Career
Zubaida redirects here. See also Sami Zubaida
Zubaidah's birthdate is unknown. It is known that she was at least a year younger than Harun.
Her father, Ja'far was a half-brother of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi. The name means "little butter ball". Zubaidah's real name at birth was Sukhainah or Amat al-'Aziz".
The Abbasid caliph Muhammad al-Amin, who had a double royal lineage, was Zubaidah's son. Her stepson was 'Abdullah al-Ma'mun, who also became a caliph after the civil war with al-Amin. It is said that Zubaidah's palace 'sounded like a beehive' because she employed one hundred women maids who had memorized the Qur'an.
On her fifth pilgrimage to Mecca she saw that a drought had devastated the population and reduced the Zamzam well to a trickle of water. She ordered the well to be deepened and spent over 2 million dinars improving the water supply of Makkah and the surrounding province. "This included the construction of an aqueduct from the spring of Hunayn, 95 kilometers to the east, as well as the famed “Spring of Zubayda” on the plain of Arafat, one of the ritual locations on the Hajj.
When her engineers cautioned her about the expense, never mind the technical difficulties, she replied that she was determined to carry out the work “were every stroke of a pickax to cost a dinar,” according to Ibn Khallikan.