Rufaida Al-Aslamia is regarded across the Muslim world as the first nurse in Islam, and as evidence that organised nursing — trained, supervised, and provided as a public service — existed twelve centuries before Florence Nightingale.
What the sources say
Rufaida bint Sa'ad was born in Medina around the beginning of the seventh century, into the Bani Aslam tribe. Her father, Sa'ad Al-Aslamy, was a physician, and she learned the work from him.
The traditional accounts, drawn from the early Islamic historical literature, record that:
- She set up a tent to care for the sick and wounded, and that Muhammad directed casualties to be brought to her.
- She was present at the Battle of the Trench and at Khaybar and other engagements, and asked for and received permission to accompany the army with a group of women volunteers she had trained.
- She trained other women as nurses, which makes her the earliest named nursing teacher in the record.
- She worked outside wartime as well, treating the poor, orphans and people with disabilities in the city, which puts her closer to a public health nurse than to a battlefield attendant.
What is documented and what is tradition
This material comes from Islamic historical and biographical tradition rather than from contemporaneous administrative records, and the detail varies between sources. There is no independent seventh-century documentation of the kind a modern historian would prefer, and there are competing claims about who the first nurse in history was.
What the tradition establishes reliably is more interesting than the individual claim: that in seventh-century Medina there was organised care with a named practitioner, a trained team under her, a designated place to bring casualties, and continuity between wartime and civilian work. That is a nursing service.
Why she matters to the field
Nursing history as taught in English-speaking countries generally starts with Nightingale, occasionally reaching back to medieval religious orders. That framing treats organised nursing as a European invention of the nineteenth century, and it is wrong.
Rufaida is the standard counter-example, and she is not the only one — Islamic hospitals, the bimaristans, were running with paid staff, wards separated by condition and outpatient departments while Europe was still relying entirely on monasteries.
Her name is now carried by nursing schools, awards and hospitals across the Middle East and South Asia, and by the Rufaida Al-Aslamia Prize in Nursing at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland's Bahrain campus.
Related
Sources
- Rufaida Al-Aslamia, for the traditional accounts and the modern commemorations. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Rufaida Al-Asalmiya: the first Muslim nurse, Journal of Nursing Scholarship. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Rufaida Al-Aslamia Prize in Nursing. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Medical University of Bahrain. Accessed September 9, 2026.