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Sumayyah bint Khayyat (Arabic: سمية بنت خياطّ, died 615 C.E.) is known in the Islamic traditions as the first person in history to be murdered for having adopted the faith of Islam, in pre-Hijra Mecca. Sumayyah was the wife of Yasir ibn Amir and the mother of Ammar ibn Yasir, both well-known early entrants to the faith. The earliest reference to the incident is found in Ibn Ishaq's (died 761[1]) biography of Muhammad, Siratu Rasulullah (Meaning: Biography of the Messenger of God).[2]
By 615 C.E, five years after Muhammad's declaration of prophethood, persecution of followers of the new faith came to an active phase when the weakest members of the young community, such as the African slave Bilal, were subjected to torture and the local leaders proclaimed a ban of trade with the Muslims, prohibiting citizens of Mecca from providing food and medicine to members of the new movement. These were followed by the murder of Sumayyah by a Meccan tribal chief. After this incident a small group of Muslims led by Mohammed's daughter Ruqayya and his son-in-law Uthman fled by boat to Abyssinia, where they found protection from the more tolerant Christian Ethiopian Negus (King), Aṣḥama ibn Abjar.
The name of the person Sumayyah is not explicitly mentioned in Ibn Ishaq. It is a deduction from the reference to her son as Ammar "ibn" Sumayya, meaning Ammar "son-of" Sumayya, in Ibn Ishaq.[3]