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 tribe of Najd, who became the wet-nurse and foster-mother of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as an infant. Following the custom of the Meccan elite, Muhammad's mother Amina placed him in Halima's care within days of his birth, and he lived among the Banu Sa'd in the desert for several years before returning to his mother in Mecca. The Prophet remembered Halima and her household with warmth for the rest of his life, and the bond of foster-kinship (rada'ah) that his time with her created proved consequential decades later, when it shaped his treatment of her tribe's descendants as captives after the Battle of Hunayn.

Halima's own account of these years survives in the earliest biographical literature, transmitted by Ibn Ishaq and preserved in the recension of Ibn Hisham. It is one of the few substantial first-person narrations by a woman in the biography of the Prophet's early life, and it is treated in this article as her testimony, reported in the sira rather than in the hadith collections proper.

The Custom of Sending Children to the Desert

The Quraysh of Mecca, like other settled Arab families of means, followed a custom of sending their infants to be nursed and raised among the Bedouin of the interior rather than in the city. The reasoning given in the sources was practical and social at once: the desert air was considered healthier than that of Mecca, and a period spent among the Bedouin was thought to instil the purest classical Arabic and the physical hardiness of desert life, away from the settled town's comforts and its diseases. Families paid the wet-nurses for this service, and the arrangement carried social prestige for both sides — the child's family gained a mark of status, and the nursing tribe gained income and a lasting tie of foster-kinship to a Meccan household.

Every year, groups of women from tribes such as the Banu Sa'd would travel to Mecca in search of infants to nurse, particularly in years when drought had reduced their own resources and a wet-nurse's fee was badly needed. It was in one such year that Halima came to Mecca.

Halima's Own Account

Ibn Ishaq's narration, as transmitted through Ibn Hisham, preserves the story largely in Halima's own words. She said that she set out for Mecca from the land of Banu Sa'd together with her husband, al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza — known by the kunya Abu Kabsha — and their infant son, along with a number of other women of the tribe seeking children to suckle. It was, she said, a year of drought and famine. She rode a grey she-donkey, weak from the journey, and the party also had with them an old milch camel that gave no milk at all. That night, she said, neither she nor her husband slept, because their own child cried from hunger and there was nothing in her breast or in the camel to feed him.

When the party reached Mecca, the women were offered a newborn boy whose father had died before his birth. Halima related that every woman among them refused him, herself included at first, because he was an orphan: "What good could his mother do for us? What we want is some help from the boy's father." Each of the other women found an infant to nurse, but Halima found none. Rather than return to her companions empty-handed, she told her husband she would go back for the orphan after all. He replied that there was no harm in it, and that God might bring them a blessing through the boy. She went and took him — by her own account, only because there was no one else left to take.

What followed, in Halima's telling, she attributed directly to divine blessing rather than to chance. As soon as she put the infant to her breast, her milk came in fully, sufficient for him and for her own child besides, and both infants drank their fill and slept soundly — the first untroubled night the family had had. Her husband then went to milk the old camel and, to his astonishment, found her udder full; he milked her, and the whole family drank until satisfied. The next morning her husband told her he believed she had taken a blessed child. On the journey home, her donkey — which had lagged behind every other rider on the way to Mecca — now outpaced the whole party, so that her companions asked in astonishment whether it was the same animal. Once back among the Banu Sa'd, in territory Halima described as the most barren she knew, her flock alone grazed and returned full of milk while the flocks of her neighbours, grazing the same ground, gave none — a difference other herdsmen in the area are said to have noticed and to have directed their own animals to follow.

Whether these details of the journey are read as literal fact or as the specific colouring that traditions of this kind often carry, they are transmitted here as Halima's own account, given by Ibn Ishaq's line of transmission, and the article follows the sira in presenting them as her narration rather than as independently established history.

Years in the Desert

The infant Muhammad remained with Halima and her family among the Banu Sa'd for the customary period of nursing. Ibn Ishaq's narration states that the family, having seen the good fortune his presence had brought them, asked Amina to let him stay beyond the usual term, citing their concern that he might otherwise catch an illness common in Mecca; Amina agreed, and Muhammad remained with Halima until about the age of two, when he was weaned, and for some additional time after that.

His foster-siblings in Halima's household were named by Ibn Ishaq as Abdullah ibn al-Harith, and two daughters, Unaysa and Hudhafa bint al-Harith — the latter known by her epithet al-Shayma', who according to some accounts helped care for the infant Muhammad alongside her mother. The Prophet would later say of his years among the Banu Sa'd, "I am the most Arab of you all; I am of Quraysh and was suckled by Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr" — a statement the sources record him making to his own Companions, in recognition of the classical Arabic he credited to his upbringing there.

