Prophet's Dilemma: The Sunni Shia Split Part 1
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Welcome to Episode 18, Prophet's Dilemma, the Sunni-Shia Split.

Every year, during a single month, millions upon millions of people converge on a small city in central Iraq, a place called Karbala.

If you were to hop in a helicopter and fly over the city of Karbala, you would see a gigantic white rectangular structure dominating the landscape. A mosque, at the center of which sits a huge golden dome, surrounded by gilded spires and slender minarets. And circling this mosque are hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Some years there are millions. A river of humanity walking around the structure, over and over again.

It's more people than the naked eye can even really process, but as you look closer at this procession, you see a panorama of colors. White, green, red, black, and gold. And you see flags snapping and billowing in the breeze, banners rising high into the air, and people packed so tight and so dense that it's hard to distinguish where one person ends and the other begins.

And as you get closer, in your hypothetical helicopter, you'd start to hear a tremendous amount of noise, a deafening wall of sound, and you'd hear the steady, hypnotic beat of drums. You'd hear rhythmic chants and singing blaring through loudspeakers, creating a call-and-response pattern with the pilgrims circling the mosque.

Most Western eyes and ears would, understandably, have no clue what they were looking at. Is this a celebration? A state fair? A music festival? What is this? Well, this mind-blowing display of people, sound, and architecture is called Ashura. It is a Shia Muslim religious festival that takes place every year on the 10th day of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic lunar calendar.

Ashura is, at its core, an expression of grief and remembrance. Remembrance of something that happened over 1300 years ago, before the mosque was built, before the city existed, back when Karbala was just a lonely scrap of desert. On October 10th, in the year 680 AD, a battle took place at Karbala, although battle would be a strong word for what actually happened.

In reality, 72 travelers were surrounded by an army, cut off from their water supply for three days, starved to exhaustion, and then massacred. All the men had their heads cut off, and the women and children were hauled away in chains. The bodies were left to rot in the desert at the very same spot where the mosque in Karbala stands today.

Violence and atrocity were not rare events in the 7th century. Hell, they're not even rare in the 21st century. So why is this violent atrocity so special?

Well, it's special because of who was left headless out there in the desert. These 72 travelers were led by a man named Hussein. And Hussein was the last male blood relative of the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad, as most of you probably know, was the founder of Islam, the last in a chain of allegedly divine prophets that included Abraham, Moses, and Jesus of Nazareth. And less than 50 years after the prophet Muhammad's death,

his last remaining grandson was butchered at Karbala, snuffing out for good the bloodline that had founded Islam in the first place. Now, for reasons that will become much clearer over the course of the next hour or so, this event is a huge deal. It holds an astronomical amount of significance for Shia Muslims.

one of the two main branches of Islam, the other more dominant branch being Sunni. In the modern age, Shia Muslims remember the murder of Hussein every year during Ashura, and that grief manifests itself in many different ways, ranging from benign dramatization to outright self-mutilation. Something you will often see, and you can actually pull up footage of this on YouTube, is a more extreme form of mourning for Hussein.

Shia men and boys dressed all in white will walk down the street in a vast procession like a sea of white and in their hands are long knives sharpened to a razor's edge. To emulate the suffering that Hussein endured at Karbala, they will cut their scalps and their faces with these knives. And what they do is kind of tap the blades on their foreheads. Sometimes a few times, sometimes dozens of times, it's just a tap, tap, tap.

It can range from a gentle nick to a forceful, sustained chop into their own foreheads. The result, as the day goes on, is a sea of men and boys, some of them as young as nine years old, who are covered in blood. Because when the head gets cut, even a small cut, it bleeds a lot. And by the end of the day, all those clean white clothes are drenched in red. To the uninitiated eye, it can be an extremely unnerving and alien visual.

But believe it or not, the scalp cutting is not even the most intense expression of Asherah penance. The Catholics have long held a monopoly on self-flagellation in the popular imagination. Pope John Paul II was known to whip himself with a belt in the privacy of his room on more than a few occasions. But self-whipping is also very prevalent in the most extreme versions of the Asherah festival. And instead of leather belts, they use metal whips.

Chains. Again, if you have a strong stomach, you can look up footage of this, but sometimes it's just knives attached to a cat of nine tails. Dozens of these men will strip down to their waists, and someone will beat a drum, and at each beat of the drum, they whip their backs with these metal chains and flails as hard as they can. It's steady, like a beat. Boom, boom, boom. And it's fast, too, and it's back and forth, and they do this for minutes at a time. And

And sometimes you'll see the younger men clench wads of white cloth between their teeth just to deal with the pain. And the goal of all of this is to experience some semblance of the pain that Hussein experienced at Karbala. And it's also to kind of repay his martyrdom, his sacrifice, with the sacrifice of one's own flesh. It is a sobering testament to the raw power of belief and the weight that history can have on the modern world.

Now, the vast majority of Muslims, including most Shias, see this bloodletting practice as backwards, unsanitary, and frankly a little cray-cray. It's just not good PR for the faith. In fact, many Shia clerics and leaders have urged the faithful to donate blood instead as a more productive form of symbolic bloodletting. And many do.

Some Shia communities have found creative, even philanthropic ways of paying tribute to the Karbala story. For example, in 2018, Shia Muslims in Flint, Michigan donated thousands of bottles of clean water to charity during Ashura as a symbolic remembrance of how Hussein and his followers were deprived of water for three days at Karbala.

