one would ever marry again.
None of them could have been more anxious about her
future than Aisha. At barely twenty-one, she was about
to become the lifetime widow of a man who had not
even made a will. Would she have to go back to her
father’s house and live out her life in a kind of
premature retirement? The very idea of retirement at so
young an age might have been daunting for even the
most reclusive of women; for Aisha, it must have been
horrifying. Used to being at the center of attention, she
was not about to be relegated to the sidelines. Yet if Ali
were to be designated Muhammad’s successor in a
deathbed declaration, she feared this was exactly what
would happen. She could expect nothing good from that,
and neither could her father, Abu Bakr, who had been as
deeply wounded as she herself had been by Ali’s role in
the Affair of the Necklace.
Ali’s blunt advice had been a slur on Abu Bakr’s honor
and that of his whole family—indeed, on all the
Emigrants. That is certainly how Omar saw it. He and
Abu Bakr were the two most senior of Muhammad’s
advisers; close friends, both were fathers-in-law of the
Prophet, despite being younger than he—Abu Bakr by
two years, Omar by twelve. But where the stooped,
white-haired Abu Bakr inspired aʃection and reverence,
Omar, the stern military commander, seemed to inspire
something closer to fear.