Nevertheless, she paid a price. The days of her freedom to join Muhammad’s campaigns were over. With the exception of the pilgrimage to Mecca, she would not travel those desert routes again for as long as Muhammad lived. She must certainly have missed the adventure of those expeditions, perhaps also the guilty thrill of being so close to warfare. Fearless, even reckless, she would have made a fine warrior, but it would be all of twenty-five years until she would see battle again.
There was another price too, though again, Aisha had no way of knowing the full extent of it. The sight of her riding into Medina on Safwan’s camel had branded itself into the collective memory of the oasis, and that was the last thing Muhammad needed. In due course, another Quranic revelation dictated that from now on, his wives were to be protected by a thin muslin curtain from the prying eyes of any men not their kin. And since curtains could work only indoors, they would soon shrink into a kind of minicurtain for outdoors: the veil.
The Revelation of the Curtain clearly applied only to the Proph et’s wives, but this in itself gave the veil high status. Over the next few decades it would be adopted by women of the new Islamic aristocracy—and would eventually be enforced by Islamic fundamentalists convinced that it should apply to all women. There can be little doubt that this would have outraged Aisha. One can imagine her shocking Muslim conservatives by tearing off her veil in indignation. She had accepted it as a mark of distinction—but as an attempt to force her into the background? The girl so used to high visibility had no intention of being rendered invisible.
Meanwhile, if Muhammad had ever doubted her, it was easy to forgive him, but not Ali. Even as Muhammad lay dying seven years later, the events that would eventually place Aisha at the head of an army against Ali had already been set in motion. That advice he had given the Prophet would rankle throughout her life. Indeed, it rankles still today. Al-Mubra’a, the Exonerated, Sunnis still call her, but some Shia would use a different title for her, one that by no coincidence rhymes with her name: Al-Fahisha, the Whore.
chapter 4
THE SEEDS OF DIVISION HAD BEEN SOWN. MUHAMMAD’S WIVES, fathers-in-law, sons-in-law, cousins, daughters, aides, closest companions—everyone would be drawn into it as the seeds took root. But as Muhammad lay dying, it was the wives who were in control. It was they who guarded the sickroom, who determined if he was well enough to receive visitors or so weak that even the closest companions should be turned away; they who had argued about whose chamber he should be taken to until he insisted that it be Aisha’s; and they who now argued over which medicine to give him, even about whether to give him any medicine at all.
As the life slowly seeped out of the Prophet, the disputes increased over who should be allowed in to see him and who not. The few times he mustered the strength to make it clear exactly whom he wanted to see, they argued also about that. Even as he was helpless to prevent it, the dying man could see his worst fears coming true.
There was the time when he called for Ali, who spent most of those days studying and praying in the mosque, but Aisha lobbied instead for her father. “Wouldn’t you rather see Abu Bakr?” she said. Her cowife Hafsa countered by suggesting her own father. “Wouldn’t you rather see Omar?” she asked. Overwhelmed by their insistence, Muhammad waved assent. Both Abu Bakr and Omar were called for; Ali was not.
Cajoling a mortally sick man into doing as they wanted may seem unbecoming, even heartless, but who could blame these young wives for pushing their own agenda, for promoting the interests of their fathers over those of other possible successors like Ali? They faced a daunting future, and they knew it.
They were about to be widowed, and widowed forever. They were fated, that is, to become professional widows. It was right there in the revelation that would be part of Sura 33 of the Quran. “The Prophet is closer to the Faithful than their own selves, and his wives are their mothers,” it said. “You must not speak ill of the Messenger of God, nor shall you ever wed his wives after him. This would surely be a great offense in the eyes of God.”
If the Prophet’s wives were indeed the Mothers of the Faithful, to marry any of them even after his death would be tantamount to incest.
This ban on remarriage went against the grain of custom. In seventh-century Arabia, widows were remarried almost immediately, often to a relative of the dead husband, so that the family would be preserved and protected. To forbid this was surely a striking exception to Muhammad’s forceful advocacy for the care of widows and orphans and the needy. But then that was the point: the wives were exceptional. The ban on their remarrying emphasized the idea of the Islamic community as one large family.
While this may have worked well enough for the older wives, it must have seemed at best ironic, at worst even cruel, to the youngest of them. Aisha would be a lifetime mother, even as by the same stroke of revelation, she would be denied the chance ever to become pregnant and give birth to children of her own.
Certainly there would have been no shortage of suitors for any of Muhammad’s wives. Men would have vied to marry a widow of the Messenger of God, gaining political advantage by claiming closeness to him in this way. Indeed, that may be exactly what he sought to prevent. It was not as though the idea had not already occurred to some. Aisha’s ambitious cousin Talha had once been heard to say out loud that he wanted to marry her after Muhammad’s death—a desire that resulted in his quickly being married off to one of her sisters instead. But the word of revelation had since forestalled any more such ambitions, and that word was final. Muhammad would leave behind nine widows, and not one would ever marry again.