And the point is, there is a huge amount of variance among Shia Muslims about how to honor Hussein, who they see as a martyr, kind of like a saint, to use a Christian term. But that feeling of grief and reverence is the same all over the world. It crosses generations and cultures and national divides from Iran to Australia to Jamaica to India. It is a uniting factor for all Shia Muslims.

And the reason I bring all of this up is because the Battle of Karbala and the outpouring of emotion and tradition it engenders is one of the most important inflection points in one of the most influential religious schisms in the history of the planet. Which brings us to the true topic of today's episode. Today, we are going to be dissecting the origins of the Sunni-Shia divide, the split between the two main branches of Islam.

Now, when I first picked this topic, I was immediately overwhelmed by the crushing sense of having bitten off way more than I could chew. Islam is a hot-button topic in the 21st century just on its face anyway. And to wade deeper into the water and explore the internal divisions between an externally misunderstood religion is admittedly ambitious for a monthly podcast.

But that said, you guys know the drill. I take great pains to approach these kinds of topics with respect, nuance, and a boatload of reputable sources. Trust me, I would not come to a discussion like this without the receipts, and I promise I've done my utmost to tackle this subject with the sensitivity and the thoughtfulness it deserves. Now, just FYI, this will be a secular retelling of the story rather than a scriptural one.

So if you are a Muslim listening to this, you're bound to hear some details or anecdotes that you may not agree with. But I wanted to paint as comprehensive a picture as I could, and that requires piecing a story together from diverse, often contradictory, perspectives.

I have often said that each new topic on this show is, for me personally, a journey from ignorance to understanding. Because every topic, for the most part, is fresh to me. A lot of the times I know the contours of the story, I know the personalities involved, but the resonance that it has for other people is something that takes time to get your head around.

And the truth is, this is a topic that is almost a complete mystery to most people in the West, especially America. Because our country has some baggage when it comes to Islam. For millions of Americans and Europeans, their only acquaintance with Islam is with its most fringe elements. Groups that are not representative of the 2 billion people who adhere to this faith.

And as a result, there's a barrier of lingering distrust and otherness standing between most Americans and any true conception of what Islam's history is, what it's all about, and who was there at the beginning, and what they actually believed. And the Sunni-Shia divide in particular has been portrayed somewhat disingenuously by the media in recent years.

It's been painted with a broad, sloppy brush, characterized as this eternal, sectarian civil war that's been raging non-stop for centuries. But that's just not the case. The inflammation of tensions between Shias and Sunnis is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it's mostly about power politics, not theological debate. For most of their history, the two branches have lived in relative peace with one another,

They read the same Quran, they practice most of the same rituals, they believe the same basic tenets about the Prophet and his message. Intermarriage between Sunnis and Shias is very, very common and widely accepted, but that fracture is always there in the background. And the divergence in these two competing orthodoxies can be traced back to what is essentially a heated family dispute in the 7th century.

And it's actually a real shame that more people aren't familiar with this tale. The origin story of Islam and the resulting schism that tore it apart is one of the most dramatic, interesting, and emotionally moving stories that I've ever stumbled upon.

It has all the action and political intrigue of anything in ancient Rome. Honestly, you could easily change the names, relocate the events to ancient Italy, and the story would feel right at home amongst the pantheon of epic events involving figures like Caesar, Sulla, Marius, Brutus, Anthony. There's the same sense of scale, drama, emotion, and loss. There are huge battles, and betrayals, and romance.

It is an amazing story. And honestly, I'm very, very excited to share it with you today. And with that being said, let's jump right in. All of this starts 14 centuries ago in Arabia. 14 centuries ago in Arabia, there lived a young girl named Aisha.

Aisha was 12 years old when her father told her that she would be getting married. The prospect of an unexpected engagement like this would terrify any modern 12-year-old girl, and rightly so. Just the idea of it makes 21st century ears bristle. After all, we live in an era where the concept of childhood actually exists. Where we try and shelter young people from the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood for as long as we possibly can. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

But for Aisha, living back in the 7th century, a marriage proposal at her age was expected. Relatively normal, in fact. Shelter from the unpleasant realities of life was not an option in medieval Arabia.

The year was 620 AD, and Aisha lived in a city called Mecca. It was, geographically, in the middle of nowhere, nestled along the western Arabian coast in the shadow of the Hijaz Mountains. But while it may have been in the middle of nowhere, Mecca was at the very heart of a vibrant trade network that crisscrossed all over the Middle East.

It was a vital artery in a circulatory system of caravan routes that pumped trade goods back and forth through the neighboring empires of Persia and Byzantium. Aisha's father, a man named Abu Bakr, you're gonna want to remember that name by the way, was a respected genealogist in the city and she would have grown up surrounded by the constant hustle and bustle of her hometown. She would have seen all kinds of people from all kinds of places.

carrying dazzling luxury goods like gold, ivory, medicine, and incense. And to a little girl, Mecca must have seemed like the center of the universe, because trade goods were not the only thing you could find in Mecca. The city also had a wide selection of religions and belief systems. Aisha would have grown up walking through the streets, hearing the prayers and chants and invocations of Mecca's kaleidoscopic array of holy men.

