Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam (60 page)

And then I heard a dog bark and I snapped out of my reverie. I peered through the heavy metal rings of my armored curtains and saw that our caravan had entered a valley. The sun had fallen behind the mountains and the earth was draped in shadow.

And then I heard a chilling howl, followed by another. I looked out from my howdah as dozens of vicious dogs ran out from behind the rocks and crevices and raced around my camel, barking wildly. There was something unearthly and terrifying about them, and I felt my bones grow cold.

And then I felt the stirrings of memory and my blood fled from my face.

The dogs of al-Haw’ab…they bark so fiercely…
my husband had said.
They bark at the Angel of Death…who follows her skirts…so much death in her midst…
And then he had turned to me, fear in his black eyes.
Please,
Humayra…
Don’t let the dogs bark at you.

And then, at that instant, the demon that had possessed my soul departed and I became the Mother of the Believers again.

I called out to Talha in desperation. He rode over immediately at my cry for help.

“What is it? Are you all right?”

I peered out from my howdah, so agitated that I forgot to put on my veil. I saw him look at my face in stunned surprise, and I realized that he had not seen my features since I was a teenage girl. Talha immediately looked down and I felt my face flush in embarrassment and shame as I quickly wrapped my face behind the
niqab
. And some small part of me wondered if I looked ugly to him, a middle-aged woman who no longer possessed the vibrancy of youth that he remembered. But then the memory of the dark prophecy came to mind and all thoughts of vanity disappeared.

“We must turn back,” I begged him.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“This is the valley of Haw’ab!” I shouted to him. “The Messenger warned me against it! Please! This mission had been cursed! We must abandon it!”

Talha looked up at me in confusion. And then I saw the hateful face of Marwan as he rode up beside my camel.

“You are mistaken, my Mother,” he said. “This is not Haw’ab. That valley is miles to the west.”

“You lie!” I cried out, but Marwan simply smiled and rode off, pointedly joining the train of his fellow Umayyad lords who had financed this expedition. Even if I wanted to turn back, the men whose gold had brought us here wished to continue. And one woman’s voice of conscience had no weight on the scales of power.

Talha gazed at Marwan and I saw a defeated look cross his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and then rode back to join Zubayr.

I felt steel talons gripping my heart, and I began to pray to Allah for protection from the darkness inside my own soul.

A
ND SO IT WAS
that we at last came upon Ali’s encampment, deep in the heart of southern Iraq at a town called Basra. We had recruited sympathizers among the Bedouin tribes and some disgruntled Iraqis, and our army had now swelled to ten thousand, nearly equal to the fighting force of the Caliph.

Ever since the incident with the dogs of al-Haw’ab, the bloodlust had seeped out of my veins and I had no more desire for battle. And I could tell that Talha and Zubayr shared my feelings. The sight of an opposing army consisting of our fellow Muslims, the idea of shedding their blood, revolted us. And then an envoy from Ali arrived asking for a private meeting with me and the two Companions who led the army of Mecca.

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL
hours, we met in Ali’s simple command tent, not as enemies but as old colleagues who sat in wonder at how things could have gone so wrong between us. Ali apologized to Talha and Zubayr for the ungracious way in which he had assumed power, but he said quite convincingly that he felt there had been no other choice. With the death of Uthman, chaos had reigned, and he had sought only to reestablish order and justice to the caliphate.

“If you sought justice, then why did you not punish the assassins?” It was a question that came out of my mouth before I could stop it, and I saw that Talha and Zubayr looked relieved that I had said aloud what they had been too diplomatic to mention.

Ali sighed wearily.

“I am well aware that the assassins still live, and some of them have even joined my army, thinking that I am their patron when in truth I hold them in contempt.” He paused and then looked into my eyes, green meeting gold. “But what did you expect of me? I had no soldiers at my command at Medina. How could I have enforced the law and held these murderers accountable, when they held the entire city hostage? I needed to bring together the forces of the
Ummah,
and then I would have the power to avenge Uthman’s death.”

It was a simple statement of fact, said with such clarity that we realized at once that he was right. And then I bowed my head in shame, for I realized that I had been in the wrong the whole time.

And then a thought came to me and I suddenly felt my heart beating faster.

“You have the power now,” I said, a smile suddenly spreading beneath my veil. “We have ten thousand men under our command who are eager to hold the assassins accountable. And of the army you have gathered here, the rebels can only be a few hundred. If we combine forces, we can easily arrest them with little bloodshed.”

Ali looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled, his mysterious eyes twinkling.

“Then perhaps all of this has happened for the best,” he said. “Satan tried to divide us, but God has brought us together again.”

