The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (27 page)

Whether anyone actually believed such a thing was beside the point. Then as now, scandal was its own reward. But more important, this one fed into the existing political landscape. What Aisha and Safwan may or may not have done was not really the issue. In seventhcentury Medina as anywhere in the world today, the mere appearance of sexual impropriety was a tried and trusted way to bring down a politician. Soon the whole oasis was caught up in a fervor of sneering insinuation. At the wells, in the walled vegetable gardens, in the date groves, in the inns and the markets and the stables—even in the mosque itself—people reveled in the delicious details, real or imagined.

Muhammad had no doubt as to Aisha’s innocence. In fact he did his best to ignore the whole matter until he realized how insidiously it was undermining his authority. He sent her back to her father’s house while he decided what to do, but his young favorite had unwittingly placed him in a double bind. If he divorced her, as Ali now advised, that would imply that he had indeed been deceived. On the other hand, if he took her back, he risked being seen as a doting old man bamboozled by a mere slip of a girl. Either way, it would erode not only his own authority but that of his whole message. Incredible as it seemed, the future of the new faith now hung on the reputation of a teenage girl.

For the first time in her life, nothing Aisha could say—and as ibnIshaq puts 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 would even maintain that Safwan was known to be impotent—an unassailable statement since by then he was long dead, killed in battle and thus unable to defend his virility. A teenage girl under a cloud, she finally did what any teenage girl would do: she cried. And if there was a certain hyperbole to her account of those tears, that was understandable under the circumstances. As she put it: “I could not stop crying until I thought the weeping would burst my liver.”

isha’s situation was all the more fraught because despite having been married for four years by then, she still had no children. In fact none of the nine women Muhammad was to marry after Khadija’s death would become pregnant by him, and this absence of children, and especially of a male heir, itself led to much talk. The whole purpose of his marrying so many times was to bind together the widening umma of believers and allies, but such alliances were sealed by children. Mixed blood was new blood, free of the old divisions. What was the point of marriage without offspring?

Certainly any of his later wives would have given her eye-teeth, if not all her teeth, to have children by him. To be the mother of his children would automatically give her higher status than any of the others, especially if she were to give birth to a son, Muhammad’s natural heir. So there is no question that every one of them must have done her utmost to become pregnant by him, and especially Aisha. She could only watch in envy as Muhammad doted on his grandchildren— Khadija’s grandchildren—and most of all on Hassan and Hussein, the two young sons of Ali and Fatima. One of the few times he was ever seen to laugh was when he played with them, the image of the adoring grandfather as he dandled them proudly on his lap or got down on all fours to let them ride on his back. Aisha saw to her dismay that they were the real joy of his life, not her.

This late-life childlessness of Muhammad’s is in sharp contrast to the four daughters he’d had with Khadija, as well as the son who had died in infancy. And since all the wives except Aisha were widows or divorcées and already had children by other husbands, infertility on their part is unlikely. Perhaps, then, despite the highly sexualized image of him in the West, the multiply married Muhammad was celibate. Or since anyone lucky enough to reach his fifties in the seventh century was physiologically far older than he would be today, age may have worked on him to lessen desire, or maybe simply sperm count. But Islamic theologians in centuries to come would posit another explanation. The absence of children with these later wives, they’d say, was the price of revelation. Since the Quran was the last and final word of God, there could be no more prophets after Muhammad, and thus no sons to inherit the prophetic gene. Essentially, they finessed the issue, as theologians often do, in this case by saying that a man so graced with revelation was beyond the simple everyday grace of offspring.

