The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (32 page)

Whether it was grief for Ibrahim that drove Muhammad to withdraw from his wives, or simply the need to escape the pressure of their insistence that he give up Mariya, his night-time retreat to the roof of the mosque created panic throughout Medina. By so demonstratively turning away from his wives, he risked placing the whole power structure of the new umma in jeopardy. Nearly all of his marriages were alliances, either with leading advisers like abu-Bakr and Omar, the fathers of Aisha and Hafsa, or with prominent former enemies like abu-Sufyan, the father of Umm Habiba. These were not men to insult by turning his back on their daughters. Not even the messenger of God could do that with impunity.

Aisha cried once more until she thought her liver would burst. Even the usually stolid Umm Salama was seen quietly weeping. For a soldier like Omar, Hafsa’s father, all these tears were the last straw. Brusque as ever, he stormed into his daughter’s room. “Has he divorced you?” he demanded.

Omar left her to her weeping and went into the mosque, only to find it full of men crying with equal fervor. More enraged than ever, he rushed up to the roof, where the muezzin Bilal stood guard outside the door to the small storeroom. “Ask permission for me to enter,” he commanded, but Bilal came out shaking his head: “I announced you, but he said nothing.” Omar paced the courtyard until he could stand it no longer, then went back up the stairs to repeat his request. Again Muhammad ignored it. It took one more try for Bilal to emerge and announce: “The messenger will see you now.”

His nerves stretched to breaking point, Omar stooped through the low doorway to find Muhammad lying on his side on a rush mat. There was nothing else in the room besides piles of untanned hides— no carpet, no bedding, no sign of common comfort. It was the last place one would expect to find the head of a burgeoning state. Not that Omar wasted any time expressing surprise, let alone sympathy. Ever the man of action, he came to the point immediately. “You have put away your wives?” he asked.

“No, I have not,” came the answer, and the moment he heard it, Omar broke out into a loud and sonorous Allahu akbar, “God is great.” The men gathered below in the mosque understood what the cry meant, and took it up with relief in the knowledge that the crisis had been averted. “But I shall not go near them for a month,” Muhammad added quietly when the hubbub had subsided. And with his usual resolve, he kept his word.

Neither ibn-Ishaq nor al-Tabari offer any cogent explanation of why Muhammad insisted on that month of nights alone, but it was as though by withdrawing from his wives he was also withdrawing from the demands of the new world he had created. That sparse rooftop retreat was the Medinan equivalent of Mecca’s Mount Hira: a place of contemplation in which to come to terms not only with what he had achieved but also with what lay ahead. He must have realized that there was no room left in his life for personal attachment, and that his relationship with Mariya would end here. His life was no longer his own to determine, but belonged instead to the umma. And he certainly sensed that not much of that life remained to him, because when he emerged at the end of the month, he resolved his marital situation with a new Quranic revelation that anticipated his own death.

It would be known as “the verse of the choice,” since it spelled out the options for the wives. “Oh messenger, say to your wives: ‘If you desire the life of this world and its adornment, then come, I shall make provision for you and send you forth with honor. But if you desire God and his messenger and the future abode of paradise, then God has prepared for you a mighty reward.’ ” The wives were free to choose divorce, that is, and Muhammad would make sure they were well provided for, or they could freely accept their public role and everything it entailed. That too was spelled out. “The messenger is closer to the believers than their own selves, and his wives are their mothers,” the voice instructed. “It is not for you to marry the messenger’s wives after him; truly that is grievous in the sight of God.”

If the women chose to stay married to Muhammad, they now had to accept that their role went far beyond that of a normal spouse. They would be bound so tightly into the familial fabric of the new Arabia that they would be not merely his wives but the mothers of all the believers: “the Mothers of the Faithful.” Given that none of them had mothered a child by him, this was an extraordinary formulation. It introduced the idea of Muhammad himself as the father of the faithful, positioning him as the founding patriarch of what was to become the world’s third great monotheistic faith. If he had fathered no biological sons, he had instead fathered a multitude of spiritual ones. In a sense, all male believers were his sons, and thus forbidden to marry their mothers. The wives were to be not only widows after his death, but widows for as long as they lived.