And so it was decided that day that we would join forces and avenge the death of Uthman. The Umayyads would be satisfied with the trial and execution of the rebels (Ali had pardoned my own brother, as he had renounced the actions of the killers). And Ali could then reign legitimately as Caliph under a united empire. This terrible moment of
fitna
would be over, and the Muslims would continue to expand and grow as one community, spreading to every corner of the world the message of unity—
there is no god but God
.

We retired that night to our separate camps, praising God for saving us from the folly of our own passions. But even as we slept in security, thinking that civil war had been averted, Satan had other plans.

T
HE NEXT DAWN
I awoke to shouts and cries of horror. I leaped up and threw on my veil, staring out from the opening of my private sleeping tent at the plain of Basra. And raised my hand to my mouth in shock at what I saw.

A contingent of Ali’s men had raided our camp, setting fire to tents and killing our soldiers in their sleep. The men of Mecca poured out onto the field, quickly donning their armor to respond to this treachery.

For an instant, I thought Ali had betrayed us, but then the rising sun revealed the faces of the marauders and I recognized them as the accursed Egyptian rebels whose penchant for violence had brought us to this terrible place. I realized that they must have learned of our plans to turn on them, and they had attacked preemptively, seeking to turn our armies against each other before we could unite against them.

I raced out into the field, calling for the men to stop fighting. But it was too late. Blood had been spilled and the madness of battle was flowing through their veins. Our soldiers raced across the field to avenge themselves on Ali’s men, and the nightmare that we had sought to avert was upon us.

Civil war.

As arrows and spears began to fly all around me, I raced to the safety of my armored howdah. My brave camel rose and tried to pull me to safety, but there was nowhere to run. The fighting had begun in earnest, and the two armies of Muslims came rushing out into the field, hatred consuming them as they fought their brothers like savage beasts.

I felt tears flowing down my face as I saw swords clashing and the beautiful emerald grass turn dark with the blood of the believers. Blood that had been spilled not by idolaters or the hordes of foreign empires but by their fellow Muslims. I screamed at the top of my lungs, calling out to the men whom I called my sons to stop killing one another, but my voice was lost in the terrible din of war.

As the madness spread, my camel was soon swimming in a sea of twenty thousand men who clashed brutally all around. Arrows struck my carriage from all sides, and yet the multiple layers of ringed armor saved me, even though my howdah was beginning to look like the shell of a porcupine.

I managed to watch the unfolding battle through a small hole in the curtain, but all I could see was a blur of blood and death, and the terrible stench of defecation and decay made me want to wretch.

My camel tried to shift away from the carnage, but everywhere it went, waves of enemy soldiers were upon us. And then I realized with deep horror that they were
chasing me
—the warriors of Ali were hunting me down. Somehow I had become the symbol of the entire rebellion, and they had made me the vaunted prize, the target of their fury.

I had become a vortex of death.

And then I heard in my head a terrible cold laughter and I felt something burning on my forearm. I looked down and my eyes went wide in horror.

I was wearing Hind’s gold armlet.

She had given it to me that day when Mecca fell, the last day I had seen her. I had wanted to throw it away, but some small part of me was fascinated by the dark beauty of the entwined snakes with their ruby heart. I had told myself that it was just one small, meaningless trinket, and I had locked it away inside the trunk that held my few valuables, including the onyx necklace that had nearly destroyed my life. Over the years I would look at the armlet from time to time, examine its fine craftsmanship, but I had never worn it.

And now, somehow, it was there on my arm. And it burned like a torch, as if the ruby at its center were a live coal. Frightened, I tried to tear it off, but it was seared to my flesh.

And the laughter in my head became a voice. A clear distinct voice. Hind’s voice.

I always liked you, little girl. You remind me of myself.

I screamed in rage.

“I am not like you!”

And then the laughter grew louder and I thought I would descend into madness. I was trying to fight this monster that was inside me, and it was winning.

And then I heard another voice, a voice that was soft and gentle and familiar. The Voice of the Messenger.

Do not fight anymore. Surrender.

I closed my eyes and let go. Let the rage and the guilt and the horror wash through me like rain running down a gully in a mountainside. I felt myself fall, as I had done that fateful night on the mountain where Muhammad and my father were hiding from the assassins. I was falling deeper and deeper, my shame and anguish tearing through me.

And yet I did not resist. I let myself feel all the anger and doubt and misery and loneliness and regret that I had locked inside myself, let it all flood into my heart, until I felt swelled up with its bile.

