The Long Road Alone: Umm Salamah's Migration

The road out of Mecca stretched empty in front of her, but Umm Salamah, known then as Hind bint Abi Umayyah, could not take a single step along it. Her husband, Abu Salamah, had already set out for Medina, carrying their young son Salamah on the saddle in front of him, when men from her own clan, the Banu Makhzum, seized the reins of his camel and refused to let their kinswoman leave with him.

In the commotion that followed, her husband's family also intervened, insisting the child remain with them rather than travel with his mother. Within moments, Umm Salamah found herself utterly alone, stripped of both her husband and her son, standing in the dust of Mecca with nothing.

Umm Salamah and Abu Salamah had already lived through one migration together, having been among the first group of Muslims to flee to Abyssinia to escape the persecution of the Quraysh, a journey recorded in Ibn Ishaq's Seerah as one of the earliest organized migrations in Islamic history. They returned to Mecca some years later and, when the opportunity to migrate to Medina arose following the Prophet's ﷺ own hijrah, they resolved to go together as a family.

It was on this second attempt at migration that Umm Salamah's ordeal began, an episode she herself narrated in later years and which was preserved by scholars of hadith and seerah as one of the most moving individual accounts of sacrifice during the migration period.

For nearly a year afterward, according to her own recollection, Umm Salamah went every morning to the valley outside Mecca where her son had been taken from her, and sat there weeping until nightfall, separated from both her husband, who had gone on to Medina without her, and her child, who remained with his father's relatives in Mecca. It was, by her own account, the hardest period of trial she endured in her life, a prolonged and lonely grief with no certainty of when or whether it would end.

Eventually, moved by the sight of her enduring devotion, a man from her clan interceded on her behalf and pressured the Makhzum kinsmen to release her, and separately her husband's family relented and returned her son to her.

With her son finally restored to her, Umm Salamah made a decision few women in her position would have dared: she would travel to Medina alone, without an escort, carrying her infant son the entire distance herself. Partway along the road, she encountered Uthman ibn Talha, a man not yet Muslim but moved by compassion at seeing a woman traveling that dangerous route unaccompanied, who offered to escort her safely the rest of the way to Medina, leading her camel by its rope without asking anything of her, and leaving her only once she had safely reached her husband.

She would later describe him as the most noble man she encountered in her life for the honor and reserve with which he protected her on that journey.

Her trials did not end with the migration. Abu Salamah was wounded in the Battle of Uhud and, though he initially recovered, the wound eventually worsened and led to his death some months later, leaving Umm Salamah widowed in Medina with several young children. Before he died, Abu Salamah made a supplication that has since become one of the most frequently cited prayers of consolation in Islamic tradition, asking Allah to grant his widow someone better than himself after his passing.

That prayer was answered when the Prophet ﷺ himself proposed marriage to her, and despite her initial hesitations about her age, her many children, and her jealous temperament, which she voiced honestly to him, the Prophet ﷺ reassured her and she accepted, becoming one of the Mothers of the Believers.

As a wife of the Prophet ﷺ, Umm Salamah became known not only for the trials she had endured but for the sharpness of her wisdom, most famously demonstrated during the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. When the Muslims, frustrated and disheartened by the terms of the treaty, were reluctant to follow the Prophet's ﷺ instruction to shave their heads and end their state of ihram, Umm Salamah advised him, according to the account in Sahih al-Bukhari, to simply go out and perform the actions himself without repeating the command, so that the Companions would follow his example rather than continuing to hesitate through verbal instruction alone.

The Prophet ﷺ acted on her counsel exactly as she suggested, and the Companions, seeing him shave his head and sacrifice his animal, immediately followed suit, resolving a moment of real tension within the early Muslim community.

Umm Salamah lived a remarkably long life, outliving the Prophet ﷺ by decades and becoming one of the last surviving Mothers of the Believers, a source of hadith and religious guidance sought by the generation of Muslims who came after the Companions. Her life stretched from the earliest persecution in Mecca through the Abyssinian migration, the anguish of forced separation from her family, widowhood, and finally into a position of respected authority within the growing Muslim community, a trajectory that few figures in early Islamic history matched in its span and depth of experience.