barbed rhyming couplets acted like lances, verbal attacks
all the more powerful in a society where alliances were
made on a promise and a handshake, and men were
literally taken at their word.
Soon the whole oasis was caught up in a fervor of
sneering insinuation. At the wells, in the walled
vegetable gardens, in the date orchards, in the inns and
the markets and the stables, even in the mosque itself, up
and down the eight-mile length of the Medina valley,
people reveled, as people always have and always will, in
the delicious details, real or imagined, of scandal.
Try as he might, Muhammad could no longer ignore
the matter. That Aisha was innocent was not the point;
she had to be seen as innocent. He was well aware that
his power and leadership were not beyond dispute in
Medina, while to the south Mecca still remained in
opposition to him and, even after two major battles,
would not submit for another ɹve years. The scurrilous
satirical poems had already reached that merchant city,
where they were received with outright glee.
Muhammad had been placed in a double bind. If he
divorced Aisha, he would by implication be
acknowledging that he had been deceived. If he took her
back, he risked being seen as a doting old man
bamboozled by a mere slip of a girl. Either way, it would
erode not only his own authority as the leader of Medina
but the authority of Islam itself. Incredible as it seemed,