It was a huge spectrum of spirituality, all coexisting in a single city. There were pagans, sorcerers, and fire-worshippers. There were people of the book, as they were called, the Christians and the Jews who occupied wide swaths of the Middle East at the time. The city was an odd hybrid of the sacred and the salesy.

like some kind of bizarre mix between a church and a Costco. As the writer and scholar Leslie Hazelton describes in her book Muhammad the First Muslim, quote, Amulets were made from animal parts and hair, parchment and rare shrubs, pieces of gold thread and precious stones, and they could make you fertile or virile, protect you against evil or call it down on those you wished.

Sideshows featured Indian fakirs walking over coals and African snake charmers, dancing monkeys and fighting roosters. Bards competed with one another in the sixth century equivalent of poetry slams, while soothsayers traded in the future, preachers in faith and prostitutes in the flesh. Shamans went into their trances, rolling and writhing in the dust,

End quote.

Even before the creation of Islam, Mecca was a holy place. Pilgrims came from far and wide not just to trade but to worship. They flocked to make offerings at the Kaaba, a cubic structure located at the center of the city. The Kaaba was believed to be the gateway to the divine, a spiritual superconductor for dozens, even hundreds of gods, big ones and small ones, gentle ones and cruel ones.

Mecca, in many ways, was the city of the gods, and the Kaaba was the center of it. Fun fact, that word, Kaaba, that Arabic word, that's actually where we get the English word cube, that geometric structure in Mecca. But then something happened. An insignificant 40-year-old merchant, a nobody, had come forward saying that everything that the Meccans believed was a lie. There were not hundreds of gods. There was only one god.

And if that didn't blow their minds, what he said next did. Not only was there one God, but this supreme deity had chosen him, this nobody merchant, as his messenger. According to this prophet, God was only speaking through him. He wasn't special. He wasn't a miracle worker. He couldn't heal the sick. He couldn't part the sea. He was just a conduit, a microphone into which God whispered.

And all he wanted to do was share God's message with the world. Most people in Mecca thought this guy was either crazy or a con man. They laugh him off. They say, come on, is he for real? Quote-unquote divine messengers are a dime a dozen in Mecca. And why now? Why you?

Why at 40 years old do you just receive a message out of the blue from God? No way. This person was a poser, a grifter, a fake. But someone doesn't think he's a fake. Aisha's father, Abu Bakr, sees something in this man. When the merchant-turned-prophet spoke, it lit a spark in people. His words were beautiful, hypnotic.

Anyone who listened to him recite this divine poetry was instantly filled with a sense of peace and calm. Abu Bakr couldn't stop thinking about it. Who knows how many sleepless nights he laid awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the recitations that he had heard. Well, to the shock and anger of the entire Meccan community, Abu Bakr accepts this prophet's message. He converts to monotheism.

And this was a big deal because Abu Bakr was a respected member of Mecca's ruling class. People trusted him, looked up to him. And if this prophet's message was good enough for Abu Bakr, then there had to be some merit to it. And as Abu Bakr spent more and more time with this man, they became very close. As close as brothers, in fact. But it was not always easy to be the prophet's friend.

The ruling class of Mecca did not like this monotheistic message, not only because it ran contrary to their most sacred traditions, but it also messed with their cash flow. As an important stop on the trade routes and home to the shrines to many pagan gods, Mecca was a very lucrative piece of real estate, and communing with your gods at the holiest place in Arabia had a price of admission. You had to pay for the privilege of circling the Kaaba. As Leslie Hazleton writes, quote,

Piety and profit were the twin engines of their city's prosperity. End quote. The prophet's one-god-and-only-god message, if widely accepted, could collapse the city's carefully constructed economy, or so the Meccans believed.

In short, this prophet was bad for business. The Meccan elite hurled constant insults at him on the street. They pushed him, they shoved him, and they beat him. They threw wet trash at him and dumped blood and animal organs at him while he prayed. Abu Bakr often had to leap to the prophet's defense when hecklers cornered him in the street or intimidated his followers. Abu Bakr's young daughter Aisha remembered her father coming home one night with patches torn out of his hair and beard.

He'd sustained injuries trying to defend the prophet from attackers. Aisha was just a child at the time, and she would have had a child's conception of the situation in Mecca. She knew something big was going on. The adults were fighting. Her dad was coming home with bruises. People in the streets were talking about this man, this prophet.

They were quoting him, repeating the beautiful verses and poetry that seemed to pour out straight from the lips of heaven. At some point, Aisha must have asked her dad what this prophet's name was, and Abu Bakr would have answered, his name is Muhammad.

The Prophet Muhammad's movement in Mecca began to grow. His message was egalitarian, one of non-violence and charity that resonated deeply with the city's less fortunate. The slaves, the poor, and the beggars. And once a respected man like Abu Bakr chose to believe, there were even more converts. A movement was growing in the streets of Mecca. Something electric. Something game-changing.

But then, the Prophet Muhammad was struck by a personal tragedy. His wife of 26 years, a woman named Khadija, died. At this time, men in Arabia often took several wives, but Muhammad had bucked that trend.

In his 40 years, he had only taken one wife, and an older woman at that. Which was a little unusual. It was a deeply affectionate marriage. Muhammad had loved Khadija more than anything. She had been the first person he'd told about his message from God. And even though Muhammad doubted himself, she had encouraged him to preach his message. But now, just as his movement was beginning to flower, the woman who had supported him was gone.

Nothing could ever replace Khadija, but Abu Bakr, Muhammad's high-status convert and closest friend, comes to him with an idea. He could see his friend was in pain. It was not right for a man to be unwed, he said, especially one burdened with a message from God. Muhammad would need all the love and support that he could get. He needed to remarry.

