Part 11

Khadija was barely under ground when the Prophet prepared to embark boldly upon matrimonial seas. About two months later he married Sauda, a tall, corpulent, mature widow whose brother celebrated the event by sprinkling ashes on his head; he synchronously engaged himself to Abu Bekr’s daughter Ayesha, whom he eventually espoused at the age of ten; but it has been suggested that “there may have been something more than ordinarily precocious about the child.” She herself attributed her hold on Mohammed’s affections not only to her childish beauty, but to her plumpness. “When I was betrothed to the Prophet,” she related, “my mother endeavored to make me fat; and she found that with me nothing succeeded so well as gourds and fresh dates. Eating well of them I became round”; yet, as she grew up, she lost her flesh and became thin and willowy. In 624 Omar found himself with Hafsa, a widowed daughter of twenty, upon his hands. Irritated and scandalized by her exhaustive but fruitless endeavors to win a second husband, he offered her in turn to Othman and Abu Bekr, who, knowing that she inherited her father’s cranky temper, refused to accept the honor. Omar was so insulted by this double rebuff that he at once flew angrily to Mohammed to make a complaint. The Prophet, at his wit’s end because of the social uproar that had been started, saved the situation by marrying Hafsa himself, and thus abundantly gratified his wish to have a wife who cried and complained all the time. Zeinab, widow of one of the heroes of Bedr, became his fifth wife in 626; her gentle and charitable disposition perhaps accounts for the fact that she was the only one of his wives who preceded him to Paradise. His sixth bride was won in a peculiar way. As Abu Selama lay expiring of a wound received at Uhud, Mohammed entered and quieted the wailing women with this prayer: “O Lord! give unto him width and comfort in his grave; lighten his darkness; pardon his sins; and raise up faithful followers from his seed.” Just four months later (626), the Prophet pressed his ardent suit upon Abu’s widow Um, who, against her better judgment, finally yielded to his importunity.

Meanwhile the much-married man had discovered that his domestic arrangements were getting more and more complicated. Founding a precedent that has since been followed by many Christian churches, he occupied a part of the Mosque. His domestic quarters were established along its eastern wall; they seem to have been constructed from a series of adjacent huts owned by one Haritha, who retired more or less willingly from each of them whenever Mohammed needed a new shelter for a bride; and as the years passed, poor Haritha would barely fix up a new abode before he was shoved out of it. An entrance for the Prophet’s exclusive use led from each dwelling into the Mosque; having no separate apartment for himself, he rotated daily from one hut to the other according to a fixed schedule: “the day of Hafsa, the day of Um,” _ad finem_. Before long, however, he deliberately infringed upon the rights of all his other wives by breaking the routine in favor of Ayesha--the now lithe and lissom beauty who still toyed with her playthings and frolicked with Mohammed in nursery games--until the deserted wives raised such a squabble that he was forced to emit the famous revelation, so cuttingly commented on by Ayesha, which gave him license to consort with her who pleased him most at the moment.

