Chapter V: Part 5

Kinana’s notoriously beautiful wife, the seventeen-year-old Safiya, and her companion were then fetched up to the Prophet; the companion, seeing the headless trunk, beat her face and howled aloud. “Take that she-devil hence!” snapped Mohammed; but he tenderly folded his mantle around Safiya’s head to screen her from the sight, for he had determined to marry her. His approaching nuptials, however, were nearly ruined by Zeinab, a Jewess who had lost all her male relatives and her husband on that fateful day. She poisoned a kid, tastily garnished it, and then placed it before him, smiling and coaxing him to eat. Having distributed the least desirable parts among his fellows, he bit off a choice mouthful from the shoulder; but barely had his teeth closed on it when he cried, “Hold! surely this shoulder hath been poisoned,” and indecorously spat it out. One man who had partaken of the meat died, and Mohammed himself is reputed to have been afflicted with such violent pains that he was repeatedly cupped between the shoulders; yet within a short time he was observed to disappear with the fickle-hearted and coyly reluctant Safiya behind the bridal tent.

Thus the former Meccan merchant and exile passed from conquest to conquest. He was now not only a prophet--plenty of contemporary men professed a similarly exclusive claim to that commonplace title--but the recognized dictator over Medina and an extensive range of contingent territory; furthermore, the terror inspired by the mere mention of his name had penetrated to the most distant stretches of Arabia, and was beginning to arouse sinister forebodings in adjacent nations. Had his relatively unbroken succession of victories made him an inexorably ruthless tyrant whose actions were wholly prompted by an insatiable ambition, or had they but reaffirmed his ceaselessly reiterated claim that he was only plastic clay in Allah’s hand? Did he delight to glut himself in wanton bloodshed, or, in the inmost regions of his spirit, did he believe that the punishments meted out upon his enemies had actually been self-inflicted inasmuch as they had refused to accept the one true God? “And He hath caused to descend from their strongholds the Jews.... And He struck terror into their hearts. A part ye slaughtered, and a part ye took into captivity. And He hath made you to inherit their land, and their habitations, and their wealth, and a land which ye had not trodden upon; and God is over all things powerful.... I am the strongest, therefore Allah is with me.” Did those exultant words emanate from a profligate, coldly calculating and atrociously barbarous hypocrite, or from a humble and grateful penitent whose sole wish was to be a channel through which Allah’s divine purposes might be made manifest? The answer forever bides.

AVOCATIONS

I

Incessant wars and rumors of wars by no means occupied all of Mohammed’s attention. He might be prophet, statesman, general and practically king, but he was also something more: he was a family man on a large scale. Aloof and reserved on public occasions, he was excessively affectionate toward his friends, and indeed some of his wives. Since he no longer had any small children, he was particularly fond of little tots; while standing at prayer he sometimes held a child in his arms, and at Medina he often allowed a little girl to lead him around by the hand. From the plumbless depths of his character a vast and intricate collection of odd mannerisms, which occasionally corresponded with the surpassing dignity of his office, came to the surface; and all the manifold resources of psychology, philosophy and related branches of erudition have been exhausted in the attempt to analyze or synthesize his personality from these _disjecta membra_. But the dry bones still remain scattered and unfleshed; all the prodigal resources of modern scholarship have excavated fewer vital facts about the Prophet than one of his most favored wives or friends might have related in less than a day. When, therefore, they speak with voices whose authenticity is generally granted, they should be allowed to hold the stage.

Ayesha, certainly, was one of them. Questioned once about her illustrious consort, she tartly replied: “He was a man just such as yourselves; he laughed often and smiled much.” “But how would he occupy himself at home?” the insistent voice continued. “Even as any of you occupy yourselves,” came the abrupt response. “He would mend his clothes, and cobble his shoes. He used to help me in my household duties; but what he did oftenest was to sew. If he had the choice between two matters, he would always choose the easier, so as that no sin accrued therefrom.” Ayesha obviously had few illusions about Mohammed; but that is one of the peculiar privileges of great men’s wives, and besides he was her senior by more than forty years--a fact that probably accounts very largely for her continual underestimation of his several abilities. Her highly partial record, accordingly, should be corrected and supplemented with equally pertinent particulars.