So, Abu Bakr says, look, my daughter, Aisha, is almost of marrying age. Let's join our families together officially. We can strengthen this growing flock with the bonds of marriage. Let's turn a movement into a family. Muhammad, despite his grief over Khadijah, agrees to Abu Bakr's proposal. It was decided that when Aisha was of the proper age, she would marry the Prophet.

Now, let's just address the elephant in the room. Obviously, obviously, a 12-year-old girl marrying a middle-aged man is not acceptable in our 21st century post-Enlightenment society. And believe it or not, some sources assert that Aisha was even younger when she got married. But it's very important that we always examine the behavior of historical figures within the context of the times they lived in.

What was normal in the past often seems unthinkable now. But again, this is medieval Arabia, where the concept of childhood did not exist as we think of it now. Preteens and teenagers were pretty much considered full adults, and they had many of the responsibilities that came along with adulthood.

So, as uncomfortable as it makes us, let's try and keep our cool about this particular facet of the story. We've addressed the cringe factor, now let's move past it. Because as you will see, Aisha is too dynamic and too strong of a character to ever be reduced to some kind of passive, one-dimensional sense of victimhood. This is a story completely dominated by men. But as she grows up, Aisha carves out her own place within it.

Through her words and actions, she demands to be remembered in the pages of history. As we will see, she had a consequential role to play in the Sunni-Shia split. So, with that caveat, let's get back to the story. It's impossible to know for sure how Aisha felt about the prospect of marriage, but odds are, she was terrified. Not only would she be marrying a much older man, but a holy one at that. A messenger from God, or so many believed.

The adults around her would have told her that it was the honor of her life, a great privilege, and the pressure must have been unimaginable. Before long, Aisha and Muhammad were married, and when she finally spent some time alone with this venerable prophet, she must have been surprised at how human he seemed. According to Leslie Hazleton, quote, he had round, rosy cheeks and a ruddy complexion.

He was stockily built, almost barrel-chested, which may partly account for his distinctive gait, always "leaning forward as though he were hurrying towards something." And he must have had a stiff neck, because people would remember that when he turned to look at you, he turned his whole body instead of just his head. The only sense in which he was conventionally handsome was his profile, the swooping hawk nose long considered a sign of nobility in the Middle East.

Muhammad had messy, curly black hair and wore loose, patchy robes. For a prophet, Aisha might have thought, he didn't look like much. But then she starts talking to him. And he wasn't aloof or cold or distant the way you might expect a divine messenger to be. He was just a guy. Capable of warmth, humor, anxiety and frustration. He really was just an ordinary person. And Muhammad was surprised by Aisha in turn.

This girl, even as a young teenager, was a forceful, confident personality. She had a razor-sharp sense of humor and absolutely no filter. She'd say whatever came to her mind whenever it came to her mind. She would insist on having things her way, and in time, she became intensely protective of her new husband.

Before long, Muhammad and Aisha developed an extremely close bond. The prophet would go on to take several other wives as he built alliances in Mecca, as was the common practice, but Aisha always held the most prominent place among them. She was the fiercest, the bravest, and the one whom he felt most comfortable around. He called her Humayra, or My Little Redhead, because Aisha would always dye her hair with henna, making it appear a deep crimson.

And he felt like he could tell her anything. And that's why, one night, Aisha worked up the courage. She asks Muhammad what really happened on the night he'd received his message from God. What happened in that cave?

Muhammad had only ever told the full story, the full impact of the experience, to one other woman on planet Earth. His first wife, Khadija. And she was long gone. He needed someone else to know. Even this young girl who knew nothing about the wider world. So Muhammad sits Aisha down and tells her the truth.

The year was 610 AD, although some sources say 609. Either way, it was about 10 years earlier.

At this time, Muhammad was a nobody, a mildly successful merchant making his living supervising the caravans that twisted through the Arabian deserts to and from Mecca. Orphaned at a young age, he had been adopted and raised by Bedouin tribesmen until he was about six years old. As a small child, he had learned to navigate the dunes by starlight, to care for the unruly herds of camels, and to defend himself in a fight.

The Bedouins eventually returned him to his extended family in Mecca and Muhammad got a job with his uncle, managing his caravan business. By 610 AD, Muhammad was living a comfortable life as a merchant, happily married with four daughters. But there was an emptiness nagging at him.

a sadness without a name. He didn't find any comfort or spiritual satisfaction in the endless array of gods and goddesses that held sway over Meccan society. All those idols left him cold and numb. And to Muhammad, they didn't represent salvation or enlightenment. They represented money and fees and upcharges.

Mecca was a theme park, and he craved distance from it. As Muhammad later described, these gods could, quote, End quote.

So, he got into the habit of taking annual trips out into the mountains overlooking Mecca, essentially solo camping trips. It was quiet, it was peaceful, far away from the crass capitalism of Mecca. When he was out in the wilderness, he would fast and meditate, and Leslie Hazelton describes the kind of altered consciousness this kind of solitude can produce. Quote, "...as the darkness thickened, so too did the silence."

the kind of absolute silence that rings in the ears a high perfect tone that comes from everywhere and nowhere a vibration more than a sound really as though the whole landscape is sentient the rock itself seems to be alive as it releases the accumulated warmth of daytime into the cool of the night

And as the stars begin their slow revolution overhead, there comes that sense of being a human all alone, and yet inexorably part of something larger, a sense of life and existence far older and deeper than the superficial ambitions and everyday cruelties of human affairs. End quote. On a night just like that, Muhammad set up camp in a cave and fell asleep.