Conflicting reports have been handed down concerning the acquisition of the Prophet’s seventh bride. Going one day to visit his adopted son Zeid, who was absent, he was invited in by Zeid’s wife Zeinab, who ... but here the tales diverge. Some say that Mohammed merely saw her unveiled face, while others assert that her carelessly disarranged dress gave him further glimpses; some say that the Prophet, moved by a purely artistic admiration of her beauty, uttered the words, “Praise be to God, the ruler of hearts!” but others insist that his approbation was of a lower sort, and translate his ejaculation thus: “Gracious Lord! Good Heavens! how Thou dost turn the hearts of men!” It is agreed, however, that Zeinab was so elated at the impression she had made on the Prophet’s facile susceptibility to feminine wiles that she took special pains to repeat his compliment over and over to Zeid, who, in addition to being short, pug-nosed and generally ugly, was a mere freedman, and, therefore, had never appealed too strongly to his high-born wife. Hot with jealousy, Zeid went to Mohammed and declared that he wished to divorce Zeinab. “Why,” he was asked, “hast thou found any fault in her?” “No,” groaned Zeid, “but I cannot live with her.” “Go and guard thy wife,” he was told, “treat her well and fear God.” But Zeid, who presumably saw how matters lay, soon divorced her “in spite of the command of the Prophet,” remarks an admirer, who goes on to explain that Mohammed “was grieved at the conduct of Zeid, more especially as it was he who had arranged the marriage of these two uncongenial spirits.” Obviously, the trouble could be mended in but one way. One day, as Mohammed sat by Ayesha’s side, a prophetic spasm gripped him; after it had passed, he smiled and gently inquired, “Who will go and congratulate Zeinab, and say that the Lord hath joined her unto me in marriage?” The wedding soon took place; yet, since many Moslems thought it rather odd that the Prophet, after forbidding sons to wed their bereaved stepmothers, should himself marry the wife of an adopted son, it seemed highly advisable for him to have recourse to Allah. Thus runs the Koran: “And when Zeid had fulfilled her [Zeinab’s] divorce, We joined thee with her in marriage, that there might hereafter be no offence to Believers in marrying the Wives of their adopted sons, when they have fulfilled their divorce; and the command of God is to be fulfilled.” Criticism immediately collapsed. Zeinab proudly boasted that “God had given her in marriage to His Prophet, whereas his other wives were given to him by their relatives”; but Ayesha retorted with the caustic observation that there was no longer the least doubt that Mohammed rendered Allah’s messages verbatim, inasmuch as this last revelation showed the Prophet up most unmercifully. Ayesha, however, was one woman in a thousand.

III

By this time Mohammed had come to be regarded as a highly desirable catch by every widow in Medina, while attractive women came from all the corners of Arabia to offer themselves to the impressionable man. His inordinate masculinity prompted the other Moslems to justify his excess of brides on the judicious ground that his “Excellency had the power of thirty strong men given him”--a consideration that was esteemed by certain discriminating traditionalists to be a proof of what has been characterized as the Prophet’s “divinely conferred preëminence.” In short, he was every inch a man. His spare, well-moulded figure was tall and commanding; he walked so fast that his gait has been compared to that of a man ascending a hill, or of one “wrenching his foot from a stone,” and this rapid locomotion made him unconsciously bend his back until in his last years he became round-shouldered. “That blessed prince’s head was large,” we are told, “and yet he was not big-headed.” His face was lean and rosy, his skin was clear and “soft as woman’s,” his slightly Roman nose was thin and shapely--some people “might regard his nasal bone as exceedingly long, though in reality it was not so”--his neck, on the unimpeachable authority of Ali, was “like that of a silver urn,” and “his blessed mouth was open, but exceedingly graceful.” The quality and abundance of his ebon hair has been explained in great detail. Thick and curly masses of it--“not very frizzled or very dangling but just right”--hung about his ears; his vast expanse of beard presumably concealed from vulgar eyes an otherwise conspicuous peculiarity: “from his chest down to the navel there was drawn a thin line of hair, while the other parts of the chest and stomach were hairless, although there was hair on his blessed arms and shoulders and the upper part of his chest.” Even in his slumbers he retained his appearance of ease and grace, for he “lay on his right side, putting the palm of his right hand under his right cheek.” An admirer summed up his manly comeliness in this poetic outburst: “I saw him at full moon, and he was brighter and more beautiful than she,” and another charming tradition affirms that no fly ever alighted on his body. Yet the handsome man was not flawless. The penetrating eyes, fringed with long and lustrous lashes, were red-lidded and bloodshot; ugly gaps disfigured his dazzling white teeth; and on his back was a birthmark which, though held to be the divine “seal of prophecy” that distinguished him as the last of the authentic prophets, was probably a large mole.

