The Jewel Of Medina (57 page)

Jones, Jameelah.
The Sahabiyat (During the Prophet’s Era)
. London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1994.

Kabbani, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham, and Laleh Bakhtiar.
Encyclopedia of Muhammad’s Women Companions and the Traditions They Related.
ABC International Group, 1998.

Levy, Ruben.
The Social Structure of Islam
. London: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Mernissi, Fatima.
Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry
. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004.

Moosa, Matti and D. Nicholas Ranson (trans.).
The Wives of the Prophet by Sh. Muhammad Ashraf.
Pakistan: Ashraf Press, 1971.

Rodinson, Maxime, and Arthur John Arberry, Charles Perry, Claudia Roden.
Medieval Arab Cookery
. UK: Prospect Books, 2001.

Rodinson, Maxime.
Muhammad
. New York: Random House, 1980.

Salahi, M.A.
Muhammad: Man and Prophet: A Complete Study of the Life of the Prophet of Islam.
Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK: Element Books Ltd., 1995.

Q: How did you become interested in the subject of women and Islam?

A:
In spring of 2002, when the U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan, I began hearing news about the reversals for women there under the Taliban, how girls were no longer allowed to go to school and women were required to wear burqas, how the windows of their homes had to be painted black so they could not be seen from the outdoors, etc. As a feminist, I was disturbed by these reports and I wanted to learn more.

I knew very little about Middle Eastern culture or Islam at the time, so I read a few books about women in the Middle East by American journalists Geraldine Brooks and Jan Goodwin. In these books I discovered that the Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives and concubines. Being unable to find very much information about any of them made me want to tell their stories to the world.

Q: With twelve women to choose from, why did you settle on A’isha as the protagonist?

A:
I didn’t choose A’isha; she chose me! Both the books I mentioned told a similar tale of a young girl playing outside on the swing or teeter-totter and her mother calling her inside, washing her face, combing her hair, putting her in a new gown, and taking her into the bedroom to marry a man nearly six times her age. That scene played itself in my mind over and
over again until, while working out in the gym one day, I realized that if I couldn’t stop thinking about A’isha, I should probably write about her.

Originally I thought about giving each of the wives a segment of the book in which to tell her own story, but ultimately, A’isha pushed the other wives aside with the sheer force of her personality. She was a quickwitted, sharp-tongued, politically astute survivor. And what a love affair she had with her husband!

Q: What qualifies you, a non-Muslim, to tell this tale?

A:
I’m not a Muslim but I am a woman, and I know the rivalries and yearnings and heartaches that women experience in the name of love. I’m also a human being, so I know about love and desire and greed and jealousy and fear. I can’t really know what it was like to be alive and a woman in seventh-century Saudi Arabia, but I can certainly start, as Hemingway advised, with what I do know. The rest, as for any writer, is imagination. And while I’m not a Muslim, I have a huge respect and regard for the Muslim faith, which I hope is evident in my novel.

Q: What was your motivation for writing this book?

A:
At first, I just wanted to honor these women by telling their stories. Then, during my research, I discovered things about Muhammad and Islam that excited me, and I began to hope that, in writing this book, I could help increase inter-cultural empathy and understanding and that I could empower women, especially Muslim women, by showing that Islam is, at its source, an egalitarian religion. I think Islam gets a bad rap in that regard, whereas the oppression of women really comes from male insecurity more than anything Muhammad ever advocated. From what I’ve read, he was actually fairly egalitarian in his attitudes toward women.

Q: In your book, Muhammad, the Prophet of God, is a man of great physical passion and also a man who becomes seduced by power. Ali, revered by Shi’ites, is depicted as an impulsive, hostile, somewhat immature young man. Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, also revered by Shi’ites, comes off as jealous and possessive of her father, and unpleasant. Are you concerned that Muslims will be offended by your depictions of certain characters and events?

A:
Remember, this story is A’isha’s, told from her point of view. She was jealous of Muhammad’s other wives, and must have felt critical of his decision to marry again and again. She also had a very antagonistic relationship with Ali as well as with Fatima. Eventually, A’isha and Ali clashed in the first Islamic civil war which began the Sunni-Shi’ite split. So of course these characters are not portrayed in a flattering light!

The sequel to
THE JEWEL OF MEDINA
, which is nearing completion, continues the tale of Islam’s development through alternating points of view, both A’isha’s and Ali’s. So readers will get much better-rounded, sympathetic portraits of Ali as well as Fatima, whom Ali married.

Q: Did you take literary license with any of the facts in writing this book?

A:
Yes! I’ve never read anything about A’isha wielding a sword, but I wanted to demonstrate that some women did fight in early Islamic battles under Muhammad. It wasn’t common, but it did happen. Plus, the sword represents A’isha’s strength, and the fact that later in life she did lead troops in the Battle of the Camel against Ali.

Also, A’isha was not engaged to Safwan at birth, but to the son of one of her father’s friends. And her struggle to become
hatun
, or the Great Lady of the harem, is fabricated. The
hatun
was a concept I picked up from reading about Turkish harems of later times. But I know A’isha was very competitive with her sister-wives, so I felt comfortable inventing this particular contest to illustrate the problems she grappled with as Muhammad’s youngest wife and also as a woman who loved her husband very much and suffered from his polygamy.

Most of the license I’ve taken has to do with the wives, since I could not find many details about most of them. The stories that have come down mostly concern what they did, not why they did those things. I had to invent motives, which, as a fiction writer, I appreciated being able to do.

Q: How can you say Muhammad helped women when he had such a large harem? Wasn’t that disrespectful to his wives?

A:
Many scholars and Muslims contend that Muhammad married for political, not personal, reasons. Of course, nearly all his wives and concubines were supposedly very beautiful, which tells me he might have had personal reasons for these marriages, too.

I believe these practices that are so unfamiliar—and unacceptable—to us today should be considered in the context of the time period and culture in which they occurred. The most powerful men—chieftains, kings—had many wives as a sign of their power. Muhammad may have been trying to establish himself as a powerful man, too—for survival in a warrior culture, for spreading Islam and thereby saving souls, or for political power.

For the wives who loved Muhammad, such as A’isha, these marriages must have been painful. Historical accounts are full of anecdotes illustrating her competitiveness with her other wives, not all of which I was able to use in my book. One that I loved was the story of the “honey trick.” Muhammad was spending an inordinate amount of time with one of his wives—some accounts say Hafsa, others say Zaynab. Usually he was very conscientious about dividing his time equally among his wives, so A’isha knew there was some extenuating circumstance. She discovered that this other wife had a jar of honey—very rare and precious, and one of the few indulgences that Muhammad allowed himself.

A’isha, knowing that Muhammad was extremely fastidious in his personal hygiene, pretended on his next visit that his breath smelled horrible. “What have you been eating?” she said. She got a couple of her sister-wives, including Sawdah, to do the same. Mortified, Muhammad refused that honey in the future, and stopped spending so much time with the wife who had it. But Sawdah felt guilty and confessed, and A’isha got in trouble. This was when A’isha was a young girl, but supposedly she used other, more sophisticated, tactics later to dissuade Muhammad’s interest in other women.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

A:
I hope the readers of
The Jewel of Medina
will be entertained and uplifted, inspired to take control of their own destinies and empathetic to this other culture that we in the West know so little about but that we tend to demonize because we are at war in the Middle East. Muslim, Christian, Jew, atheist, Buddhist—we are all human beings with needs, desires, and fears, all “created from the same soul.” The sooner we as a species can embrace the concept of unity, the closer we will be to achieving Paradise right here on Earth. Because Paradise means living continually in the presence of God, and, as the Bible says, “God is love.”