Nine Parts of Desire (13 page)

Muhammad, according to many detailed physical descriptions, was a handsome irtan, of medium height with wavy black hair, a full beard, thick-lashed dark eyes and a radiant smile that revealed a gap between his front teeth. He was meticulous about his grooming, perfuming his beard and brushing his teeth at least five times a day. His only unattractive features were a tendency to bloodshot eyes and a protruding vein in his temple that is said to have become more pronounced when he became angry.

In the year or two after Aisha moved in, Muhammad married three more women, all war widows: Hafsah, the twenty-year-old daughter of his close friend Omar; an older woman, Zeinab, whose generosity had earned her the name “Mother of the Poor,” and who died just eight months later; and Umm Salamah, a famous beauty whose arrival caused Aisha the first pangs of the jealousy that would blight the rest of her life. When Aisha learned about the marriage to Umm Salamah, “I was exceedingly sad,” she said, “having heard much of her beauty.” She called on the new wife and found her “twice as beautiful and graceful as she was reputed to be.”

Muhammad tried to keep to the Koran’s instruction that a man must treat all his wives equally. His practice was to see each of them, every afternoon, in a brief private meeting, but to have his dinner and spend the night with one at a time, in strict rotation. Aisha found the arrangement unsatisfying. ‘Tell me,” she asked him one day, “if you were to come upon two camels, the one already pastured and the other not, which would you feed?” Muhammad answered that of course it would be the one not pastured. “I am not like the rest of your wives,” Aisha replied. “Every one of them has been married before, except me.”

Occasionally, if Muhammad wanted to spend time with a wife out of her turn, he would ask permission of the wife whose “day” it was. He soon learned better than to ask Aisha to give up her day. “For my part,” she said, “I always refused him” and insisted on her scheduled visit. Sensitive to the young girl’s needs and, perhaps, to the prophet’s desires, the aging Sawda permanently relinquished her “day” to Aisha. But soon the arrival of several more wives spread the prophet’s attentions even thinner.

Muslims argue that the many marriages of Muhammad’s last ten years reflected the fast expansion of Islam, and his need to build alliances with diverse clans. At other times, they say, his choices reflected compassion for needy widows. Since women will always outnumber men in societies at war, they argue, surely it is better that women share a husband than have no man in their lives at all. Muhammad, they say, was setting an example by taking widows into his care.

Non-Muslims, particularly Islam’s hostile critics, have taken a different view. Muhammad, they say, was a sensualist, whose increasing power and prestige gave him means to indulge his lusts after the death of the first wife who had been his patron.

These critics seem to overlook the austerity of the prophet’s household. The mudbrick rooms of the mosque were hardly the quarters of a sensualist. Even as the Muslim community became rich on the spoils of military victories, Muhammad continued to live simply and to insist that his wives do the same. The poverty that he enforced in his own household became the source of much bickering between Muhammad and his wives.

Yet the devout view, of Muhammad as husband cum social worker for needy widows, isn’t entirely convincing either. At least one hadith indicates that Muhammad knew polygamy was damaging for women. When his son-in-law Ali considered taking a second wife, the prophet expressed concern for the feelings of his daughter Fatima. “What harms her harms me,” he told Ali, who abandoned the idea of a further marriage. (Shiites, who venerate Ali and Fatima, discount this hadith. They argue that Muhammad would never have criticized a practice that the Koran had declared lawful.)

Not all Muhammad’s wives were pathetic cases or politically expedient matches. The beautiful Umm Salamah certainly wasn’t needy. She had loved her first husband and, reluctant to remarry, had rejected a slew of eligible suitors when Muhammad began his dogged pursuit. She turned the prophet down at least three times. “I am a woman of an exceedingly jealous disposition, and you, O Messenger of God, acquire many women,” she said, as one excuse for rejecting his suit. Muhammad replied: “I shall pray God to uproot jealousy from your heart.”

Despite his attempts at fairness, the whole community seems to have become aware that Aisha was his favorite wife. Muslims who wanted to send him a gift of food began timing their presents for the days they knew he would be spending in Aisha’s apartment. Since Muhammad lived so humbly, these gifts often provided his household’s only luxuries. Umm Salamah, for one, bitterly resented the preference shown to Aisha. “I see that the rest of us are as nothing,” she said when yet another basket of goodies arrived on Aisha’s day. Enraged, she flounced off to complain to Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter.