His muscles must have been aching from the long walks and the climbing, mentally spent from meditation and belly aching from fasting, and he drifted off into unconsciousness. At some point in the middle of the night, he jolts awake. He gasps. Someone is grabbing him, crushing him, smothering him. He's being attacked in the pitch blackness of the cave. A bandit or a robber must have slipped in while he was sleeping.

Muhammad struggles against it, but he cannot move. He's completely paralyzed, locked in a death grip. Then, as he would tell it later, he hears a voice in his ear, a booming, incomprehensible voice, and it says one word to him, quote, recite.

"Recite what?" he asks. "I'm not a poet or a scholar. What do you want me to do?" This presence doesn't answer. It just tightens its grip. It squeezes him harder and harder until he can barely breathe. Muhammad thought he was dying, and just as he thinks he's about to pass out, to be crushed to death, something flows into his lungs.

Not any form of relief, something even more violent and more painful. As Leslie Hazleton writes, quote, Imagine being breathed into, inspired, with such force that your body can hardly bear it.

End quote.

Words, verses, poetry, whatever you want to call it, start being pulled out of Muhammad. He's speaking aloud and alone in this cave. He's aware of what's happening, but he can't stop it. It's like someone else is in the driver's seat and he's locked in the trunk. In a trance, he starts reciting, speaking words that are not his own. Quote, "...recite in the name of your Lord who from an embryo created the human."

End quote.

Those, ladies and gentlemen, are some of the first verses of what would become the Quran, Islam's holy book. But at the time, Muhammad did not feel enlightened or blessed or spiritually soothed. He felt one and only one visceral emotion, fear.

Indescribable, existential fear. He wakes up covered in sweat, shivering, his lungs on fire. Without missing a beat, he knows what he has to do. Muhammad runs out of the cave and prepares to leap off a cliff to kill himself.

He was 100% convinced that he had gone insane, that he had suffered a psychotic break. The more superstitious part of his brain thought maybe he'd been possessed by a desert spirit, a djinn. And his first instinct was to end it all, right then and there. But as he looks over the cliff, preparing to jump, he pauses. His thoughts must have returned to his wife or his children, we'll never know.

But he decides not to commit suicide. It would turn out to be one of the most consequential personal decisions in human history. Muhammad runs through the darkness in a blind panic. He crawls over the hills and the mountains in a desperate attempt to get home. To get to another human being, anyone, some kind of tangible tether to reality. As Leslie Hazleton writes, quote,

He came stumbling down the mountain, slipping and sliding on the loose scree, his breath hot and rasping, each inhalation needing to be struggled for until it felt like his chest would burst with the effort of it. His robe was torn, his arms and legs scratched and bruised by thorns and sharp-edged rocks in the path of his headlong flight for home. "'I have been in fear for my life,' was the first thing he said. "'I think I must have gone mad.'

Trembling, shuddering, almost convulsively, he begged Khadija to hold him and hide him under her shawl. Cover me, cover me, he pleaded, his head in her lap like a small child seeking shelter from the terrors of the night. And that terror alone was enough to convince her that what her husband had experienced was real. The End

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Five years after Muhammad's revelation on the mountain, what would be later referred to as Laylat al-Qadr or the Night of Destiny, he called all of his friends and extended family together, about 40 tribal elders all in all. At first, they did not know why they were there. There must have been a sense of anxiousness or unease, at the very least curiosity. All they knew was that Muhammad had something important to tell them.

In this crowd of waiting relatives, there was a 13-year-old boy named Ali. Ali was Muhammad's little cousin, and like most 13-year-olds, he was going through a bit of an awkward phase. He was a little pudgy, with skinny legs and bad eyesight, but those eyes were glued on Muhammad as the older man stood up and began addressing the group.

Muhammad explained to them what had happened five years ago on the mountain, how he had received a message from God, how he had been chosen as Allah's prophet. It had not been an easy road. After the first revelation on the mountain, God went dark on Muhammad. For two years, he heard nothing. He received no divine messages. It was two long years of thinking he really had gone insane.

or experienced some kind of fluke possession out in the desert. Maybe God was just messing with him, being cruel. But then, one day, the visions returned to him, and the divine messages start pouring forth, assuring him that he had not been abandoned, and now was the time to spread the faith. For three years, Muhammad quietly shared his recitations with his immediate family.

But in the year 615 AD, and just a reminder that some of these dates are pretty fuzzy, he decided it was time to grow the flock. Or, as he would claim, he was commanded by God to grow the flock. All of Mecca needed to hear God's message. So, on that night, in front of the 40 members of his extended clan, Muhammad recites the words that he believed God had spoken to him.

The recitations revolved around a few central themes, economic equality, nonviolence, compassion for the less fortunate, and just general kindness. But most of all, it called for a surrender to God, or Islam in Arabic.

to completely subjugate oneself to heaven. And these were messages that contrasted starkly with the economic ruthlessness and macho survivalist ethos of Arabian tribal culture. In today's vernacular, the Meccans would have called Muhammad a tree-hugging hippie.

Well, after he finishes speaking, Muhammad asks this dead silent room of 40 people, quote, God has ordered me to call you to him. So which of you will cooperate with me in this venture as my brother, my executor, and my successor? End quote. Silence. No one answers. Not a single person. Except for one.

