After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (3 page)

Its loss and the ensuing scandal would be known as the Affair of the Necklace, the kind of folksy title that speaks of oral history, which is how all history began before the age of the printing press and mass literacy. The People of the Cloak, the Episode of Pen and Paper, the Battle of the Camel, the Secret Letter, the Night of Shrieking—all these and more would be the building blocks of early Islamic history. This is history told as story, which of course it always is, but rarely in such vivid and intimate detail.

For the first hundred years of Islam, these stories lived not on the page but on the tongues of those who told them and in the ears and
hearts of those who heard them and remembered them to tell again, the details gathering impact as the years unfolded. This was the raw material of the early Islamic historians, who would travel throughout the Middle East to gather these memories, taking great care to record the source of each one by detailing the chain of communication. The
isnad,
they called it—the provenance of each memory—given up front by prefacing each speaker’s account in the manner of “I was told this by C, who was told it by B, who was told it by A, who was there when it happened.”

This was the method used by Ibn Ishaq in his biography of Muhammad; by Abu Jafar al-Tabari in his magisterial history of early Islam, which comes to thirty-nine volumes in English translation; by Ibn Saad in his sometimes deliciously gossipy collections of anecdotes; and by al-Baladhuri in his “Lineage of the Nobles.” It is an extraordinarily open process, one that allows direct insight into how history is communicated and established, and is deeply respectful of the fact that,
Rashomon
style, if there were six people there, they would have six similar but subtly different accounts.

Al-Tabari was Sunni, but his vast history is acknowledged as authoritative by Sunni and Shia alike. Its length and detail are part and parcel of his method. He visits the same events again and again, almost obsessively, as different people tell their versions, and the differing versions overlap and diverge in what now seems astonishingly postmodern fashion. Al-Tabari understood that human truth is always flawed—that realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase “Only God knows for sure.”

Reading these voices from the seventh century, you feel as though you are sitting in the middle of a vast desert grapevine, a dense network of intimate knowledge defying the limitations of space and time. As they relate what they saw and what they heard, what this one said and how that one replied, their language is sometimes shocking in its pithiness—
not at all what one expects from conventional history. It has the smack of vitality, of real people living in earthshaking times, and it is true to the culture, one in which the language of curse was as rich and developed as the language of blessing. Indeed, both curse and blessing figure prominently in what is to come.

The necklace was lost just one day’s journey outside Medina, toward the end of one of Muhammad’s campaigns to unite Arabia’s tribes under the banner of Islam. These were full-scale expeditions lasting weeks and even months at a time, and he usually took at least one of his wives along with him. None was more eager to go than Aisha.

For a spirited city teenager, this was pure excitement. If Medina was not yet a city in the way we now think of the word—it was more of an agglomeration of tribal villages, each one clustered around a fortified manor house—it was urban enough for the nomadic past to have become a matter of nostalgia. Long poems celebrated the purity of the desert, softening its harshness with the idea of a spiritual nobility lost in the relative ease of settled life.

For Aisha, then, these expeditions were romance. There was the thrill of riding out of the ribbon of green that was Medina, up into the jagged starkness of the mountains that rose like a forbidding no-go zone between Medina and the vast deserts of central and northern Arabia. The Hijaz, they called it—the “barrier”—and beyond it stretched more than seven hundred miles of arid steppe until the land suddenly dipped into the lush river basin of the place they knew as al-Iraq, from the Persian word for lowlands.

This was Aisha’s chance to discover the fabled purity of the desert, and she must have savored every detail of it, admiring the way the scouts who led them knew where every spring was, hidden deep between clefts of rock, every place where a well had been sunk, every dip in the landscape that held the sudden winter rains to create pools that would vanish
within a few days. They needed no compasses, no maps; the land was in their heads. They were master travelers.

From her vantage point in her howdah—a canopied cane platform built out from the camel’s saddle—Aisha 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 gold and silver mines that produced much of the wealth of the Hijaz; the Beduin warriors of remote tribes, fiercely romantic to a city girl. She watched and listened to the drawn-out negotiations with those tribes that resisted acknowledging Muhammad and Islam, hoping for a peaceful outcome even as some other part of her may have hoped the talks would break down so that the only choice left was the sword and the world devolved into action, men’s voices grown hoarse with yelling and the air charged with the clang of steel and the acrid tang of blood.

It was on these expeditions that she learned her repertoire of battle cries, spurring on the men from the rear. The women of seventh-century Arabia were no shrinking violets, and least of all Aisha, known for her sharp tongue and her wit. She learned to curse the enemy, to praise her own side’s virility, to urge the men on to new feats of valor as she would do years later in the thick of battle, even as men were dying all around her. She knew her invective was unnerving, all the more powerful—eerie, almost—for coming in the high, shrill, piercing voice she was known for, unmistakably hers. But both her tongue and her wit would almost fail her now.

It had still been dark when they began to break camp to start the final leg of the journey home, using the cool early hours of the day to advantage. In the chilly predawn half-light, Aisha made her way a hundred yards or so beyond the encampment to relieve herself behind a spindly bush of broom, as women still do when they’re out in the wild, looking for a modicum of privacy. She got back to her camel just as the caravan was preparing to move off, and had already settled into the howdah when she put her fingers to her throat and her heart skipped a
beat—that sudden sense of something missing, of absence where there should have been presence. Her necklace, her gift from Muhammad, was gone.

