cuckolds allowing this stranger to take over your nest?”
she’d taunted—she had received a sword through her
heart in the dead of night for her pains. Word spread as
quickly as her poems had, and other Medinan
wordsmiths who had been critical of Muhammad
quickly began turning out verses in his praise.
In the twenty-ɹrst century, Westerners shocked at the
scope of Muslim reaction to Danish cartoons of
Muhammad seemed to conclude that there is no
tradition of satire in Islam. On the contrary, there is a
strongly deɹned tradition, and one clearly linked to
warfare. In the seventh century, satire was a potent
weapon, and it is still seen that way. Salman Rushdie’s
novel The Satanic Verses created such a stir in the
Islamic world because it was an extraordinarily well-
informed satire. By playing on Quranic verses and on
hadith reports of Muhammad’s life, Rushdie cut close to
the bone. While satire may be thought relatively
harmless in the West—at its best, cutting-edge humor,
but the cut only a ɹgurative one—in Islam the cut is far
more literal. When they are the ɹrst weapon in war,
words draw blood.
Satire was usually aimed at the enemy, however. It
took a mind as subtle as Muawiya’s to see the potential
in poems that seemingly insulted him, calling his virility
into question and accusing him of weakness if he held
back from open war with Ali.