Ali, the awkward 13-year-old kid, stands up and says, quote, End quote.

Years later, long after the Prophet's death, Ali remembered what happened next. Muhammad approached the boy, put his arm around his neck, and smiled. He says, quote, End quote.

Initially, Muhammad only had a handful of followers, mainly his first wife Khadijah and his little cousin Ali. But as he preaches in and around Mecca, something about his recitations begins to click. There was something intangibly attractive about Muhammad's words that just took hold of people. As the scholar Karen Armstrong writes in her biography of the Prophet, quote, Muhammad's converts eagerly awaited each new revelation. After he had recited it, they would learn it by heart."

and those who were literate wrote it down. They felt moved and stirred by the exquisite language of their scripture, which they were convinced could only have come from God. It is difficult for a non-Arabic speaker to appreciate the beauty of the Qur'an because this is rarely conveyed in translation. The text seems wearyingly repetitive, it has no apparent structure, no sustained argument or organizing narrative.

But Muhammad's followers would have been able to pick up verbal signals in the texts that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again, like the variations in a piece of music, which subtly amplify the original melody and add layer upon layer of complexity. End quote.

Muhammad's recitations also resonated with women, invoking a new and radical approach towards gender that was clear from the very outset. He railed against the subjugation of women, including the practices of female circumcision and domestic violence. He hated that stuff and he wanted to see it eradicated from Meccan society. But Muhammad's female-friendly philosophy was present in the very words of the recitations themselves. As Armstrong elaborates, quote,

The divine voice constantly changed the way it referred to itself as "we", "he", "your lord", "Allah" or "I", shifting its relationship to both the Prophet and his audience. Nor was God distinctively male. Each recitation began with the invocation "in the name of Allah, the compassionate and the merciful ."

Allah was a masculine noun, but the divine names Al-Rahman and Al-Rahim are not only grammatically feminine, but related etymologically to the word for womb. A partially personified female figure was central to nearly all of the early revelations. End quote.

For the Prophet's followers, listening to these revelations was pure bliss. But for Muhammad, receiving them was a taxing, almost violating experience. As he would admit later in his life, quote, Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.

He told his young wife, Aisha, that the revelations came, "...like the tolling of a bell, and that is the hardest on me. Then it leaves me and I am aware of what he said. And sometimes it appears to me as an angel in the form of a man and addresses me, and then I am conscious of what he says."

End quote. Sometimes Aisha would be around to personally witness these moments, and the teenage girl remembered, quote, End quote.

As we discussed before, through the perspective of Aisha, these messages did not vibe with the Meccan aristocracy. At first, they didn't consider him much of a threat, but as his influence grew and his alliances multiplied, Muhammad became a problem, one that might need to be silenced. One of the leaders even asked him, quote, "...how could God only send a nobody like you?"

Historian Karen Armstrong talks a little bit more about these ideological divisions in her book. Quote, "...the revelations had brought to light a fault line in the city. Over the years, a worrying divide had opened up between young and old, rich and poor, men and women. And this was dangerous."

"The scripture that was being revealed to Muhammad, verse by verse, surah by surah, condemned this kind of inequality. One faction would inevitably suffer at the hands of another. Any society that was divided against itself would be destroyed, because it was going against the very nature of things." Eventually, the Meccan elite decide that they've had enough of this false prophet.

This charlatan, whom in their eyes had brainwashed so many weak-minded people, spat on their polytheistic traditions, and challenged their rightful control over the city. So the Meccan bosses get together for a good old-fashioned brainstorm. And the question at hand was simple: how do we get rid of this guy? One boss suggests locking him up and throwing away the key. He says let's just throw him in a cell and leave him there until he dies.

No, no, no, said the others. That's not going to work. His followers could storm the jail. It could create riots. That's not going to work. But another idea comes up. Let's exile him, says one of them. Quote, let us expel him from among us and banish him from our land. We don't care where he goes or where he settles. The harm he's been doing will disappear and we will restore our social harmony.

End quote. Well, that wouldn't work either, some of them say. His message was so powerful, he could easily ally himself with the Bedouin raiders and migratory clans out in the desert. Having been raised in that environment as a young boy, he had a feel for that culture, he knew their ways. Quote, "...he could lead them against us, crush us with them, seize power from our hands, and do with us as he wants."

End quote. But eventually, they settle on a solution. In a way, it was both clean and messy. Quote,

That's the Arabic word for the people of Mecca.

End quote. So, a group of hitmen is sent to Muhammad's house in the dead of night, and they knew he left his house every morning at dawn, and when he did, they'd hack him apart with their swords and put an end to this upjumped merchant with delusions of grandeur. So they hide outside his house, and they wait.

At dawn, the door opens and a hooded figure steps into the morning light. The assassins strike, but before they can kill him, they pull back the man's hood. Turns out it wasn't Muhammad at all. It was his young cousin, Ali. They demanded, quote, where is your companion, end quote.

The awkward teenager had grown up into a strong young man, and Ali answered, quote, Do you expect me to keep watch over him? You wanted him to leave, and he has left. End quote.

And Ali was telling the truth. Muhammad was long gone, safely hidden away in a mountain cave with his close friend and father-in-law Abu Bakr. Someone involved in the plot to kill the prophet had loose lips, and Muhammad was warned the night before. They decided his little cousin Ali would play the decoy while his friend Abu Bakr smuggled him out of Mecca.

