Umm Salama (Hind bint Abi Umayya)

Umm Salama — Hind bint Abi Umayya — was a widow of the early Muslim migrations who became a wife of the Prophet. Tradition remembers her intelligence, her counsel at Hudaybiyya, and the hundreds of hadith narrated on her authority.

She and her first husband, Abu Salama, were among the early Muslims who fled Meccan persecution to Abyssinia in The first migration to Abyssinia ¹. Back in Mecca, the couple's move to Medina was blocked by her family — the sira remembers her as the first woman to emigrate with her child — and after Abu Salama died of wounds from The Battle of Uhud, she married the Prophet about 626 ².

At The Treaty of Hudaybiyya in 628, when the pilgrims were turned back short of Mecca and the men hesitated to abandon the pilgrimage rites, tradition tells that it was Umm Salama who advised the Prophet to act first himself — the men followed ¹.

She outlived the Prophet by nearly five decades in Medina, answering questions of law and ritual; several hundred hadith stand in her name in the Sunni collections ¹.

Her preserved reports shaped daily Muslim practice — and her role at Hudaybiyya is still cited when Muslims talk about counsel, marriage and who may advise whom.