Whatever the reason for Aisha’s childlessness, it rankled her. However much she teased and entertained Muhammad, she could never give him what Khadija had. She might be the favorite among the late-life wives, but no matter how hard she tried, she could never compete with the hallowed memory of the one she’d dared to call “that toothless old woman whom God has replaced with a better.” And now, with this accusation of infidelity, she was especially vulnerable. Lacking the respect automatically accorded a mother, she could easily be cast off.

esolution of what would be known as “the affair of the necklace” could come only by grace of a higher authority, and so it did. Even as Aisha swore her faithfulness to him yet again, Muhammad went into the trance-like state of revelation. “When he recovered, he sat up and drops of water fell from him like rain on a winter day,” she would remember. “He began to wipe the sweat from his brow, and said, ‘Good news, Aisha! God has sent down word of your innocence.’ ”

She had been slandered, said the Quranic voice. “The slanderers are a small group among you, and shall be punished. But why, when you heard it, did believing men and women not think the best and say ‘This is a manifest lie’? Why did you think nothing of repeating what others with no knowledge had said, thinking it a light matter when in the eyes of God it was a serious one? Why did you not say ‘This is a monstrous slander?’ God commands the faithful never to do such a thing again.”

If the slanderers had been telling the truth, the voice added, they would have produced four witnesses to testify to the transgression; the absence of witnesses was itself evidence of their outrageous lie. Aisha’s exoneration was thus all the more powerful in that it demanded not one person but four to gainsay her. For a wronged woman, there could have been no better outcome. Her honor was divinely vindicated, and those who had spread the rumors about her were flogged. But if it had all turned out well for her, it would not turn out well for other women.

In the long term, the verses exonerating Aisha would be interpreted in a very different way by conservative Islamic clerics, and used to do the opposite of what had originally been intended: not to vindicate a woman but to blame her. Conflating adultery with rape, they’d argue that any such charge could only be valid if the woman could do the virtually impossible and produce four witnesses. Unless she could do so, a ghastly catch-22 came into effect: the accused rapist was to be declared blameless and the accuser punished not only for slander but for adultery, since by charging rape she had herself testified to illicit sexual relations. Aisha’s exoneration was thus destined to become the basis for the humiliation, silencing, and even killing of countless women after her.

Aisha herself would not enjoy her triumph for long. With the exception of Khadija, she had so far managed to keep her jealousy of Muhammad’s other wives in check. Omar’s daughter Hafsa was known more for her mind than her looks (by some accounts she was to play a considerable role in determining the written form of the Quran), while both Sawda and Umm Salama, the woman who had emigrated to Medina alone with her infant son and who had become Muhammad’s fourth wife after being widowed at Uhud, were hefty middle-aged matrons. But now Muhammad took a fifth wife: Juwayriya, one of the captives from the battle with the Mustaliq.

“By God, I had hardly laid eyes on her before I detested her,” Aisha swore, testifying to the other’s beauty. “I knew Muhammad would see her as I did.” But then politics was never Aisha’s strongest suit. Muhammad had married Juwayriya not for her beauty but in an overture to her conquered tribe. It was a gesture of alliance, a declaration that enmity between them was a thing of the past, and if it was not the one the Mustaliq might have chosen, it was certainly one they now willingly accepted. Aisha might think in terms of passion, but Muhammad’s considerations were far more diplomatic. Until, that is, he married yet again.

This time there seemed no doubt that it was out of desire. It could even be seen as reassuringly human that a man in his mid-fifties could be so carried away with it. But once more the story is a strange one, as though designed to emphasize Muhammad’s sexual virility despite the lack of children. He had apparently gone to visit his adopted son Zayd, but found only Zayd’s wife Zaynab at home. Expecting her husband and not Muhammad, she was in “a state of disarray,” as ibnIshaq tactfully puts it. Flustered by the sight, Muhammad rushed away murmuring, “Praise be to God who affects men’s hearts!” When Zayd heard about this, he took it as a sign of Muhammad’s desire, and in a fit of filial devotion— or possibly, by some accounts, because it hadn’t been the best of marriages in the first place—he divorced Zaynab so that Muhammad could marry her instead.

