He sighed again, a sound that was laced with exhaustion. I suddenly saw the tiny new lines around his dark eyes and realized that he had not been sleeping well. Just as suddenly I felt regret that among all the responsibilities of leadership he carried, worry over the trouble I had foolishly caused should add to his burden.
“I have worked for so many years to bind these quarrelsome people together as a family,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “Yet it takes only one small incident to tear them apart.”
The room blurred as tears flooded my eyes.
“I’m sorry, I never intended-”
“It was not your intention, but the damage is still done,” he said abruptly, and I felt as if I had been slapped. The Messenger was always exceedingly courteous and considered interrupting others to be the height of ill manners. The fact that he would cut me off so forcefully, especially in the presence of my rival wives, revealed how far I had fallen in his estimation. I felt my throat constrict painfully as the thought that he would divorce me stabbed into my heart.
And then another voice sounded through the small apartment, the gentle motherly tone of Umm Salama.
“We are your wives and your partners in this world and the next,” she said steadily. “What is it that you wish us to do, O Messenger of God?”
She had chosen her words carefully and in doing so had taken the brunt of responsibility for the day’s events off my lonely shoulders and placed them squarely upon the Mothers as a group. I looked across the room at her, my eyes brimming with unspoken gratitude for her decision to end my solitude.
The Prophet hesitated, and when he spoke, it was with the unyielding authority of the leader of a nation, not with the gentle tones of a family patriarch.
“God has revealed these words to me,” he said, and my blood began to race. A Revelation had come to address the chaos I had created, and the thought that God Himself would intervene in this earthly affair terrified me.
And then the Messenger of God began to recite the lyrical words sent down from heaven, and I forgot everything except the haunting beauty of his voice:
O wives of the Prophet, you are not like any other women.
If you fear God, do not speak softly
In case the sick at heart should lust after you
But speak in a firm manner.
Stay at home and do not flaunt your finery
As they did in the Days of Ignorance.
The Messenger stopped and let the holy words sink in. I blinked and suddenly felt a flash of relief. The commandment was not onerous, and surely God could not mean this literally. The Messenger had often said there was much in the holy Qur’an that was symbolic and a dogmatically literal adherance to the law would undermine God’s purpose. The commandment to stay at home, locked away in this tiny room with clay walls, while the world buzzed around about me, could not possibly be a strict rule that was meant to be applied with fervor. It had to be a general admonition, to curtail the kind of social impropriety that could lead to scandal and violence, as my stupid behavior at the wedding had done.
But when I looked at the Prophet, the intensity in his eyes froze the smile that was forming on my lips. Something dark still hung between us, and I suddenly felt frightened again.
“You should not leave your houses unless necessary. It is for your good and for the good of the Ummah,” he said, and I felt my breath stop. The Messenger was serious about applying the commandment. We were now expected to stay inside our homes like prisoners.
“There is more,” he said grimly. “God has issued a command to the believers as well.”
He took a deep breath and then recited the flowing verses:
When you ask his wives something, do so from behind a curtain.
This is purer for your hearts and theirs.
It is not right for you to offend God’s Messenger
Just as you should never marry his wives after him.
That would be an enormous sin in the sight of God.
The Messenger stopped and we looked at one another in confusion, unable to comprehend what was being asked of us. I understood the prohibition against marrying another man after the Prophet-the rivalries and divisions that would erupt over the honor of securing the hand of a queen of the realm would tear the nation apart. But the notion that we could only speak to men from behind a curtain was startling to Arab women, who were accustomed to living in the open air. We all wanted to believe that we had misunderstood the verses. It was one thing to stay inside our homes under the compulsion of necessity, but to cut ourselves off from our fellow believers in this manner was incomprehensible. Surely this rule would be liberally interpreted.
But the Messenger quickly put an end to our hopes.
“From this point on, you may not speak to any man who is not mahrem except through a veil or a curtain,” he said forcefully, his eyes locked on mine, and I felt my heart sink.
The mahrem referred to any man whom we were forbidden from marrying because of the laws of incest. Our brothers, our sons, our fathers, our uncles, and our nephews were our flesh and blood and outside the possibility of sexual relations. But all other men, including close friends like Talha, fell outside the taboo-and now we could no longer talk to any of them except from behind a barrier. It was a stunning and extreme change, one that I had not been prepared for, and I could not imagine how I could possibly comply with God’s commandment.
The Messenger stood up to leave and we all watched him go as if we were in a dream. But as he opened the door, I saw a flash of the outside world, of the hustle and bustle of the Masjid and the streets of Medina, and suddenly felt tears in my eyes as the realization struck me that I would never be able to venture out into that world as I had done all my life, free and proud.
From now on, my life was to become a prison, even when I was not confined to the tiny apartment whose mud walls seemed to be closing in on me. For whenever I ventured out into the sun, my face would be hidden away behind a veil. The bars of my jail would follow me everywhere and were unbreakable, forged from a tiny strip of cotton that was stronger than the mightiest Byzantine steel.
22
The next several months were among the most difficult of my young life. Accustomed to freedom of movement in the oasis, given deference and right-of-way anywhere I went as a Mother of the Believers, I was suddenly trapped inside the confines of my tiny chamber. The small window that looked on the Masjid courtyard was covered with a thick black curtain made of coarse wool, and a similar sheet blocked the threshold of my door. Not that it mattered. Once the commandment of the veil had been revealed, the men of Medina had assiduously avoided my company, fearful of bringing the wrath of God down upon their heads. Even if the walls of my apartment had been torn down and I sat open and exposed to the sun, not even a blind man would have dared approach me.
Even the women of Medina were now nervous about keeping my company, and I had few visitors aside from my sister, Asma, and my mother. The other wives, similarly trapped behind the veil, blamed me for their predicament. Even Hafsa, with whom I had developed a friendly alliance against our beautiful rival Zaynab bint Jahsh, was bitter and rarely spoke to me anymore.
My lonely days were spent reading the holy Qur’an, which was no longer being secretly inscribed on palm leaves or the shoulder bones of goats but was being preserved on pieces of sturdy parchment bought from Egyptian traders. I found comfort in the stories of the prophets who had endured great tribulations during their sacred missions, men like Moses, who had been forced to leave behind the riches of his princely life and flee into the desert, where he would hear the Voice of God. Or of my forefather Ishmael, who had been expelled from a life of comfort in Abraham’s home and sent into the arid wastes of Arabia to found a new nation that would renew God’s covenant with man. These stories of exile and redemption had always held great meaning for the Muslims, who saw in the painful journeys of the past an echo of their own lives. But they began to take a greater personal meaning for me, as I found some comfort in the hope that even as these holy ones of God had endured deprivation and loss in the service of a higher cause, perhaps my own confinement would serve some purpose beyond a punishment for my sinful flirtations.