For indeed, despite his felicity in cobbling, sewing, milking his goats and tarring his camels, there were many things that he did not like at all. He detested lying on the part of others, and separated himself from those of his adherents who cultivated a natural taste for mendacity, until they repented; he held the custom of usury in special abhorrence: “One dirhem of usury which a man eats, knowing it to be so, is more grievous than thirty-six fornications,” he declared. He also loathed dogs and pictures--“Angels will not enter a house containing a dog or pictures,” and “Every painter will be in hell,” he oracularly announced, but the reason for this outburst is obscure. Perhaps it was because Arabian art was notoriously bad--and then again, perhaps he was jealous of anything that, no matter how rude and primitive, was entirely beyond his comprehension. Once, during public prayers, he chanced to notice that his mantle was richly figured, and when he had ended he said: “Take away that mantle, for verily it hath distracted me in my prayers, and bring me a common one”; and on another similar occasion he threw off a silken robe in disgust, saying, “Such stuff it doth not become the pious to wear.” He wore a golden ring until he noticed that all the people were beginning to follow his example, whereupon he went into the pulpit, pulled the ring off with the words, “By the Lord I will not wear this ring ever again,” and then prohibited the use of such adornments. A friend who had sent him a present in the form of a steaming dinner was much chagrined when it was returned uneaten and even untouched by his fingers--for he “used to eat with his thumb and his two forefingers,” and, “after he had finished eating, he licked his blessed fingers: first the middle one, then the prayer-finger, and last the thumb”--but he was pacified when the Prophet explained that he had not tasted it because onions had been cooked with the food; for Gabriel, he went on to say, strenuously objected to the odor of both onions and garlic. Furthermore, he abstained from tasting lizards, for he feared that they were descended, by some inexplicable metempsychosis, from a certain tribe of Israel. He commonly reclined during his meals, though sometimes “he would sit on his left leg, posting up the right; and if he was very hungry, he would sit down altogether and post up both legs.”

Yet the catalogue of his likes was far more extensive than the list of his aversions. He was so devoted to everlasting prayers that his legs often became swollen from long standing; and when anyone remonstrated with him, he would reply: “What! Shall I not behave as a thankful servant should?” He was very careful not to yawn during his devotions, and if perforce he sneezed, “he made a moderate noise, covering his blessed face with his robe-sleeve and putting his blessed hand before his nostrils,” after which he would ejaculate, “Praise be to Allah!” Before commencing his orisons, he always sniffed up several handfuls of water from his right hand and then blew the liquid out with his left hand. Ordinarily, he prayed with his shoes on, though he once took them off while engaged in public supplication--a deed immediately aped by the entire audience; but the Prophet at once informed them that their action was unnecessary, “for he had merely taken off his own because Gabriel had apprised him that there was some dirty substance attaching to them.” His prayers were so earnest and vehement that “it might be known from a distance that he was speaking by the motion of his beard”--which he had let grow until it reached to the middle of his broad chest; but he regularly clipped his moustache. When it was once suggested to him that his appearance would be vastly improved if he reversed the process, the counselor was properly rebuked. “Nay,” said Mohammed, “for my Lord hath commanded me to clip the moustaches and allow the beard to grow.”

