The Jewel Of Medina Read online

  Now, though, I wondered: Had al-Lah changed my destiny for me already, by switching my engagement from Safwan to Muhammad? My purdah would make sense then. If I were the future wife of God’s Prophet, I would be much more valuable, and more vulnerable—especially with men like Abu Sufyan skulking around, looking for every opportunity to hurt Muhammad. If I lost my virginity, even to rape, not only would I be sullied but Muhammad would be, also.

  I slumped onto my bed, feeling as though stones filled my body. Married to Muhammad! It couldn’t be. He was older than my father, much older than Hamal in comparison to Fazia-turned-Jamila. But then, why was he allowed to visit me during my purdah, when all other men were forbidden? Suspicion was a heavy hand squeezing my chest, stealing my breath.

  “Safwan,” I whispered. “Come and rescue me. Hurry, before it’s too late”

  After the death of Mu’tim, I noticed changes in the shifting sands of my father’s face, in the set of his mouth. At night he would sit in the courtyard with my mother and Qutailah and talk while I, long banished to bed, hovered in the shadows and sifted the menacing words from their susurrant tones.

  “Torture,” my father would murmur. “Assassination.” And my mother and Qutailah would exclaim, then cry when he spoke of leaving Mecca.

  “Al-Lah will take care of us,” my father would say. “There is nothing to cry about. Nothing to fear.”

  One night, as I lay in bed under the weight of their words, a woman’s shriek pulled me to my window. In the thin light cast by the crescent moon I spied four men dragging my beloved neighbor Raha, she of the pomegranates and twinkling eyes, out of her house, slapping and punching her as she struggled.

  “Where is your precious Prophet now, you Muslim whore?” a man said with a coarse laugh. In the starlight I could just see the face of Abu Sufyan, whose sweat glistened like beads of grease in every fold and crease of fat, and of his companion Umar, whose pocked face seemed to writhe with hatred as he pressed his hand to Raha’s mouth. I jumped up and down and pounded the wall with my fist, spurred by my speeding pulse.

  “Raha!” I shrieked. “Let her go, you Qurayshi dogs!” I ran to the kitchen, Raha’s shrieks ringing in my ears, and grabbed a knife, then flung open the front door—but my mother caught my wrist and held me there.

  “Where do you think you are going?” she cried.

  “Raha!” I said, trying to yank myself free. “Abu Sufyan is beating her up.” My father grabbed his robe and raced out the door, grappling with his sword as he went. My mother slammed the door behind him, then turned to me with flaring nostrils.

  “And what did you plan to do once you got there? Let those men look at you, or worse?” she demanded.

  “I wanted to rescue Raha—”

  “With what? A kitchen knife? Those men have swords, A’isha. Swords! They could cut you into pieces, or worse.”

  “Yaa ummi, I can fight. Safwan taught me how. See?” I swished my knife—impressively, I thought. “Let me go to her, ummi. They’ll kill her if we don’t save her.”

  “Sword-fighting in the streets? Do not be ridiculous. You are a girl, not a boy. You cannot save anyone. That is the task of men.”

  “But what about Raha? What about abi? I saw four men, and there’s only one of him.”

  “Your father would lose his life before he would accept your help,” she said. Her eyes were fierce, like a wild animal’s. “You know what those men would do to you. Then your family would be disgraced. Is that what you want?”

  “But Abu Sufyan—”

  “Abu Sufyan is the reason you are in purdah now!” she shouted. Her face had turned as red as if she were strangling. “He was bragging to everyone in Mecca that he was going to deflower you. He said you had teased him with your red hair.”

  The thought of that greasy-bearded goat touching me made me feel as if rats were scuttling all over my skin. I ran to my bedroom window to urge my father on in his fight for Raha, hoping to see him knock Abu Sufyan to the dust. What I found made me scream: my father on his back and Abu Sufyan standing over him, pressing the point of his sword into my father’s cheek. Blood oozed around the blade. In the background I saw Umar tying a gag across Raha’s mouth and shoving her into a wagon.

  Abu Sufyan looked up and saw me in my window, shrieking and jumping up and down. He leered and licked his thick lips. “Yaa Abu Bakr, your lovely little fire-haired daughter has come to say good-bye.”

