trifled with.
Yet even Hind had stayed in the rear during the
ɹghting itself. Even she had been too much the urban
aristocrat to ride into the thick of battle. That was the
kind of thing nomadic women were known for: women
like the fabled Umm Siml, who had led her tribe in ɹerce
resistance against Abu Bakr’s forces during the Wars of
Apostasy. Poets still celebrated her in long odes to the
romance of the desert. They praised the sacred white
camel she had ridden on and the absolute fearlessness
and devotion she had inspired in her men until both she
and the camel were ɹnally slain. But Umm Siml had not
been a Muslim—not by Abu Bakr’s reckoning, in any
case. She had been an apostate. So when Aisha rode out
onto that battleɹeld outside Basra on her red camel, it
was the ɹrst time a Muslim woman had led men into
war. It was also to be the last.
Nobody doubted her right to be there, not at the time.
Her critics raised their voices only later. “We fought for
a woman who thought herself the Commander of the
Faithful,” said one survivor bitterly. Said another:
“Instead of trailing her skirts at home, she crossed the
desert at a gallop, making herself a target her sons had to
defend against spears and arrows and swords.” It is not
hard to imagine how the same phrases could be turned
around in odes of praise to her courage and leadership,
all the more if she had been victorious, or if she had
been killed in battle like Umm Siml, but that was not to