Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 209
happy union of our Holy Prophet with the lady Khadijah”.58 Similarly, Turkish
women, in their preference of monogamy, follow both the lady Khadijah, and
hers and the Prophet’s four daughters. They were all monogamously married
to their respective husbands with unwritten but silently acknowledged con-
tracts until their deaths. Only Ali who is married to Fatimah attempts to breach
that unwritten contract when he wants to wed the daughter of Abu Jahl, the
enemy of Islam, as a co-wife to Fatimah. But the Prophet warns Ali by recall-
ing the example and promise of his infidel but “truthful” son-in-law in Mecca,
Abu Al-’As bin Al-Rabi’.59 The Prophet continues: “No doubt, Fatima is a part of
me, I hate to see her being troubled. By Allah, the daughter of Allah’s Apostle
and the daughter of Allah’s Enemy cannot be the wives of one man”.60 After
Fatimah’s complain and the Prophet’s warning Ali gave up the idea of marry-
ing Abu Jahl’s daughter and never married anyone else until Fatimah’s death.
However, he took four wives as soon as she died, and the number of his wives
never fell under four.
The Early Hours, despite its tragic setting of wartime and disaster, is Pick-
thall’s most optimistic novel. Camuriddin, the main hero of the novel is a poor,
young Macedonian Muslim. His accidental encounter with a wounded Turkish
officer leads him to join Niazi Bey’s revolutionary fedais marching from Resna
to stage the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. Meanwhile in Saloniki he visits
Sadık Pasha, his former commander whose life he had saved in Yemen. To fulfil
an old promise made at the war field in Yemen, he weds Camuriddin to one of
his households, the young servant girl, Gul-raaneh. The couple live in Istanbul
and have children until the Balkan war breaks out, when Camuriddin takes
his wife and children to his home village in Macedonia and becomes a soldier.
He is injured in the war and his left arm is amputated; he also learns from
an old refugee from his hometown in Macedonia that the Greek bandits have
slaughtered his mother, brothers and children, and his wife Gul-raaneh killed
herself before the bandits reached her. Sadık Pasha’s daughter Reshideh is also
widowed during the war and when she encounters Camuriddin and learns
his terrible fate and condition, she proposes him. Camuriddin, feeling highly
honoured by the proposal but somewhat surprised, consults Reshideh’s father,
who confesses with full consent that it was his primary intention to wed him
to his own daughter when he had made his old promise. He adds: “‘But when
I saw thee there at Saloniki, in so poor a guise, I thought a girl attendant much
58 Ibid., 153.
59 M. Muhsin Khan, The Translation of the Meanings of Sahih Al-Bukhari, Vol. 5 (Riyadh:
Darussalam, 1997), 59, 62, 16, 3729.
60 Ibid.