After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (4 page)

So it was Aisha’s good fortune, or perhaps her misfortune, that a certain young Medinan warrior had been delayed and was riding alone through the heat of the day to catch up with the main expeditionary force when he saw her lying under that acacia tree.

His name was Safwan, and in what Aisha would swear was an act of chivalry as pure as the desert itself, he recognized her immediately, dismounted, helped her up onto his camel, then led the animal on foot the whole twenty miles to Medina. That was how everyone in the oasis witnessed the arrival of the Prophet’s wife just before nightfall, hours behind the main body of the expedition, sitting tall and proud on a camel led by a good-looking young warrior.

She must surely have sensed that something was wrong as people stared in a kind of stunned astonishment. Must have noticed how they hung back, with nobody rushing up to say, “Thanks be to God that you’re safe.” Must have seen how they looked sideways at each other and muttered as she passed. No matter how upright she sat on Safwan’s camel, how high she held her head or how disdainful her glare, she must have heard the tongues start to wag as children ran ahead, spreading the word, and must have known what that word was.

The sight was too much to resist. The Prophet’s youngest wife traveling alone with a virile young warrior, parading through the series of villages strung along the valley of Medina? Word of it ran through the oasis in a matter of hours. A necklace indeed, people clucked. What could one expect of a childless teenager married to a man in his late fifties? Alone the whole day in the desert with a young warrior? Why had she simply lain down and waited when she could have caught up with the expedition on foot? Had it been a prearranged tryst? Had the Prophet been deceived by his spirited favorite?

Whether anyone actually believed such a thing was beside the point. In the seventh century as today, scandal is its own reward, especially when it has a sexual aspect. But more important, this one fed into the existing political landscape of the oasis. What Aisha and Safwan may
or may not have done in the desert was not really the issue. This was about Muhammad’s reputation, his political standing.

Any slur on Aisha was a slur on her whole family, but especially on the two men closest to her: the man who had given her in marriage and the man who had taken her. Her father, Abu Bakr, had been Muhammad’s sole companion on that night flight from Mecca for the shelter of Medina, and that distinction had helped make him one of the leading figures among the former Meccans who had made Medina the new power center of Arabia. The Emigrants, they were called, and right there in the name was the fact that the Medinans still thought of them as foreign, as Meccans. They were respected, certainly, but not quite accepted. They still had that whiff of outsiders who had come in and somehow taken over, as though the Medinans themselves had not invited them. So it was the native Medinans, the ones known as the Helpers, who were especially delighted by this new development. In the politics of seventh-century Medina, as anywhere in the world today, the appearance of impropriety was as bad as impropriety itself.

Even among the Emigrants, though, there were those who thought the Abu Bakr household needed to be taken down a peg, and especially the young girl who so evidently thought herself better than anyone aside from the Prophet himself. Among the women in particular, Aisha was resented. Muhammad’s daughters, let alone his other wives, were weary of her grandstanding. For the first time, the young girl so insistent on standing out, on being exceptional, found herself standing out too much.

There is no doubt that Aisha was innocent of the charges against her. She may have been young and headstrong, but she also had a highly developed sense of politics. To risk her whole standing, let alone her father’s, for a passing dalliance? That was out of the question. The favorite wife of the Prophet consorting with a mere warrior, and one who wasn’t even from one of the best families? She would never dream of it.
Safwan had behaved as she had expected him to behave, the white knight to her maiden in distress. To imply anything beyond that was the most scurrilous slander. How could anyone even think such a thing?

Certainly Muhammad did not. If anything, he must have felt guilty about having left his young favorite alone in the desert, so at first he dismissed the rumors, convinced that they would die down soon enough. But in this he seriously misread the mood of the oasis.

Overnight, the poets got busy. They were the gossip columnists, the op-ed writers, the bloggers, the entertainers of the time, and the poems they wrote now were not lyrical odes, but the other great form of traditional Arabic poetry: satires. Laced with puns and double entendres, they were irresistibly repeatable, building up momentum the more they spread. The barbed rhyming couplets acted like lances, verbal attacks all the more powerful in a society where alliances were made on a promise and a handshake, and men were literally taken at their word.

