Umm Ma'bad

An elderly Bedouin woman living in a tent in the desert at a place called Qudayd (قُدَيْد), on the route between Makkah and Madinah (roughly one and a half hours by modern road from Madinah). She and her husband were wandering Bedouin, so poor that when the Prophet ﷺ and Abū Bakr stopped and asked to buy food, she had nothing to offer. Her husband had gone out to find food.

She noticed that the Prophet ﷺ saw an old goat in the corner of the tent, one that had long since stopped producing milk and was only being kept for eventual slaughter. He asked her permission to try milking it. She smirked: that time had passed, this goat was done. But she gave permission. The Prophet ﷺ said Bismillāh, made duʿāʾ, and touched the udder. It filled immediately with milk. Abū Bakr milked it, they drank to satisfaction, and left the remainder for Umm Maʿbad and her husband.

When her husband returned and found the milk, she told him everything. She described the two travelers, including the Prophet ﷺ, in detail. Her description is one of the most famous physical descriptions of the Prophet ﷺ: he was wasīm (handsome, well-featured), with long hair that fell near his earlobes, neither short nor tall, a light complexion. Her husband recognized that these must be the two men the Quraysh were searching for. When she realized one of them claimed to be a Prophet, she said: "This is not a claim; he is a Prophet." Both she and her husband accepted Islam.

Her account of this incident is narrated by her directly and is one of the few descriptions of the Prophet ﷺ given by a woman who saw him without prior knowledge of who he was.