out, on being exceptional, found herself standing out too
much.
There is no doubt that Aisha was innocent of the
charges against her. She may have been young and
headstrong, but she also had a highly developed sense of
politics. To risk her whole standing, let alone her
father’s, for a passing dalliance? That was out of the
question. The favorite wife of the Prophet consorting
with a mere warrior, and one who wasn’t even from one
of the best families? She would never dream of it.
Safwan had behaved as she had expected him to behave,
the white knight to her maiden in distress. To imply
anything beyond that was the most scurrilous slander.
How could anyone even think such a thing?
Certainly Muhammad did not. If anything, he must
have felt guilty about having left his young favorite
alone in the desert, so at ɹrst he dismissed the rumors,
convinced that they would die down soon enough. But
in this he seriously misread the mood of the oasis.
Overnight, the poets got busy. They were the gossip
columnists, the op-ed writers, the bloggers, the
entertainers of the time, and the poems they wrote now
were not lyrical odes, but the other great form of
traditional Arabic poetry: satires. Laced with puns and
double entendres, they were irresistibly repeatable,
building up momentum the more they spread. The