Soon the whole oasis was caught up in a fervor of sneering insinuation. At the wells, in the walled vegetable gardens, in the date orchards, in the inns and the markets and the stables, even in the mosque itself, up and down the eight-mile length of the Medina valley, people reveled, as people always have and always will, in the delicious details, real or imagined, of scandal.

Try as he might, Muhammad could no longer ignore the matter. That Aisha was innocent was not the point; she had to be
seen
as innocent. He was well aware that his power and leadership were not beyond dispute in Medina, while to the south Mecca still remained in opposition to him and, even after two major battles, would not submit for another five years. The scurrilous satirical poems had already reached that merchant city, where they were received with outright glee.

Muhammad had been placed in a double bind. If he divorced Aisha, he would by implication be acknowledging that he had been deceived. If he took her back, he risked being seen as a doting old man
bamboozled by a mere slip of a girl. Either way, it would erode not only his own authority as the leader of Medina but the authority of Islam itself. Incredible as it seemed, the future of the new faith seemed to hang on a teenage girl’s reputation.

In the meantime, he banished Aisha from her chamber on the eastern wall of the mosque courtyard and sent her home to Abu Bakr. There she was kept indoors, away from prying eyes and ears, while word was put out that she had returned to her father’s house to recuperate from a sudden illness. Not that the rumormongers were buying it. Illness, indeed, they said knowingly; she was hiding her face in shame, as well she might.

For the first time in her life, nothing Aisha could say—and as one early historian put it, “she said plenty”—could make any difference. She tried high indignation, wounded pride, fury against the slander, but none of it seemed to have any effect. Years later, still haunted by the episode, she even maintained that Safwan was known to be impotent—that “he never touched women”—an unassailable statement since by then Safwan was long dead, killed in battle, and so could not defend his virility.

A teenage girl under a cloud, Aisha finally did what any teenage girl would do. She cried. And if there was a touch of hyperbole to her account of those tears, that was understandable under the circumstances. As she put it later, “I could not stop crying until I thought the weeping would burst my liver.”

You could say it was just chance that the loss of a necklace should create such trouble. You could point to it, as conservative Muslim clerics still do, as an example of what happens when women refuse to stay home and instead take an active part in public life. You could counter that this is just the same old sexist trick of blaming the woman in the story. Or
you could argue that it was inevitable that trouble begin with Aisha, given her personality and, above all, given her resentment of Muhammad’s first wife.

The wealthy merchant widow Muhammad had married when she was forty and he twenty-five, Khadija was the woman to whom he had been faithful, in a monogamous marriage, until the day she died. It had been in her arms that he had sought shelter and comfort from the awe and terror of revelation, her voice that had reassured him and confirmed the awesome validity of his mission. No matter how many more times he married, he would never find that quality of love again.

How could a teenage girl possibly compete against the hallowed memory of a dead woman? But then who but a teenage girl would even dream of trying?

“I wasn’t jealous of any of the Prophet’s wives except for Khadija, even though I came after her death,” she said many years later. And though this was clearly untrue—whenever there was so much as a mention of another wife’s beauty, Aisha bristled—Khadija was certainly the focus of her jealousy. Muhammad’s first wife was the one woman who, precisely because she was dead, was unassailable. He had made this perfectly clear, for in all of Aisha’s teasing of him, the one time she went too far—the one time Muhammad rebuked her—was when she dared turn that sharp tongue of hers on Khadija.

It took the form of a question designed, it seemed, to taunt Muhammad with her own attractiveness. It was the kind of question only a teenager could ask and only an older woman could regret as she related the incident many years later. In language unmistakably hers—nobody else would have dared be so startlingly direct—the young Aisha had asked Muhammad how he could possibly remain so devoted to the memory of “that toothless old woman whom God has replaced with a better.”