  “Yaa abi, let me come out!” I cried, glaring at Abu Sufyan. “I’ll save you and Raha.”

  “Yes, let her come out,” Abu Sufyan said, baring his teeth. “I will warm myself in those flames of hers, and your life will be spared.”

  His foe distracted, my father rolled away from Abu Sufyan and leapt to his feet, snatching up his sword. Abu Sufyan lunged at him with his blade but my father stepped nimbly to the side before striking back at him. They exchanged blows until Abu Sufyan slashed my father’s forehead, sending blood gushing into his eyes. As he wiped it away Abu Sufyan climbed onto his horse, and he and Umar rode away with Raha in their possession and my screams pelting their ears.

  My mother ran outside carrying a strip of cloth to bandage my father’s head. “I am unharmed, A’isha,” abi called. He and my mother approached Raha’s house, its broken door agape like a crying mouth, and tended to her husband who lay in the front yard, bleeding in the dirt, his sword in his hand.

  “Raha,” I moaned. “I could have saved you, I know I could. Oh, Raha, I’m so sorry.”

  My stomach clenched like a fist, folding me in half. I dropped to my bed, curled like a question around myself, soaking my pillow with great, hot sobs. Poor Raha, always so jolly and as gentle as a lamb, filled with love for everyone. What would become of her? I’d heard my father talk about Believers getting whipped—women, feeble shaykhs—their lives seeping away through their wounds. I pictured Raha’s dimpling cheeks, the spark in her eyes as she’d slipped me forbidden sticks of honey and adorned my hair with blossoms. What were they doing to her now? Her cries echoed in my head. I pulled my pillow over my ears, but nothing helped.

  I could have stopped those men if my mother hadn’t interfered. Fighting with a real blade couldn’t be much different from fighting with a wooden sword, as I’d done so many times with Safwan. I would have sent that dung-breathed Abu Sufyan’s head rolling in the dirt, and the mean-faced Umar would have run whimpering home like a whipped dog.

  Why, al-Lah? Why would He let this happen to Raha, who loved Him so much? Wasn’t He supposed to protect us? Maybe He was so busy, he hadn’t noticed Raha’s cries.

  My arms and legs still hummed with the longing to run to Raha and free her. That energy was God’s; I felt it in the blood that sang though my veins. He had heard Raha’s cries, and He’d called me to fight for her. But I couldn’t.

  You cannot save anyone. That is the task of men.

  My mother’s rebuke stung me more sharply than it had the first time. In my mother’s world, being female meant being helpless. Powerless. Because what else was a sword but power? In her world, women weren’t supposed to fight, only to submit. They weren’t supposed to plan, but to let others plan for them. They weren’t supposed to live, only to serve.

  I pulled myself up to my windowsill and peered into the stars, imagining they were the one thousand and one eyes of al-Lah. When He looked at me, what did He see? Inferiority, a shrunken soul, a light that shone more feebly than that of a man? Or did He see what I felt—a bright burning, like the bush He’d inhabited the day He’d revealed Himself to Moses? Muhammad, who knew the stories of the People of the Book, had told me the tale, how the bush had burned but never expired, with a fire that breathed and spoke and lived, like the fire that burned in my breast right now.

  Raha was gone, to be rescued not by me, but by men. Her husband had lain on the ground but he was standing now, leaning on my father, alive and not taken, his sword in his hand. Raha had neither the sword nor the skills with which to defend herself. Now she was a p
risoner of Quraysh, completely vulnerable to their will, while her husband, who could fight back, remained free.

  “Raha,” I whispered. “If only I could save you now.” Tears filled my eyes again, but I blinked them away. As a warrior would have done.

  Imprisoned in my room, I could save no one. My mother had spoken the truth in that respect. But I wouldn’t be trapped here forever. Someday I’d get married, either to Safwan, who would be my side-by-side warrior in the desert, or to Muhammad, who would teach me to use a sword if I asked him. I’d make it seem like a game, and he’d play it with me in his courtyard.

  Either way, I was not going to live my life in fear and submission to the whims of men like Abu Sufyan. Not to be able to fight for myself, or the people I loved, would be the worst kind of slavery. Never again would I watch, helpless, while those Qurayshi bullies threatened my people. I’d become the best fighter, male or female, Mecca had ever seen. If Abu Sufyan attacked us then, he’d have to defeat A’isha first. And that he would never do.