In more mundane matters, too, his tastes were equally pronounced. He affected white clothes chiefly, but was also partial toward red, yellow and green garments, and he sometimes wore woolens. Scrupulously neat in his personal habits, and ever ready to condemn untidiness (yellow teeth, in particular) in his companions, he yet wore a turban, wrapped many times around his head, whose lower edge looked “like the soiled clothes of an oil-dealer.” But such carelessness was uncommon, for his clothes, though mostly inexpensive, were habitually clean and neat. When he donned freshly laundered clothes, he was accustomed to remark: “Praise be to the Lord, who hath clothed me with that which shall hide my nakedness and adorn me while I live.” He had a perfect mania for toothpicks: at night he invariably kept one handy to use before performing his ablutions; while traveling he always carried a generous supply; indeed, he used them so frequently between his wide-spaced teeth, “white as hailstones,” that he gradually wore his gums away; and one person chanced to observe him, toothpick in mouth, making a gurgling, “a-ccha” noise as if he were going to disgorge his food.

The narrowness of his means at Medina limited his gluttonous desires for a time, but his rapid successes soon enabled him to feast upon delectable dainties. He was very fond of sweetmeats, honey, cucumbers and ripe dates (“When he ate fresh dates he would keep such as were bad in his hand”) and he eyed the pumpkin with particular favor. One of his servants, gazing abstractedly at some pumpkins one day, after Mohammed’s death, was overheard saying “Dear little plant, how the Prophet loved thee!” Like a true Arab, he preferred mutton to all other flesh. “I once slew a kid and dressed it,” narrated a Medinan. “The Prophet asked me for the forequarter and I gave it to him. ‘Give me another,’ he said; and I gave him the second. Then he asked for a third. ‘O Prophet!’ I replied, ‘there are but two forequarters to a kid.’” The meal that he relished with most gusto, however, was “a mess of bread cooked with meat, and a dish of dates dressed with butter and milk.” He had a predilection for several wells around Medina whose waters, he said, were both “cold and sweet,” and, after he drank, he sometimes bathed in them or invoked a blessing on their contents by spitting into them. Close-fisted and frugal most of the time, he readily loosed his purse-strings when he saw something whose appeal was irresistible. He once paid about twenty camels for a single dress, and also gave eight golden pieces for a mantle. At bedtime he regularly put antimony on his eyelids, “saying that it made the sight more piercing, and caused the hair to grow”; he had a crystal goblet with silver trimmings, a copper vase for his baths, and an ivory comb; but perhaps his chief fancy inclined toward perfumes. “We always used to know when Mohammed had issued forth from his chamber by the sweet perfume that filled the air,” one of his servants testified. He indulged without stint in musk and ambergris, and he burned camphor on odiferous wood so that he might enjoy the smell. With her customary acumen, Ayesha put the gist of the matter into one pithy sentence when she said: “The Prophet loved three things--women, scents, and food; he had his heart’s desire of the first two, but not of the last.” In fact, Mohammed himself argued that these two innocuous diversions intensified the ecstasy of his prayers.

II

Mohammed’s adoration of particular women was nevertheless tempered with penetrating discretion toward the sex in general. It is true that he abrogated the usage which permitted, and even encouraged, sons to inherit their fathers’ wives, and that the code of Islam allowed single ladies to be mistresses of their own actions; but it is also true that married women continued to be treated merely as sports and playthings for the convenience of their husbands. “Men stand above women,” says the Koran, “because of the superiority which God hath conferred on one of them over the other.... Wherefore let the good Women be obedient.... But such as ye may fear disobedience or provocation from, rebuke them, and put them away in separate apartments, and chastise them. But, if they be obedient unto you, seek not against them an excuse for severity; verily God is lofty and great.” While Moslem husbands might easily obtain an absolute divorce if they chose, the idea that women might occasionally desire the same privilege seems never to have entered the Prophet’s head. Women might win Paradise, to be sure, yet no provision was made whereby they could anticipate such captivating entertainments as were promised to faithful men. Mohammed, in fact, was sagacious enough to entice males to Islam by implying that there would be no occasion for them to lament the loss of their wives in Paradise: “Whenever a woman vexes her husband in this world, his wife among the Houris of Paradise says: ‘Do not vex him (May God slay thee!) for he is only a guest with thee. He will soon leave thee and come to us’”--and indeed, the most subtly cruel punishment that the Prophet ever inflicted upon erring males was to separate them for a period from their wives. If, however, some wives remained refractory in the face of this warning, Mohammed had still another card up his sleeve: “If a man summon his wife to his bed and she refuse to come, so that he spends the night in anger, the angels curse her till morning.”

