campaigns to unite Arabia’s tribes under the banner of
Islam. These were full-scale expeditions lasting weeks
and even months at a time, and he usually took at least
one of his wives along with him. None was more eager
to go than Aisha.
For a spirited city teenager, this was pure excitement.
If Medina was not yet a city in the way we now think of
the word—it was more of an agglomeration of tribal
villages, each one clustered around a fortiɹed manor
house—it was urban enough for the nomadic past to
have become a matter of nostalgia. Long poems
celebrated the purity of the desert, softening its
harshness with the idea of a spiritual nobility lost in the
relative ease of settled life.
For Aisha, then, these expeditions were romance.
There was the thrill of riding out of the ribbon of green
that was Medina, up into the jagged starkness of the
mountains that rose like a forbidding no-go zone
between Medina and the vast deserts of central and
northern Arabia. The Hijaz, they called it—the
“barrier”—and beyond it stretched more than seven
hundred miles of arid steppe until the land suddenly
dipped into the lush river basin of the place they knew as
al-Iraq, from the Persian word for lowlands.
This was Aisha’s chance to discover the fabled purity
of the desert, and she must have savored every detail of
it, admiring the way the scouts who led them knew