allah names. He found you an orphan, in a world that showed orphans no mercy. The whole of the Qur'an's command to honour the orphan, to never repulse him, to never turn him away, is lit from within by the fact that the one delivering that message had lived it. He knew, from the inside, exactly what it was to be the child everyone overlooked.
The women of Banu Sa'd
There was a custom among the noble families of Quraysh. They would send their infants into the desert to be nursed and raised for a time by women of a tribe called Banu Sa'd, who lived far from the city, in remote villages south of Ta'if. There were good reasons for it. The desert air protected the children from the diseases that travellers carried back into Makkah, the very kind of illness that had killed both of the Prophet's parents. The children grew accustomed to a hard, simple life with almost nothing, and they learned the purest, most beautiful Arabic, untouched by the mixing of tongues in the trading city.
These women came to Makkah once a year to take infants back under contract, and they chose carefully, because for them it was a livelihood. They looked for one of two things in a child: a wealthy family who would pay well, or a child being groomed for leadership, whose future authority might one day reward the woman who had been a mother to him. Money, or power. Those were the prospects that made a baby worth taking.
Now picture the Prophet ﷺ in that marketplace of hope. His father was dead and had left nothing. His grandfather was poor and dying. He had no older brother who might grow into a leader. His mother was a teenage widow in real poverty, with barely a brother of her own to lean on. By the measure those women used, he offered nothing at all. So Amina held her son out, and woman after woman came, asked their few questions, heard the word "orphan," and moved on. One by one they chose other children. When the contracting was done, only one infant had not been taken. It was the Prophet ﷺ.
There is something almost unbearable in that scene. The mother, holding out her beautiful child, hoping someone would see his worth, and the world walking past, certain there was nothing in him to gain. The very child who would one day be a mercy to all the worlds was, for that moment, the baby no one wanted.
Halima takes the one no one wanted
Among those women was Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb, who would become known as Halima al-Sa'diyya. Her very name carries something of her character: it comes from hilm, which means forbearance, gentleness, patience. She had come from Banu Sa'd with her husband, al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with him), for most of the scholars hold that he too later accepted Islam. With them were her young daughter, ash-Shayma, and an infant son.
That year, Halima later said, was a year of famine, and her family was the most stricken household in all of Banu Sa'd. She was so malnourished she could produce almost no milk. They had two animals, an old brown donkey and a thin she-camel, and neither gave anything. They went whole nights without sleep from hunger, their children crying for food, praying for rain that did not come. The journey to Makkah was long and brutal, and her weak donkey kept falling behind the caravan that pulled ahead and left her struggling. This was a last desperate effort: perhaps one of the families of Quraysh would give her a child and she could earn something to survive.
But she had no milk and no money to offer, and so the other women had passed her by just as the families had passed by the orphan. Every other woman had taken a child. She was about to go home empty-handed, the failure of a failed year. So she went back to her husband and spoke of the one infant left, the boy whose mother kept holding him out, the orphan no one would take. "I do not want to return with nothing," she said. "Let us take him. It is better than going home empty-handed. And perhaps Allah will place some good in him." She had no idea what she was saying. Al-Harith agreed. And so Halima went back to Amina and took the child no one else had wanted, under a contract to nurse him.
What happened next she would tell for the rest of her life. As they prepared to leave, her husband went to the thin she-camel and found her udders full of milk. They drank, and the animal seemed suddenly alive. She lifted the child to nurse him for the first time, and her own breast, dry from starvation, filled with milk, enough for him and for her own son too. She mounted the old donkey that had dragged behind the whole way to Makkah, and now it carried her so swiftly that the others called out for her to wait. Her husband said, "By Allah, Halima, you have taken hold of something blessed." When they reached home, still in the grip of drought, they sent their few sheep out to graze on the driest land imaginable, and the animals came back full, giving milk when nothing else in the region would. They knew, without understanding how, that a blessing had come to rest upon their house.
