Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

84 t CHAPTER FOUR
Note: Aisha, by all reports Muhammad’s favorite wife, had an interesting
history. She is the eyewitness who stands, despite her gender
and age—she was only about eighteen when Muhammad died—behind
many of the reports of the sayings and deeds (hadith) that form
the core not only of the Prophet’s biography but of the very substance
of Islamic law. Her life with Muhammad is embroidered with a great
deal of fancy, but there is a strong consensus that Quran 24:11–20,
which reprimands the Muslims for believing in a scandalous libel,
was about her and an incident that was thought—falsely, as the
Quran itself makes clear—to have compromised her reputation.
Among those alleged to have thought her guilty was Ali, Muhammad’s
cousin and confidant. If true, it would go far toward explaining
Aisha’s later antipathy toward Ali—she actually accompanied troops
into battle against him—in the great political skirmishes for the leadership
of the umma between 556 and 661.
It is difficult to make generalizations about Muhammad’s
eleven-odd wives and perhaps two concubines. Many of the relationships
seem to have been political, some compassionate, some,
perhaps Aisha and Zaynab, affairs of the heart. At Medina, after
Aisha, Muhammad married Hafsa (his companion Umar’s widowed
daughter); Zaynab bint Khuzayma (already twice a widow);
Umm Salama (another Muslim widow); Zaynab (his adopted son
Zayd’s divorced wife); Juwayriyya (daughter of a defeated Bedouin
chieftain; perhaps a hostage or a spoil of war, or both); Umm
Habiba (widow of an Abyssinian émigré and daughter of the powerful
Quraysh leader Abu Sufyan); Safiyya (widow of the Jewish
ruler of Khaibar, killed by the Muslims in 628; she converted to
Islam); and Maymuna (sister-in-law of Abbas, another powerful
Quraysh leader). In addition, we know of two concubines: the
Jewess Rayhana of the Qurayza, who became Muhammad’s property
when the tribe surrendered in 627, and Miryam, the Coptic
“gift” who bore him a son, Ibrahim, who died in infancy.