The Women of Khaybar, and the Girl with the Necklace

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

A group of Anṣārī women volunteered for the Khaybar expedition, to treat the wounded, carry water, and work in the background, and the Prophet ﷺ allowed it. As a rule he did not take women on campaigns, but Khaybar's outcome was so little in doubt that he permitted it here.

The youngest of them, a girl of perhaps seven or eight whose name the narration never records, had no mount, so on the way to Khaybar the Prophet ﷺ seated her on the luggage behind his own saddle. When the camel stopped and he told her to come down, she froze, she had found blood beneath her, her very first cycle, and she was petrified with embarrassment, in the worst imaginable place and company for it. Seeing the traces on the saddle, the Prophet ﷺ said gently: perhaps you have begun your cycle (لَعَلَّكِ نَفِسْتِ)? She nodded. No irritation, no anger: he told her to go cleanse herself and settle her matter, then bring water and salt, wash the saddle, and take her seat again. He turned a lifelong horror story into a lifelong comfort.

The women received no battle-shares, they had not fought, but the Prophet ﷺ gave them gifts, and this girl's gift was a necklace he placed around her neck with his own hands. She wore it for the rest of her life, and made it her waṣiyyah that it be buried with her. The shaykh draws the fiqh point too: where there is no fitnah, there was no ḥaraj in a young girl riding behind him in public, and what we really see is how the Prophet ﷺ turned a moment of terror into lifelong honor.