Strange and beautiful signs
Halima became, in every real sense, a mother to the Prophet ﷺ for these years. He grew healthy and strong, safe from the diseases of the city, and he learned the pure tongue of Banu Sa'd. When his grandfather later saw him, he marvelled: "The beauty of Quraysh and the eloquence of Sa'd." The boy played with his foster brother Abdullah and adored his older foster sister ash-Shayma. He had a family, a real one, full of siblings and love.
When the agreed term ended, Halima could not bear to give him back. She returned to Amina and asked to keep him longer, for the blessing they had seen in him. Amina, puzzled by the unusual request from the same woman who had once been reluctant to take him at all, agreed out of a mother's love for her thriving child.
Then one day, as the Prophet ﷺ played with his foster brother, two men in white robes that no one had seen before came to him. The boy Abdullah came running to his mother, terrified, saying the men had thrown Muhammad to the ground and split open his chest. This was the angel Jibril. He had laid the Prophet ﷺ down, opened his chest, and removed from his heart a portion, saying, "This is the share of Shaytan in you." Then he cast it away and closed him up again, and there remained upon his chest a fine line of stitching that no one could explain. Halima and al-Harith ran out and found the boy on the ground, his face pale, shaken to his core, a small child who had just had his heart taken out and returned with no explanation he could grasp.
That night al-Harith, frightened, said, "Halima, I fear this boy has been struck by something." In their fear they decided to return him to his family, and brought him back to Amina before the term was done. When she heard their worry that some harm or curse had touched her son, she answered with the certainty of a mother who knew. "Do not say my child is cursed. This child of mine has a special status." And then she told them what she had carried in silence. When she was pregnant with him, she said, she never felt his weight. When she delivered him, she saw a light come from her that lit up the palaces and the far country of ash-Sham. He was blessed, she insisted, not cursed, and something would one day come of him.
Amina never lived to see what that something was. She, like Halima, could not piece the signs together; she only knew they were there. Halima returned to her distant village, carrying a lifelong attachment to a boy she would not see for decades, while the Prophet ﷺ went on with his life in Makkah.
The grave at al-Abwa
When the Prophet ﷺ was about six, Amina took him to Madinah, then called Yathrib, to visit her relatives, the same family that would one day shelter her son when the whole world turned against him. On the way home she fell ill with a high fever in a village called al-Abwa. And there, in the middle of nowhere, a six-year-old boy who was already an orphan watched his mother die in front of him. He clung to her and cried as she took her last breath, and the people of the village buried her. He came back to Makkah now with no father and no mother. By the time he was eight, his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib would die too. He was passed from hand to hand, and his parents' two lives, added together, barely reached forty years.
This was the pain the Prophet ﷺ carried, and almost never spoke of. If you had met him later in Madinah, the honoured Messenger of Allah, you would scarcely have known how to raise such a thing with him, and he would not have raised it himself. He did not air his pain to people. He took it, at night, to his Lord.
So it is no small thing that this hidden grief surfaced near the end, when at last he turned off that road and climbed to the marked grave at al-Abwa and wept over his mother for the first time in over fifty years. He asked Allah's permission to seek forgiveness for her and was not granted it, for she had died before the message. But he was given permission to visit her grave, and he came. Fifty-four years of carried sorrow, poured out at last over the woman who had held him out to the world, hoping someone would see his worth.
A mother returned, and a debt repaid
And here the two stories come full circle in the most tender way. As his life drew toward its end, the people of his past began returning to him. After the battle of Hunayn, where the Hawazin, Halima's own people, had fought him and then come into Islam, a woman came forward to his encampment insisting, "I am the sister of your leader." He said that if she truly were his sister, there was a mark between them that only the two of them would know. She showed her arm, where he had once bitten her in play as a small boy in her care. It was ash-Shayma, Halima's daughter, his foster sister. He leapt to his feet, jolted by the past made suddenly present, spread his own cloak on the ground for her, and offered her either to stay with him, loved and honoured, or to return to her people with his care. She chose her people, and he saw to it generously.
