Zaynab bint Jahsh

Zaynab bint Jaḥsh, the Prophet's (ﷺ) cousin (her mother Umaymah was his paternal aunt) and sister of Ḥamnah bint Jaḥsh, would in time become one of the Ummahāt al-Muʾminīn, her full marriage story, and the revelation surrounding it, belongs to a later point in the Sīrah. During the slander of ʿĀʾishah (5 AH), ʿĀʾishah herself identified Zaynab as the one wife who was a genuine rival to her, of noble Qurashī lineage, a blood relative of the Prophet (ﷺ), and someone the Prophet (ﷺ) was known to hold in particular regard. When the Prophet (ﷺ) asked Zaynab directly what she knew of ʿĀʾishah's character, she answered: "I will not let my ears and eyes speak something I have no knowledge of, I know nothing of her but good," refusing to let personal rivalry override her religious conscience. ʿĀʾishah later said of her, "Her dīn protected her tongue." Zaynab's own sister Ḥamnah, by contrast, took the opposite path in the same episode, spreading the rumor in an apparent attempt to damage her sister's rival, for which Ḥamnah alone bore the legal punishment, while Zaynab's restraint left her entirely untouched by it. Born Barra, she was the daughter of Umaymah bint ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the Prophet's ﷺ paternal aunt. After an unhappy marriage to Zayd ibn Ḥārithah ended in divorce, Allah married her to the Prophet ﷺ directly in the Qurʾān (Sūrat al-Aḥzāb 37) in Dhū al-Qaʿdah 5 AH, the only nikāḥ contracted without walī, witnesses, or mahr, and the verses of ḥijāb came down on her wedding night. Famed for fasting, night prayer, and boundless charity (Umm al-Masākīn), she fulfilled the Prophet's ﷺ prophecy of 'the longest hand,' dying in 20 AH as the first of his wives to follow him, after giving away her entire 12,000-dirham stipend in a single day.