Muhammad’s marriage to a child just a year or two younger than herself must have been difficult for Fatima in the wake of her mother’s death. Her own marriage, to Muhammad’s nephew Ali, was arranged soon after Aisha moved in. Whether it had its seeds in unrecorded childhood squabbles, or in the rivalry between Fatima’s husband Ali and Aisha’s father Abu Bakr for the role of Muhammad’s chief lieutenant, a bitter enmity developed between Aisha and Fatima. Eventually it expressed itself in the Shiite-Sunni schism that was to sunder Islam. The temperaments of the two young women could
hardly have been more different. Fatima was self-effacing and shy; Aisha was quick-witted and outspoken.

In any case, Umm Salamah knew where to look for an ally against Aisha. Fatima promised Umm Salamah to speak to her father about his favoritism. Muhammad’s reply must have stung. “Dear little daughter, don’t you love who I love?” he asked her. “Yes, surely,” she replied. When she continued to put her case, Muhammad cut her off. “Aisha,” he said, “is your father’s best beloved.” This brought Ali into the argument, chiding Muhammad for slighting his daughter by saying he loved Aisha best. The bitterness of the argument must have lingered, because soon afterward Muhammad ordered the door sealed between his wives’ apartments and the apartment of Ali and Fatima. (Shiites deny this exchange ever took place: in their version, Muhammad extolled Fatima as “a human houri,” or near-divine being.)

Aisha tried to undermine her complaining rivals with childish pranks. One day she noticed that Muhammad had lingered longer than usual on his evening visit with one of her rivals, enjoying a drink made with honey, his favorite delicacy. Aisha gathered some of the other wives together and concocted a practical joke. As he stopped by each woman’s apartment, all of them pretended to be offended by his breath. Muhammad, fastidious about his person, was worried and confused. “All I ate was honey!” he exclaimed. The women muttered that the bees who made the honey must have fed on the nectar of a foul-smelling plant. Afterward, Muhammad refused honey when it was offered to him, until the more mature Sawda counseled Aisha that the joke had gone far enough, and that the poor prophet was depriving himself of one of his few pleasures.

Once Aisha and her coconspirators actually thwarted one of the prophet’s attempts to add another wife to his growing harem. Aisha was distraught when Asma, the beautiful daughter of a prince, arrived with an elaborate escort for her marriage to Muhammad. Aisha and Hafsa, pretending to be helpful, volunteered to assist the young woman dress for her wedding. As they fussed around her, they shared “confidences” about the prophet’s likes and dislikes. He would be inflamed with passion, they advised, if she pretended unwillingness. When it came time to consummate the marriage, they advised her to
back away from the prophet’s embrace and say, “I take refuge with Allah from thee.”

The prophet, appalled at the thought of inflicting himself on an unwilling woman, immediately told Asma not to worry, that he would call for her escort and see her safely home. Asma went, devastated, and complaining bitterly that she had been the victim of deceit.

The multiple marriages fed such petty rivalries and added to the growing feud between Ali and Abu Bakr that was to threaten Islam’s political future. They also began to shape the rules of the emerging faith. Muhammad’s increasing number of divine revelations on women seemed more and more influenced by the need to achieve tranquillity in his own household. Aisha, for one, wasn’t afraid to point out the coincidence. “It seems to me,” she said tartly, “your Lord makes haste to satisfy your desires.”

One such coincidence was the revelation that adopted children weren’t to be considered as blood kin. This followed Muhammad’s glimpse of the partially unclad Zeinab, wife of Zaid, the freed slave whom Muhammad had adopted and raised as a son. The community had been shocked by Zaid’s divorce and Muhammad’s intention to marry Zeinab, which flouted the ban on a father’s marriage to the wife of a son. Muhammad was with Aisha when he had the revelation saying that it was a mistake by Muslims to consider adoption as creating the same ties as blood kin. From that point, the Koran says, Muslims were to proclaim the true parentage of any children they raised. God, the revelation disclosed, had arranged Muhammad’s marriage with Zeinab to disclose to Muslims the error of their previous beliefs. When Zeinab moved into the mosque, she was able to taunt Aisha by claiming that her marriage to the prophet had been arranged by God.

