The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (26 page)

Muhammad’s response startled everyone: he gave the order to cut down the Nadir palm groves. In Arabia, trees of any kind were treasured, but date palms especially so. Each one represented generations of careful tending and work, so that to destroy the palms was to destroy not only property but history. Cutting them down was a calculated statement that the Nadir now had nothing left to stay for, and a warning of what might happen to them if they resisted further. Plus it had the additional advantage of unnerving ibn-Ubayy, whose promised two thousand men never materialized. The ensuing siege was a repeat of that of the Qaynuqa the previous year. After fifteen days, with no water left and no future to look forward to in Medina, the Nadir capitulated. They would leave with little more than their lives, allowed to take only one camel-load of goods for every three people.

But this time there would be no sad procession. Unlike the Qaynuqa, the Nadir left Medina in what seemed more like a triumphal parade. They beat drums and tambourines as they went, dressed in their finest clothes and decked out in all their jewelry. As one witness put it: “They went with a splendor and a glory the like of which had never been seen from any tribe in their time.” It was an impressive display of protest, a defiant statement by the Nadir that they were the ones who should be proud, and all the rest of Medina ashamed. As they headed north toward the oasis of Khaybar, and on into Palestine and Syria, the manner of their leaving said as much about their expulsion as the reason given for it.

The Quranic voice quickly came into play to counteract the shocking image of believers destroying date orchards: “Whatever you believers have done to their trees, whether cutting them down or uprooting them, was done by God’s leave, so that he might disgrace those who defied him.” This was not the fault of the believers but of men like ibn-Ubayy: “Consider the hypocrites who say to their fellows, the faithless among the People of the Book, ‘We would never listen to anyone who sought to harm you, and if you are attacked, we shall certainly come to your aid.’ God bears witness that they are liars.” By expelling the Nadir, Muhammad had not only made it clearer than ever that he would tolerate no challenge to his authority; he had again forced his will on ibn-Ubayy.

For the volatile Omar, however, this was not enough. Always the warrior, he urged Muhammad to have done with ibn-Ubayy and give the order to kill him. Instead, he received a political lesson. “What? And let men say that Muhammad slays his companions?” came the reply. To make a martyr of ibn-Ubayy would only be counter-productive; he was far more useful kept close, as a subordinate. Indeed five years later, his power by then unchallenged, Muhammad would return to the issue. “What do you think now?” he’d ask Omar. “By God, if I had ordered ibn-Ubayy killed when you advised it, the chiefs of Medina would have been shaking with fury. But by now if I commanded them directly to kill him, they would do it.”

As for the expulsion of the Nadir, the Quranic voice spoke out in angry defense of the decision. Where it had previously maintained that a small number of Jews were creating opposition to Muhammad’s message and thus betraying their own faith, it now asserted that there were only a few “good Jews” among them. Verse after verse would build into a bitter polemic whose style and content reflected Muhammad’s personal feeling of betrayal. The expulsion of both the Qaynuqa and the Nadir was now justified by labeling them “evil-doers.” “It was God who drove the unbelievers among the People of the Book out of their dwellings . . . They imagined that their strongholds would protect them, but God’s scourge fell upon them . . . If God had not decreed expulsion for them, he would surely have punished them in this world.” None of which boded well for Medina’s one remaining Jewish tribe.

crutiny of those in power was no less intense in the seventh century than it is today. Inevitably, Muhammad’s private life was now very public, though it may well be anachronistic to even speak of a private life. The concept of privacy is relatively modern, just

like the idea of marriage as a romantic union. Through most of history, marriage was an arrangement between men—between fathers and husbands, that is. It was an accepted means of strengthening the bonds of family, which is why marriage between first cousins was common. But for leaders, it was also a means of forming and consolidating alliances. Marriage brought allies close and former enemies even closer. It was a declaration of political amity written, as it were, in the flesh.

