Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam (28 page)

S
afiya stood by the desert road, watching her kinsmen from the tribe of Bani Qaynuqa abandon their homes and leave the city forever. They loaded their carpets and small furnishings on the back of hundreds of camels and donkeys, along with whatever household items they could carry—utensils, scrolls, small pots and pans. Heavy bundles contained food for the trek through the wilderness, including stores of dates, olives, and dried meats. Her eyes caught the eye of a young boy sitting on a mule, crying that he wanted to stay, but his mother shushed him and told him to always look forward, never back.

It was happening again, Safiya thought bitterly, just as her father had feared. The world was always changing, but one thing remained the same—Jews were being expelled from their homes. She felt a flash of anger at Muhammad, and she wanted to embrace it and fan its fire until it consumed her heart. But she couldn’t silence the small voice within her that said her people were not blameless in this matter. Had they listened to wiser voices like her own, they would have welcomed the Muslims and become their allies in bringing peace and prosperity to Arabia. But their own fears, the centuries of loss and betrayal, had conditioned them to resist change. They had sought to undermine the new order and inevitably brought upon themselves its wrath.

Tears in her eyes, she turned to the elderly rabbi Husayn ibn Sallam, himself a member of the Qaynuqa, but one who had been granted express permission to remain because of his cordial relationship with Muhammad.

“What will happen to them?” she asked softly.

Ibn Sallam wiped his nose on his sleeve. His eyes were red but dry, and she guessed that he had no more tears left to shed.

“They will go north to Syria,” he said quietly. “Our people still have a few settlements that survive under Byzantine rule. They will find refuge there.”

“But you will stay.” It was not a question, and there was no hint of reproach in her voice, but the rabbi flinched as if he had been struck.

“I have to.”

She had not expected this as a response.

“I don’t understand.”

Ibn Sallam sighed heavily.

“The sands of time are shifting, but I fear that our people do not see it,” he said as if he had read her thoughts. “The Bani Qaynuqa let their pride blind them to the new reality. I will stay and counsel the Bani Nadir and the Bani Qurayza to flow with the stream of history, not against it.”

Safiya watched the lengthy train of her brethren pass outside the hills of Mecca toward an unknown destiny in the north.

“Do you really think our people would risk further confrontation with Muhammad?” she asked wearily. She could not bear to witness this exodus again. “Why would they be so foolish?”

The rabbi smiled sadly.

“Our people take great pride in the fall of Masada,” he said, referring to the fortress where Jewish zealots had killed themselves and their families rather than surrender to Roman hordes. “I fear that our hearts secretly long to relive it. To die in glorious sacrifice against an invincible foe.”

Ibn Sallam turned his eyes away from the heart wrenching sight of his tribe vanishing forever into the sands of time.

“May God protect us from the folly of our own dreams.”

And with that, he walked away, head bowed. Safiya could hear the mournful tune of an old Hebrew prayer on his lips, one commemorating the tragic destruction of the Temple on Tisha b’Au.

Safiya watched as the last of the camels left the precincts of the city, taking a proud people away from everything they knew. She gazed at the yellow walls of the fortress that had housed the Bani Qaynuqa for hundreds of years. Safiya knew that by nightfall the abandoned quarter would be looted, and the empty houses would soon be occupied by Muslim families. Within a few months every trace of the ancient Jewish tribe would be lost and forgotten.

She walked back home slowly, wondering how long it would be before she, too, would be forced to look forward, even when her heart cried like a child to go back, to cling to a past that was no more tangible than a mirage.

Her mother had said before she died that home is where the heart is. Safiya’s heart had been made from the dust of Medina, and it deserved to return to the dust from which it had been born.

Safiya made a silent prayer to God, Elohim, Allah, Deus, or whatever it was He preferred to be called:

Even if you wish to take me away from this city, let it be that one day I will return. However the winds of history may blow, let them guide the ship of my destiny home. Lord of the Worlds, King of the Heavens, let me die where I have lived. Amen.

W
hile the Muslims and Jews came close to war in Medina, the Meccan army was regrouping under the watchful eyes of Hind. History follows the deeds of men, but often ignores the women who influenced momentous events, for good or for ill. It is time for me, Abdallah, to reveal more about the queen of Mecca. Many know her terrible crimes, but few understand the woman who perpetrated them. It is not easy to descend into such dark depths. But I have seen a shameful hint of that darkness within myself, so perhaps it is only fitting that I do so for Hind.

Ever since their defeat at Badr, Hind had encouraged the Meccan soldiers to conduct regular drills to sharpen their skills. A second defeat was unthinkable, and Hind had promised that any man who sulked back home bearing the flag of loss would be torn to shreds by the women of city before he entered its holy precincts.