The revelation on the seclusion of the prophet’s wives came on Zeinab’s wedding night. Sensitive to the ill feelings that the match had inspired, Muhammad had invited many guests to his wedding feast. Three of them lingered long after the meal, engrossed in conversation and seemingly oblivious to the prophet’s impatience to be alone with his new bride. As Zeinab sat quietly in a corner, waiting for the guests to leave, Muhammad strode out of the room and wandered the mosque courtyard. He dropped in on Aisha, who politely
inquired how he liked his new companion. Muhammad confided that he hadn’t yet had a chance to enjoy her company, and wandered off to look in on each of his wives before returning to the room of the wedding feast. To his intense annoyance, the guests were still there. Irritable, he went back to Aisha’s room and sat with her until finally someone came to tell him that the boorish guests had left.

Anas ibn Malik, a companion who had witnessed the whole scene, accompanied Muhammad back to the nuptial chamber. Muhammad had one foot in the room when he let fall a curtain between himself and Anas, and, as he did so, began reciting in the voice he used for revelations: “O ye who believe! Enter not the dwellings of the prophet for a meal without waiting for the proper time, unless permission be granted you. But if ye are invited, enter, and, when your meal is ended, then disperse. Linger not for conversation. Lo! that would cause annoyance to the Prophet, and he would be shy of asking you to go; but Allah is not shy of the truth. And when you ask his wives for anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain
(hijab).
That is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.”

These words now are inscribed in the Koran as the word of God. Obviously, such a verse is read very differently by a believing Muslim and a nonbelieving outsider. To a nonbeliever, it is hard to envision God troubling to micromanage matters of etiquette, like some kind of heavenly Miss Manners. To Muslims, though, there is nothing very extraordinary in God dealing with a situation that obviously left his prophet uncomfortable and unsure of how to act. In these latter years of Muhammad’s life, with the community expanding rapidly, many new issues, large and small, had to be resolved. The Medina revelations are almost always far less poetic and more specific than the elegant reflections of the earlier verses revealed in Mecca. Often they came in direct response to new dilemmas facing the community.

What is so puzzling is why the revelation of seclusion, so clearly packaged here with instructions that apply only to the prophet, should ever have come to be seen as a rule that should apply to all Muslim women.

In Muhammad’s lifetime the rule almost certainly was limited to his wives. It completely changed their lives. Muhammad had au
thorized Aisha, in his absence, to give religious advice, telling Muslims to “take half your religion from this woman.” But after the revelation of seclusion, she no longer mingled freely with the visitors to the mosque. Some wives, like Sawda, famed for her fine leathercraft, had worked to contribute to the household’s budget. The wives had even gone into battle alongside Muhammad, tucking up their robes and carrying water, or caring for the injured. Even Fatima had attended the battlefield, once cauterizing a bleeding head wound of her father’s by applying ashes, a folk remedy that signified her skill as a nurse.

After the seclusion, Muhammad took one or two wives on campaign only as his sexual partners, drawing lots among them for the privilege. It was after one such battle that Aisha found herself facing the biggest trial of her married life.

As camp broke before dawn, Aisha walked off into the desert to urinate before the march. Returning to camp, she realized she’d dropped an agate necklace and retraced her steps looking for it. By the time she found it the men had led off the camel carrying her curtained litter, believing her to be already inside. She sat patiently on the sand, waiting for someone to miss her. A few hours later, a young soldier named Safwan found her waiting alone and carried her back to the city on his camel.

Her arrival with this young and handsome man created a scandal. Ali, Fatima’s husband, took the opportunity to feed Muhammad’s growing doubts of Aisha’s virtue. As the scandal mounted, Aisha left her apartment at the mosque and returned in disgrace to her parents, who seemed just as ready to accuse her as everyone else. The gossip raged for over a month.

Finally Muhammad had a revelation clearing her name.

“Good tidings, O Aisha!” he cried out. “God most high has exonerated you.”

“Rise and come to Muhammad,” her parents urged.

“I shall neither come to him nor thank him,” said the strong-minded young woman. “Nor will I thank both of you who listened to the slander and did not deny it. I shall rise to give thanks to God alone.”