Zaynab bint Jahsh (RA) and the marriage no one arranged

The story

The Prophet ﷺ once told his wives that the quickest of them to join him would be the one with "the longest hand." Baffled, they took turns standing against a wall, stretching their arms up to compare whose reach was longest. Zaynab bint Jahsh wasn't the tallest of them, and her arms weren't the longest either. But she was the first of them to die.

It turned out "long hand" never meant height at all. Zaynab came from one of the noblest branches of Quraysh, proud of her lineage in a way that had once made her turn down every suitor who wasn't noble enough for her taste. But she was also a skilled craftswoman, and everything her hands earned, she gave away.

Where her co-wives had fathers or brothers who'd arranged their marriages, Zaynab often pointed out that hers had been arranged by no one at all. "There is none among your wives," she told the Prophet ﷺ once, "whose family didn't give her to you in marriage — except me. It was Allah, from above the seven heavens, who married me to you." She said it not to set herself above the others, but because it was true, and because none of it had come from her own hand.

Long before she died, she'd already prepared her own shroud. When the moment came, she asked that it be given away in charity instead, along with whatever else could be spared. She was fifty-three, and by every account of the women around her, the most generous hand among them had simply reached the end of its life first.