All nine wives chose to stay. They would become, as it were, the vestal virgins of Islam, honored, respected, and celibate. On the personal level, it sounds a harsh fate to modern ears, especially for Aisha and Hafsa, who were both barely twenty. Perhaps they couldn’t conceive of Muhammad dying, or perhaps they sincerely accepted the sacrifice of the personal for the political. But for Aisha in particular it would an ironic fate, even a cruel one. She would be a lifetime mother to all, even as by the same stroke of revelation she would be denied the chance ever to become pregnant and have a child of her own.

For all the honor accorded them, most of the wives would take little part in the formative events of Islam. But then it could be said that Aisha, with her boldness, would play a large enough role for all nine. Two decades after Muhammad’s death, she would mount a red camel to lead an army into battle against his cousin and son-in-law Ali, who had just been acclaimed as the fourth caliph. Hurling blood- curdling war cries from within her armored howdah even as her men were being slaughtered literally at her feet, she cut an indelible figure, so much so that the encounter—just outside Basra, in southern Iraq— would be dubbed the Battle of the Camel. By the time it was done, her howdah would be studded with so many arrows that it reportedly “bristled like a porcupine.” One arrow even penetrated the armor and lodged in her shoulder, but that did nothing to stop her, and nobody realized she’d been wounded until she surrendered. Whatever the wisdom of her political judgment, her courage was undeniable.

She returned to Mecca undaunted by defeat. Emphatically outspoken even as she was sidelined by events after that battle, she established herself as the leading Mother of the Faithful: the sole woman who had been a virgin when Muhammad married her; the only one who could tease him and make him smile; the youngest, the liveliest, and always, she insisted, the favorite. Since she outlived all his other widows, nobody was left to dispute her when she described her life with Muhammad. Essentially she wrote her memoirs in the form of thousands of hadiths, the reports of Muhammad’s actions and sayings relied on by the Muslim faithful as guidelines for emulation and contemplation. She’d leaven her accounts with images that still tantalize adolescent imaginations, like that of her dangling her toes over his face to tease him—too tantalizing for later Islamic clerics, who’d whittle down her contributions to the body of hadiths from several thousand to a few hundred. As long as she lived, however, few people dared challenge her. Even in forced retirement, she still commanded respect.

he public demands on Muhammad increased by the day. The once marginal palm- grove oasis of Medina was now the power center for hundreds of miles around, with tentacles extending all the way to Bahrain and Oman on the east coast of Arabia, up to the border of Byzantine territory to the north, and south to most of the Yemen. Representatives of Beduin tribes and independent kingdoms alike began arriving in a constant flood of tribute, eager to pledge allegiance and to negotiate the terms of their alliances. This was “the year of delegations,” and each one had to be received and given due honor, demanding Muhammad’s personal attention.

Dozens of such delegations arrived, but among the most significant was the one from Najran, halfway between Mecca and the coast of Yemen. At a major caravan crossroads, the city had been the home of Arabia’s largest Christian population for well over a century. If Najran were to accept islam, that would constitute a crucial political statement, especially with the Byzantine Empire seemingly resurgent to the north. In fact its conversion would set the pattern for the whole of the Christian-dominated Middle East.

The Quranic message spoke powerfully to Arabian Christians. The prophetic role of Jesus was fully acknowledged, and there would be more about Mary in the Quran than there was in the Gospels. Yet Najran was divided. It made political sense to ally themselves with Muhammad, but how was this to be reconciled with theology? Those in favor argued that he was the Paraclete, or Comforter, whose arrival Jesus had foretold in the Gospel of John and who was said to embody the Holy Spirit, even to be “the second Jesus.” Those against maintained that the Paraclete was supposed to have sons, and since Muhammad did not, it could not possibly be him. Determined to resolve the dispute by debating the matter with him directly, the Najran delegation arrived in Medina only to find that debate was moot.

