home in tears of shame; the insult was not only to
Fatima but also to him, and, worst of all, to Khadija. He
immediately sought out Muhammad and confronted
him, calling him to account for neglecting his blood
family. “Was it not enough for you that Aisha should
have insulted us,” he said, “but then you tell Fatima that
Aisha is your best beloved?” And while the Prophet may
have been able to ignore Fatima, he could not ignore Ali.
He would now make amends.
He chose the occasion well. The long arm of the
Byzantine Empire had reached deep into Arabia, and the
town of Najran, midway on the main trade route
between Mecca and the Yemen to the south, was the
largest center of Christianity in the peninsula. The
Quranic message spoke powerfully to Arabian
Christians, as it did to several of the Jewish tribes that
had ɻed south from Palestine after failed rebellions
against Roman rule centuries before, and that were by
now all but indistinguishable in language and culture
from their Arab neighbors. Islam was based, after all, on
the religion of Abraham. It was widely believed that the
Kaaba had originally been built by Adam and then
rebuilt by Abraham, and that the Arabs were the
descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael. Islam was seen
less as a rejection of existing faiths than as an elevation
of them into a new, specifically Arabian identity.
Yet Najran was divided. Those in favor of accepting
Islam argued that Muhammad was clearly the Paraclete