This might have made sense if marriage between a father and his son’s divorced wife was not considered incestuous and thus taboo, even if, like Zayd, the son was adopted. But whatever the real story, this would not be a repeat of the affair of the necklace. This time, Quranic revelation intervened immediately to nip scandal in the bud. The problem was resolved by reasserting the taboo on a father marrying a son’s former wife but with careful new wording: the ban now applied to “the wives of your sons who sprang from your loins”—to birth sons, that is, not adopted ones. And since Muhammad had no surviving sons who had sprung from his loins, the revelation took the opportunity to expand further on his paternal status. “Muhammad is not the father of any of you men,” it said. “He is God’s messenger and the seal of the prophets.”

In the face of divine authority, the tart-tongued Aisha had no choice but to accept the marriage to Zaynab, though she made her feelings known nonetheless. “Truly, God makes haste to do your bidding,” she told Muhammad, apparently unaware that in light of her own recent exoneration by Quranic fiat, this might be considered a tad ungracious.

All too aware of the tensions between his wives, Muhammad rotated his nights in strict sequence between them. He had no room of his own, instead moving from one wife’s room to the next. In keeping with his insistence on simplicity, these rooms were really no more than palm-roofed lean-tos built in a row against the eastern wall of the mosque compound, each with a curtained doorway opening onto the courtyard, and with little furnishing other than a raised stone bench at the back where bedding was spread out at night and rolled up in the morning. The believers kept close tabs on how much time Muhammad spent with which wife, whose honeyed drink he seemed to like best, what mood he was in after spending the night with whom. There could hardly be a more public private life, one far more conducive to stress than to the licentiousness imagined with such envious censoriousness by many Victorian-era European scholars.

Another Quranic revelation from this time seems to reflect the stress created by these multiple marital arrangements. It began by granting Muhammad special dispensation as the leader of the umma to marry as many times as he wished. “This privilege is yours alone,” it said, “given to no other believer.” In principle, it went on, all other male believers could follow traditional practice and take up to four wives. But only in principle. Far from encouraging polygamy, the revelation went on to openly discourage it. Four wives were permitted only so long as each had equal status. But that, said the Quran, was hardly likely. Muhammad was to instruct his followers that “you will never be able to deal equitably between many wives, no matter how hard you try; so if you fear you cannot treat them equally, then marry only one.”

For him, that “only one” would always be Khadija. It had been eight years since her death, but as the demands of leadership increased, he seems to have yearned all the more for the monogamy he’d once had. By now his marital situation was beginning to require as much intricate diplomacy as his political one. Far from being a source of warmth and support, it only added to the increasing stress on him as war with Mecca threatened once again, leading to what was destined to become the most controversial decision of his life.

s any reasonably astute political observer can testify, political leaders under pressure domestically can always bolster their popularity with an aggressive foreign policy. It’s a strategy that’s been played out throughout history, and Muhammad now made

good use of it. Even as he continued to weaken opposition inside Medina, he increased the harassment of the Meccan trade caravans, forcing the Quraysh to abandon their usual north–south route for the long and expensive detour through the barren steppelands of the Najd and up through southern Iraq. Even then they were vulnerable. One raid led by the newly divorced Zayd, Muhammad’s adopted son, struck deep into the Najd, capturing a whole caravan as its merchants and guards fled for their lives.

The poet Hassan ibn-Thabit celebrated the event, taunting the Meccans with their loss of trade. “Say farewell to the streams of Damascus,” he gloated, “for the road is barred by battle.” He was kept far busier than any poet laureate today, not least because he also had to glorify the ongoing assassinations of Muhammad’s critics, many of whom were rival poets. The task was sometimes challenging. One band of believers infiltrated the northern oasis of Khaybar and managed to kill their victim as he slept, only to create a ruckus when one of the more short-sighted among them missed his footing and fell down a flight of stone steps, thus rousing the whole neighborhood. The attackers were forced to take refuge in a drainage ditch, stinking and shivering for hours until they could make good their escape—not exactly the heroic figures lauded by ibn-Thabit as “traveling by night with nimble swords, bold as lions in a jungle lair, setting at naught every calamity.”

