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.”
