Nine Parts of Desire (14 page)

What became known as “the affair of the slander” made its way into the Koran. Why, God asks the believers, when they heard the
allegations about Aisha, “did not the believing men and believing women form in their minds a good opinion and say, This is a lie manifest’? Why have they not brought four witnesses regarding it?” Since then, Islamic law has required four witnesses to sustain a charge of adultery: “The whore, and the whoremaster, shall ye scourge with an hundred stripes…. But as to those who accuse women of reputation of whoredom, and produce not four witnesses of the fact, scourge them with fourscore stripes, and receive not their testimony forever.”

In the two years following his controversial marriage to Zeinab, Muhammad acquired five new women, including two Jews and a Coptic Christian. (There is a difference of opinion about whether he married all three of these women or simply kept one or two of them as concubines.) Mary, the Christian, became the focus of the harem’s intense jealousy when she bore Muhammad a son. (The boy died in infancy.) Aisha, who hadn’t been able to conceive, was particularly heartbroken. At one point she had complained to Muhammad about her lack of a kunya, or mother designation, since all the other widows had the kunyas of sons they’d borne to their previous husbands. Like the present-day Palestinian, Rehab, Aisha felt the lack of distinction keenly. Muhammad told her to call herself Umm Abdullah, after the son of her sister, to whom she was very close.

Aisha must have perceived Mary and her son as dangerous rivals for Muhammad’s attention. Certainly an uproar followed the discovery of Muhammad having intercourse with Mary in Hafsa’s room on Aisha’s “day.” The fallout from that upset, coupled with nagging from the women about the grinding poverty of their lives, caused Muhammad to withdraw from the harem and keep to himself for almost a month. The community worried that he might divorce all his wives, throwing into turmoil the alliances he’d so carefully crafted.

Finally he returned from his retreat and offered each of his wives a divinely inspired ultimatum: they could divorce him and have a rich settlement of worldly goods, or they could stay with him, on God’s terms, which included never marrying again after his death. In return, they would be known forever as Mothers of the Believers, and reap a rich reward in heaven. All the women chose to stay.

It would be wrong to portray Muhammad’s domestic life as
nothing but jealousy and scandal. The hadith also record moments of great tenderness in the little rooms around the mosque. One day, as Aisha and Muhammad sat together companionably, she at her spinning, he mending a sandal, Aisha suddenly became aware that he was gazing at her with a radiant expression on his face. Suddenly, he rose and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Oh, Aisha,” he said, “may Allah reward you well. I am not the source of joy to you that you are to me.”

Another hadith recounts an incident when several of Muhammad’s wives were arguing with him over household finances. While the argument was in progress, Omar, Muhammad’s stern lieutenant and the father of Hafsa, entered the room. The women, fearful of Omar’s violent temper, immediately fell silent and hurried away. Omar yelled after the women that it was shameful that they should be more respectful of him than of the prophet of God. One replied, from a safe distance, that the prophet of God was known to be much gentler to women than his overbearing friend.

When Muhammad became ill and was dying, he at first kept to his habit of fairness among wives, moving his sickbed from one room to another depending on whose turn it was to have his company. But one day he began asking whose room he was to go to the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. The wives perceived that he was trying to calculate how long it would be until he was with his beloved Aisha. All decided to give up their turns to allow him to spend his last weeks with Aisha. He died in her arms and was buried in her room.

She was just nineteen years old. A lonely future stretched before her: childless, and banned from remarriage. All she had left was influence. Because she had spent so much time at Muhammad’s side, she became a leading religious authority. Originally, 2,210 hadith were attributed to her: ninth-century scholars, dismissing the word of a mere woman, threw out all but 174.

On Muhammad’s death, Aisha became a wealthy woman. She inherited nothing from Muhammad, who left all his own property to charity. But the community paid her for the use of part of her room—where she continued to live—as the prophet’s tomb. The sum, 200,000 dirhams, was so vast that five camels were needed to transport
it. The payment may have been extra generous because Muhammad’s successor, or caliph, turned out to be Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr.