  HE WAITS FOR YOU

  MECCA THEN MEDINA, 622–623

  Muhammad’s adopted son, Zayd, found Raha the next day tied to a tree and bleeding all over.

  “They tried to force me to denounce the Prophet,” she told my mother on our balcony a few nights later, her soft voice quavering, as I listened from the ladder below. “I wanted to curse them, but my mouth would not form the words.”

  Umar and Abu Sufyan had taken turns at the whip, threatening to kill her if she wouldn’t obey them. When she’d passed out, unable to bear the pain anymore, they’d left her, assuming she was dead or would be soon.

  Ummi sucked in her breath, then spoke in a hushed, urgent voice. “Did they—are you—”

  “My honor is intact, thank al-Lah,” Raha said. She paused. When she spoke again, she sounded tiny and far away. “But to my shame, I had to be examined by a midwife before I could return home. My husband’s family demanded it. If I had been raped, they would have insisted he divorce me.”

  I gasped in outrage at her words—why should she be punished for others’ evil deeds?—then clamped my hand over my mouth. But it was too late: My mother’s head snapped around before I could duck out of sight and in a moment she was leaping up from her seat and shooing me down the ladder, following close behind.

  “You are supposed to be in bed, not listening to tales for adult ears,” she muttered as she pushed me along to my bedroom. “But I am glad you heard Raha’s story. Maybe now you will be thankful that we keep you inside. Raha is fortunate, but those men would have ruined you.”

  Like the lavender plant she loved so much, the delicate Raha was a hardy survivor. One week after her abduction she loaded up all her household goods and led her husband to Yathrib, the Jewish city to the north where Muhammad’s distant relations had agreed to harbor him and his followers. As I watched their slow retreat from my window I swallowed my sorrow by the mouthful, reminding myself that I was a warrior now. Yet as her little caravan moved away from me, diminishing with each step, my chest tightened as though my heart were shrinking also. May al-Lah curse that villain Abu Sufyan for chasing my Raha away! Yet, as it turned out, we would join her very soon.

  The next evening Ali pounded on our door, yelling for Muhammad. When I arrived at the entryway, my mother was holding the door open and pressing a hand to her throat. Ali burst past her with eyes like shooting stars, waving his arms at Muhammad, who had just come in from my father’s mosque.

  “Yaa cousin, Abu Sufyan and his friends are sending their sons to murder you tonight,” he said between gasps. “One youth from each tribe in Mecca, so no tribe will bear the blame for your death.”

  My mother cried out, causing my heart to miss a beat. I ran to her side, but she shook her head and told me to go to my room. Instead I turned to Muhammad, whose face was as pale as if he were already dead, but he only nodded to Ali and headed with the men toward the majlis. I made sure my mother wasn’t watching me, then followed them. After more than two years’ purdah, I knew no one would bother to tell me what was happening. But I had become a very stealthy spy.

  I listened in silence, crouching outside the majlis curtain, while the men devised their plan. Since the assassins would strike tonight, they’d have to work quickly. Muhammad needed to get out of Mecca as soon as possible, and he’d have to stay away a long time—forever, perhaps.

  “Al-Lah has made His intentions clear,” Muhammad said to abi. “I will leave for Yathrib as soon as it is safe.”

  “And I will escort you,” my father said. “Not a single hair on your head will be harmed, al-Lah willing.”

  “Yaa Abu Bakr, I am more capable of protecting him than you are,” Ali said. “Wouldn’t it be better, cousin, if I escorted you to Yathrib?”

  “God has other work in mind for you, Ali,” Muhammad said.

  My father borrowed some clothing from one of his servants and cloaked Muhammad in it, disguising him, then hurried him away to a cave outside town. Meanwhile, Ali wrapped himself in Muhammad’s red robe and lay on his bed, pretending to sleep. I, Asma, and my mother and her sister-wives went to Muhammad’s home—me bouncing in my saddle all the way across town, thrilling at the adventure and the fresh air. We climbed the stairs to a bedroom and watched from the windows as a gang of men crept toward the house. When they banged on the door, we stuck our heads outside as Muhammad had told us to.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Muhammad’s wife Sawdah called in a calm voice, although she gripped her Evil-Eye amulet as though it held her rooted to the earth. “The Prophet is sleeping. He will be ready enough to see you in the morning.”