That the Prophet, as was only natural, allowed himself a wider latitude of encounters than was granted to his adherents--who might espouse only four women, but might also form liaisons “without antecedent ceremony or any guarantee of continuance” with any number of female slaves--was made clear by Ayesha. “I was jealous of the women who gave themselves to the apostle of God,” she admitted, “and said, ‘Does a woman give herself?’ Then when God revealed: ‘Thou mayst decline for the present whom thou wilt of them, and thou mayst take to thy bed her whom thou wilt, and whomsoever thou shalt long for of those thou shalt have before neglected; and this shall not be a crime in thee.’ I said, ‘I see your Lord does nothing but hasten to fulfil your desire!’” Yet due allowance should be made for Ayesha’s jealousy; for, while Mohammed married approximately twelve women, she was the only virgin among them--the others were widows or divorcees who commonly brought him wealth or desirable political connections. For indeed, though he once playfully chided a Moslem who had married a mature woman instead of a “young damsel, who would have sported with thee, and thou with her,” he was too canny to follow his own counsel. At the same time, he preferred women of spirit; in fact, he definitely rejected one girl because “she never cried or complained”--a criticism that certainly could not be aimed against most of his brides.

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.

In any case, harmony was restored. Mohammed, worn and haggard from his domestic tribulations, was soon restored to health and amused himself by watching the antics of his growing boy. But when Ibrahim was yet hardly able to toddle around, he began to pine away. Just before his decease, the Prophet clasped him in his arms and sobbed bitterly; when the other watchers endeavored to console him by recalling his own strong objection to the outward expression of grief, he replied in a broken voice: “Nay, it is not this that I forbade, but wailing and fulsome laudation of the dead.... We grieve for the child: the eye runneth down with tears, and the heart swelleth inwardly; yet we say not aught that would offend our Lord. Ibrahim! O Ibrahim!” For the child had died while his father was talking, and, after making the observation, “The remainder of the days of his nursing shall be fulfilled in Paradise,” Mohammed tenderly comforted Mary. Speechless and heavy-eyed, he kept a steadfast guard while the body was washed and laid out; then he prayed over it and finally followed the procession to the little grave. After it had been filled with earth, he sprinkled fresh water upon the mound and spoke these words: “When ye do this thing, do it carefully, for it giveth ease to the afflicted heart. It cannot injure the dead, neither can it profit him; but it giveth comfort to the living.”

THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN

I

Six long years, with their burden of foreign and domestic struggles, had elapsed since the Hegira; yet the recollections of Mecca, the Kaba, the Black Stone--in short, the memories of _home_--had remained ineradicably fixed in the minds of the Prophet and his flock. About half of Arabia, and approximately three-fourths of his wives, might now be pretty well under his dominion; but his heart often troubled him when he recalled his sins of omission in failing to fulfil the Lesser and Greater Pilgrimages--and, incidentally, the hateful truth that the intransigent Koreish still ruled the beloved city. Why, therefore, should he not undertake a pilgrimage during one of the sacred months? for surely, the mere fact that he himself had previously violated their sanctity could not rightly be held against him if he returned as a humble penitent. The Koreish, bound by adamant Arabian custom, would almost certainly allow him and his followers to make their sacrifices to the national religion; and, even in case his ancient foes should molest the journeying Moslems, perhaps--_perhaps_--he would be able to deal with them.