None of them could have been more anxious about her future than Aisha. At barely twenty-one, she was about to become the lifetime widow of a man who had not even made a will. Would she have to go back to her father’s house and live out her life in a kind of premature retirement? The very idea of retirement at so young an age might have been daunting for even the most reclusive of women; for Aisha, it must have been horrifying. Used to being at the center of attention, she was not about to be relegated to the sidelines. Yet if Ali were to be designated Muhammad’s successor in a deathbed declaration, she feared this was exactly what would happen. She could expect nothing good from that, and neither could her father, Abu Bakr, who had been as deeply wounded as she herself had been by Ali’s role in the Affair of the Necklace.
Ali’s blunt advice had been a slur on Abu Bakr’s honor and that of his whole family—indeed, on all the Emigrants. That is certainly how Omar saw it. He and Abu Bakr were the two most senior of Muhammad’s advisers; close friends, both were fathers-in-law of the Prophet, despite being younger than he—Abu Bakr by two years, Omar by twelve. But where the stooped, white-haired Abu Bakr inspired affection and reverence, Omar, the stern military commander, seemed to inspire something closer to fear.
In that small sickroom, he must have been an overwhelming presence. So tall that Aisha would say that “he towered above the crowd as though he were on horseback,” Omar was always with a riding crop in his hand and always ready to use it, on man or beast. His voice was the voice of command; honed to terseness on the battlefield, it compelled obedience. The moment he came into any room, Aisha would remember, all laughter stopped. People’s voices trailed off into silence as they registered his arrival; faces turned toward him as they waited for him to speak. There was no room for small talk around Omar, no space for frivolity. His presence now at the side of the ailing Prophet was a confirmation of how serious the situation had become.
Every person in that room wanted to safeguard Islam, yet each also wanted to safeguard his or her own position. As is the way in political matters, all were convinced that the interests of the community and their own personal interests were one and the same. And all this could be sensed in the strange and disturbing incident that came to be known as the Episode of Pen and Paper.
On the ninth day of Muhammad’s illness, he appeared to recover somewhat—the kind of illusory improvement that often precedes the
end. He seemed perfectly lucid as he sat up, sipped some water, and made what many believe was one final attempt to make his wishes known. But even this came laden with ambiguity.
“Bring me writing materials that I may write something for you, after which you will not be led into error,” he said.
It seems a simple enough request and a perfectly reasonable one under the circumstances, but it produced near panic among those in the room at the time: the wives, Omar, and Abu Bakr. Nobody there knew what it was Muhammad wanted to write—or rather, as tradition has it, to dictate to a scribe, since one of the basic tenets of Islam is that he could neither read nor write, however improbable that may have been in a man who was for many years a merchant trader. That would have required that he keep records of what was bought and sold, and though this was no great literary art, it did require the basic skills of literacy. But Muhammad’s assumed illiteracy acted as a kind of guarantee that the Quran had been revealed, not invented, that it was truly the word of the divine, not the result of human authorship.
Whether the dying Prophet wanted to write or to dictate, though, the question now on everyone’s mind was the same: What would it be? General guidelines for how they should proceed? Religious advice to the community he was about to leave behind? Or the one possibility that seemed most called for and yet was most feared: a will. Was the dying Prophet about to definitively name his heir?
The only way to know was to call for the pen and paper to be brought to him, but that is not what happened. No sooner had he uttered the request than everyone attending him was aware of what it might mean. What if it really was to write his will? What if it was not in their favor? What if it named Ali as his successor, not Abu Bakr or Omar or another of his close companions? And if it was indeed his will he wanted to write, why not simply speak it? Why insist on pen and paper? Did that mean that even on his deathbed, he did not trust them to carry it out and so wanted it written down, unambiguously, for all to see?
None of this did anyone there say out loud, however. Instead, they voiced concern about overstraining Muhammad in his illness. They worried about placing too much pressure on him. They argued that the sickroom should be kept quiet, and even as they stressed the need for silence, their voices rose.
It is the strangest scene. There was every sign that the man they were all so devoted to was ready to make his dying wishes known, perhaps even designate his heir, once and for all. It was the one thing everyone wanted to know, and, at the same time, the one thing nobody wanted to know. If Ali turned out to be the designated heir, nobody in that room wanted it put into writing.
Yet it is also an altogether human scene. Everyone so concerned, everyone crowded around, trying to protect Muhammad from the importuning of others, to ease life for a mortally ill man. They were all, it seemed, doing their best. But as their voices rose in debate over the pros and cons of calling for pen and paper, the terrible sensitivity to noise overtook Muhammad again. Every angry note, every high-pitched syllable seemed to drill through his brain like an instrument of torture until he could take it no more. “Leave me,” he said finally. “Let there be no quarreling in my presence.”
He was so weak by then that the words came out in a mere murmur. Only Omar managed to hear him, but that was enough. Using his commanding presence to full advantage, he laid down the law. “The Messenger of God is overcome by pain,” he said. “We have the Quran, the Book of God, and that is sufficient for us.”
It would not be sufficient, though. It could have been and perhaps should have been—Omar’s words are still used today as the model of perfect faith—but it was not. The Quran would be supplemented by the practice of Muhammad, his example in everything from the greatest events to the smallest details of everyday life, as related by those closest to him. The sunna, it would be called—the traditional Arabian word for the custom or tradition of one’s forefathers—and this was the word from which the Sunnis would eventually take their name, though the Shia would follow nearly all the same traditions.