Instead of meeting the Najranites surrounded by his now customary bevy of counselors, Muhammad dismissed his aides for the occasion. He received the Christians with only four members of his immediate family in attendance: his daughter Fatima, her husband Ali, and their sons Hassan and Hussein. Without saying a word, he slowly and deliberately took hold of the hem of his cloak and spread it high and wide over the heads of this small family. They were the ones he sheltered beneath his cloak, the gesture said. They were his nearest and dearest, the ahl al-bayt, or “people of the house”—the House of Muhammad, his flesh and blood.

Whether calculated or instinctive on Muhammad’s part, this was a consummate piece of theatricality, the seventh-century equivalent of the perfect photo op. Arabian Christian tradition had it that Adam had received a vision of a brilliant light surrounded by four other lights, and had been told by God that these were his prophetic descendants. The moment the Najran delegation saw Muhammad spread his cloak over the four members of his immediate family, it seemed that the Adamic vision had been fulfilled. The prophetic message that had begun with Adam and been passed down through Abraham and Moses to be embodied in Jesus had now found its final and completed expression in the man the Quran called “the seal of the prophets.” They accepted islam on the spot.

Muhammad’s dramatic staging of this meeting makes it clear that he was acutely aware of how his every gesture was fraught with meaning. Yet that awareness has to have weighed heavily on him. He had begun his mission in full humility, simply as a messenger. Indeed the Quran argued for humility as the highest virtue, continually warning against pride and arrogance. But now the widespread reverence for him threatened to make humility a thing of the past. No matter how much he tried to delegate authority, his revelations were still the word of God, and for the believers it was a small leap to assuming that everything he said, down to the last exclamation or passing comment, was a reflection of divine will. For all the Quran’s insistence that he was just a man, obedience to him was sworn in the same breath as obedience to God.

His public role had expanded to consume every moment of his waking life, and now that waking life consumed most of the night as well as the day. The weariness told in his reddened eyes and in the deepening creases of his forehead. As though the headaches of government weren’t enough, the physical headaches he had suffered since being wounded at the Battle of Uhud had begun to come with migrainelike intensity, sapping both mind and body. While everyone had expected him to travel to Mecca for the pilgrimage month of Dhu al-Hijja that year, he did not, sending abu-Bakr instead to lead the Medinan pilgrims.

Ibn-Ishaq explains this absence by arguing that Muhammad had declared that this would be the last year anyone who had not accepted islam would be allowed to participate in the hajj, and thus would not make his own pilgrimage until Mecca was free of all paganism for the duration. But the argument begs the question. Pagans or no, Muhammad had made the lesser umra pilgrimage the year before, and the year before that too. A pagan-free Mecca was not the real issue here. Instead, the exhaustion of revolution achieved seemed to be taking its toll. Or was it something more than exhaustion?

hroughout this year, Aisha would recall Muhammad spending nights on end in the graveyard of Medina, standing vigil for the dead. There were so many of them by now. Among the simple stone markers, each one barely higher than a child’s knee, were those of two of his four daughters, as well as that of his adopted son Zayd. For a father to outlive his children was not uncommon in those days, but it was no less painful than it is now, fraught with the sense that the rightful order of life and death has been reversed.

Many of his early supporters were here too, some dead of wounds on the battlefield, some of sickness, some—a very few—simply of old age. “Peace be upon you, oh people of the graves,” Aisha heard him saying. “Happy are you, so much better off than men here.” It was as though he was longing to join them, to escape the demands on him and find rest.

He stood watch equally over the graves of former adversaries like ibn-Ubayy, the leader of the “hypocrites,” who had died just a few months earlier. Omar would remember being shocked to see Muhammad at the burial: “I confronted him and said, ‘Are you going to pray over God’s enemy?’ But he smiled and said, ‘Leave me be, Omar. I have been given the choice and I have chosen.’ Then he prayed and walked with ibn-Ubayy’s body until it was lowered into the grave.” It was Muhammad’s acknowledgment not only of ibn-Ubayy’s sincerity, but perhaps also of the value of someone unafraid to challenge his decisions. Now there was nobody left to do so.