In a dream he imagined himself and his worshiping band going through the stiff ritual of pilgrimage: encircling the Kaba, slaughtering the sacrificial victims, and completing the other well-remembered ceremonies. The Moslems, after listening to his fervid narration of this vision, pulsated with desire to accompany him; and so, having taken a bath and donned the two-piece pilgrim garb, in February, 628, he set out, mounted on Al-Kaswa, at the head of some fifteen hundred votaries each of whom was armed with a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows. At one stage of the journey they halted and, uttering the plaintive cry “Labbeik! Labbeik! (Here am I, O Lord! Here am I!),” placed their curious ornaments around the necks of seventy votive camels. In the busy midst of these pious engagements, however, the Prophet did not neglect to dispatch a spy to report on the behavior of the Koreish; the envoy finally returned with the news that the Meccans were obviously distrustful of Mohammed’s peacefully religious intentions, and that, in very truth, a large body of armed Koreish was guarding the road that led to Mecca. “Their wives and little ones are with them,” said the spy, “and they have sworn to die rather than let thee pass,” adding the further detail that they were clothed in panthers’ skins--a symbol of their determination to fight like beasts in an effort to bar any advance. Mohammed and his people therefore decided to continue toward Mecca by a sinuous route that would lead them to the edge of the sacred city. At this juncture Al-Kaswa stopped short and refused to budge another inch. “She is weary,” the Moslems insisted; but the Prophet replied: “Nay, Al-Kaswa is not weary; but the same hand restraineth her as aforetime held back the elephant”--for, as became a loyal Arab, he had not forgotten how Arabia had been saved from the invader Abraha. He further declared that he would not march upon the city, for fear that the few Moslems who were still living there might chance to be harmed in the struggle that might take place; but it is also possible that he checked his advance because he had learnt that the Koreish, hearing of his own manœuver, had also deviated in such a way that they still blocked his path.

Very soon afterward, a Koreishite deputation approached to interview Mohammed. “I have no other design but to perform the pilgrimage of the Holy House,” he insisted, “and whosoever hindereth us therefrom, we shall fight against them.” This sally was met by the retort that the desperate Meccans “will not suffer this rabble of thine to approach the city.” A long, wrangling dispute followed in which blows came near being struck; and the only concession that the Prophet could obtain was the information that “this year he must go back; but in the year following he may come, and having entered Mecca then perform the pilgrimage.” Mohammed, who realized that his acquiescence to these instructions would irreparably harm his prestige, decided to send a counter delegation to Mecca. Omar was the first man requested to act in this capacity; but that fearless fighter begged off on the plea that he had no powerful relatives in the city to protect him against the Koreish, and, pointing to Othman--whose slight to Hafsa had not been forgotten--suggested that _he_ be the Moslem representative. Othman had excused himself from fighting at Bedr on the grounds that his wife, the Prophet’s own daughter, was ill; but, realizing that the influence of his family connections would protect him on this occasion, he readily consented to depart. His return was so long delayed that Mohammed feared he might have been treacherously slain, and a tensely dramatic scene took place. The Prophet, standing beneath an acacia tree and encircled by the entire number of his votaries, requested a solemn pledge that they would not turn their backs, but, if necessary, would fight till the last man dropped; the covenant was individually sealed as each man clasped Mohammed’s outstretched hand--when Othman suddenly appeared, entirely unharmed. Nevertheless, the Prophet was immensely pleased; indeed, he never ceased to refer to this auspicious event, which had symbolized the strength of the union of religious ecstasy and martial enthusiasm that dominated his willing slaves.

