Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb al-Sa'diyya: Foster-Mother of the Prophet

Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb al-Sa'diyya (Arabic: حليمة بنت أبي ذؤيب السعدية) was a Bedouin woman of the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, a branch of the Hawazin, who became the wet-nurse and foster-mother of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. She came to Mecca in a year of famine looking for an infant to nurse for a fee, and took the orphaned child — by her own account — only because every other woman in her party had refused him and no one else was left. He remained with her among the Banu Sa'd until he was weaned and for some time beyond, and the tie of foster-kinship made in those years was invoked decades later, when her tribe stood before him as captives after the Battle of Hunayn. Her account of the journey and of the years that followed is transmitted by Ibn Ishaq largely in her own words, and is one of the few extended first-person narrations by a woman in the biography of the Prophet's childhood.

The Custom of Fostering in the Desert

Settled Meccan families of means did not raise their infants in the city. They sent them out to be nursed among the Bedouin of the interior, on the reasoning that the desert air was healthier than the town's, that a child would take from it the purest Arabic and the hardiness of desert life, and that Mecca's diseases were better avoided. The wet-nurse was paid, and the arrangement bound the two households in a lasting foster-kinship that both sides valued.

Each year women of tribes such as the Banu Sa'd travelled to Mecca looking for nurslings, and they came in greatest numbers in years when drought had stripped their own herds and a nursing fee mattered most. Al-Waqidi reports that ten women of the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr made the journey with Halima on the occasion that concerns her.

Halima was not the Prophet's only wet-nurse. He was suckled by his mother Amina; by Thuwayba, a freedwoman of his uncle Abu Lahab; and then by Halima. The kinship Thuwayba created was treated as binding in law: when Umm Habiba proposed that the Prophet marry a daughter of Umm Salama, he answered that she would not be permitted to him even setting aside that she was already in his household, because she was his niece by suckling — her father Abu Salama and he had both been nursed by Thuwayba. That exchange is preserved in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.

Her Household

Ibn Ishaq gives her father's name as Abu Dhu'ayb, whose given name was Abd Allah ibn al-Harith, of the line of Nasr ibn Sa'd ibn Bakr ibn Hawazin. Her husband, the Prophet's foster-father, was al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza of the same tribe. Their children — the Prophet's foster-siblings — were a son, Abd Allah ibn al-Harith, and two daughters, Unaysa and Khidhama, the latter known by the epithet al-Shayma'. Ibn Ishaq adds that al-Shayma' is said to have cradled the infant alongside her mother while he was with them.

The Journey to Mecca

Halima's own telling, transmitted by Ibn Ishaq through a chain reaching back by way of Abd Allah ibn Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, begins in hardship. It was a year of famine. She rode a dark grey she-ass worn out from the road; the family had their own infant son with them and an old milch camel that, she said, was not giving a drop. Neither she nor her husband slept that night, because their own child cried and there was nothing in her breast for him and nothing in the camel. They travelled in hope of rain. Her donkey lagged behind every other rider in the party, weak and thirsty, to her companions' irritation.

At Mecca the orphan was offered to all of them and all of them refused him, herself included:

"I don't know of one woman of ours who was not offered the Messenger of God; but all refused him when it was said that he was an orphan. We refused him saying, 'What good could his mother do for us? What we want is some help from the boy's father; what could his mother do for us?'"

The economics were plain: a nurse was paid by a father, and this child had none. Every woman in the party found an infant except Halima. When the group was assembling to leave she went to her husband:

"By God, I hate to go back amongst my companions without having a baby to suckle. I'll go off to that orphan and take him."

"It's not your duty to do so; and so perhaps God will bring us some blessings through him."

She was candid about her motive: "the fact is, by God, I only took him because I couldn't find anyone else."

The Blessing

What she described next she attributed to the child rather than to chance. She had no sooner brought him back to her baggage than her milk came in freely, enough for him and for her own son besides; both drank their fill and the family passed its first easy night. Her husband went to the old camel and found her udder full, milked her, and they drank until satisfied. In the morning he said:

"Halima, by God I really think you've taken a person who is blessed! You see what a fine, happy night we passed when we took him? May God Almighty go on bringing us more benefit yet!"

On the road home the she-ass that had trailed the whole party outpaced every animal in it, until the other women called across to her — was that really the same donkey she had set out on? She said it was. "Well, by God, something's really happened to her!"