You can see how she intended this as a flirtatious tease, blithely unaware of the effect of her words. But the fact remains that they were said
with the casual disregard of the young and vivacious for the old and dead, the cruel derision of a teenager. And if Aisha thought for a moment she could gain precedence over Khadija in such a way, Muhammad’s response stopped her in her tracks.

“Indeed no, God has not replaced her with a better,” he said. And then, driving the point home: “God granted me her children while withholding those of other women.”

There it was: Not only was Khadija the only one beyond all criticism, but the Prophet himself held Aisha’s childlessness against her. A virgin bride she may have been, but in a society where women gained status through motherhood, mother she was not and would never be.

Is that where her determination began, or had it been there all along? For determination was what it would take for Aisha to remake herself as she did. This childless teenager would establish herself after the Prophet’s death as the leader of the Mothers of the Faithful, the term by which his widows were known. She would be the one who spoke for them all, who would transform herself into
the
Mother of the Faithful, a power behind the throne whose approval was sought by every ruler and whose influence was underestimated by none. Mother of none, she would become—at least as she saw it—the mother of all Muslims.

Daring, headstrong, outspoken even when it reflected badly on herself, Aisha stands squarely at the center of this story, able to run verbal rings around every man in it. Every man, that is, but one, and that was the man to whom Muhammad now turned for advice in the Affair of the Necklace.

I
F THERE WAS A SINGLE PERSON WHO SEEMED DESTINED TO BE
Muhammad’s successor, it was Ali, his first cousin and the man whose name the Shia were to take as their own. They were, and are, the followers of Ali, or in Arabic,
Shiat Ali—
Shia, for short.

Ali had been the first man to accept the new faith of Islam. He’d been only thirteen years old at the time, yet he’d remember it with the kind of absolute clarity that marks the most momentous points of one’s life. It had happened just after Muhammad’s first soul-shaking encounter with the angel Gabriel. Still caught up in the utter terror of a human who had come face-to-face with the divine, he had sought refuge in Khadija’s arms, and once she had reassured him—“This truly is an angel and not a devil, and you will be the prophet of this people”—he had called together his closest kinsmen and asked for their support. “Which of you will assist me in this cause?” he asked.

As Ali would tell it, “They all held back from this, while I, although I was the youngest of them, the most diseased in eyesight, the most corpulent in body and thinnest in the legs, said ‘I, oh Prophet of God, will be your helper in this matter.’ ”

Diseased eyes? Corpulent? Thin legs? Was Ali joking at his own expense? His self-description bears no resemblance to the virile yet tender warrior in the brightly colored posters so popular among the Shia faithful, who have little of the Sunni abhorrence of visual representation. On sale in kiosks and from street vendors throughout the Shia heartland, from Lebanon to India, the posters show not an awkward teenager but a handsome man in his forties. The jaw set firm beneath the neatly trimmed beard, the strong eyebrows, the dark eyes raised upward—you might almost mistake his portrait for the conventional image of Christ except that it has more of a sense of physical vitality and strength.

There is the sword for one thing. Sometimes slung over his back, sometimes laid across his lap, this sword was destined to become more famed throughout the Islamic world than King Arthur’s sword Excalibur ever would be in Christendom. Like Excalibur, it came with supernatural qualities, and it too had a name: Dhu’l Fikar, the “Split One,” which is why it is shown with a forked point, like a snake’s tongue. In fact it wasn’t the sword that was split but the flesh it came in contact with, so that the name more vividly translates as the Cleaver or the Splitter.

It had been Muhammad’s own sword, given by him to Ali—bequeathed, you might say. And after he had fought valiantly in battle with this sword, despite multiple wounds, Ali earned the best known of the many titles Muhammad would confer on him:
Assad Allah,
Lion of God. That is why he is often shown with a magnificently maned lion crouched at his feet, staring out at the viewer with the calm gaze of implacable strength.