A treaty of peace was eventually drawn up. For ten years the Koreish caravans were to be unmolested, and during this same period extraneous clans could be converted either to Islam or to the faith--such as it was--of Mecca; in the following year, also, the Moslems were to be allowed to complete their pilgrimage, but this year they must return unedified and still burdened with their sins. Perhaps Mohammed swallowed this bitter medicine the more readily because previous experience had taught him that treaties were mere scraps of paper; yet he found it excessively irritating to endure the high-handed methods of the noted orator Suheil, ambassador for the Koreish. The Prophet, assuming as a matter of course that he himself should phrase the language of the covenant, began to dictate to Ali, who willingly served as a scribe, in this high-flown manner: “In the name of God, most gracious and merciful”--“Stop!” Suheil abruptly interrupted, “as for God, we know Him; but this new name, we know it not. Say, as we have always said, _In thy name, O God!_” “In thy name, O God,” Mohammed repeated, “These are the conditions of peace between Mohammed the Prophet of God and”--“Stop again!” commanded the imperturbable spokesman. “If thou wert what thou sayest, I had not taken up arms against thee. Write, as the custom is, thine own name and thy father’s name.” “Write, then,” said the amazed but ever tactful Prophet, “between Mohammed son of Abdallah, and Suheil son of Amr....” and so on until the end. The document was then duly witnessed by members of both factions; and Mohammed, firmly resolved to perform at least a modicum of his vows, shaved his head (or cut his hair; historians have not determined the facts about the matter), and, while all the Moslems treated their heads in a similar manner, he directed that the doomed camels should be sacrificed.

The unexpected outcome of this journey left many Moslems unsatisfied. Some of them--both the “Shavers” and the “Cutters”--had refused to part with their hair until the Prophet ordered them to do so; Omar, in particular, had so completely recovered the strength of his trembling knees that he threatened to head a renegade movement. Obviously, therefore, it was high time to produce a new message from on high. Even before the return journey was begun, the words “Inspiration hath descended on him” were eagerly repeated throughout the encampment, and a great crowd collected around the Prophet, who, standing upright on Al-Kaswa’s broad back, began to intone thus: “Verily, We have given unto thee an evident Victory,” adding, at the end of a tediously prolix mass of jubilantly phrased but wholly unintelligible rhetoric: “Now hath God verified unto His Apostle the Vision in truth; ye shall surely enter the Holy Temple, if it please God, in security, having your heads shaven and your hair cut. Fear ye not; for He knoweth that which ye know not.” As he concluded, one of the onlookers exclaimed, “What! is _this_ the Victory?” “Yes,” came the calm reply, “by Him in whose hand is my breath, it is a Victory.” And in fact, despite the Prophet’s muddy-mindedness on this occasion, there was much to justify his statement. Perhaps he realized that the peaceful outcome of his pompous expedition, which was certain to be noised over a large part of Arabia, would win him more converts than force had ever done--for had he not convinced the Koreish of his pacific intentions, and had _they_ not treated him with high honor? Thus, indeed, it turned out; various tribes, hoodwinked by highly colored accounts of the pilgrimage, at once sought to make alliances with Mohammed; and the result was that, during the next year, Islam grew as it had never grown before.

Two interesting incidents took place soon after Mohammed had returned to Medina. Abu Basir, a youthful acolyte of Islam who still lived in Mecca, became so restless under the domination of the Koreish that, after a series of bold assaults and hairbreadth escapes, he managed to reach Medina in safety; the Prophet was so much stirred by the lad’s tale of rash but admirable bravery that he commented, as if speaking to himself: “What a kindler of war, if he had but with him a body of adherents!” Abu Basir, encouraged by these words, at once organized a band of seventy similarly inclined young braves who, for the next few months, assaulted Koreishite caravans and killed the captives with so much gusto that Mohammed, at the humble request of the Meccans, finally felt constrained to command the robbers to cease from kindling war. The second event was of an entirely different sort. Some of the Medinese Jews, who had openly and loudly proclaimed their adherence to Islam, surreptitiously obtained several of the Prophet’s blessed hairs, and, after tying them into eleven knots around the branch of a palm-tree, lowered the evil invention into a well. Their sly and malignant design was soon rewarded: Mohammed grew feeble, his mind became afflicted with stranger hallucinations than ever before, he neglected his devotions, and he even showed indifference toward his wives. But Gabriel shortly revealed the cause of his malady; the well was examined, the necromantic knots were loosed, and the Prophet, thus freed from the voodooistic spell, experienced a lively recrudescence of his manifold talents.