Tears in her eyes, she turned to the elderly rabbi Husayn ibn Sallam, himself a member of the Qaynuqa, but one who had been granted express permission to remain because of his cordial relationship with Muhammad.
“What will happen to them?” she asked softly.
Ibn Sallam wiped his nose on his sleeve. His eyes were red but dry, and she guessed that he had no more tears left to shed.
“They will go north to Syria,” he said quietly. “Our people still have a few settlements that survive under Byzantine rule. They will find refuge there.”
“But you will stay.” It was not a question, and there was no hint of reproach in her voice, but the rabbi flinched as if he had been struck.
“I have to.”
She had not expected this as a response.
“I don’t understand.”
Ibn Sallam sighed heavily.
“The sands of time are shifting, but I fear that our people do not see it,” he said as if he had read her thoughts. “The Bani Qaynuqa let their pride blind them to the new reality. I will stay and counsel the Bani Nadir and the Bani Qurayza to flow with the stream of history, not against it.”
Safiya watched the lengthy train of her brethren pass outside the hills of Mecca toward an unknown destiny in the north.
“Do you really think our people would risk further confrontation with Muhammad?” she asked wearily. She could not bear to witness this exodus again. “Why would they be so foolish?”
The rabbi smiled sadly.
“Our people take great pride in the fall of Masada,” he said, referring to the fortress where Jewish zealots had killed themselves and their families rather than surrender to Roman hordes. “I fear that our hearts secretly long to relive it. To die in glorious sacrifice against an invincible foe.”
Ibn Sallam turned his eyes away from the heart wrenching sight of his tribe vanishing forever into the sands of time.
“May God protect us from the folly of our own dreams.”
And with that, he walked away, head bowed. Safiya could hear the mournful tune of an old Hebrew prayer on his lips, one commemorating the tragic destruction of the Temple on Tisha b’Au.
Safiya watched as the last of the camels left the precincts of the city, taking a proud people away from everything they knew. She gazed at the yellow walls of the fortress that had housed the Bani Qaynuqa for hundreds of years. Safiya knew that by nightfall the abandoned quarter would be looted, and the empty houses would soon be occupied by Muslim families. Within a few months every trace of the ancient Jewish tribe would be lost and forgotten.
She walked back home slowly, wondering how long it would be before she, too, would be forced to look forward, even when her heart cried like a child to go back, to cling to a past that was no more tangible than a mirage.
Her mother had said before she died that home is where the heart is. Safiya’s heart had been made from the dust of Medina, and it deserved to return to the dust from which it had been born.
Safiya made a silent prayer to God, Elohim, Allah, Deus, or whatever it was He preferred to be called:
Even if you wish to take me away from this city, let it be that one day I will return. However the winds of history may blow, let them guide the ship of my destiny home. Lord of the Worlds, King of the Heavens, let me die where I have lived. Amen.
15
While the Muslims and Jews came close to war in Medina, the Meccan army was regrouping under the watchful eyes of Hind. History follows the deeds of men, but often ignores the women who influenced momentous events, for good or for ill. It is time for me, Abdallah, to reveal more about the queen of Mecca. Many know her terrible crimes, but few understand the woman who perpetrated them. It is not easy to descend into such dark depths. But I have seen a shameful hint of that darkness within myself, so perhaps it is only fitting that I do so for Hind.
Ever since their defeat at Badr, Hind had encouraged the Meccan soldiers to conduct regular drills to sharpen their skills. A second defeat was unthinkable, and Hind had promised that any man who sulked back home bearing the flag of loss would be torn to shreds by the women of city before he entered its holy precincts.
Not that she considered Mecca holy. Hind had long ago given up believing in any divine force, plural or singular. The last time she had prayed was when she was six years old. Her mother was dying of a terrible wasting disease, and Hind had watched in grief as her beautiful face had collapsed in on itself until all that was left was a skull barely covered by flesh. The night her father, Utbah, had told her that her mother was leaving them, she had run to the Kaaba. Having stolen the sacred key from her father’s den, she had broken the ancient taboo and had climbed inside, falling prostrate before the crimson idol of Hubal. The little girl had stayed in that position until sunrise, her forehead pressed against the cold marble floor of the House. During that time, Hind had prayed to every god whose icon stood in the sanctuary, begging the deity to spare her mother. She had cried out to the daughters of God-Allat, Uzza, and Manat. The Phoenician goddess Astarte. Nergal, the angry god of war. The sun god Shams. Abgal, the lord of camel drivers. Munaf, the goddess of fertility. Aglibol, the Palmyran god of the crescent moon. The snake god Wadd. Qawm, the Nabatean protector of caravans. Even Isaf and Naila, the lovers who had defiled the Kaaba with their unbridled lust.
And finally, when she had named every god she knew and had heard no response, she had cried out to Allah, the High God who created the heavens and the earth before retiring to his Throne beyond the stars. Surely the One who had made the gods themselves, who had created life and death, surely He could save her mother.
But when the sun rose, Hind felt the gentle hand of her father, lifting her from her prostration. Her mother had passed away in her sleep, he said.
Hind had not wept. She had gone home and played with her dolls, apparently accepting the tragic news with the stoic dignity that was required of a great house of Quraysh.
But the tears that she did not release remained locked inside her, eating away at her heart like a worm at a corpse. The pain inside her breast became like a poison that ate away at her soul, building over the years until there was nothing left inside her but anger.
The gods had abandoned her. And so she abandoned them. A fair trade, all in all.
Over the years, Hind had never paid much attention to the stupid cult of her people, who continued to delude themselves that there was some higher order behind life. Hind had learned that night her mother died that there was no meaning, no purpose to existence. Love was an illusion, a painful trick of an uncaring cosmos. Joy a fleeting moment, lost in the wind. The only thing that was real was the body, for it alone felt pleasure and pain. So she concluded that the purpose of life, if there was any, was to heighten pleasure and deaden pain.
And thus her life had become an endless quest for ecstasy, for stretching the body’s ability to experience pleasure to its limit. She surrounded herself with amusements to enhance her senses. The most harmonious music to delight her ears. The softest clothes to caress her skin. She had tasted every wine and every rare meat. And she had spent a lifetime exploring the forbidden pleasures of the flesh, with both men and women and with many partners, often at the same time. She had sworn an oath that if there were any pleasure to be plucked out of life, she would experience it all before the darkness took her and she remembered no more.
The gods of Mecca played no role in her life except as a source of income to support her sensual lifestyle. If there were any part of her that still believed in them after her mother died, it vanished two years later when her father invited a wandering kahin, a soothsayer who claimed to commune with the gods, to stay in their home and bless their family with his powers. The man had slipped into her bedroom one night, naked except for an armlet of gold shaped like intertwining snakes, the symbol of his sacred familiar. In his hand, the kahin held an ivory idol of some Yemeni fertility god whose name she never learned. He had told her to say nothing about what had happened, for it had been a sacred rite and a curse would fall upon her if she told anyone the mysteries of the god.