And then I said aloud the words that Adam had said after he had been expelled from Paradise. The words that had reconciled him to his God. The words that even now could free me from the weight of the million sins that were poisoning my soul. The words that my husband had come to remind mankind of, one last time.

“Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned.”

And then the darkness took me, and I knew no more.

The End of the Beginning

W
hat is faith?

It is a question that I asked at the beginning of the end, and I ask it once again now, at the end of the beginning. The setting of one world and the dawn of another.

Perhaps I have written this account, this collection of my memories, for no other reason than to answer this question that has haunted me over the years.

Nearly twenty years have passed since that fateful day in Basra when I faced my darkest demons, and the world has moved in directions that none of us could have expected.

Ali is dead. Muawiya reigns unchallenged as the Caliph of the Muslim empire.

It was an outcome that none of us could have foreseen on that terrible, blood-soaked plan in Iraq. Ali emerged victorious in a battle that he had never wanted to fight. The worst fighting had centered around my camel, as Ali’s men sought to bring down the most visible symbol of the enemy, while my own soldiers had fought to the death to make sure that the Mother of the Believers was unharmed. In the end, the last of my protectors was killed and the poor camel’s legs were hamstrung. When my howdah crashed to the ground, the Meccan resistance collapsed and Ali’s men held sway over the battlefield.

I lay inside the upturned carriage in shock, an arrow having torn into my shoulder. My mind was still reeling from the strange vision I had experienced at the height of the battle, but I felt no fear in my heart. Even though I was facing almost certain death at the hands of my enemy, I was calm, serene, for I had surrendered my fate to God. I had become, in truth, a
Muslim
.

And then the steel curtains parted and a gentle hand reached inside to see if I was still alive. My brother Muhammad had ridden out into the field when he saw my camel fall, and he alone had the courage to peer inside the sacred carriage and see if the Messenger’s most beloved wife still lived. I held him tight and wept, and the tears cleansed my heart as the rain would soon cleanse the green fields of Basra of the stain of blood.

After Muhammad had removed the arrow point from my shoulder and bandaged my wound, he picked me up like a little girl and carried me back to Ali’s tent. The Caliph looked at me with great sorrow, and I could see that his green eyes were now crimson from grief.

“Zubayr is dead,” he said simply, and I felt my heart crumble. They had been best friends and had fought beside each other, and now he was gone.

Somehow I managed to find my voice.

“And Talha?”

Ali turned away, unable to answer. Muhammad took my hand in his and shook his head, and I felt a scream rising in my throat.

“How?” was all I could choke out. It did not matter, but I needed to know.

“It was not one of our men,” my brother said softly. “A soldier of the Bani Tamim in our ranks said that Talha was betrayed by Marwan, who shot him in the back in heat of battle.”

The world was vanishing in a veil of tears.

And then Muhammad leaned close to me.

“My witness said that Talha spoke before he died, but the words made no sense to him,” he whispered.

“What did he say?”

“She is still so beautiful.”

A
LI PARDONED ME
in public and announced that he had nothing but respect for the Mother of the Believers, the wife of Muhammad in this world and the hereafter. He led funeral prayers for the dead on both sides of the conflict. And then he sent me back to Medina with an honor guard.

I returned to my home in silence, unable to share with anyone the depth of pain that I carried. The other Mothers avoided me for a time, and the only person I could turn to for support was my sister, Asma. She was kind to me, although I sensed that there was a distance between us. She did not say it aloud, but I always believed that she never truly forgave me for having led her beloved husband, Zubayr, to his death.

Isolated from family and friends, I focused on doing what I could to repair the damage I had inflicted on our faith. I returned to teaching and sharing the hadith that contained my beloved husband’s words. But I renounced any involvement in politics.

The Battle of the Camel was not the end of the civil war, just the beginning. Muawiya refused to make peace with Ali, and their struggle erupted into open warfare on the plains of Siffin near the Euphrates. The brutal battle between the Muslims led to thousands of dead on both sides. And then Ammar, one of Ali’s soldiers and a man from my childhood memories, was slain. Yes, Ammar, whose mother, Sumaya, had been the first martyr; Ammar, the youth whom Hamza and I had rescued from the wilderness. The Messenger had once prophesied that Ammar would die a martyr, like his mother, and that his killers would be wrongdoers. When word spread that Ammar had been killed in battle by Muawiya’s men, some of the rebels lost heart, fearing that the Prophet’s words now branded them as the unjust party.

Ali gained the upper hand. But as his forces were poised to annihilate Muawiya’s regiments, the crafty politician sued for peace, sending out troops who held pages from the holy Qur’an high on their spears. Ali was tired of warfare between brothers and accepted Muawiya’s proposal to arbitrate their rival claims to the leadership of the community.