Not that she considered Mecca holy. Hind had long ago given up believing in any divine force, plural or singular. The last time she had prayed was when she was six years old. Her mother was dying of a terrible wasting disease, and Hind had watched in grief as her beautiful face had collapsed in on itself until all that was left was a skull barely covered by flesh. The night her father, Utbah, had told her that her mother was leaving them, she had run to the Kaaba. Having stolen the sacred key from her father’s den, she had broken the ancient taboo and had climbed inside, falling prostrate before the crimson idol of Hubal. The little girl had stayed in that position until sunrise, her forehead pressed against the cold marble floor of the House. During that time, Hind had prayed to every god whose icon stood in the sanctuary, begging the deity to spare her mother. She had cried out to the daughters of God—Allat, Uzza, and Manat. The Phoenician goddess Astarte. Nergal, the angry god of war. The sun god Shams. Abgal, the lord of camel drivers. Munaf, the goddess of fertility. Aglibol, the Palmyran god of the crescent moon. The snake god Wadd. Qawm, the Nabatean protector of caravans. Even Isaf and Naila, the lovers who had defiled the Kaaba with their unbridled lust.

And finally, when she had named every god she knew and had heard no response, she had cried out to Allah, the High God who created the heavens and the earth before retiring to his Throne beyond the stars. Surely the One who had made the gods themselves, who had created life and death, surely He could save her mother.

But when the sun rose, Hind felt the gentle hand of her father, lifting her from her prostration. Her mother had passed away in her sleep, he said.

Hind had not wept. She had gone home and played with her dolls, apparently accepting the tragic news with the stoic dignity that was required of a great house of Quraysh.

But the tears that she did not release remained locked inside her, eating away at her heart like a worm at a corpse. The pain inside her breast became like a poison that ate away at her soul, building over the years until there was nothing left inside her but anger.

The gods had abandoned her. And so she abandoned them. A fair trade, all in all.

Over the years, Hind had never paid much attention to the stupid cult of her people, who continued to delude themselves that there was some higher order behind life. Hind had learned that night her mother died that there was no meaning, no purpose to existence. Love was an illusion, a painful trick of an uncaring cosmos. Joy a fleeting moment, lost in the wind. The only thing that was real was the body, for it alone felt pleasure and pain. So she concluded that the purpose of life, if there was any, was to heighten pleasure and deaden pain.

And thus her life had become an endless quest for ecstasy, for stretching the body’s ability to experience pleasure to its limit. She surrounded herself with amusements to enhance her senses. The most harmonious music to delight her ears. The softest clothes to caress her skin. She had tasted every wine and every rare meat. And she had spent a lifetime exploring the forbidden pleasures of the flesh, with both men and women and with many partners, often at the same time. She had sworn an oath that if there were any pleasure to be plucked out of life, she would experience it all before the darkness took her and she remembered no more.

The gods of Mecca played no role in her life except as a source of income to support her sensual lifestyle. If there were any part of her that still believed in them after her mother died, it vanished two years later when her father invited a wandering
kahin,
a soothsayer who claimed to commune with the gods, to stay in their home and bless their family with his powers. The man had slipped into her bedroom one night, naked except for an armlet of gold shaped like intertwining snakes, the symbol of his sacred familiar. In his hand, the
kahin
held an ivory idol of some Yemeni fertility god whose name she never learned. He had told her to say nothing about what had happened, for it had been a sacred rite and a curse would fall upon her if she told anyone the mysteries of the god.

Spent from his “sacred rites,” the man had slept beside her. The eight-year-old Hind had risen from her bed and crawled into the kitchen, ignoring the stream of blood that ran down her leg. She wordlessly pulled out the sharpest meat cleaver she could find and went back and slit the
kahin
’s throat without any hesitation. She then placed the Yemeni idol under her bare feet and crushed it, ignoring the shards of ivory that tore into her flesh. And then Hind had taken the
kahin
’s armlet, the symbol of his power, placed it on her own wrist, and climbed back into bed, falling into dreamless sleep beside the corpse.

Her father had found the “holy man’s” naked body in her room the next day and had quietly buried him in their backyard. Utbah had never spoken about it with Hind, but no more
kahins
were invited to stay with them.

After that incident, she had never paid the gods or their self-appointed mouthpieces any attention.

Until Muhammad, the low-class merchant who had climbed into wealth by marrying a rich old woman, decided to enter the prophecy business. He spoke pretty words of poetry and the fools of Mecca were suddenly willing to give not only their wealth to him but also their very lives. Instead of embracing the only truth of life, the pursuit of pleasure, they adopted his austere teachings, denying themselves the good things and wandering around with empty stomachs and praises to an imaginary God on their lips.

This new religion was more sophisticated in its teaching than the nonsense her people believed, and that was exactly why it offended Hind even more. It was such a well-crafted tale that even intelligent men like Umar, men she had admired and exchanged pleasures with, had given up life in order to embrace its walking death. Islam was exactly the kind of delusion that men craved, with its promises of eternal life and cosmic justice, when neither state of affairs was true.

