political standing.
Any slur on Aisha was a slur on her whole family, but
especially on the two men closest to her: the man who
had given her in marriage and the man who had taken
her. Her father, Abu Bakr, had been Muhammad’s sole
companion on that night ɻight from Mecca for the
shelter of Medina, and that distinction had helped make
him one of the leading ɹgures among the former
Meccans who had made Medina the new power center of
Arabia. The Emigrants, they were called, and right there
in the name was the fact that the Medinans still thought
of them as foreign, as Meccans. They were respected,
certainly, but not quite accepted. They still had that
whiʃ of outsiders who had come in and somehow taken
over, as though the Medinans themselves had not invited
them. So it was the native Medinans, the ones known as
the Helpers, who were especially delighted by this new
development. In the politics of seventh-century Medina,
as anywhere in the world today, the appearance of
impropriety was as bad as impropriety itself.
Even among the Emigrants, though, there were those
who thought the Abu Bakr household needed to be taken
down a peg, and especially the young girl who so
evidently thought herself better than anyone aside from
the Prophet himself. Among the women in particular,
Aisha was resented. Muhammad’s daughters, let alone
his other wives, were weary of her grandstanding. For
the ɹrst time, the young girl so insistent on standing