Encompassed by six wives and two slave concubines, Mohammed soon discovered that the most energetic efforts were required to provide for their wishes. They not only made a heavy drain on his purse and his larder, but upon his patience; for, while he was rapidly ageing, several of them were just nearing the height of feminine attractiveness, and many youthful Moslems, envious of the conjugal liberties which Mohammed so prodigally claimed, were in the habit of calling at one or another of his houses on matters that had little to do with religion. The favorite, Ayesha, soon got into a scrape that turned his suspicions into open jealousy. She had accompanied him on one of his martial expeditions--a custom of which his other brides frequently availed themselves by the casting of lots, Ayesha being the fortunate winner on this occasion--in a vehicle drawn by a camel and punctiliously veiled from view; and, after he had victoriously returned to Medina and the cart was opened, he discovered to his great horror that she was not inside. When she came up a little later, escorted by young Safwan, she explained that she had lost her necklace, had gone to search for it, and upon her return had found that her guides, thinking that she was inside, had guided the camel and its supposed burden back to Medina. Shortly afterward, she continued, Safwan had chanced to meet her, “expressed surprise at finding one of the Prophet’s wives in this predicament,” and, upon receiving no reply from the virtuous maiden, had asked her to mount his camel; as she shyly complied, he had averted his face so that he did not see her ascend the beast, and not a word had passed between them on the return journey. No one knows what Mohammed might have done had not scandalous tongues started to wag; but wag they did, and the poor girl, noticing her husband’s cold demeanor, promptly fell ill and went to visit her father. The Prophet meanwhile was much disturbed, for the business was very complicated. Should he punish the daughter of Abu Bekr, his most valued and intimate friend, trouble would almost certainly follow; on the other hand, such fellows as Abdallah ibn Obei and the poet Hassan could not be permitted to go around making lewd jokes at his expense. So, visiting Ayesha in the presence of her father and mother, he said: “Ayesha! thou hearest what men have spoken of thee. Fear God. If indeed thou art guilty, then repent toward God, for the Lord accepteth the repentance of His servants.” The grief-stricken girl burst out weeping and replied: “By the Lord! I say that I will never repent towards God of that which ye speak of. I am helpless. If I confess, God knoweth that I am not guilty. If I deny, no one believeth me.” In this dire predicament, the Prophet fortunately fell into a profound trance; upon his recovery, he wiped great beads of sweat from his brow and exclaimed: “Ayesha! rejoice! Verily, the Lord hath declared thine innocence.” “Embrace thine husband!” cried Abu’s wife, but Ayesha contented herself with the ejaculation, “Praise be to the Lord”--in Whom she apparently recognized a capacity for chivalry that was foreign to her husband. And one night not long afterward, hoping perhaps to turn the tables on him, she secretly followed him when he slipped quietly out of the house on what seemed to be an amorous expedition; but she was grievously disappointed upon discovering that he was bent upon no more exciting errand than going to a graveyard to offer up prayers for the dead.

Thus the affair ended. Mohammed, however, immediately improvised a law that imposed a severe scourging upon scandal-mongers who failed to produce four witnesses to substantiate any charge of whoredom--a penalty that was at once inflicted upon Hassan, another man named Mistah, and even one of the Prophet’s sisters-in-law; but he dared not treat Abdallah ibn Obei thus. Hassan, moreover, had already been badly wounded by the indignant Safwan; and so Mohammed, who really loved the incorrigibly mischievous versifier, salved his double hurts by presenting him a costly piece of property and a concubine. The grateful fellow immediately manufactured new stanzas in praise of Ayesha’s purity, her pert humor, and her supple figure--a series of compliments to which she had the bad grace to retort that the poet himself was disgustingly fat.