Such exploits, especially in their hyped-up versions, may have been good for the depleted morale of the believers after the near rout at Uhud, but they only helped solidify opposition to Muhammad. The Meccan leader abu-Sufyan now formed a coalition army in which his most prominent allies were the Ghatafan Beduin from the Najd and the Jewish tribes of Khaybar, where the expelled Nadir were itching to reclaim the lands and property confiscated after their expulsion from Medina. Early in the year 627, abu-Sufyan gave the order to converge on Medina, and this time he had no intention of stopping on the outskirts. The aim was invasion, and a forced end to Muhammad’s rising power.

But with thousands of armed men moving through the desert, the grapevine buzzed, and Muhammad had ample time to prepare. First he ordered the early spring crops in the fields around Medina to be harvested, thus depriving the approaching enemy of fodder for their horses and camels. Then he set about digging in. The rough lava fields to the west, south, and east of the oasis were impassable for horses, but the main approach route from the north was the kind of open ground that all but invited a mass charge by abu-Sufyan’s powerful cavalry. To thwart this possibility, everyone in the oasis, women and children as well as men, set to with shovels, digging a dry moat studded with sharply pointed stakes to impale the horse of any rider attempting the leap across. With ten people assigned to dig every sixty feet, the work took six days. By the time it was done, the moat stretched across the whole of the northern entrance to Medina, and the excavated stones and dirt had been heaped into a high defensive berm behind it.

It was the last thing abu-Sufyan’s allied armies had expected. Just the idea of a moat—a ditch, as they sneeringly called it—was “dishonorable” and “un-Arab,” a shabby trick borrowed from Persia, where it should have stayed. Taunts flew along with arrows. What kind of timid warriors hid behind mounds of earth erected by women and children? “But for this ditch to which they clung, we would have wiped them out,” one Meccan poet wrote. “Being afraid of us, they skulked behind it.”

The taunts were intended to tempt Muhammad’s men out into the open to prove their courage in face-to-face combat, and many would have obliged if he hadn’t insisted they hold their positions behind the berm. He was proven right when a few enemy horsemen did try to leap the moat at its narrowest point, only to be thrown when their horses were impaled. For all the numbers ranged on either side of the moat, the Battle of the Trench, as it would be called, would result in only five casualties on abu-Sufyan’s side, and three on Muhammad’s.

Abu-Sufyan had no option but to settle in for a siege, though he could hardly have expected a successful outcome. To besiege a compact, walled city was one thing, but Medina was still basically a series of villages, each with its own small fortified stronghold. There was no way to seal it off completely. The besiegers had to make do with blocking the main access route and harassing the defenders with volleys of arrows. Still, that was enough to work on Medinan nerves. From behind the berm, they could see hundreds of campfires burning ominously by night, and by day they faced the constant menace of enemy archers taking potshots like rifle snipers. “Muhammad promised us the world,” one clan leader was heard to grumble, “and now not one of us can feel safe going to the privy!”

This kind of disaffection with Muhammad was exactly what abuSufyan was aiming for, allowing him to seek out the soft spots in Muhammad’s support and try to turn them to his advantage. Behind- the-scenes wheeling and dealing—enticements to switch sides, spies acting as double and even triple agents—was as much part of warfare in the seventh century as it is today. Night after night, emissaries slipped back and forth between the oasis and the besieging camps. In Medina, where the mere appearance of a stranger was remarkable even in peacetime, it was almost impossible to keep such overtures secret, but this itself was part of abu-Sufyan’s strategy. With nerves frayed and suspicion heightened, the rumor mill worked overtime.

First it was said that Muhammad had secretly offered the Ghatafan Beduin a third of Medina’s huge date harvest if they abandoned the Meccan-led alliance. Whether he did or not is beside the point; the rumor itself was enough to cause dissension. Not all the owners of that date crop were pleased with how freely their property had reportedly been offered for barter. Many felt that Muhammad had brought this siege on them by escalating his vendetta with Mecca, and saw no reason why they should have to pay for it, while the more bellicose believers argued loudly against what they saw as a dishonorable attempt to placate the Ghatafan.

