Wives of Muhammad
13 women married to Muhammad and brief outlines of the circumstances of the marriages
The Islamic prophet Muhammad is said to have had thirteen wives in total (although two have ambiguous accounts, Rayhana bint Zayd and Maria al-Qibtiyya, as wife or concubine). As a sign of respect, Muslims refer to each of these wives with the title "Umm al-Muʾminīn" (Arabic: أُمّ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِين, lit. 'Mother of the Believers'; plural: أُمَّهَات ٱلْمُؤْمِنِين, romanized: Ummahāt al-Muʾminīn), which is derived from 33:6 of the Quran.
Sources give different numbers (11-19) based on narrations about Muhammad's marriages. Ali Dashti lists 23 wives of Muhammad, which he divides them into three categories. Two of these were concubines, and four were women who gave themselves to Muhammad, other than concubines and wives permitted for him by the last part of verse 49 of surah Al-Ahzab. Nine of Muhammad's wives survived after him. Aisha, who became known as Muhammad's favorite wife in Sunni tradition, survived him by decades and was instrumental in helping assemble the scattered sayings of Muhammad that form the hadith literature for the Sunni branch of Islam.
Muhammad's first marriage was to Khadija bint Khuwaylid in 595, when he was 25 and she was either 28 or 41. She was his only wife until her death in 619 (the Year of Sorrow) ended their 24-year-long marriage. After Khadija, Muhammad went on to marry ten women: Sawdah bint Zam'ah in 619; Aisha bint Abi Bakr in 620; Hafsah bint Umar, Zaynab bint Khuzayma, and Hind bint Abi Umayya in 625; Zaynab bint Jahsh in 627; Juwayriya bint al-Harith and Ramla bint Abi Sufyan ibn Harb in 628; and Safiyya bint Huyayy and Maymunah bint al-Harith in 629.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2354223. The Library of Congress control number is sh2012000474. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wives of Muhammad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.