Muhammad’s death caused the boil-over of the long-simmering power struggle between Ali and Abu Bakr. Fatima, who had lived very quietly, raising four children, burst briefly into public life to fight for Ali’s right to be caliph. By that time all her sisters had died childless, leaving her and her sons and daughters as Muhammad’s only descendants. She argued powerfully that Ali had been Muhammad’s choice. It was she who proclaimed that her father’s command had been that the leadership of Islam should remain with his blood relatives. The Shiat Ali, or Partisans of Ali, rallied to support her. But she failed to convince the majority of the community. While Ali was prepared to mend the rift by accepting Abu Bakr’s leadership, Fatima held out with the courageous stubbornness that continues to characterize modern Shiites. Convinced that her father’s will had been flouted, she refused to offer allegiance to Abu Bakr. Perhaps as a result of the stress of that losing struggle, she fell ill and died just six months after her father.

Not everyone mourned the passing of Islam’s prophet. In the southern Arabian region of Hadramaut, six women decorated their hands with henna, as if for a wedding, and took to the streets beating tambourines in joyful celebration of Muhammad’s death. Soon, about twenty others joined the merry gathering. When word of the celebration reached Abu Bakr, he sent out the cavalry to deal with “the whores of Hadramaut.” When his warriors arrived, the men of the settlement came to their women’s defense but were defeated. As punishment, the women had their henna-painted, tambourine-playing hands severed at the wrists.

Who knows what motivated the women to make their rousing and reckless celebration? To them, at least, it must have seemed that Muhammad’s new religion had made their lives more burdensome, less free. And much worse was coming. Repression of women was about to be legislated into the religion on a large scale by Abu Bakr’s successor as caliph, the violent misogynist Omar.

That Aisha supported Omar’s bid for leadership shows the depth of her loathing for Fatima’s husband, Ali. Her opinion of Omar was not high. Kno his cruelty to the women of his household, she had cleverly helped foil a match between him and her sister.

Omar cracked down on women in ways that he must have known flouted Muhammad’s traditions. He made stoning the official punishment for adultery and pressed to extend the seclusion of women beyond the prophet’s wives. He tried to prevent women from praying in the mosque, and when that failed, he ordered separate prayer leaders for men and women. He also prevented women from making the Hajj, a ban that was lifted only in the last year of his life.

On Omar’s death, Aisha supported Othman as his successor. When Othman was murdered by members of a rebellious faction, Ali, who had had to wait twenty-four long years since Muhammad’s death, finally got his chance to lead. When he became the Muslims’ fourth caliph, Aisha’s well-known enmity soon made her a lightning rod for dissidents. She spoke out stridently against Ali’s failure to punish Othman’s killers.

As opposition to Ali’s rule mounted, Aisha made a brave and reckless move that might have changed forever the balance of power between Muslim men and women.

She led the dissidents into battle against Ali in a red pavilion set atop a camel. Riding ahead of her troops, she loudly exhorted them to fight bravely. Ali, realizing the effect this was having on his men’s morale, ordered her camel cut down under her. He then routed her forces. Hundreds of her partisans were killed, including her dearest friends and relatives.

The defeat proved disastrous for Muslim women. Her opponents were able to argue that the first battle of Muslim against Muslim would never have happened if Aisha had kept out of public life as God had commanded. After the battle, one of Muhammad’s freed slaves reported a hadith that has been particularly damaging to Muslim women. The man said he had been saved from joining Aisha’s army by recalling Muhammad’s remark on the news that the Persians had appointed a princess as ruler: “No people who place a woman over their affairs will prosper.” Whether or not the former slave’s con
venient recollection was genuine, that hadith has been used against every Muslim woman who has achieved political influence. In Pakistan it was frequently cited by opponents of Benazir Bhutto.

After the rout, Aisha finally made her peace with Ali. She retreated from politics but remained an eminent religious authority. Most accounts describe her in later life as a sad and self-effacing woman whose one wish was to be forgotten by history.

It is said that she wept whenever she recited the Koranic verses: “O wives of the prophet… remain in your houses.”

Chapter 5

C
ONVERTS

“Marry not women who are idolaters, until they believe: verily a maid-servant who believeth is better than an idolatress, although she please you more.”

THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE COW

A
t sunrise, before the heat slams down and the air becomes heavy with diesel fumes, Tehran smells of fresh-baked bread. At neighborhood bakeries women wait in line with their flowery household chadors draped casually around their waists. Their faces seem less lined than they will look later, as they struggle through the crowded city burdened with parcels and children and the countless worries of women in poor countries. During this pause they have the brief luxury of watching someone else’s labor.

Sometimes, when I tired of the stares and questions I got as the lone woman registered at the Laleh Hotel, I would head for the northern suburbs to stay with a family who had become good friends. They lived on a winding road of mosques, shops and every kind of housing from villas to hovels. In the mornings I would find my way to the local bakery by following my nose. The air carried both the sweetness of seared crusts and the tang of woodsmoke from ovens sunk into the bakery floor. Inside, a four-man assembly line blurred in a heat shimmer of deft hands and flying dough. The bakers made
lavosh
—thin, flat sheets of bread soft as tissue. They worked like jugglers: one bov weighing dough, another rolling it flat, a third flinging it from stick to stick to stretch it thin, a fourth slapping the wafer against the oven
wall. Watching the other women, I learned to reach for the hot bread with my hands wrapped in a fold of chador. I would carry it home that way to the Mamoudzadehs’ breakfast table.

Like houses everywhere in the Islamic world, the Mamoudzadehs’ gave nothing away from the street. Its huge iron gate shut out the world completely, securing the family’s privacy within. The gate opened to a courtyard with flower gardens, children’s bikes and a shady mulberry tree from which Janet Mamoudzadeh made the jam that spread deliciously over the steaming lavosh. I kicked off my shoes into the pile by the front door and stepped onto the softness of handmade rugs and kilims. Just inside, I flicked my chador onto a rack that contained two or three of the coats and scarves that Janet wore for ordinary use; the more concealing, nunlike magneh she wore to her job as an English teacher at her daughter’s grade school, and the chador she kept for religious occasions.

Janet’s husband Mohamed was a trader at the Bazaar-e-Bazorg—the Grand Bazaar—dealing in Persian carpets and foreign currencies. She had met him at college in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was studying engineering and she was taking computer science. She fell in love, converted to Islam, and traveled home with him to Iran.

Janet married Mohamed before the revolution, when it was possible for non-Muslims to live in Iran with their Muslim spouses. These days, conversion is obligatory, in line with the Shiite view that permanent marriage (as opposed to sigheh) can take place only between Muslims. The prophet’s sunnah on this matter doesn’t really help to clarify the Koranic verses.

The prophet had relationships with at least two Jewish women and one Christian, but Islamic sources differ as to whether the women converted or, if they kept their own faith, whether they became full-fledged wives. Safiyah, the wife of the leader of the Jews of Khaiber who died in battle with the Muslims, converted to Islam and is mentioned in all the sources as a full-fledged wife of the prophet. The status of the other two women isn’t so clear. Some sources say that the other Jew, Raihanah, decided to remain as a slave/concubine in the harem, so that she could keep her faith and remain free of the restrictions of seclusion. Mary, the Coptic Christian, who never
changed her religion, is described as a concubine in all but Egyptian sources.

Janet converted to Islam because her husband wanted his children raised as Muslims and she believed that having the same religion would make her household more harmonious. She looked upon her conversion in a matter-of-fact way. “Allah, God—it’s the same guy, isn’t it? And if you read the Koran, Mary is in there, and Jesus—it’s just that they’re called Maryam and Isa.”

Janet’s conversion had been a simple matter. In her family’s living room in Kansas, in front of two witnesses, she had simply proclaimed the
shehada,
the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Because her husband is Shiite, she also added the additional, optional sentence: “Ali is the friend of God.” Once she said the simple formula, she was a Muslim. To be a
good
Muslim, she also had to live by the other four of the faith’s Five Pillars: praying five times a day; fasting in Ramadan; giving alms to the poor—usually set at 2.5% of a person’s net worth, not mere income—per year; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in her life, if she could afford it.