After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (6 page)

But Muhammad’s gesture with the cloak also spoke to Ali and Fatima. There were ties of love and ties of blood, he was saying, and between the two, blood must always come first. There was no room for the childless Aisha under that cloak.

It was only to be expected that Muhammad would turn to Ali for advice on how to proceed in the Affair of the Necklace, but from Aisha’s point of view, he could not have consulted a worse person. Indeed—at least by her account, which is the only one we have—Ali’s advice could hardly have been more blunt. Surprisingly blunt, in fact, since Ali was known for his eloquence. The collection of his speeches and sermons known as
Nahj al-Balagha,
or the Path of Eloquence, would be taught for centuries as the exemplar of perfection in language and spirit. Famed for his depth and his insight, he would represent the ideal combination of warrior and scholar, courage and chivalry. But at least according to Aisha, there was no hint of chivalry, let alone eloquence, in the advice he now gave.

Perhaps he made a far more sophisticated argument, and Aisha gave only the gist of it. Perhaps he had lost patience with the melodramatic aspect of the whole business, or perhaps he could simply take no more of Aisha. All we know for certain is that while the advice he gave Muhammad might be seen by some as refreshingly forthright, it also seems peculiarly curt.

“There are many women like her,” he said. “God has freed you from constraints. She is easily replaced.” There are plenty more fish in the sea, that is. Divorce her and be rid of the whole affair.

It was the first open expression of the crack in the newly formed bedrock of Islam—the jagged break, barely perceptible at first, that would develop into a major fault line. The casual dismissiveness of Ali’s words, the barely concealed contempt, didn’t just sting but cut to the bone. Yet the casualness is precisely what makes it so humanly persuasive.
That throwaway phrasing, that evident disdain, that apparent willingness to believe in Aisha’s infidelity—all this she would hold against him as long as she lived.

There is no record of whatever else Ali may have advised, though he almost certainly said more. Not only is the curtness of his response strangely uncharacteristic, but so too is the fact that it failed to take into account Muhammad’s dilemma. Divorcing Aisha would solve nothing, for the rumors of infidelity would still stand unchallenged, eroding Muhammad’s authority. Resolution could come only by grace of a higher authority, which was exactly what now happened.

After three weeks of indecision, Muhammad went to Abu Bakr’s house to question Aisha himself. There, even as she swore her innocence yet again, he went into a prophetic trance. As she would tell it, “The Prophet was wrapped in his garment and a leather cushion was put under his head.… Then he recovered and sat up and drops of water fell from him like rain on a winter day, and he began to wipe the sweat from his brow, saying, ‘Good news, Aisha! God has sent down word of your innocence.’ ”

It was a divine revelation, perfectly timed. That same day Muhammad proclaimed it in public, in the words that are now part of Sura 24 of the Quran: “The slanderers were a small group among you, and shall be punished. But why, when you heard it, did faithful men and women not think the best and say, ‘This is a manifest lie’? If the slanderers had even produced four witnesses! But they produced no witnesses, so they are liars in the eyes of God…. Why did you think nothing of repeating what others with no knowledge had said, thinking it a light matter when in the eyes of God it was a serious one? Why did you not say, ‘This is a monstrous slander’? God commands the faithful never to do such a thing again.”

It was a glorious exoneration of Aisha, and all the more powerful in that it demanded not one but all of four people to contradict her word.
Unless there were four witnesses to an illegal sexual act, it said, the accused was blameless, and the false accusers were the ones to be punished.

For a wronged woman, there could have been no better outcome, yet the form of it would be cruelly turned around and used by conservative clerics in centuries to come to do the opposite of what Muhammad had originally intended: not to exonerate a woman but to blame her. The wording of his revelation would apply not only when adultery was suspected but also when there had been an accusation of rape. Unless a woman could produce four witnesses to her rape—a virtual impossibility—she would be considered guilty of slander and adultery, and punished accordingly. Aisha’s exoneration was destined to become the basis for the silencing, humiliation, and even execution of countless women after her.

She had no idea that this would be the case, of course. What she knew was that the accusations against her had been declared false, and by no less than divine authority. Her accusers were publicly flogged in punishment, and the poets who had composed the most scurrilous verses against her were now suddenly moved to compose new ones in lavish praise of her. She returned to her chamber in the courtyard of the mosque and resumed her role as the favorite wife, though now with the added status of being not only the sole person in whose presence Muhammad had received a revelation but also the only one to have had a revelation specifically about her.

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.

T
HE 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.