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

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 manbamboozled 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