Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam (56 page)

S
hortly after Fatima passed away, Ali went to my father and publicly reconciled with him. He told Abu Bakr that he bore no bitterness toward him and did not dispute his right to authority. He had withheld his endorsement, Ali said, as he felt that the family of the Prophet had been excluded in the handling of the succession. But the matter was done and Ali wished no more ill will between the House of the Messenger and the House of the Caliph. With the loss of Fatima, the Prophet’s young grandsons were motherless and Ali wanted to dedicate his time to raising them and spreading Islam through teaching. Abu Bakr was welcome to shoulder the burdens of the nation in his stead.

My father had wept and embraced the young man, and even my stone heart softened toward him slightly. Despite my inability to forgive him for betraying me, I felt sorry for Ali, who had, in the aftermath of the Prophet’s death, lost everything. As long as the Messenger had been alive, Ali had been one of the most prominent and influential members of the community. But since my husband’s death and the controversy around Ali’s refusal to swear allegiance to Abu Bakr, he had become increasingly isolated. His strange and awkward personality, tolerated during Muhammad’s lifetime, now made people wary, and he spent most of his days alone, tending to the plot of land that Abu Bakr had agreed to give him in trust. Ali had few friends, and only Talha and Zubayr could be considered regular visitors to his home. And now, with the death of Fatima, he was truly alone.

Abu Bakr led Ali out before the believers in the Masjid after Friday prayers, and the son-in-law of the Prophet clasped the right hand of the father-in-law of the Prophet and swore his loyalty. There were audible sighs of relief and cries of praise to God, for the uncertainty that had hung over my father’s reign, the nagging question of legitimacy, had finally been resolved.

At least in the hearts of most people. A few passionate supporters of Ali continued to grumble that the right of Muhammad’s bloodline had been usurped and that Ali remained the rightful claimant to the throne of the Muslims. Ali himself did not publicly endorse such talk, but I remained suspicious that he was not doing enough to silence these malcontents.

And then news came from Khalid in the east that made us all forget our squabbles and turn our gaze to the future of Islam.

T
HE
M
USLIM DEFEAT OF
Musaylima had placed our armies directly on the borders of the ancient Persian empire. The Sassanid kings had ruled this great nation for almost four hundred years, and at the height of their power, their empire held dominion from Anatolia to the Indus River. But over the past several decades, the Sassanid shahs had been locked in a brutal and destructive war with the Byzantines for control of the region.

For most of my young life, the Christians had been on the defensive. Antioch and Alexandria had fallen to the Sassanids. And then the Christians suffered the ultimate humiliation when the fire worshipers conquered Jerusalem and stole the sacred relics of the Church, including what was alleged by their priests to be the True Cross of Jesus. The Byzantines had been demoralized until the rise of the Emperor Heraclius, who had valiantly fought back against the Persians and expelled the invaders from the holy city.

The victorious Heraclius had rallied his people to take the fight to the enemy, and the Byzantines had attacked the very heart of the Persian empire, marching down the length of the Tigris River and sacking the Sassanid palace at Dastagered. Heraclius had nearly achieved his goal of taking the Persian capital at Ctesiphon, but the Persian defenders had destroyed the ancient bridges over the Nahrawan Canal, frustrating his advance. Heraclius had returned triumphantly to the seat of his own empire, but his victory was ultimately hollow. Though he had succeeded in pushing back his ancient adversaries, his army was broken by the constant warfare and the Byzantine treasury depleted.

The Sassanids were in even worse disarray, and the Persian king, Khusro, was overthrown and murdered by his own son Kavadh, who negotiated a shaky truce with the Byzantines. I remember when I first heard the news of Khusro’s death from a Yemeni merchant in the marketplace of Medina. I had smiled behind my veil, for Khusro had rejected my husband’s call to Islam, tearing up his letter in contempt. As the Messenger had prophesized then, his kingdom had been similarly torn in two.