Then word had it that abu-Sufyan was trying to entice both the so-called hypocrites and Medina’s one remaining Jewish tribe, the Qureyz, into forming a second front inside Medina, promising his full support if they’d rise up against Muhammad. Someone swore that the leader of the expelled Nadir tribe had been seen entering the Qureyz stronghold, and that he’d been heard trying to “twist the camel’s hump” by appealing to the Qureyz as fellow Jews to help right the wrong of expulsion.

Every such rumor reached Muhammad, of course, but he would prove himself as adept as abu-Sufyan at psychological warfare, turning the rumors around to his advantage. To this end he employed the services of Nuaym ibn-Masud, a Ghatafan clan leader who had secretly accepted islam. “My own tribesmen do not know of this,” he told Muhammad, “so instruct me as you will.” It must have seemed a heaven-sent opportunity, since Nuaym was perfectly placed to sow disinformation both among dissenting factions inside Medina and within the besieging armies. “Make sure they abandon each other,” Muhammad instructed him, “for war is deception.”

This canny piece of military wisdom is justifiably famous, but it is not usually attributed to Muhammad. “War is deception” first appears in the sixth-century BC Chinese classic The Art of War by Sun Tzu. And while the idea of Muhammad consciously quoting Sun Tzu is an intriguing one, the words were most probably placed in his mouth by ibn-Ishaq, since although Sun Tzu’s work was certainly known in the cosmopolitan milieu of eighth- century Damascus, it’s doubtful that it had reached the seventh-century oasis of Medina. Nevertheless, Muhammad clearly had an excellent grasp of the principle involved, as evidenced in the intricate triple cross he now orchestrated.

In a tale of the kind calculated to delight by demonstrating how cleverly an enemy can be outwitted, Nuaym went first to the Qureyz. Assuring them that he was speaking in strictest confidence as a well- wisher, he warned them that any overtures abu-Sufyan had made were not be trusted, since the Meccans were only interested in booty. Once they had that, Nuaym said, they’d return home, leaving the Qureyz at risk of Muhammad’s revenge if they worked against him. Thus they’d be well advised to demand collateral from abu-Sufyan in the form of hostages, so as to ensure his loyalty to them.

With the Qureyz thus well primed for suspicion, Nuaym went for the double cross and gained an audience with abu-Sufyan, informing him that the Qureyz had decided to demand Meccan hostages as collateral for their cooperation, but were in fact loyal to Muhammad. Any hostages abu-Sufyan gave them would only be handed over to the believers for execution, so he’d be wise to refuse the demand. Finally, Nuaym tripled the cross by going back to his own tribe, the Ghatafan, and telling them that the Qureyz would demand not Meccan but Ghatafan hostages, and that their ally abu-Sufyan was in on the deal.

As ibn-Ishaq tells it, everyone reacted exactly as planned. The Qureyz demanded hostages as collateral for their cooperation with abu-Sufyan, who instantly saw this as proof of their allegiance to Muhammad. No second front materialized, and the Qureyz defended Medina along with everyone else. The Ghatafan Beduin, convinced that abu-Sufyan had crossed them, struck camp and returned to their tribal lands in bitter regret at the thought of losing all those dates that may or may not have been offered. Stymied by the moat and with his coalition in disarray, abu-Sufyan was soon ready to take advantage of any excuse to declare the siege a lost cause. At the end of the third week, the late-winter weather obliged.