Back in the territory of the Banu Sa'd, which Halima described as the most barren ground she knew of on God's earth, her goats went out to graze and came back full of milk while her neighbours' ewes, on the same pasture, gave nothing at all. The others eventually told their shepherds to drive their flocks wherever the daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb's flock went; they did, and it made no difference — hers came home satisfied and theirs hungry.

The Years Among the Banu Sa'd

He reached the age of two with her and was weaned. She thought him unlike the other children — already sturdy, growing into a fine boy — and when the family brought him back to his mother at that point they were, she admitted, reluctant to give him up, "very covetous of him because of having seen the blessings he had brought." So she made a case to Amina for keeping him longer, putting it as concern for his health: let them take this son of theirs back for another year, since they feared he might catch a disease from Mecca. They pressed her until she agreed, and the child returned to the desert with them for a further two or three months.

Al-Waqidi preserves a scene from those years. Halima went out looking for the boy and found the animals lying in the full sun, and the child with her daughter. She asked why they were out in such heat, and the girl answered that her brother did not get hot — that she had seen a cloud shading him, which halted when he halted and moved when he moved, until he came to that spot.

The Prophet later credited his Arabic to this upbringing. Haykal renders the saying he used with his Companions: "I am the most Arab among you, for I am of the tribe of Quraysh" and was suckled among the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. How long the fostering lasted is not agreed: Ibn Ishaq's account of Halima's narration gives two years to weaning and a few months more, while Haykal reckons the desert years at five.

The Opening of the Chest

The episode that ended the arrangement is known as the opening of the chest, Shaq al-Sadr. In Halima's account, one of the boy's foster-brothers came running in from the grazing animals in great agitation:

"That Quraysh brother of mine! Two men dressed in white came to him, laid him down, and split open his abdomen!"

She and her husband ran out and found the child standing there, pale. His foster-father took hold of him and asked what was wrong, and he said the same thing: two men in white had laid him down, opened his abdomen, drawn something out of it and thrown it away, and then closed him again.

Ibn Ishaq also transmits an account in the Prophet's own words, given to his Companions long afterwards, which supplies what the child could not. Two men in white came to him among the animals carrying a golden basin filled with ice; they laid him down, opened his abdomen and took out his heart, split it, extracted a black clot and threw it away, washed the heart and his insides clean, and put everything back as it had been — after which one told the other to weigh him against ten of his people, and he outweighed them.

The episode does not rest on the sira alone. Sahih Muslim, in the Book of Faith, carries it from Anas ibn Malik with Halima named in the report itself: Jibril came to the Prophet while he was a boy living with Halima the wet-nurse and playing with the other boys, took hold of him and laid him on the ground, opened his chest and took out his heart, drew from it a clot of blood and said, "This was the Shaitan's share of you," then washed it in a vessel of gold filled with Zamzam water and restored it. The boys ran to his nurse crying that Muhammad had been killed; they came to him and found his colour changed. Anas added that he used to see the mark of that stitching on the Prophet's chest. The details differ between the two lines — a basin of ice in one, Zamzam water in the other — and there is no agreement on how old the child was when it happened.

The Return to His Mother

Halima's husband wanted the boy back with his family at once. "Halima, I'm afraid my foster son has become afflicted; let's hurry and give him back to his family before what we fear does develop."

Amina was surprised to see them. "So why did you bring him back, nurse? You both wanted to have him so much." They told her it was nothing, that God had relieved them of the task and they had done their duty, and that they feared some harm might come to him. She would not accept it. "What's going on with you both! Tell me truthfully what's worrying you!" — and she kept at them until they told her what had happened. Her answer was the reassurance the sira preserves:

"Are you afraid for him from Satan? Absolutely not; Satan won't get to him. By God, this son of mine has a great future before him."

She then told them what she had experienced herself: that he was the lightest child she ever carried; that while pregnant she had seen in her sleep a light so bright it lit the castles of Syria; and that at his birth he came out as babies do not, drawing himself up on his arms and raising his head towards heaven. "So leave him, and don't worry." Ibn Kathir notes that the account of the chest-opening is transmitted through several other lines as well, and is among the best known and most often told of the episodes of the Prophet's childhood.

Ibn Ishaq preserves a second reason for the return, and Haykal reports that he presented it as the real one: that after the weaning a party of Abyssinian Christians saw the child and said among themselves that they should take him back to their country and their king, because they knew he was going to be of consequence. Halima, in this account, got him away from them only with difficulty, and it was this that decided her to return him to his own people.

A further report has her lose the boy on the outskirts of Mecca as she brought him in. She went to his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, who sent men to search; Waraqah ibn Nawfal and another man of the Quraysh found him, and his grandfather carried him on his shoulders around the Kaaba, praying for his protection, before returning him to his mother.

