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.”
[Illustration: IX]