The grand political events to the north provided interesting gossip, but they had been of little practical interest to the Muslims in the early years, as survival had been our primary focus. But now that Islam was established as the sole ruling force over a united Arabia, we could no more ignore the empires on our borders than they could us. These two great nations—Persian and Byzantine—had exhausted each other through centuries of warfare, and the rise of a new state in their midst presented an unexpected and dangerous threat to their delicate balance of power. Neither of the empires had the resources or energy to engage us directly, whatever threats may have rumbled from their envoys, and they were forced to use proxies in their effort to keep us in check. The Byzantines had tried to ally with the Jews of Khaybar, forcing my husband to conquer the city and use it as a defensive shield to the north. And the false prophet Musaylima was rumored to have received financing and training from the Persians to the east. But with the defeat of these quislings, the day was fast coming when our forces would come into direct contact with those of the rival empires.

And then one warm morning, a year after my husband had died, that day came. Acting upon orders from my father, Khalid sent an army of eighteen thousand men from Yamama into the fields of Persian Iraq, claiming them for Islam. The Persians responded with a force of nearly twice that size, led by elephants armored in steel. The Sassanid army was a terrifying juggernaut, the likes of which the Arabs had never before encountered, and the Arab swords and spears looked like toys compared to the mighty honed blades of the ancient Persian empire. But Khalid knew that this monstrous foe had one weakness. Mobility. The heavily shielded horses and elephants could not march for long under the hot desert sun without succumbing to exhaustion, and so he utilized the hit-and-run tactics the Messenger had perfected at Khaybar. The Muslims would ride out into the field and engage the front lines of the Persians, and then escape back into the wilderness, having goaded their adversaries into pursuit. The farther the Muslims drew the soldiers of Persia into the sands, the slower and more confused they became. By the time the Persian general Hormuz realized his tactical error, it was too late.

Khalid led the Muslims in one final charge, during which the tired and bewildered Sassanids used a standard defensive tactic that had worked for them in the past but would lead to tragedy that day. The Persian soldiers linked themselves together with chains to hold back Khalid’s cavalry. They stood united like a rock in the face of the Muslim charge. This tactic had been successful against Byzantine soldiers, who had decided that a frontal attack against the chain was nothing less than suicide. But the Persians did not understand that the guarantee of death on the battlefield did not deter Muslims but only encouraged them with the promise of eternal life. To the shock of the Persian defenders, Khalid’s horsemen crashed against the chained warriors without fear, immolating themselves on the lances of the Sassanids. As the Muslims continued to charge despite the wall of death, the Persians became frightened by their intensity and commitment, and panic began to spread among the dehydrated and exhausted troops. And then, when Khalid slew their commander, Hormuz, the Persian warriors tried to flee, but the chains that had been meant to hold back their enemies now became shackles that led them to their deaths.

Khalid’s men destroyed the Persian force in what became known to us as the Battle of the Chains. Thousands of the Sassanids’ best troops fell that day, and the Arabs had opened a door into the east. The Muslims exploded out of the desert and soon descended on the city of al-Hira, the capital of Persian Iraq, which had been administered by Arab Christians known as Lakhmids. Khalid showered the people of al-Hira with gifts and promised the Christians that their right of worship would be protected under the laws of Islam, a guarantee that had never been given by their Persian overlords. The Lakhmids quickly capitulated, and the boundaries of Islam had in one stunning swoop extended outside of the Arabian peninsula and reached the banks of the Euphrates.

Our nation had just become an empire.

T
HE REJOICING IN THE
streets of Medina at word of Khalid’s victory was soon followed by sadness. My father fell deeply ill, and he was confined to his bed. I sensed the cloud of death that was hanging over Abu Bakr. I could not imagine a world without him any more than I could one without my husband. But in truth, I could still feel Muhammad’s presence in my room and found some comfort in the intuition that he was still with me. Yet my father was just an ordinary man, and when he passed away, he would truly be gone.

Asma and I stayed by his side, night and day, nursing him through the fever. And then one morning, I saw a look on his face, a serenity and resignation that told me that his time had come.

“Call Uthman,” he whispered to me.

