After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam Read Online Free PDF Page A

arrival—the hundreds of camels being unloaded and stabled, the throng of warriors being greeted by wives and kinsmen—her absence went unnoticed. Her maid assumed she’d slipped down from the howdah and gone perhaps to see her mother. Muhammad himself would have been far too busy to think of her. Everyone simply assumed she was someplace else.
    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 mayor 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