Aishah bint Abi Bakr

Aishah was the daughter of Abu Bakr, and she grew up in a house that had been Muslim from the very beginning. The marriage was contracted in Makkah before the Hijrah, and she joined the Prophet's ﷺ household in Madinah some years later.

Living in that household meant seeing things nobody else saw: not the public teaching, but how the Prophet ﷺ prayed at night, what he did at home, how he treated his family. A great deal of what the community knows about ordinary daily practice comes from that vantage point, and could not have come from anywhere else.

The Prophet ﷺ died in 11 AH. Aishah lived for roughly another five decades, and those decades are the reason she matters so much to how Islam was transmitted.

People came to her with questions and kept coming — Companions, then their students, then their students. The sources describe senior figures deferring to her on matters she had direct knowledge of, and describe her disagreeing with them when she thought a report had been garbled.

She died in Madinah, commonly reported as 58 AH, and was buried in al-Baqi.

After Uthman was killed in 35 AH, the Muslim community entered a period of internal conflict, and Aishah was among those involved in it. The classical sources record these events very differently from one another, and Muslim communities have read them differently ever since. SahabaMate notes that this happened and does not narrate, apportion or adjudicate it.