Nor did Mohammed stop here; he quickly proceeded to bring about other equally desirable reforms. The institution of the Veil for women--a custom, already not unknown, whose origin was probably due to the common superstitious fear of the horrific “evil eye”--was now imposed upon his harem; and the Koran also made it clear that the day of Moslem peeping Toms was over. “O ye believers! Enter not the apartments of the Prophet, except ye be called to sup with him, without waiting his convenient time.... And stay not for familiar converse; for verily that giveth uneasiness to the Prophet. It shameth him to say this unto you; but verily God is not ashamed of the Truth. And when ye ask anything of the Prophet’s wives, ask it of them from behind a curtain; this will be more pure for your hearts and for their hearts. It is not fitting that ye should give uneasiness to the Apostle of God, nor that ye should marry his Wives after him for ever. Verily that would be a grievous thing in the sight of God.... The Prophet is nearer unto the Believers than their own souls, and his Wives are their Mothers.” All Moslem women, furthermore, were commanded to veil themselves, at home or while walking abroad, from the prying eyes of everyone except a rich variety of relatives. “And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts and display not their ornaments except what appears thereof, and let them wear their head-coverings over their bosoms, and not display their ornaments except to their husbands or their fathers, or the fathers of their husbands, or their sons, or the sons of their husbands, or their brothers, or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or those whom their right hands possess, or the male servants not having need (of women), or the children who have not attained knowledge of what is hidden of women ... and turn to Allah, O Believers! so that you may be successful.”

IV

Yet somehow or other, despite all his efforts to do Allah’s will, the Prophet’s wives still continued to be rebellious and even fractious. Sadly unmindful of her recent misadventure, Ayesha in particular continued to be as saucy and impudent as ever. When in her distress she had gone to her parents, Ali, who next to Abu Bekr was Mohammed’s bosom friend, had consoled him in this way: “O Prophet! there is no lack of women, and thou canst without difficulty supply her place.” Upon hearing of this, Ayesha took a temporary revenge by shouting in Mohammed’s very face that he liked Ali better than her own father, and a permanent one by treating Ali like a dog for the rest of his life. It chanced, however, that Abu Bekr overheard his vixenish daughter thus berating her husband; utterly unmoved by the fact that she had been standing up for him, Abu at once rushed in and roared, “I will not hear thee lift thy voice against the apostle of God!” But when he seized her and lifted his hand to slap her face, Mohammed interfered; so Abu went away in a foaming rage, while the Prophet heaped coals of fire on Ayesha’s head with the comment, “You see how I delivered you from the man.” Abu continued to growl and grumble for several days, but eventually returned to find the pair completely reconciled. “Include me in your peace as you included me in your quarrel!” he begged; and Mohammed joyfully answered, “We do, we do!” But perhaps Ayesha provoked the Prophet most of all by failing to treat his religious views with proper decorum; when she was particularly miffed about something, she showed her disrespect by refusing to address him as the “Apostle of God.” Once he unwisely told her that, on the day of judgment, all mankind would be raised in the same condition as they had been born--naked, barefooted and uncircumcised. She immediately interrupted his disquisition with the remark that, if this were so, immodest thoughts would prevail, and all that he could think of to say in reply to her untimely jest was that “the business of the day would be too weighty and serious to allow them the making use of that liberty.” With an even more lamentable lack of judgment, he once commented on his great love for Khadija--an indiscretion that brought the swift retort: “Was she not old? Has not God given you a better in her place?” “No, by God!” exclaimed the homesick man, “there can never be a better! She believed in me, when men despised me; she relieved my wants, when I was poor and persecuted by the world.”

Besides Ayesha’s shrewishness, too, he was forced to endure mean tricks used by some of his other pestering wives, who, knowing his strong aversion to such smells as onion and garlic, sometimes took pains to eat malodorous foods. In his perplexity he devised various avenues of escape; but even the horse-races and the performances of singing-girls, which he not infrequently included in his list of pleasures, afforded him little lasting relief. There was some solace, however, in the fact that many of his famous followers were also stung by domestic broils. Abu Bekr and Omar, coming one day to visit the Prophet, found him gloomy and glum in the midst of his family. After Omar had made the aside remark, “I must say something to make the Prophet laugh,” he began thus: “O Apostle of God, if I see Bint Kharija [his wife] asking me for money I get up and throttle her!” Mohammed, immensely tickled in spite of himself, replied, “These women about me, as you see, are asking for money.” Abu Bekr immediately bounded up and started to choke Ayesha; Omar also seized his daughter Hafsa by the throat and savagely demanded, “Will you ask the Apostle of God for what he does not possess?”--upon which both women simultaneously gasped, “By God, we will never ask him for anything he does not possess!” This incident seems to have taught Mohammed how to manage his women better. Having first absented himself from their ministrations for about a month, he appeared with a new string of commandments. “O Prophet, say unto thy Wives--If ye seek after this present Life and the fashion thereof, come, I will make provision for you and dismiss you with a fair dismission. But if ye seek after God and His Apostle, and the Life to come, then verily God hath prepared for the excellent amongst you a great reward. O ye Wives of the Prophet! if any amongst you should be guilty of incontinence, the punishment shall be doubled unto her twofold; and that were easy with God.... Ye are not as other women.... And abide within your houses; and array not yourselves as ye used to do in the bygone days of ignorance. And observe the times of Prayer; and give Alms; and obey God and His Apostle.”