  Unwilling to force their way inside and kill Muhammad while women were in the house, they waited outside the door, murmuring and watching him sleep—or so they thought. In the morning, when abi and Muhammad had had plenty of time to get away, Ali stepped outside, dropped the robe, and whipped out his sword, scattering the sons of Quraysh like so many flies. When the assassins were gone, we women went home and packed our belongings. The time had come for us to leave Mecca.

  We fled on a moonless night, cloaked by a darkness as close as the grave. Tears choked our whispered good-byes to our motherland, the city of our ancestors, the home of our births and our blessed temple, the Ka’ba. We carried almost nothing with us, just food and water and a few clothes. Leaving our dirty dishes behind. Tossing our family histories into the fire. What good had our relatives done for us? We had the umma— the Believers—and Muhammad. Our caravan included me; Muhammad’s daughters Fatima and Umm Kulthum; his wife, Sawdah; my mother and Qutailah; my brother Abd al-Rahman, and my sister. We left behind my father’s wife Alia, who refused our God. She pressed her idol Manat between her palms as she watched us slip away. She would pray for us, she said, that we would realize our error before it was too late.

  “You’d better pray for yourself,” I muttered, but my mother wept and clung to her until Qutailah pulled them apart.

  I would have cried, also, except for my resolve to become a warrior. Mecca was the only home I had ever known, and even in my purdah I’d dreamt of her colorful market, her craggy mountains, her enormous, cube-shaped Ka’ba crowded inside and out with scary, beautiful carved gods. Would I ever see my beloved city again? Would I ever see my friend Nadida, who could turn her long face and wide mouth into likenesses of the Ka’ba’s idols, making us laugh so hard our sides ached? Would Safwan’s family join us, or would they remain in Mecca and marry him to someone else? I looked back at the city as we rode away, yearning for a glimpse of my friends, but it was late and the houses of Mecca slept as if assassins had never roamed her streets.

  We rode north to Yathrib, the Jewish town, where the Arabic tribes living there—Aws and Khazraj—had agreed to offer refuge to Muhammad and his followers. The journey was long, through desert sands so deep we had to place blankets before our camels’ feet so they wouldn’t sink to their knees. Over vast, desolate plains of jagged black rock and desert wilderness where a sing
le misstep could break a bone. Through forests of palms so dense we had to shout to keep from losing one another. Beside the foreboding ridge of Mount Subh rising like a massive djinni between us and the Red Sea. Onward we pressed, to our Prophet and my father and a new life, free, we hoped, of fear.

  At the break of our twelfth day we arrived, me weeping and rubbing my eyes against the onslaught of green. Green glowed in bawdy profusion over the daisy-strewn fields, the hills blaring with lushness and lavender, the promenade of grasses and shrubs and trees. It dripped from delicate green limbs dangling unripe pomegranates, from gnarled and woody acacias, and, in whispers, from pale-leafed olives dappling the terrain with dabs of blue and gray like shade, relieving the eyes from the emerald glare. Against the ring of rust-red hills surrounding the town on three sides, green leapt up as if alive. From my camel’s hump I could feel the leaf-kissed air moving like a cool moist cloth across my brow as I inhaled the fresh clean scents of petal and blade and springs gilding the morning.

  This was Yathrib. Or, as Muhammad called it, al-Medina, “The City.” Some city! As we entered the humble arched gate of stone and mud, a different aroma greeted us along with the bleats and moans of sheep and cattle. I gasped and covered my nose against the tang of manure, sharp as a slap, rank enough to sting my eyes. Flies whirled like sandstorms in constant frenzy, clustering in the corners of our eyes, blocking my view of the homes in all their mud-bricked squalor and the rotted grins of farmers in grimy clothes. My ummi’s eyes brimmed with tears as we rode down the single, sorry street.

  In only a few days my mother was fretting: Why had we ever moved? Mecca had its problems these days, but compared to Medina it was Paradise. Where, in this town, was the bustling market offering everything we could ever want? Where were the shops and the colorful caravans? Where were the crowds of people from faraway lands in their strange costumes, speaking in tongues like music? We missed our majestic Mount Hira, stony and black as a thunderhead, and our families and friends.