Thuwaybah

Thuwaybah was the freedwoman (mawāt) of Abū Lahab who suckled the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ in the first days of his infancy, before he was given over to Ḥalīmah al-Saʻdiyyah for nursing among the Banū Saʻd. Though her place in the sīrah is brief, it is remembered with tenderness, for she was among the first to nourish the Prophet ﷺ, and the milk-kinship she established joined him in foster-brotherhood to others whom she had nursed, among them his uncle Ḥamzah ibn ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib. The Prophet ﷺ continued to honour her throughout her life, and her memory was preserved among the early reports of his birth and infancy.

Thuwaybah was a slave of Abū Lahab ibn ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ. When the Prophet ﷺ was born and the news was brought to Abū Lahab, Thuwayba is the one who, by the reports, carried the tidings to him; and in his joy at the birth of his nephew Abū Lahab freed her. In the days that followed, before a wet-nurse from the desert tribes was found, Thuwaybah suckled the infant Prophet ﷺ, as she had suckled others, so that she was the first to nurse him after his mother Āmina. She had milk at that time from a son of her own named Masrūḥ.

Through her nursing Thuwaybah became a foster-mother to the Prophet ﷺ, and those whom she had suckled became his foster-brothers and foster-sisters by the milk-kinship (riḍāʻa) that Islam later recognized as creating the bonds and prohibitions of true kinship. Among those she had nursed were Ḥamza ibn ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ, who was thus also his foster-brother, and Abū Salama ibn ʻAbd al-Asad, later a Companion and the first husband of Umm Salama. The sources note these foster-relationships in their discussions of the law of riḍāʻa and of the women whom the Prophet ﷺ might not marry on account of it.

The Prophet ﷺ held Thuwaybah in honour and affection throughout his life. The reports relate that he and his wife Khadījah used to treat her with kindness and to send to her, and that after the Hijra he continued to inquire after her and to send her clothing and provision from Madīnah, until word reached him of her death. She is said to have died in the year 7 AH, after the expedition to Khaybar; and when the Prophet ﷺ asked also after her son Masrūḥ, he was told that he had died before her, and that she had left no kin to inherit from her.

A well-known tradition connects Thuwaybah with the case of Abū Lahab, the Prophet’s ﷺ implacable enemy, whose condemnation is pronounced in the Qurʼān. It is related that Abū Lahab was seen after his death in a dream, in a state of torment, but saying that he was given to drink a little on Mondays through a hollow between his fingers, because he had freed Thuwaybah in his joy on the Monday of the Prophet’s ﷺ birth, and had rejoiced at the news she brought. The report was cited by some of the scholars in connection with the merit of rejoicing at the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, though others noted that it was a dream and discussed its bearing accordingly.

There is some difference among the authorities as to whether Thuwaybah ever embraced Islam. Most of the early notices treat her simply as the freedwoman who nursed the Prophet ﷺ and whom he honoured, without affirming her conversion, and the biographers are generally cautious on the point; some later writers held that she became a Muslim, while others left the question open. The uncertainty did not diminish the regard in which she was held in the tradition as the first nurse of the Prophet ﷺ, and her name was preserved among those connected with his infancy.

The place of Thuwaybah in the sīra belongs to the account of the Prophet’s ﷺ birth and earliest days, before the well-known sojourn among the Banū Saʻd with Ḥalīmah. The biographers set her nursing at the very beginning of his life, as the first of the milk-bonds that the tradition recorded, and her brief appearance is bound up with the law of foster-kinship and with the honour the Prophet ﷺ showed to those who had served him in his infancy. Her son Masrūḥ and her foster-children are named in the genealogical and legal literature that grew up around the subject.

In the sīrah tradition, Thuwaybah is remembered as the freedwoman who first suckled the Prophet ﷺ, the foster-mother who joined him in milk-kinship to Ḥamzah and others, and whom he honoured with kindness and provision to the end of her life. Modest as her role was, it earned her a lasting place in the narrative of his infancy, and the report of Abū Lahab’s easing on Mondays for her freeing preserved her name in the wider memory of the community as a figure touched, however slightly, by her nearness to the birth of the Prophet ﷺ.

## References

1 W. Montgomery Watt, “Ḥalīma,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3:94. 2 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-nikāḥ,” bāb wa-ummātukum allātī arḍaʻnakum, no. 5101. 3 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-riḍāʻ,” bāb taḥrīm ibnat al-akh min al-riḍāʻa, no. 1449. 4 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 69–70. 5 Ibn Saʻd, Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 1:108–9. 6 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʻAsqalānī, al-Iṣāba fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʻIlmiyya, 1995), 7:565–66.7 Al-Suhaylī, al-Rawḍ al-unuf (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʼ al-Turāth al-ʻArabī, 2000), 2:155–58. 8 Abū Nuʻaym al-Iṣbahānī, Dalāʼil al-nubuwwa (Beirut: Dār al-Nafāʼis, 1986), 1:147–49.