But where would they go? Hunted and hated in their hometown of Mecca, Muhammad and his followers needed a new home, a new place to live and worship.

Which, to the modern ear, sounds like a fairly simple proposition. You know, you don't like where you live, you move. But again, we're talking about 14 centuries in the past. In a tribal, family-centric society like medieval Arabia, your home was part of you. Leaving it was like leaving yourself in a lot of ways, and it was a painful, hollowing choice to make.

But it had to be done, and Muhammad decides that he would resettle in a city to the north, a place historian Juan Cole called, quote, an emerald oasis of date orchards and farms dotted with tribal hamlets, among which stood imposing tower houses and defensive redoubts, end quote. It was called Medina, and it would be Muhammad's new base of operations.

And this all happened in the year 622, about 12 years after the first revelation, about seven years after Muhammad had started preaching his message, and about five years after he'd married the young Aisha. And that's just to ground us in the timeline a bit.

And this migration to Medina, or Hijra in Arabic, is considered a watershed moment in the history of Islam. In fact, it's so important that later Muslim scholars began their calendar at this event. In other words, 622 was year one for the gestating Islamic empire.

But this transition brought with it a mounting degree of political complexity. Medina was much less homogenous than Mecca. There were Jewish tribes, Christians, atheists, polytheists, and Muhammad had to negotiate with all of them to work out a tenuous state of coexistence. Muhammad's role was becoming more and more complicated.

He was now both a religious leader and a political leader, and you get a sense that he starts to struggle with finding that balance between pragmatism and idealism. You don't have to look at the world too closely to realize that religious ideals often start to decay when exposed to the harsh light of worldly reality. It would also be a very hard transition for two of the most important people in Muhammad's life, his teenage wife Aisha and his young cousin Ali.

Her age is up for debate, obviously, but Aisha would have probably been about 16 or 17 at this time. That's a rowdy age for any teenage girl, but Aisha was not your average teenage girl. By this point, she had begun to grasp a sense of her own importance. Not only was she the wife of the Prophet, she was his favorite wife. As Muhammad took on new alliances, he sealed them with marriages. By the end of his life, Muhammad would have nine wives.

but Aisha was always the favorite and the most jealous. These years in Medina are when Aisha really starts to blossom into the desert rose she would eventually become, thorns and all.

In her book, Leslie Hazleton describes Aisha as, quote, quick-witted, sassy, tart-tongued, and charming, end quote. When it came to her marriage to the Prophet, Aisha was extremely territorial. She grudgingly acknowledged the reality that she would have to share Muhammad with eight other women, but she resolved herself to be the most favored and powerful among them. There's one anecdote from this time period that distills all of Aisha's qualities down perfectly.

During the early years in Medina, Muhammad tries to broker an alliance with a local Christian tribe, one that would be sealed with a marriage. So the chieftain of this tribe sends his most beautiful daughter to Muhammad to be married. Well, before the wedding night, Aisha decides to give the new bride some advice.

Aisha tells Muhammad's new fiancé that the Prophet liked to be teased. She tells her that on the wedding night, she should play hard to get and use a very particular phrase, quote, I take refuge with God from thee, end quote. So, the new fiancé takes Aisha's advice and on her wedding night, she says that phrase to Muhammad. Well, as it turned out, that was the specific phrase used to annul marriages.

Not being acquainted with Islam, this young Christian girl had accidentally torpedoed the new alliance, just by following Aisha's manipulative advice. The girl was sent back to her tribe in tears and Aisha comforted the confused and disappointed Muhammad in his tent. She would not suffer any rivals, at least no more than she already had to. Muhammad may have claimed to have been imparted with divine wisdom, but he clearly had a blind spot when it came to his free-spirited young wife.

On one occasion, she became displeased that he was spending extra time with another wife who knew how to make his favorite drink, a mixture of honey and goat's milk. Next time Aisha saw him, she complained that his breath smelled bad because of the beverage. Not wanting to gross out his favorite wife, he quit drinking the drink and spent less time with that other wife.

But there was one area where Aisha could overstep her bounds. No matter how hard she tried, there was one woman she could never eclipse. Muhammad's first wife, the long-dead Khadija.

the woman who had been his entire world for 26 years, who had held him in her arms when he thought he was going crazy, who had encouraged him to spread his message in the first place. The memory of Khadijah was such a raw, painful subject for Muhammad that he wouldn't even talk about her. He wouldn't even say her name aloud. As Aisha confessed many years later, quote, I wasn't jealous of any of the Prophet's wives except for Khadijah, even though I came after her death, end quote.

One day, as a teenager, Aisha's envy of this long-dead woman came out. She teased Muhammad, "...how could you remain so devoted to the memory of that toothless old woman whom God has replaced with the better?" Muhammad was not the type to have a violent outburst, but he knew how to cut others deeply with a few carefully chosen words.

After Aisha's flippant insult to Khadijah, Muhammad replies, quote, Indeed, no, God has not replaced her with the better. God granted me her children while withholding those of other women. End quote. Muhammad was referring to the fact that neither Aisha nor any of the other new wives had been able to bear his children. His first wife, Khadijah, had. Several, in fact.

And no one really knows for sure why these other women were unable to conceive children with Muhammad. Some historians will say it's sterility or impotence. The fact is we just don't really know. But Aisha could not argue with that rebuttal, and she never said a word against Khadijah in front of Muhammad again. The Prophet's love life was getting complicated, and the simmering tensions within his rapidly expanding household were destined to turn deadly.