She realized instantly what must have happened. The string had snagged on a branch and snapped without her noticing, scattering the beads onto the ground. But if she was quick about it, there was still time to retrieve them. Without a word to anyone, she slipped down from the howdah and retraced her steps.

Even for someone so determined, though, finding the beads took longer than she’d foreseen. In the early half-light, every broom bush looked the same, and when she finally found the right one and knelt down, she had to sift through the piles of dead needles beneath the bush to find each bead. Yet find them she did, one by one, and returned triumphantly to the camp with the beads tied securely into a knot in the hem of her smock, only to discover that the camp was no longer there. The whole expedition had moved on, and she was suddenly alone in the desert.

How it had happened was understandable. Her maid, an Ethiopian slave girl, had seen her climbing into the howdah, but nobody had seen her slip out again. They had all assumed she was inside and that since the canopy was drawn, she did not want to be disturbed, so they had left without her. What was not quite as understandable to most people was what happened next, or rather, what did not happen next.

Aisha did not run after the caravan, even though the well-trodden route was clear enough. She did not even walk after it, though it could not have been far ahead. Camels laden with equipment and supplies do not move fast. It would have been easy to catch up on foot, especially in the early morning before the sun has gained heat, when the chill of the desert night still hangs in the air, crisp and refreshing—a matter of an hour or so at the most.

Instead, in her own words, “I wrapped myself in my smock and
then lay down where I was, knowing that when I was missed they would come back for me.”

It was inconceivable to Aisha that her absence would not be noted, unthinkable that the caravan would not halt and a detachment be sent back to find her. As the Prophet’s wife she assumed a position of privilege. To expect her to catch up on foot was to expect her to behave like a normal teenage girl, and 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 later maintained: six years old when she was betrothed to him and nine years old when the marriage was celebrated and consummated. And though this was unlikely, few disputed her claim in her lifetime. Indeed, few people cared to dispute with her at all. As one of the most powerful Caliphs would say many 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.”

But if Aisha was indeed married so young, others would certainly have remarked on it at the time. In fact most reports have her aged nine when she was betrothed and twelve when she was actually married, since custom dictated that girls not marry until puberty. But then again, to have been married at the customary age would have made Aisha normal, and that was the one thing she was always determined not to be.

As she reminded everyone who would listen through to the end of her life—an enviably long one compared to the other main figures in this story since she would outlive them all—she was not only Muhammad’s youngest wife but also the purest, the only one who had been neither a divorcée nor a widow but a virgin at marriage. And most important of all, she was Muhammad’s favorite.

Humayra—“
my little redhead”—he called her, though she was almost
certainly not a natural redhead. If she had been, it would have led to much comment in dark-haired Arabia; indeed she herself, never shy with words, would have said a lot more about it. But a double measure of henna would have made her hair glow dark red, as was of course the purpose. It emphasized her difference.

She had been the first of the nine wives Muhammad had married after the death of Khadija—offered by her father, Muhammad’s close friend and longtime supporter Abu Bakr, as a means of distracting the Prophet in the depth of his mourning. It was easy to see why. Bold and irrepressible, she would bring him back to life. By her own account, at least, she would tease and taunt him and not only get away with it but be loved for it. Muhammad seemed to have granted her license for girlish mischief, as though he were a fond father indulging a spoiled daughter, entranced by her sassiness and charm.

Charming she must have been, and sassy she definitely was. Sometimes, though, the charm wears thin, at least to the modern ear. The stories Aisha later told of her marriage were intended to show her influence and spiritedness, but there is often a definite edge to them, a sense of a young woman not to be crossed or denied, of someone who could all too easily switch from spirited to mean-spirited.

There was the time Muhammad spent too long for Aisha’s 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 Muhammad had a particular weakness. When he finally came to her chamber and told her why he had been delayed, she made a face and, knowing that he was particular about bad breath, wrinkled her nose in distaste. “The bees that made that honey must have been eating wormwood,” she insisted, and was rewarded when the next time Muhammad was offered a honeyed drink, he refused it.

Other times she went further, as when Muhammad arranged to seal
an alliance with a major Christian tribe newly converted to Islam 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, advised her that Muhammad would think all the more highly of her if on the wedding night, she resisted him by saying, “I take refuge with God from thee.” The new bride had no idea that this was the Islamic phrase used to annul a marriage. All she knew was that the moment she said it, Muhammad left, and the next day she was bundled unceremoniously back to her own people.

Aisha, in short, was used to having things her own way, so when she was left behind in the desert, she saw no reason to expect anything different. If there was the slightest murmur of panic at the back of her mind as the sun rose higher overhead and she took shelter under a scraggly acacia tree, as the shadow of the tree grew shorter and still nobody came, she would never have acknowledged it, not even to herself. Of course she would be missed. Of course someone would be sent for her. The last thing anyone would expect was that she, the favorite wife of the Prophet, run after a pack of camels like some Beduin shepherd girl. That would be just too demeaning.

Someone did come, though not a special contingent deputized to search for her, as she had expected. In fact the expedition sent nobody at all, since they never realized she was missing, not even after they had reached Medina. In the hubbub of 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.