In the meantime, Omar’s argument prevailed. His words had their intended effect, and the sickroom subsided into somewhat shamefaced silence. If Muhammad had indeed meant to name an heir, he had left it too late. He no longer had the strength to make his final wishes known, let alone to quiet down the argument. Perhaps he was not as lucid as he appeared, or perhaps everyone in the room truly did have his best interests at heart, or the community’s, but it is no contradiction to say that more was involved. Nearly every person there surely feared that Muhammad was about to put in writing what he had indicated just three months before, at the end of his last pilgrimage to Mecca—or as it would soon be called, the Final Pilgrimage.
Had he sensed then that he would never see Mecca again? That he didn’t have much longer to live? Was that why he had made such a point of singling out Ali the way he did?
Shia scholars would maintain that he had a clear intimation of mortality, and that he prefaced his declaration with these words: “The time approaches when I shall be called away by God and I shall answer that call. I am leaving you with two precious things and if you adhere to both of them, you will never go astray. They are the Quran, the Book of God, and my family, the People of the House, Ahl al-Bayt. The two shall never separate from each other until they come to me by the pool of Paradise.”
Sunni scholars dispute this. These words were added later, they say, and besides, they do not indicate that Muhammad knew he was soon to die. Like anyone of sixty-three, when the human body makes its age known in ways a younger person never imagines, he certainly knew he would not live forever, but that did not mean he expected to die in the near future. He was merely preparing the assembled Muslims for the inevitable, whenever it would come.
The time and place of Muhammad’s declaration are not in dispute. It was on March 10 in the year 632, three months before his final illness. The caravan of returning pilgrims had stopped for the night at the spring-fed water hole known as Ghadir Khumm, the Pool of Khumm. It was not the picturesque Hollywood image of an oasis, but oasis it was: a shallow pool with just enough moisture in the sand around it to nurture the undemanding roots of a few scraggly palm trees. In the barren mountains of western Arabia, even the smallest spring was a treasured landmark, and this one more than most since it was where several caravan routes intersected. Here the thousands of returning pilgrims would break up into smaller parties, some going on to Medina and other points north, others to the east. This was the last night they would all be together, and their numbers were swelled by the arrival of Ali at the head of a force returning from a mission to the Yemen. He had been successful: Yemenite opposition to Muhammad had been quelled, and taxes and tribute paid. Celebration was in the air. It was the perfect time, it seemed, for Muhammad to honor his former protégé, now a mature man of thirty-five, a warrior returning with mission accomplished.
That evening, after they had watered the camels and horses, after they had cooked and eaten and chosen sleeping places under the palms, Muhammad ordered a raised platform made out of palm branches with camel saddles placed on top—a kind of makeshift desert pulpit—and at the end of the communal prayer he climbed on top of it. With that flair for the dramatic gesture for which he was famed, he called on Ali to climb onto the pulpit alongside him, reaching out his hand to help the younger man up. Then he raised Ali’s hand high in his own, forearm pressed along forearm in the traditional gesture of allegiance, and in front of the thousands of people gathered below them, he honored the younger man with a special benediction.
“He of whom I am the master, of him Ali is also the master,” he said. “God be the friend of he who is his friend, and the enemy of he who is his enemy.”
It seemed clear enough at the time. Certainly Omar thought it was. He came up to Ali and congratulated him. “Now morning and evening you are the master of every believing man and woman,” he said.
Surely this meant that Omar had taken Muhammad’s declaration to mean that Ali was now formal
ly his heir, and it is hard to imagine that Omar was the only one to understand Muhammad’s words this way. But again, there is that fatal ambiguity. If Muhammad had indeed intended this as a formal designation, why had he not simply said so? Why rely on symbolism instead of a straightforward declaration? In fact, why had he not declared it during the hajj, in Mecca, when the greatest concentration of Muslims were all in one place? Was this just a spontaneous outpouring of love and affection for his closest kinsman, or was it intended as more?
In the three months to come, as in the fourteen hundred years since, everything was up for interpretation, including what it was exactly that Muhammad had said. We know what words were used, but what did they mean? Arabic is a language of intricate subtleties. The word usually translated as “master” is mawla, which can mean leader, or patron, or friend and confidant. It all depends on context, and context is infinitely debatable. Omar could simply have been acknowledging what every Muslim, Shia and Sunni alike, still acknowledges, which is that Ali was a special friend to all Muslims.
Moreover, the second part of Muhammad’s declaration at Ghadir Khumm was the standard formula for pledging allegiance or friendship throughout the Middle East of the time—“God be the friend of he who is your friend, the enemy of he who is your enemy”—the formula much degraded in modern political parlance into the misguidedly simplistic “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But even in its original form, this did not necessarily imply inheritance. As a declaration of trust and confidence in Ali, it was accepted by all. But did that mean it was a declaration of Ali as the Prophet’s successor?
After the Prophet Page 5