The Opening of the Chest

While Muhammad was still in Halima's care, the sira records an episode known as the opening of the chest (Shaq al-Sadr). Ibn Ishaq's narration describes how one of Muhammad's foster-brothers ran in from among the family's grazing animals, badly frightened, saying that two men in white had come to "that Quraysh brother of mine," laid him down, and opened his body. Halima and her husband ran out and found the boy standing, pale but unharmed, who told them the same thing: that two men in white had laid him down, opened his chest, taken something from within it and thrown it away, then restored him. Fearing some affliction had befallen their foster-son, Halima and her husband returned him to his mother in Mecca, and it was Amina, according to this account, who reassured them that no harm would come to him.

This episode is not confined to the sira literature. It is also transmitted with a sound chain in Sahih Muslim, in the Book of Faith, on the authority of Anas ibn Malik: that Jibril came to Muhammad while he was playing with other boys, took him, opened his chest, drew out his heart, extracted a dark clot from it and said, "That was the part of Satan in you," then washed the heart with water from Zamzam in a golden basin before restoring it. The other boys ran to his nurse crying that Muhammad had been killed, and when they reached him he was found alive, only pale in the face. Anas adds that he himself saw the mark of the stitching on the Prophet's chest. Because this report is transmitted independently in the canonical collection with its own chain, rather than resting on the sira narration alone, it stands as an authenticated element of the story rather than as part of Halima's testimony specifically — Anas, not Halima, is the named authority for it in Sahih Muslim.

Return to His Mother, and a Danger on the Road

Ibn Ishaq's narration records that as Halima was bringing the weaned Muhammad back toward Mecca, the party passed a caravan of Christians who took hold of the boy, remarking that he should be brought before their king as a person of great importance; Halima, in this account, managed only with difficulty to get him back from them. A further report states that on a later approach to Mecca she briefly lost track of him, and that his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib sent men to search; Waraqa ibn Nawfal and another man of the Quraysh are said to have found the boy and returned him, after which his grandfather carried him on his shoulders around the Kaaba, praying for his protection, before restoring him to his mother.

Muhammad remained with his mother Amina until her death when he was about six years old, and was then raised by his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and, after Abd al-Muttalib's death two years later, by his uncle Abu Talib. Halima's direct role in his upbringing had by then ended, but the Prophet did not lose touch with the household that had raised him.

A Later Visit, and the Prophet's Continued Regard

According to Muhammad Husayn Haykal's biography, Halima came to visit Muhammad again years later, after his marriage to Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, during a period of drought affecting her people. On that occasion, this source records, she returned to her tribe with a camel laden with water and forty head of cattle. The same account states that whenever Halima visited him, Muhammad would spread out his own mantle for her to sit on, as a mark of the respect and gratitude he held for the woman who had nursed him. This gesture — spreading his cloak for a woman of her household — recurs in the sources in connection with her family, including in the episode described below concerning her daughter Shayma' after the Battle of Hunayn.

Halima's Tribe and the Battle of Hunayn

The Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, Halima's tribe, were themselves a branch of the larger Hawazin confederation. Decades after Muhammad's childhood among them, in 630 CE (8 AH), the Hawazin and their allies the Thaqif took up arms against the Muslims and were defeated at the Battle of Hunayn, a month after the conquest of Mecca. Among the six thousand captives taken in the battle's aftermath were men and women of the Banu Sa'd — the tribe that had nursed the Prophet as an infant.

When a delegation of Hawazin came to plead for the return of their captured families and property, their spokesman, named in the sources as Zuhayr ibn Surad, appealed to the Prophet in verse, reminding him that among the prisoners were "your aunts and your nurses who looked after you," and that he had been suckled at their breasts as a child. Ibn Ishaq's account, preserved by Ibn Kathir, records the Prophet's reply: that whatever share of the captives belonged to himself and to the family of Abd al-Muttalib was returned to them freely, and he asked the rest of the army to do likewise. The sources state that some six thousand men and women were freed as a result, along with a substantial distribution of camels and goods.

Ibn Kathir draws the connection explicitly: the good fortune that Halima and her household received when the infant Muhammad was placed in their care came back, he writes, to benefit the wider people of Hawazin generations later, when their capture at Hunayn was answered with the Prophet's clemency on account of the foster-tie his own childhood had created with them.

