The Messenger of God held Ali’s right hand aloft and called out loudly, his black eyes shining with a frightening intensity.

“Hear, O Muslims and do not forget. Whosoever holds me as his Mawla, know that Ali is also his Mawla. O Allah, befriend those who befriend Ali, and be the enemy of whosoever is hostile to him!”

It was a powerful pronouncement and one unlike any I had ever heard my husband say. He had clearly exalted Ali in a way that he had never done for any other man among his followers. And yet the words themselves were unclear and open to interpretation, for the word Mawla means many things in Arabic, including master, friend, lover, and even slave. But whatever my husband meant, it was clear that he was tired of the grumbling about the young man who had fathered his grandchildren and wanted to put an end to the cheap gossip about his closest relative.

Whether Muhammad intended anything more in that moment than to remind us to respect and honor his cousin would become a matter of passionate debate in the years to come. And one day the argument would devolve into open warfare.

44

Several months after we returned from the Pilgrimage, the Messenger entered my house one day when I was sewing. I looked up from the patch that I was applying to my old cloak to see him gazing at me serenely, a soft smile on his lips.

“Is it not Maymuna’s day?” I asked, referring to the most recent of my husband’s wives, Maymuna bint al-Harith, an impoverished divorcée whom he had married shortly after the truce with Mecca. She was a kindly woman in her thirties who was always seeking ways to raise money to free slaves, as she believed that no man should be a slave to anyone except God. Maymuna was an aunt of Khalid ibn al-Waleed, the Sword of Allah, and many believed that she had influenced her nephew to abandon Mecca and defect to the Prophet’s side.

The Prophet had continued his policy of spending one day with each of his wives to ensure that they were all treated equally. Today was dedicated to Maymuna, and my husband was normally meticulous about spending all of his allotted time with the wife whose turn had come, so I was surprised to see him in my room.

“I just wanted to look at you,” he said simply, but there was something in his voice that worried me. It was the tone of a man who was about to leave on a long journey and was unsure when he would see his loved ones again.

The Messenger walked toward me slowly. He looked weak and tired, and I sat him beside me on a small cushion. He smiled warmly as I ran my hand through his black curls, which were now peppered with strands of silver.

As I looked into his eyes, I sensed he wanted to say something, and yet he was holding himself back.

“What is it?” I asked, despite my growing apprehension about whatever it was that he was hiding from me.

“You will live long, insha-Allah,” he said rather elliptically. “But there are times that I wish you would have passed away before me.”

I was shocked at these words. My husband wanted me to die before he did?

“Why would you say that?” I asked rather sharply, not bothering to hide my hurt.

The Prophet ran his hand across my face, like a blind man trying to recognize someone’s features. Or a traveler who was leaving and wanted to imprint a memory onto the tips of his finger.

“So that I could pray over your body and ask forgiveness for you.”

I gave him a surprised and perhaps ungracious look, as my pride managed to twist his words into some kind of insult. But in the years to come, there would be many times that I wished that I had indeed died that day, and that his blessing could have protected me from the Day of Judgment, when the true burden of my guilt will be weighed by God.

But alas, that was not my destiny, nor his. The Messenger of God took no offense at the rather sharp glance I had given him. He smiled again and rose to his feet to leave…and then collapsed to the floor!

“My love!” I cried out in shock, forgetting to be angry at his enigmatic words. The Messenger had fallen as if his knees had been cut from beneath him, and he lay curled at my feet like a baby in a crib.

I quickly bent over and touched his forehead. He was burning up.

And then I felt his body shake with tremors, but they were not the unearthly convulsions of the Revelation; they were the very human shivers of a man consumed by fever.

FOR THE NEXT THREE nights, we gathered around the Messenger as he lay in Maymuna’s bed. The Mothers had been at his side nonstop since the moment I had cried out for help and Ali and Abbas had arrived to aid their kinsman. We had kept a vigil into the late hours, applying cold rags to his forehead to lower the fever and feeding him bowls of soup and broth to give him strength. But the days passed and my husband’s state only worsened.

“It will pass…” I would reassure the other Mothers. “It always does…He is the Messenger of God…the angels will heal him…”

But even I had difficulty believing my own words.

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT of the Messenger’s illness, a council of his inner circle gathered at his bedside to debate the future of Islam. With the Prophet incapacitated and steadily deteriorating, the future of the entire Ummah was at stake. The fragile unity that the Messenger had forged among the Arabs by the sheer strength of his personality was now on the verge of collapsing. Rumors were coming that some of the Bedouin tribes were considering renouncing their pacts of alliance with Medina. And the Byzantine empire was allegedly massing its forces for an invasion.

While these were the kinds of political and military threats the Muslims were accustomed to facing, there was a more troubling development. A group of pretenders to the mantle of prophecy was rising, each trying to steal some of Muhammad’s success to enhance his own glory. A rogue named Musaylima had proclaimed himself a new prophet of Allah. He had written to my husband in the months past calling on his “brother” to recognize Musaylima as his fellow Messenger of God and suggesting that the two should divide the world between them. Before he had fallen ill, Muhammad sent a response to Musaylima branding him a liar and proclaiming that all the world belonged to God alone. But the false prophet was undeterred and had begun to raise a following from among the superstitious clan of Bani Hanifa on the eastern edge of the Najd desert. And a woman of the Bani Tamim named Sajah, a kahina who was rumored to be versed in dark magic, had similarly proclaimed herself a prophetess and was busy gathering a small but fanatically loyal group of disciples. Had the Messenger not been confined to his sickbed, the defeat of these new threats to Islam would have been his priority.

The council of believers had arrived, hoping to find the Messenger in a rare moment of lucidity in which he could guide them as to how to run the affairs of state. The small band consisted of my father, Umar, Uthman, Ali, Talha and Zubayr, along with Muawiya, a new member of the Messenger’s inner circle. The son of Abu Sufyan had emigrated to the oasis after the surrender of Mecca and had been chosen by the Messenger as his personal scribe, an honor that had formerly belonged to Ali. Muawiya’s sudden rise to prominence in the community had startled some Muslims, but my husband had wisely realized that an overture to this scion of the Quraysh would accelerate the process of reconciliation. And the honey-tongued young man had quickly proven his skills as a politician, winning over skeptics with gifts and sweet words. Umar in particular had taken a liking to the former prince of Mecca and had taken him under his wing. Muawiya’s star was rising rapidly in the heavens of Islam, and it appeared that the only one who remained suspicious of his intentions was Ali, which was perhaps understandable.