��66 No god but God
become the supremely powerful leader of an increasingly expanding
community, some kind of segregation had to be enforced to maintain
the inviolability of his wives. Thus the tradition, borrowed from the
upper classes of Iranian and Syrian women, of veiling and secluding
the most important women in society from the peering eyes of every-
one else.
That the veil applied solely to Muhammad’s wives is further
demonstrated by the fact that the term for donning the veil, darabat
al-hijab, was used synonymously and interchangeably with “becoming
Muhammad’s wife.” For this reason, during the Prophet’s lifetime, no
other women in the Ummah observed hijab. Of course, modesty was
enjoined on all believers, and women in particular were instructed to
“draw their clothes around them a little to be recognized as believers
and so that no harm will come to them” (33:60). More specifically,
women should “guard their private parts ...and drape a cover
(khamr) over their breasts” when in the presence of strange men
(24:31–32). But, as Leila Ahmed observes, nowhere in the whole of
the Quran is the term hijab applied to any woman other than the wives
of Muhammad.
It is difficult to say with certainty when the veil was adopted by the
rest of the Ummah, though it was most likely long after Muhammad’s
death. Muslim women probably began wearing the veil as a way to
emulate the Prophet’s wives, who were revered as “the Mothers of the
Ummah.” But the veil was neither compulsory nor, for that matter,
widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a
large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their reli-
gious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in
society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.
T HE ERA IMMEDIATELY following Muhammad’s death was, as
will become evident, a tumultuous time for the Muslim community.
The Ummah was growing and expanding in wealth and power at an
astounding rate. A mere fifty years after his death, the tiny community
that Muhammad had founded in Yathrib burst out of the Arabian
Peninsula and swallowed whole the massive Sasanian Empire of Iran.
Fifty years after that, it had secured most of northwest India, absorbed