In late middle age, then, the man devotedly married for so long to a single wife was multiply married. Within three years of Khadija’s death, Muhammad had three wives, with six more yet to come. The first of his late-life marriages, to a quiet widow named Sawda, had been arranged by his followers, who were concerned about the depth of his grief for Khadija. He had also accepted his close friend and supporter abu-Bakr’s offer of his daughter Aisha as a bride, and so as not to be seen to favor abu-Bakr above all others, had then married Omar’s daughter Hafsa after she’d been widowed at Badr. Two of his closest advisers had thus become his fathers-in-law, while two others became his sons-in-law, one of them doubly so. Not only had the Umayyad aristocrat Uthman married Muhammad’s eldest daughter after her first husband had been forced to divorce her; when she died shortly after the Battle of Uhud, he immediately married her sister Umm Kulthum. And Muhammad had personally arranged the marriage between his youngest daughter Fatima and his cousin and all-butadopted son Ali.

This seeming muddle of marriages was part of the traditional and far-reaching Arabian web of kinship, one that beggars the modern Western idea of the nuclear family. It makes a mockery of something as simplistically linear as a family tree, becoming far more like a dense forest of vines. And a very strong one, since it would reach deep into the future. The two fathers-in-law abu-Bakr and Omar were to be the first two leaders of Islam after Muhammad’s death, each acclaimed as his successor or khalifa—caliph in English—and they would be immediately followed by the two sons-in-law Uthman and Ali. By both giving and taking in marriage, Muhammad was establishing the leadership matrix of the new Islamic community.

But if this was clear to the men, it was not necessarily so to the women involved, and especially not to the youngest, most outspoken, and most controversial of Muhammad’s late-life wives, abu-Bakr’s daughter Aisha. Where challenges to Muhammad’s leadership had previously come from political opponents, now one of the strongest would come from alarmingly close to home.

Certainly Aisha never saw herself as merely a means of political alliance, let alone as just one wife among many. In fact if there was one thing she would insist on all her life, it was her exceptionality. There was the age at which she had married Muhammad, to start with. She had been a mere child, she’d maintain: six years old when she was betrothed and nine years old when the marriage was celebrated and consummated. Few disputed her claim in her lifetime; indeed, few people cared to dispute with her at all. As one of Islam’s most powerful politicians would remember years later, “There was never any subject I wished closed that she would not open, or that I wished open that she would not close.”

If Aisha was indeed married so young, however, others would certainly have remarked on it at the time. Instead, more restrained reports have her aged nine when she was betrothed and twelve when she was actually married, which makes sense since custom dictated that girls be married at puberty. But then again, to have been married at the customary age would make Aisha normal, and that was the one thing she was always determined not to be. Tart-tongued and quick-witted, she would, at least by her own account, tease Muhammad and not only get away with it but be loved for it. It was as though he had granted her license for girlish mischief. Much as a fond father might indulge a spoiled daughter, he seemed diverted by her sassiness and charm.

Charming she must have been, and sassy she definitely was. But sometimes the charm wore thin, at least to the modern ear. The stories Aisha would later tell of her marriage were intended to show her influence and spiritedness, but there’s often a definite edge to them, a sense of a young woman not to be crossed or denied.

There was the time Muhammad spent too long for her liking with another wife who had made a “honeyed drink” for him—a kind of Arabian syllabub, probably, made with egg whites and goat’s milk beaten thick with honey, for which he had a special weakness. Knowing that he was very particular about bad breath, Aisha turned her face away when he finally came to her room, and asked what he had been eating. When told about the honeyed drink, she wrinkled her nose in distaste. “The bees that made that honey must have been eating wormwood,” she insisted, and was rewarded when Muhammad refused the drink the next time he was offered it.

Other times she went further, as when Muhammad arranged to seal an alliance with a major Christian tribe in the time-honored manner by marrying its leader’s daughter, a girl renowned for her beauty. When the bride-to-be arrived in Medina, Aisha volunteered to help prepare her for the wedding and, under the guise of sisterly advice, told her that Muhammad would think all the more highly of her if she at first resisted him on the wedding night by saying, “I take refuge with God from thee.” The new bride had no idea that this was the phrase used to annul a marriage; the moment she said it, Muhammad left, and the next day she was bundled unceremoniously back to her own people.

