reaching out, of healing old divisions and transforming
them into alliance, and with Ali, the healing impulse
went deep: He formally adopted Asma’s three-year-old
son by Abu Bakr and, by so doing, extended a hand in
another direction—to the boy’s inɻuential half sister
Aisha.
Once again, though, Aisha remained unusually silent.
If she felt that Ali had stolen part of her family, there is
no record of it, though over the years, as her half brother
grew to manhood in Ali’s house, her resentment of his
loyalty to Ali would become all too clear, and the young
man who should have bound the two antagonists
together would only split them farther apart. For the
meantime, however, that division would merely simmer,
upstaged by a second even more remarkable union. In
the strongest possible sign of unity, Ali honored the
Caliph Omar by giving him the hand of his daughter
Umm Kulthum—Muhammad’s eldest granddaughter—in
marriage.
The vast vine of marital alliance now reached across
generations as well as political diʃerences. Omar was
the same generation as Muhammad yet had married his
granddaughter. Ali, thirteen years younger than Omar,
was now his father-in-law. And if Fatima turned in her
modest grave at the idea of any daughter of hers being
married to the man who had burst into her house and
slammed her to the ɻoor, that was the price of unity—
that, and Omar’s settlement of a large part of