Khadija was a wealthy merchant who employed Muhammad, was impressed by his honesty, and proposed marriage — she was, by most accounts, considerably older, and he took no other wife during the twenty-five years they were married. Her importance is not domestic: she is the first person to believe the revelation, at the moment he himself doubted it, and she funded and sheltered the community through the years of boycott and persecution. The Prophet's recorded grief for her years after her death, and his reported defense of her memory, are part of why the tradition holds her as it does.