Nevertheless, she paid a price. The days of her freedom
to join Muhammad’s campaigns were over. With the
exception of the pilgrimage to Mecca, she would not
travel those desert routes again for as long as
Muhammad lived. She must certainly have missed the
adventure of those expeditions, perhaps also the guilty
thrill of being so close to warfare. Fearless, even reckless,
she would have made a ɹne warrior, but it would be all
of twenty-five years until she would see battle again.
There was another price too, though again, Aisha had
no way of knowing the full extent of it. The sight of her
riding into Medina on Safwan’s camel had branded itself
into the collective memory of the oasis, and that was the
last thing Muhammad needed. In due course, another
Quranic revelation dictated that from now on, his wives
were to be protected by a thin muslin curtain from the
prying eyes of any men not their kin. And since curtains
could work only indoors, they would soon shrink into a
kind of minicurtain for outdoors: the veil.
The Revelation of the Curtain clearly applied only to
the Proph et’s wives, but this in itself gave the veil high
status. Over the next few decades it would be adopted by
women of the new Islamic aristocracy—and would
eventually be enforced by Islamic fundamentalists
convinced that it should apply to all women. There can
be little doubt that this would have outraged Aisha. One
can imagine her shocking Muslim conservatives by
tearing off her veil in indignation. She had accepted it as