adulation. Yet she must have realized how meaningless
all this was. She had been at the center of the story of
Islam, and now she was on the sidelines. Times had
changed, the empire had changed, and Aisha had little
option but to accept being made into a kind of living
monument.
Worse still, there were those who would have preferred
that she be a dead one. Among the politicians making
the obligatory courtesy call on her in Medina was Amr,
Muawiya’s governor of Egypt and his former chief of
staʃ, who made no bones about the matter. Aisha knew
that Amr spoke for Muawiya as well as for himself when
he told her to her face that it would have been better for
all concerned if she had been killed at the Battle of the
Camel. When she asked how so—and only Aisha would
even have asked—the answer came with horribly
unexpected frankness. “Because then you would have
died at the height of your glory and entered heaven,”
Amr said, “while we would have proclaimed your death
as the most infamous act of Ali.”
And so saying, he left Aisha with the question that
would surely unsettle her for the rest of her life. Where
she had always thought of herself as the virtual queen of
Islam, had she been all along merely a pawn in someone
else’s game?
Muawiya made the formal announcement of his son,