Fatima (died 633)

Dome and minarets of a mosque in Qom, Iran. Qom is a holy city of the Shiite branch of Islam and an important place of pilgrimage. The gold-domed mosque was built in the 17th century as a shrine over the tomb of Fatima, the sister of the imam.

Daughter of Muhammad. She married her cousin, Ali, and sayyids and sherifs claim she forms the link in their descent from Muhammad. For Muslims, she is one of the four perfect women.

Her mother was Khadija. Shiites, especially, think of her as ‘the incarnation of everything divine in the nature of woman, the most noble ideal attainable by man’. The date of her birth is not known and she died a few months after her father.