Hind hated Muhammad for giving false hope to people—a hope that made the strong weak and ensured that men would trade the pleasures of the moment for an illusory promise of reward beyond the grave. Hind had made it her mission in life to shatter this illusion, to take away the lie so that men and women could be free to embrace the world as it was, not as they wished it to be.

Since her father’s death at Badr, Hind had been consumed with vengeance. She often accompanied her husband to military training exercises in the desert outside Mecca. Her eyes swept across the field in search of a champion, someone who could strike a blow for truth and reveal Muhammad for the sham he was.

She watched her husband calling out to the men, encouraging them as they practiced sparring with swords and thrusting with their spears.

“Train hard, O sons of Mecca! The day of retribution is coming.”

The men responded to Abu Sufyan’s cries by accelerating their moves, hoping to please the man who was for all intents and purposes their king. Hind had considered discarding her husband after the disaster of Badr, make his death appear to be an accident. But she realized now that she had been wise to restrain herself. She could see that Abu Sufyan held the soldiers’ respect and was still useful to her. Still, she knew that he was old and she would need a more youthful body to advance her cause and please her body.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she saw him.

Hind’s eyes fell upon a tall Abyssinian slave. He was as black as night and moved like a panther. In his hand, the slave held a powerful javelin, carved in accordance with the traditions of his people, who were masters of the art of spear throwing. He darted through a crowd of defenders, slipping between men like a snake winding through the rushes.

His eyes fell upon a target, a wooden pole that had been erected in the midst of the rocky field. The slave held the javelin to his shoulder and gracefully threw the weapon a hundred feet across the field. It landed straight in the heart of the pole and tore through to the other side.

Hind felt a swelling in her heart as well as in her loins. She walked over to the slave, and felt her desire growing as his skin shone with sweat and his musky odor flooded her senses.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Wahsi,” he said, panting for breath. “I belong to Jubayr ibn Mutim.”

Hind smiled. Jubayr was her cousin and she knew him well. There had been a time when Hind had worried that he would defect to the Muslims after she learned that Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s chief sycophant, had proposed engaging his daughter Aisha to Jubayr. But the lustful Muhammad had decided to take the child for his own bed, and Jubayr had remained loyal to Mecca.

She stepped closer to Wahsi, put a hand on his powerful arm that was almost as thick as a tree.

“Do you know Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib?”

She spoke the name of her father’s murderer with difficulty.

Wahsi looked uncomfortable, but he nodded.

“I know him,” he said, then hesitated. “He was always kind to Bilal and myself.”

Hind frowned. Bilal, the slave who had become Muhammad’s chief singer, had killed his former owner, Umayya, at Badr. The bond between slaves in the city was as tight as brothers, and it was certainly possible that Wahsi’s loyalty had been corrupted by the connection. She would have to gauge where his affinities truly lay.

“Would you consider Hamza a friend?”

Wahsi paused, measuring his words.

“To the extent that a slave and a free man can be friends, yes, I would.”

That was disappointing, but not an insurmountable obstacle.

“Tell me, Wahsi, what is your freedom worth to you?”

Wahsi stepped back, his eyes looking over Hind carefully.

“I don’t understand.”

Hind moved again to his side. This time she let her hand touch his bare chest. She closed her eyes and felt the steady, powerful rhythm of his heart beating against her fingers.

“Is earning your freedom something you would risk your life for?”

“Yes,” he said, without any hesitation.

She opened her eyes and looked deeply into his black pupils.

“Is it something you would kill for?”

His eyes narrowed but he did not look away.

“Yes.”

Hind smiled and caressed his flesh. The muscles of his abdomen were hard and well defined. She could feel her thighs growing wet, and the salty aroma of her arousal filled the air between them.

“No doubt. But is your freedom so precious that you would kill a friend to secure it?”

Wahsi hesitated for a moment. And then he lifted his shoulders proudly.

“If that is the price for the key to my chains, then yes.”

Hind squeezed his forearm, let the tip of her fingernail nick his skin, drawing blood. Wahsi stood impassive as she brought her finger to her lips and sucked the tiny drop of his life fluid into her mouth.

“I will speak to my cousin Jubayr,” she said in a husky voice. “He will give you a furlough for the evening. Come to my house tonight. There is much to discuss.”

A
ND SO HIND FOUND
at last a champion for her revenge. A vengeance that would prove far uglier than any of us could ever have imagined.

You may wonder, dear Abdallah, why I take the time to detail her role in these events. She was a monster, you say, unworthy of being recorded in the annals of our faith. And perhaps you are right. Her crimes have justly earned her the condemnation of history. Hind was indeed cruel, vindictive, and manipulative. And yet she was also more than that. Strong. Proud. Passionate. A woman who refused to let the world conquer her. A woman who could have done so much good had the wound in her heart been healed with the balm of love. And despite my hatred for her memory, I sorrow for the child that still lived within her. A little girl on her knees, crying out to the heavens for her mother. A cry that was met with silence.