funeral. She was to be buried quietly, with only her close
family, the true Ahl al-Bayt, in attendance.
If Aisha felt any sense of triumph on hearing of her
rival’s death, she was unusually quiet about it. But she
had no need to exult. She was now doubly honored: the
widow of the Prophet and the daughter of his successor.
Triply honored, indeed, for her chamber by the
courtyard wall of the mosque was also Muhammad’s
grave.
You can see how some might treasure the image of the
young widow sleeping with her husband buried under
her bed. It has a touch of magical realism, like a scene
from a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, but this is no
novel, and the reality is that Aisha never slept in her
chamber again. All the widows were moved out into
private quarters away from the mosque, each with a
generous pension—and Aisha’s more generous than the
others. She would not eat and sleep for the rest of her life
in the company of her dead husband, though she would
certainly live as if she did.
Where she had striven so hard to own Muhammad in
life, it now seemed she would succeed in owning him in
death. She would become a major source of hadith—the
reports on the Prophet’s practice, or sunna, in things
large and small, from great matters of principle to the
most minute details of when he washed and how, even