Night temperatures in the high desert can plummet more than forty degrees Fahrenheit below daytime highs, the cold all the more bitter for being in such contrast to the heat of the day. But the last straw for abu-Sufyan was a biting gale-force wind that came howling down through the hills, overturning tents and kettles. “By God, our horses and camels are dying, no pot of ours stays put, no fire of ours keeps burning, no tent of ours holds together,” he declared. “Saddle up, we are leaving.”

uhammad had again held off a huge Meccan army, yet his followers gave him little credit for it. They were left full of an intense frustration created by the enforced powerlessness of having been under siege. However successful the defensive strategy of the dry moat, it ran against the grain psychologically. That enemy accusation of having acted in an “un-Arab” way by avoiding battle rather than rushing into it cut deep into their sense of honor. Even for a poet as skilledasibn-Thabit, it was hard to create the required heroic narrative out of women and children digging a trench.

No leader can afford to alienate his core following. Muhammad needed to rouse the believers with a definitive call to action, and he lost no time issuing it. At noon prayers that Friday, just five hours after the Meccans and their remaining allies had decamped, he declared a new enemy: Medina’s last remaining Jewish tribe. The angel Gabriel had appeared to him, he said, and instructed him to “strike terror into the hearts of the Qureyz” in punishment for having considered collaboration with the Meccans.

Why the Qureyz? They were certainly not the only ones in Medina to have suspected that if not for Muhammad’s aggressive policies, they would never have come under siege. But the relatively powerless Jewish tribe made for a better target than the “hypocrites,” who had at least nominally accepted islam and were spread throughout the powerful Aws and Khazraj tribes. The rumors had done their work, and the Qureyz were vulnerable. They were the perfect target of opportunity, and would now provide an outlet for frustration—both Muhammad’s own personal frustration with the Jewish refusal to acknowledge him as a prophet, and that of his followers after three weeks of forced inaction under siege. Where the believers had been the besieged, they would now become the besiegers. That same afternoon they surged out of the mosque, grabbed swords, spears, and bows, and surrounded the Qureyz village.

Inside their stronghold, the Qureyz leader called a council meeting and outlined three possible courses of action. The first was to abandon their Jewish identity, accept islam, and swear absolute obedience to Muhammad as the prophet. The second: to carry out a surprise counter-attack on the Sabbath, when Muhammad and his men least expected them to. The third was what might be called the Masada option: the men could kill the women and children to save them from capture and slavery, then either kill themselves or fight to the death. But the council was in denial. Far slower than their leader to realize the depths of their predicament, they argued that things had not come anywhere near such a point. They had long been affiliates of the Aws tribe, who would surely vouch for them. As people under threat tend to do, they clung to the established order of things, refusing to acknowledge that as the Nadir tribe had been told just a year earlier, “islam has canceled the old alliances.”

They appealed to the Aws, pointing out that they had worked side by side with everyone else to build the defensive moat. If they hadn’t been among the fiercest defenders, that was only because the moat was at the northern entrance to the oasis, and their village was eight miles away at the southern end. They had not worked against Muhammad, they swore; they had merely done what any independent tribe would do, and kept their options open. But the Aws remained silent, and as Muhammad would now make ruthlessly clear, independence was no longer an option.

The Qureyz held out for two weeks, then gave in to the inevitable and surrendered unconditionally. Yet even as they were led out in fetters, many still clung to hope. The worst most of them expected was what had happened to the two other Jewish tribes before them. Expulsion, after all, was one thing. Massacre, quite another.

he fetters were not a good sign. The Aws leaders knew what they meant, and finally tried to intervene for their former affiliates. At least Muhammad could spare the lives of the Qureyz, they argued, as he had done with the Qaynuqa and the Nadir. But Muhammad wanted more than to repeat the past; this time, it seems, he intended to set an example for the future. Not wanting to antagonize the Aws by seeming to ignore their request, however, he made as though to consult with them. “People of Aws,” he countered, “will you be satisfied if one of your own passes judgment on the Qureyz?” They declared themselves well satisfied, assuming that they had thus secured the lives of the fettered prisoners. But it was to be Muhammad, not they, who chose which of their tribe would decide the fate of the Qureyz, and there can be little doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing when he selected Saad ibn-Muad.