Rufaida Al-Aslamia

Rufaida Al-Aslamia, also spelled Rufayda, was an Arab medical and social worker from Medina whom Middle Eastern tradition remembers as the first female Muslim nurse in Islam. The article gives her birth as 620 AD and says she belonged to the Bani Aslem tribe and gained her first clinical experience from her father, a physician. She is described as treating casualties in her own tent, as organising what the article calls the first documented mobile care units, and as taking part in the battles of Khandaq and Khaibar, where she trained a group of women companions as nurses. The article itself notes that who counts as the first nurse in history is a matter of controversy, so the title belongs to Middle Eastern attribution rather than settled record. A nursing prize awarded by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland at the University of Bahrain carries her name.