I immediately dispatched a messenger, and within a few minutes the son of Affan arrived. As Uthman knelt beside my father, he looked older but was still remarkably handsome, and I noticed the sparkle of generosity and kindness in his eyes.

“What can I do for you, old friend?” he said, running a hand through my father’s thinning white hair.

“I have a testament for the people, a final command as Caliph that I want you to deliver to them,” my father said, enunciating every word carefully, his breath wheezing.

Uthman lowered his head. For a moment, I wondered if he would object, as had the Companions during Muhammad’s last illness. I trembled at the thought of another chaotic struggle for succession. The Muslims had established order only because of my father’s statesmanship. Would we have to endure another round of tribesmen jockeying for position? With the Muslim nation now expanding into the heart of the Persian empire, with enemies circling us like vultures over a battlefield, we could not afford another dispute over authority. And my heart chilled at the thought that the small but vocal faction that favored the right of Ali and the Prophet’s grandsons might not choose to acquiesce as easily as they had done before. If Uthman refused to pass along my father’s wishes, the
Ummah
could descend overnight into civil war.

Uthman finally raised his head and looked into Abu Bakr’s eyes. He squeezed my father’s gnarled hands and nodded.

“I will do as you wish.”

My father sighed in clear relief and then gave me a glance that I understood. I went and retrieved a piece of parchment and gave it to Uthman, along with a quill pen that was one of Abu Bakr’s few earthly possessions.

And then my father recited his last testament.

“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is the order of Abdallah ibn Abu Quhayfa, known to men as Abu Bakr. Whereas…”

And then he stopped. I looked at my father and saw that he had fallen unconscious. My heart skipped a beat. If my father died before he could state his wishes,
fitna
would be upon us. I looked at Uthman and saw from his pale face that he was thinking the same thing.

I looked around and saw that we were alone. Asma had returned home to feed you, Abdallah, and there was no one present in the Caliph’s quarters to witness what happened next.

“What do we do?” Uthman asked me in a voice that sounded like a frightened boy’s.

I could hear the blood pounding in my ears, and my mouth was as dry as salt. And then I made a decision for which I could have been killed on the spot.

“Write in ‘I appoint Umar ibn al-Khattab as my successor among you,’” I said, fighting off the terror of my own presumption. Of all the men left in Medina, I knew that only Umar commanded the fear and the respect of every faction, and he could be counted on to hold the people together.

I looked at Uthman, my gold eyes focused on him like a hawk. If he objected and word spread that I had usurped the Caliph’s power and forged his final command, nothing would save me from the fury of the mob. The Mother of the Believers would be torn to shreds in the street by her children.

But Uthman’s saving grace, and his fatal weakness, was his trusting and gentle nature. He was like a little child who saw only the best in others and had no understanding of the machinations of politics or the treacheries of the human heart.

He looked at me for a moment and then nodded and wrote in the words in Abu Bakr’s name.

I felt the world spin around me. Had I just done this thing? Had I actually seized my father’s mantle and spoken on his behalf, single-handedly appointing the next Caliph of Islam? And then I began to tremble in fright at my audacity and wondered what madness had taken hold of me.

And then a miracle happened. Of all the wondrous and inexplicable things I witnessed during my years with the Messenger of God, none was as remarkable as the sudden sound of my father’s voice.

“Where was I?” Abu Bakr said, his eyes blinking away the sleep that had taken hold of him.

The blood drained from my face, and I shot Uthman a warning look, but it was too late. The gentle and unpretentious man simply handed over to the Caliph the sheet on which he had written in the words I had instructed him.

My father looked at the parchment in surprise, his eyes narrowing. And then he turned to Uthman, and, to my shock, a warm smile spread on his face.

“I think you were afraid that the people would dispute among themselves if I died in that state,” he said, no hint of accusation or outrage in his voice.

Uthman looked at me, and for a moment I expected him to reveal my presumption. But his eyes twinkled and he simply nodded in affirmation, and I realized that my secret was safe with him.