It was a decision born out of compassion and statesmanship, but some of Ali’s partisans were shocked to hear that he was willing to negotiate what they believed to be his divine right to rule. Ali himself had never publicly claimed any such right for himself or his heirs, and some of these partisans turned against him like spurned lovers. They renounced their support and branded him a traitor. These fanatics decided that they alone possessed the true understanding of Islam, which had been corrupted by men like Ali and Muawiya. And these self-proclaimed true believers, known as the
Khawarij,
were now dedicated to cleansing Islam by destroying anyone who failed to embrace their uncompromising vision. The
Khawarij
sent spies with poisoned daggers to rid the Muslim world of its competing claimants to the throne. They struck Muawiya in his palace in Damascus. The son of Abu Sufyan was grievously wounded but survived.

Ali was not so lucky. A
Khawarij
assassin named Ibn Muljam stabbed him in the head while he was leading the prayers in Kufa in southern Iraq. Ali lived for two days in excruciating pain before dying a martyr. His final wish had been that his assassin be tried fairly and that the Muslims should refrain from torturing him. In this last request, he was ignored, and his followers made Ibn Muljam’s final hours on earth horrifyingly painful.

In the aftermath of Ali’s death, his son Hasan was briefly elected Caliph in Kufa but abdicated under threat of attack by Muawiya. The Syrian governor quickly declared himself Caliph, and the Family of the Prophet did not oppose him. Muawiya was gracious in victory and treated the People of the House magnanimously. He gave them great wealth and generous pensions, on the condition that they stay out of politics and not challenge his rule. The Prophet’s grandsons, Hasan and Husayn, agreed, and they withdrew from public life to the quiet sanctuary of Medina. They lived in peace in the oasis, and I saw them regularly, always greeting them as if they were my own sons.

And then a few years ago, Hasan unexpectedly fell ill and died. There was much weeping in Medina for the son of Fatima and Ali, and there were rumors that he had been poisoned by Muawiya’s corrupt son Yazid, who had feared that Hasan would challenge the power of Damascus once the Caliph died. I do not know if this is true, but I have learned that the Umayyads are a cruel and vicious clan.

For in the midst of all this madness, I faced my own painful tragedy at the hands of the Bani Umayya. My fugitive brother, Muhammad, was finally captured by Muawiya’s men. The lord of Damascus wanted my brother sent to him so that he could face trial for his involvement in the events leading to Uthman’s death. But my proud and fiery brother taunted his captors with such intensity that they disobeyed Muawiya and killed him on the spot. Even as I write this, my hand shakes in horror at their vile actions. For the Umayyad commander added desecration to the crime of murder. The odious man took Muhammad’s corpse and threw it into the carcass of a dead mule, and then set it on fire.

I wept for many days when I heard the terrible news. And then, in the midst of my grief, Ramla, the daughter of Abu Sufyan who had married my husband, made a vicious gesture to rub salt in the wound. She ordered her servants to cook a lamb and then deliver the meat to my door, with a note saying that it had been roasted just like my brother.

I have not touched meat to this day. And I have never forgiven the heartless Ramla, nor will I look upon her again, even if we are reunited as Mothers of the Believers on Judgment Day.

L
AST NIGHT THE
M
ESSENGER
of God came to me in a dream. He was clothed in green and surrounded by a golden light. I bowed my head, too ashamed to look at him. But then he took my face in his hands and raised my eyes to meet his.

“What will happen to me, my love?” I asked. “For I fear that when my time comes, my sins will grab hold of my soul and pull me into darkness.”

Muhammad smiled at me, his eyes twinkling with an ethereal radiance.

And then he said to me the words of the holy Qur’an that I had heard before, at a time when hope had been clouded by fear of death.

God is the Protector of those who have faith. From the depths of darkness, He will lead them forth into light
.

And then he vanished and I awoke knowing that the day of my death was fast approaching.

A
ND SO WE COME
to this moment at long last, beloved Abdallah, son of my sister.

What is faith?

It is a memory. Of a time when all was perfect in the world. When there was no fear and no judgment and no death.

It is a memory of a time before we were born, a beacon to guide us back from the end to the beginning, to the memory of where we came from.

It is a memory of a promise made before the earth was formed, before the stars glittered in the primordial sea.

A promise that says that we will remember what we have learned on this journey so that we may return full circle, the same and yet different.

Older. Wiser. Filled with compassion for others. And for ourselves.

What is faith?

It is the memory of love.