You could say it was just chance that the loss of a
necklace should create such trouble. You could point to
it, as conservative Muslim clerics still do, as an example
of what happens when women refuse to stay home and
instead take an active part in public life. You could
counter that this is just the same old sexist trick of
blaming the woman in the story. Or you could argue
that it was inevitable that trouble begin with Aisha,
given her personality and, above all, given her
resentment of Muhammad’s first wife.
The wealthy merchant widow Muhammad had
married when she was forty and he twenty-ɹve, Khadija
was the woman to whom he had been faithful, in a
monogamous marriage, until the day she died. It had
been in her arms that he had sought shelter and comfort
from the awe and terror of revelation, her voice that had
reassured him and conɹrmed the awesome validity of
his mission. No matter how many more times he
married, he would never find that quality of love again.
How could a teenage girl possibly compete against the
hallowed memory of a dead woman? But then who but a
teenage girl would even dream of trying?
“I wasn’t jealous of any of the Prophet’s wives except
for Khadija, even though I came after her death,” she
said many years later. And though this was clearly
untrue—whenever there was so much as a mention of
another wife’s beauty, Aisha bristled—Khadija was