It may have been inevitable, then, that when scandal hit in the form of a lost necklace, the headstrong Aisha would be at the center of it.

t was not just any necklace, of course, though it would have been easy enough to think so. It was only a string of beads, really. Agates, or maybe coral, or even simple seashells—Aisha never did say, and one can see her waving her hand dismissively as though such detail were irrelevant. Enough to say that it was the kind of necklace a young girl would wear, and treasure more than if it had been made of diamonds because it had been Muhammad’s wedding gift to her.

It was lost on the way back from an expedition to the north to seek the support of a large Beduin tribe, the Mustaliq. When Muhammad led such expeditions himself, as he had this one, he usually took one of his wives with him, and none was more eager to go than Aisha. For a spirited teenage girl, this was pure excitement. From the vantage point of her howdah—the canopied cane platform built out from the camel saddle—she saw the vast herds of the camel and horse breeders in the northern steppes; the date-palm oases of Khaybar and Fadak nestled like elongated emeralds in winding valleys; the Beduin warriors of remote tribes, fiercely romantic to a city girl. And when negotiations failed and fighting broke out, as it did this time, her shrill voice carried over the ranks of struggling men, urging them on.

Muhammad’s men had prevailed over the Mustaliq, taking captives to be held for ransom or sold as slaves. It was still dark when they began to break camp on the final leg of the journey home, aiming as usual to use the cool early hours of the day to advantage. Before they left, Aisha made her way beyond the encampment to relieve herself behind a spindly bush of broom. She got back just as the caravan was about to move off, and had already settled into her howdah when she put her fingers to her throat and realized that her necklace was gone. The string must have snagged on a branch without her noticing, scattering the beads, but if she was quick about it, there was still time to retrieve them. Without a word to anyone, she slipped down and retraced her steps.

Even for someone so determined, though, finding the beads took longer than she’d thought. Every broom bush looked the same in the early half-light, and when she finally found the right one, she had to sift through the piles of dead needles beneath it to find each bead. By the time she returned with them tied securely into a knot in the hem of her smock, the camp was no longer there. Assuming that she was still safely in her howdah, the expedition had moved on.

The well-trodden route was clear enough, and heavily laden camels move slowly. It would have been a matter of at most an hour or so for a healthy teenage girl to catch up on foot, especially in the early morning when the chill of the desert night still lingers in the air, crisp and refreshing. But instead, in Aisha’s own words, “I wrapped myself in my smock and lay down where I was, knowing that when I was missed they would come back for me.”

It was inconceivable that her absence not be noted. Unthinkable that the caravan not halt and a detachment be sent back to find her. If there was a murmur of panic at the back of her mind as the sun rose higher and she took shelter under a scraggly acacia tree, she would never acknowledge it. Of course she would be missed, and of course someone would come for her. The last thing anyone would expect was that she, Muhammad’s favorite wife, run after a pack of camels like some Beduin shepherd girl.

But the expedition sent nobody since they never realized she was missing, not even after they reached Medina. In the hubbub of arrival—the camels being unloaded and stabled, the warriors being greeted by wives and kinsmen, the captives being led away—her absence went unnoticed. Everyone simply assumed she was somewhere else. So it was Aisha’s good fortune, or perhaps her misfortune, that a young Medinan warrior had been delayed and was riding alone through the heat of the day when he saw Aisha 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 dismounted, helped her up onto his camel, and then led the animal on foot the whole twenty miles back to Medina. Which is how everyone in the oasis witnessed her arrival that evening, seated on a camel led by a good-looking young warrior.

She must have noticed the way people stared and hung back, with nobody rushing up to say “Thanks be to God that you’re safe.” No matter how upright she sat on Safwan’s camel, how high she held her head or how disdainful her glare, she must have seen the tongues as they started to wag, spreading the word. And must have known what that word was. Muhammad’s youngest wife traveling with a virile young warrior, parading through the series of villages strung along the valley of Medina? The news spread rapidly from tongue to tongue, house to house, village to village. A necklace indeed, people would cluck. Alone the whole day in the desert with a single man? Why had she lain down to wait when she could easily have caught up with the expedition on foot? Had it been a pre-arranged tryst? Had Muhammad been deceived by his spirited favorite?