Safiyya bint Huyayy

Origins and early life

Safiyya bint Huyayy was born about 610 in Medina, the daughter of Huyayy ibn Akhtab, chief of the Jewish tribe of the Banu Nadir, and she was born and raised a Jew; this fiche states plainly that she did not remain one, converting to Islam in 628 at the time of her marriage to Muhammad.

Work and career

Her early life belongs to the Jewish tribes of the Hijaz: her father led the Banu Nadir until their expulsion from Medina, and she was first married within the Jewish community, to the poet Sallam ibn Mishkam and then to Kinana ibn al-Rabi, a treasurer of Khaybar. Both her father and Kinana were killed in the Muslim conquest of Khaybar in 628, and she was taken captive; Muhammad freed her, offered her the choice of returning to her people or accepting Islam and marriage, and she chose the latter, becoming his tenth wife.

Islamic tradition venerates her as one of the Mothers of the Believers and records that she was mocked at Medina for her Jewish birth, and that Muhammad told her to answer that her father was Aaron, her uncle Moses and her husband Muhammad. She transmitted several hadiths, is said to have defended Uthman during the siege of his house, and lived on in Medina until about 670. Her life is documented almost entirely through early Islamic sira and hadith literature rather than through Jewish sources, a limitation this fiche states openly, and her Jewish birth is undisputed across that tradition.