But despite the minor frictions between members of the Prophet’s household, the life of Medina was one of peace and placidity. The excitement and the terror of my youth were replaced by a pleasant monotony of quiet days, each little different from the one before or the one to come. It was utterly safe and utterly boring, and some part of my adventurous spirit longed for a return to a time when every day was a matter of life and death, when the future was covered in mists and clouds and my heart beat loudly in the thrilling anticipation of change.
And then one cold winter day, when my twenties had at last given way to my thirties, the golden age of Islam ended with a single act of violence. Umar was standing at the head of prayers in the Masjid when a Persian slave sought revenge for the conquest of his nation. He rushed the Caliph and stabbed him viciously in the gut, before taking his own life.
Umar was mortally wounded by the assassin, but he lived long enough to appoint a small council of believers to choose a successor. As he lay dying in great agony, I saw him look up and smile and I heard him whisper something that I did not catch. When I turned to your father, Zubayr, who had leaned close to Umar and caught his words, he was pale.
“He said he sees his daughter holding out her hand,” Zubayr recounted, and I felt a chill go through me as I remembered the stories of the little girl he had buried alive during his days as a pagan. Umar raised his hand weakly and I watched him curl his fingers as he took hold of something I could not see. And then the Caliph of Islam, the most powerful and noble leader I had seen next to my own husband, passed away to his eternal reward.
That night, Umar was buried alongside my husband and my father, and that day, I erected a curtain inside my apartment, separating their graves from the tiny space where I lived.
The council of believers had no time to grieve, for the fate of the empire was at stake. After three days of secret consultation, the elders of Medina emerged and proclaimed the sweet-hearted Uthman to be the next Commander of the Believers.
It was a decision that made political sense, since Uthman was a prominent leader of Quraysh and could be expected to keep the nobles of the far-flung empire in check. But in the end it would prove to be a disastrous mistake, one that would lead to the horror of blood flowing through the streets of Medina.
6 Medina-AD 656
The first several years of Uthman’s rule were unremarkable. The conquests of Islam continued unabated. The Muslim armies pushed west out of Egypt and seized control of most of the Mediterranean coastline. On the eastern front, our soldiers pushed through the dying remnants of the Persian empire to seize the Kerman province, where a race of fierce tribesmen called Baluchis reigned. To the north, Armenia and the mountains of the Caucasus came under our dominion. Following my husband’s commandment to seek knowledge even if you must go to China, Uthman sent an envoy to the Emperor Gaozong and invited him to accept Islam. The Chinese overlord politely declined to convert but was shrewd enough to open trade with the Muslim empire and allowed our people to preach and propagate our faith inside his borders.
Perhaps most significantly in the realm of international relations, Uthman supervised the building of the first Muslim navy. His kinsman Muawiya, who had become the highly respected governor of Syria, soon led a naval attack on the Byzantine forces off the coast of Lebanon. The Muslims, filled with the brash confidence of decades of success, rammed the Byzantine ships, bringing their own vessels so close to the opposing fleets that their masts were almost touching. And then our warriors leaped across decks and engaged in ferocious hand-to-hand combat with the Greek sailors, using their fiercely honed skills from urban warfare on the ocean.
The Byzantine marines were accustomed to shooting at their enemies from a distance with arrows and launching flaming pellets at rival ships, but they had never fought in this fashion, with ships used merely as bridges for foot soldiers. Their confusion quickly devolved into chaos, and the sea was stained crimson with the blood of imperial sailors. Muawiya emerged triumphant, his prestige rising like the sun among the Muslims. In later years, we would learn that the victory could have been even greater, for the emperor himself had been on one of the Byzantine ships that Muawiya’s men had boarded. The lord of Constantinople had escaped certain death only by disguising himself as a common sailor and jumping into the sea, where he was rescued by his men and rushed to safety on the island of Sicily.
Uthman continued and expanded upon his predecessor’s military success, but it was in the spiritual realm that he left his greatest legacy. As the caliphate continued to grow by leaps and bounds and the number of Muslims went from thousands to millions, the need to present the standard written copies of the holy Qur’an became pressing. The Holy Book had never been compiled into one document during the Prophet’s lifetime, primarily since he was illiterate, as were a great many of the Arab tribesmen, and symbols on a parchment were meaningless to them. Because of this stark reality, Muslims committed the Qur’an to memory and relayed its teachings orally. This system worked well in the early years of our faith, but as we came into contact with highly advanced civilizations where literacy was the norm, the need to present the Word of God to the new believers in written format became a priority.
My father had kept a private copy of the Qur’an in his study, one that he had compiled after the Garden of Death, where many of the Companions who had memorized the entire Qur’an had been killed. Before his death, Abu Bakr had passed along his personal compilation to Umar, who had subsequently left it to his daughter Hafsa. When Uthman learned that she still had the folio in her possession, he asked her to submit it to him for verification. And then he summoned those in Medina who were known to have memorized the entire Qur’an, forming a committee in which I and my sister-wife Umm Salama participated. We were given Hafsa’s codex, which was a jumbled collection of verses written on parchments and palm leaves, and asked to verify its accuracy. Once it had been confirmed by all those in the holy city who knew the Qur’an by heart, Uthman ordered copies of the authorized text to be made and sent to the capitals of every province of the empire. And thus he ensured that the Word of God would not be changed according to the desires of men, as the Prophet had claimed to have happened with the scriptures of the Jews and Christians. And in doing so, Uthman fulfilled the prophecy of God in a verse of the Qur’an itself: Truly We have sent down this Reminder, and truly We will preserve it.
I have often thought that Uthman would have been fortunate if he had passed away shortly after issuing the standard written text of God’s Word. He would have been remembered purely as a man of great wisdom and vision, whose life had been of great service to the cause of Islam.
But, alas, this was not meant to be. His memory has been tainted by the actions of evil men and fools. And I grieve to say that I count myself among them.
AS THE YEARS OF Uthman’s reign grew, so did the wealth of the Muslim empire-and the ambitions of its leaders. Uthman had increasingly relied on members of his own clan, the Umayyads, to administer the business of the rapidly expanding state. Some of his kinsmen, like Muawiya, were efficient and respected governors who were loved by their subjects. But as the empire grew ever wider and the supervision by Medina became more difficult, local politicians from among the Quraysh, many of whom had embraced Islam only when Mecca fell and they had no choice, became increasingly free to rule as they wished.