Fatima when the bastard governor ordered you. You
have accepted shame and humiliation. Let destruction
come to those who accept humiliation.”
The old man’s anger and dismay struck deep into the
collective conscience. The Prophet was dead not ɹfty
years, yet here the men of his family had been
massacred, and the women humiliated. As the news
spread throughout Islam, a sense of bitter shame spread
with it, and a new name came into being for the family
of Muhammad: Bayt al-Ahzan, the House of Sorrow.
Yet this ignominious death in the desert, like that
ignominious death on the cross six centuries earlier,
would prove to be not the end but only the beginning.