The Prophet's Later Regard

Halima's part in his upbringing ended there, but the relationship did not. Haykal records that after his marriage to Khadijah bint Khuwaylid a drought struck her people and Halima came to visit him, returning to her tribe with a camel loaded with water and forty head of cattle. Whenever she came to him, the same account states, he would spread out his own mantle for her to sit on, as the mark of what he considered he owed her.

Her Tribe at Hunayn

In 8 AH, a month after the conquest of Mecca, the Hawazin and their allies were defeated at Hunayn and large numbers of them taken captive — among them people of the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, the tribe that had nursed him. Ibn Kathir draws the line between the two events himself: the blessing that came down on Halima and her household when the child was placed with them returned, he writes, to the wider people of Hawazin, who were related to the Prophet through that suckling and whom he therefore released, pitying them and treating them with kindness.

A delegation of Hawazin who had accepted Islam came to him at al-Ji'ranah, between Mecca and al-Ta'if, while the spoils were being distributed. "O Messenger of God, we are one family and tribe. You know well what misfortune has befallen us. Have mercy on us, and may God have mercy on you." Their spokesman — named as Zuhayr ibn Surad, and in a second line of transmission as Abu Sarad Zuhayr ibn Jarwal — then put the case directly:

"O Messenger of God, those prisoners you have in the stockades are your aunts and your nurses who looked after you. If we had suckled Ibn Abi Shamar or al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir and then we were to suffer from them what we have from you, we would have hoped for their help and kindness. And yet you are the most honourable of men."

He followed it with verses whose refrain returned to the same claim:

"Have pity on us, O Messenger of God, in kindness; for you are the man we plead with and implore. Have pity on a tribe ruined by fate, their whole divided, their fortune adversely changed … Have pity on women you once sucked, your mouth filled with their pure milk."

The Prophet gave up whatever share of the captives fell to himself and to the family of Abd al-Muttalib, and asked the army to do the same; the sources record some six thousand men and women released as a result.

Al-Shayma' among the captives

Halima's own daughter was among those taken. Haykal's account has her claim of kinship doubted by the soldiers who held her, until she was brought before the Prophet to have her story tested and he recognised her at once as al-Shayma' bint al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza. He went out to meet her, spread his mantle for her to sit on, reassured her, and asked whether she wished to stay in his camp or return to her people; she chose to return, and he sent her back with gifts, unharmed. The Sealed Nectar gives the same substance more briefly, recording that she was identified by a mark, honoured, offered the choice and sent home. A fuller version of the recognition is transmitted by al-Bayhaqi through Ibn Kathir, in which she named herself his foster-sister and, asked for proof, showed him a mark on her upper arm — "When you were small, you gave me this bite" — whereupon he spread his cloak for her and told her to ask what she wished.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Sahih Muslim, Book of Faith, hadith 413/261 — Anas ibn Malik's narration of the opening of the Prophet's chest while he was a boy living with Halima, and his testimony to having seen the mark of it
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — the report from Umm Habiba in which the Prophet declines a marriage on the ground of foster-kinship through Thuwayba
• Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, in the recension of Ibn Hisham — Halima's own account of the famine journey, the taking of the orphan, the blessings that followed, the years among the Banu Sa'd, the opening of the chest, Amina's reassurance, and the Abyssinian Christians
• Al-Waqidi, as reported by Ibn Kathir — the ten women of the Banu Sa'd who travelled with her, and the cloud that shaded the boy
• Al-Bayhaqi, as reported by Ibn Kathir — al-Shayma's recognition by the mark on her arm

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya, English translation, Volumes 1 and 4 — the principal source throughout, including the genealogies of Halima's household, the Prophet's own narration of the opening of the chest, and the connection drawn between the blessing on Halima's family and the clemency shown to Hawazin
• Ibn Hisham, recension of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad — for Halima's plea to her husband, the five-year reckoning of the desert period, the saying on his Arabic, the Abyssinian Christians as the reason for the return, her later visit during the drought, and the fuller account of al-Shayma before the Prophet
• Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum). Riyadh: Darussalam — for the suckling and for al-Shayma's recognition after Hunayn

Further Reading

These works were not consulted for this article and are listed for readers who wish to pursue the subject further. Nothing in the body text rests on them.

• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955 — the standard English Ibn Ishaq, in which Halima's narration may be read in its original sequence
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, Volume 1 — the classical biographical dictionary's treatment of the Prophet's nursing and early childhood
• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983