Somewhere among those same tents was Halima al-Sa'diyya herself. Years before, during his marriage to Khadijah, when Banu Sa'd was again struck by famine, Halima had come to Makkah and found the boy she once nursed now a married man able to help, and Khadijah, who loved to honour everyone who had honoured her husband, gave her forty sheep and a camel. And now, after all the years, there was one final meeting. A companion named Abu Tufayl described the strange and beautiful sight: the Prophet ﷺ himself preparing and slicing meat, and an old woman drawing near. He spread out his garment for her and, in one narration, said, "Welcome, my mother." He sat her down and served her with his own hands. When Abu Tufayl asked who she was, the answer came: "This is his mother, the one who nursed him." She and her husband and her surviving children embraced Islam. What she had truly gained from taking in the orphan no one wanted was not the milk of the camels or the energy of the donkey, but four years of blessing in this world and the greatest blessing of all in the next: faith, at the hands of the very child she had cradled.
What these mothers' lives ask of our faith
It is easy to read these two lives and feel only the weight of the sorrow, or only the wonder of the signs. But both women are putting a quiet question to our own iman.
Amina asks us about certainty in Allah's promise when we cannot yet see it. She held a fatherless, penniless child and the whole of Makkah told her, in a hundred small ways, that he was nothing. And she said, against all of it, that her son was blessed, that something would come of him. She died before she ever saw a single proof. That is the shape of real faith: to trust what Allah has placed in your care before the outcome is visible, to keep believing in His good even while the world counts you a failure. You will have seasons when, by every worldly measure, your efforts look like the child no one would take. Amina's life asks whether you can still say, in the dark, that Allah does not waste what He has entrusted to you.
Halima asks us about how we treat the ones the world overlooks. The poor, the orphaned, the unconnected, the people who offer us no obvious return, are exactly the ones her story is about. She took the boy who promised her nothing, not out of grand vision but simply because she could not bear to go home empty-handed and thought perhaps Allah might put some good in him. And Allah filled her house with blessing and her heart with faith. The Prophet ﷺ taught that the best house among the Muslims is one where an orphan is honoured, and the worst is one where an orphan is ill-treated. He also taught that of two men, one powerful and courted and the other poor and ignored, the overlooked one can be better in the sight of Allah than an earth full of the other. So here is the concrete thing. Today there is someone near you, or somewhere in the wider world of the hungry and the displaced, whom you are tempted to walk past because they cannot do anything for you. Halima's life asks you to stop, as she stopped, to give to them and to invite them to good, for the sake of Allah alone, expecting nothing back. You never know which overlooked soul Allah has filled with light.
And both of them, together, teach us about the mercy that grief can grow into. The Prophet ﷺ carried his pain to his Lord at night and let it soften him into a man who could look at any bereaved or broken person and know, from the inside, exactly what they felt. He did not parade his wounds. He turned them into compassion. When sorrow comes to you, and it will, you have the same two doors he had: to take it to people as a complaint, or to take it to Allah in the dark and let Him turn it into gentleness toward others. The first empties you. The second is how a heart becomes a mercy.
So carry one thing from each of these mothers into an ordinary day. Trust Allah's promise the way Amina trusted it, before any proof arrives. Honour one overlooked person the way Halima honoured the orphan, quietly, for Allah. And when something hurts, bring it to your Lord rather than to the world, and let Him make you kinder for it. May Allah be pleased with Amina bint Wahb and with Halima al-Sa'diyya, reward them for what they gave to His most beloved, and gather us with the Prophet ﷺ and the souls who cared for him in the highest gardens of al-Firdaws.
This chapter follows the account of Amina bint Wahb (RA) and Halima al-Sa'diyya (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The Qur'an translation is from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (93:6-8). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.