After this the air cleared somewhat, so that Mohammed enjoyed a temporary peace; yet it was not long before he incontinently got himself into another scrape. His harem had not particularly objected when he took four other brides in fairly rapid succession--Juweiriya and Safiya, both captives taken in war; Um Habiba, the daughter, _mirabile dictu_, of Abu Sufyan; and the beauteous Meimuna, the sister-in-law of his uncle Al-Abbas,--but when his wives discovered that one of his latest concubines, Mary the Coptic maid, was about to become a mother, confusion was worse confounded. For they knew that, above all else, Mohammed desired a son: he had no living boy, he was naturally affectionate, and he suffered agonies from his enemies who applied to him the sobriquet “al-abtar,” which means one without descendants, or, translated literally, “one whose tail has been cut off.” When in the course of time Mary gave birth to a son, who was named Ibrahim, she was raised from the status of a slave to a position almost on par with her “Sisters”; and Mohammed, overjoyed at his long frustrated good fortune, immediately shaved his head--which had been shorn about a month before--weighed the snippings, and distributed among the poor a corresponding weight of silver. He was also foolish enough to carry his little son to Ayesha and to burst out, in the fulness of parental pride, “Look, what a likeness it is to me!” “I do not see it,” snapped Ayesha. “What!” he cried, “canst thou not see the likeness, and how fair and fat he is?” “Yes, and so would be any other child that drank as much milk as he,” was the answer.

Not long afterward he was even more imprudent. Hafsa, chancing one day to find the Prophet and Mary in her own particular apartment, lashed out her ever ready tongue at him, and promised that she would tell all his other wives without delay. Mohammed, frightened even more than he had ever been on a battlefield, humbly prayed her to keep quiet and agreed to leave Mary for good; but Hafsa, utterly unable to keep such a flagrant breach of domestic etiquette to herself, at once told Ayesha who of course promptly informed all the other “Sisters.” The Prophet, discovering that home life was now absolutely unendurable, once more went into retirement for about a month. He was comforted in his seclusion by both Mary and Allah, one of whom suggested that this passage should be added to the Koran: “Maybe, his Lord, if he divorce you, will give him in your place wives better than you, submissive, faithful, obedient, penitent, adorers, fasters, virgins.” But this threat of wholesale divorce does not appear to have worried the enraged women so much as it did their relatives; Abu Bekr and Omar, for instance, were much upset upon learning that their chief should have deserted their daughters in favor of an ex-slave concubine. At this juncture Gabriel luckily appeared on the scene; he informed Mohammed that Hafsa, after all, was a fairly good woman and advised him to take her back. Thus, in fact, the breach was healed; but impartiality necessitates the inclusion of a statement by Mohammed’s most adequate modern defender, who swears that the whole episode was an “absolutely false and malicious” invention of the Prophet’s enemies. He goes on to say that the passage in the Koran which deals with the affair actually refers to Mohammed’s fondness for honey: Hafsa and Ayesha persuaded him to forego it; but then “came the thought that he was making something unlawful in which there was nothing unlawful, simply to please his wives.” Thus the Prophet, it is to be inferred, thought that honey was more precious than ten legal brides.