watched through the chinks in her chain mail canopy as
he too was killed.
Ali’s soldiers shouted to her men to surrender, pleaded
with them even. There was no battle left to ɹght, they
yelled, no point in this stubborn self-imposed slaughter.
But their pleas went unheeded, perhaps even unheard by
men deaf to reason, and the deaths around her camel
would be laid at Aisha’s door. She called herself the
Mother of the Faithful, people would say, but what kind
of mother would call on her sons to sacriɹce themselves
this way?
“Oh Mother of ours, the most uncaring mother we
know,” one poet later wrote. “Did you not see how many
a brave man was struck down, his hand and wrist made
lonely?”
“Our Mother brought us to drink at the pool of death,”
wrote another. “We did not leave until our thirst was
quenched. When we obeyed her, we lost our senses.
When we supported her, we gained nothing but pain.”
Seventy men were cut down as they held the reins of
Aisha’s camel, their bodies strewn at her feet. But if she
looked on in horror at the slaughter, she gave no
indication of it, and if she was terriɹed for her own life,
she never let anyone know. She certainly heard the
arrows thudding into her armored howdah; there were
so many of them stuck in the chain mail, one warrior
remembered, that it “bristled like a porcupine.” Did that