Shayma bint al-Harith Among the Captives

A specific episode connects Halima's own family directly to the Hunayn captives. Both The Sealed Nectar and Haykal's biography record that among those taken prisoner was Shayma' bint al-Harith, Halima's daughter and Muhammad's foster-sister. Ibn Kathir's translation preserves a fuller version of the recognition: a report transmitted by al-Bayhaqi states that a captive woman came to the Prophet and identified herself as his foster-sister, and that when he asked her to prove it, she showed him a mark on her upper arm, saying, "When you were small, you gave me this bite." The Prophet then spread his cloak for her to sit on and told her to ask what she wished, promising his intercession.

The Sealed Nectar's account states more simply that she was recognised "by a certain mark," honoured, and asked whether she wished to remain or return to her people; she chose to return, and was sent back with gifts. Haykal's version adds that she was at first treated roughly by soldiers who did not believe her claim, until she was brought before the Prophet and he recognised her himself. The two accounts differ in these narrative details — the bite-mark story is not present in Haykal's telling, and the manner of her identification is described somewhat differently in each — but they agree on the substance: Shayma' was among the captives, she made her relationship to the Prophet known, he recognised her, treated her with honour, and returned her to her people.

Historiographical Note

Two points about the source material for Halima's life deserve to be stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

Whether Halima herself, or only her daughter, appears in the accounts of Hunayn. Ibn Kathir, in his own commentary on a report transmitted by Abu Nasr ibn Qatada — that a woman came before the Prophet at al-Ji'ranah while he was distributing the camels, and that when asked who she was, those present said she was "his foster-mother" — raises the difficulty himself: he calculates that if this report refers to Halima and not to a foster-sister, she would have had to be at least in her nineties, since more than sixty years had passed since the suckling took place and she could not have been younger than about thirty at the time. Ibn Kathir suggests the report more likely intends her foster-sister — that is, Shayma' — rather than Halima, and adds plainly that God alone knows the truth of the matter. This article follows Ibn Kathir's own caution: the well-attested episode is Shayma's recognition after Hunayn, and the possibility that Halima herself was also present at al-Ji'ranah is reported here as a contested and unresolved point rather than as an established fact.

The date of Halima's death. No source consulted for this article establishes when or where Halima died. Later popular literature sometimes gives a date, but no such date has been traced to an early authority, and none is asserted here. What the sources do establish is that she was alive to visit the Prophet as an adult, after his marriage to Khadijah, and that her daughter Shayma' was still living, and recognisable to the Prophet by a childhood mark, as late as 630 CE.

Legacy

Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb is remembered in the Islamic tradition chiefly for the years in which she carried out an ordinary arrangement of Arabian custom — nursing another woman's child for a fee, in a year when her own family badly needed it — and for the lifelong gratitude that the Prophet showed her in return. The sira preserves her own words about the hardship that preceded her decision to take the orphaned infant, and about the abundance that followed it, giving her an unusually direct voice among the women who appear in the earliest biographical accounts of the Prophet's life.

Her significance extends beyond her own household. The tie of foster-kinship she created, between the Prophet and the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, was not a sentimental memory only: it shaped a concrete political and military decision decades later, when the defeated Hawazin's connection to the Prophet's own upbringing was invoked, and honoured, at one of the largest distributions of clemency in his career.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Sahih Muslim, Book of Faith — Anas ibn Malik's narration of the opening of the Prophet's chest while in the care of his nurse, and his testimony to seeing the mark of it
• Quran, Surah at-Tawbah (9:25-26) — the Battle of Hunayn, in whose aftermath the Hawazin captives, including Halima's household, were freed
• Ibn Hisham, recension of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah — the fullest narration of Halima's own account of the journey to Mecca, the suckling, and the years in the desert
• Ibn Ishaq, as transmitted by Ibn Kathir — the account of the Hawazin delegation after Hunayn and the return of the captives

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya [English translation]. [Compiled c. 1373 CE] — for Ibn Ishaq's narration of Halima's account, the opening of the chest, the return of the Hawazin captives, and Ibn Kathir's own assessment of the report placing a foster-relative at al-Ji'ranah
• Al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. [Completed c. 915 CE]
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. [Compiled c. 845 CE]
• Al-Bayhaqi, Ahmad ibn al-Husayn. Dala'il al-Nubuwwah, as transmitted by Ibn Kathir — the report of Shayma's recognition by a mark on her arm

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum). Riyadh: Darussalam, 1996.
• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad. Translated by Isma'il Razi al-Faruqi. Indianapolis: North American Trust Publications, 1976.
• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
• Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Further Reading

• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983.
• Armstrong, Karen. Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
• islamweb.net, "Haleemah As-Sa'diyyah: The Blessed Wet-Nurse" (islamweb.net/en/article/178817)