As Muhammad and his followers began to carve out their new home in Medina, one man began to shine brighter than any other.

Ali, Muhammad's younger cousin. As a 13-year-old boy, he had stood up and accepted Muhammad as the prophet, making him the very first male to accept Islam. As a young man, he had risked his life, playing the part of Muhammad's body double on the night the assassins had come to kill the prophet. And in 623 AD, when Ali was a strapping young guy in his early 20s, that loyalty was being rewarded, with the most precious token of gratitude that Muhammad could offer.

Muhammad decided that his daughter, Fatima, would marry Ali, making him officially the son-in-law of the Prophet. Muhammad had never been able to father any sons or any children at all after his first wife Khadija had died. But he loved Ali like a son, and he hoped that his bloodline would live on in the male children of his favorite cousin Ali and his daughter Fatima.

His hopes were well founded; they would go on to have two sons, Hasan and Husayn. Now, if you've been taking notes, you'll recognize that second name: Husayn. His tragic death years into the future is the reason millions upon millions of Shia Muslims mourn during Ashura to this very day. But no one could have guessed the dark, war-torn future that lay ahead.

For now, the Prophet was overjoyed. His most treasured daughter and his beloved cousin were joined together in marriage. But as Muhammad basked in the satisfaction of this union, his thoughts began to turn to troubling issues. In uprooting his followers from Mecca and immigrating to Medina, the Prophet and his flock faced a two-fold problem.

First, how were they going to support themselves and make a living in this new city? Muhammad and his followers did not own any land or orchards or agricultural space. They were merchants, and now they were traders with nothing to trade, except maybe the clothes on their back and the strength in their hands.

All their roots and support systems were back in Mecca. They were starting from scratch, and they needed a way of contributing to this new community. So that was one issue. The other issue was the very hometown that they had left, Mecca.

Muhammad suspected that the Meccan leaders who had tried to have him killed wouldn't simply just let it go and give up. He had a target on his back now, and he worried that it was only a matter of time before a hired hand from his old stomping grounds stuck a blade between his ribs. Or maybe Muhammad had just convinced himself of their undying hatred. After so much harassment and physical violence, God's messenger may have felt a very human desire for revenge.

Luckily, there was a way of killing two birds with one stone. Trade caravans were the lifeblood of Mecca. Unlike the agricultural oasis of Medina, Mecca had no farms or arable land. The city depended entirely on commerce to sustain itself. So, there was a constant and tempting stream of wealth and valuable stuff flowing across the desert to and from Mecca.

Raiding these caravans could be a very easy and profitable source of new income for Muhammad and his followers. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and he had presented a very convenient solution to provide for the Prophet and his flock, or so Muhammad would have told his followers. Initially, these were meant to be clean raids, no deaths, no killings. Killing was very inconvenient in 7th century Arabia because it always, always, always,

triggered blood feuds. If you killed a guy, his entire family would vow revenge and they would not rest until they tagged you back, even if it took them two, three, four generations. If you'll recall, the whole reason the Meccan leaders had decided to have ten men assassinate Muhammad simultaneously was that so no one clan could be blamed. Thus, no blood feud. And there was a precedent for these kinds of stick-up raids.

They were kind of accepted in Arabian tribal culture as a fact of life, an environmental hazard like sandstorms or animal attacks. It's worth mentioning that there were really no taboos being breached here.

So, the idea behind raiding these Meccan caravans was a simple smash and grab. Stick-up robberies, basically. Muhammad and his community would siphon a little wealth off to support themselves from the town that hated them anyway. And no one would die, so it wouldn't incur any meaningful retaliation. But like so many robberies across so many eras in so many places, accidents happen.

And before long, one of these raids went bad. Someone was killed, and it further inflamed the growing tensions between Mecca and Medina. It's tempting to place the lion's share of the blame for the trajectory of events on Muhammad and his followers, but the Meccans were engaging in their own type of provocation. They were not content to let Muhammad, who they saw as a false prophet, steal away huge chunks of their population.

These sudden conversions split apart families, took away sons, brothers, sisters, mothers, and friends, and for the Meccans it was like losing the people they loved to a charismatic cult leader, and they believed that the only way to snap them back to reality was to snatch them back to reality and haul them back to Mecca whether they liked it or not. The Meccans often sent raiding parties to abduct members of Muhammad's flock and force them to convert back to polytheism.

Sometimes, they were successful, sometimes not, but all it did was make things progressively worse. Clearly, these two cities were on a collision course, and in a matter of months, the small skirmishes, raids, and abductions bloomed into open warfare.

Ali had never killed a man, but as it turned out, killing came easily to him. The weak knees and thin legs were now fast and powerful. The paunch of his preteen years had flattened into the stomach of a fit young man. His eyesight wasn't any sharper, but his reflexes were. And when a Meccan army marched across the desert to threaten his prophet and the new community at Medina, Ali was happy to pull on a shirt of mail, buckle on a saber, and kill for his beliefs.

By the firelight in Medina, he had listened to his father-in-law's new revelations from God. From the very outset, the only acceptable form of violence in Islam was self-defense. That was unequivocal. But if the Meccans threatened to haul them all back in chains, to denounce their one true God and crush Muhammad's new religion like an inconvenient weed, then violence had to be done to defend the faith. They had no choice, Ali believed.

So, in the late 620s, a series of battles erupted across the Arabian desert between Mecca and Medina. It was in these engagements that Ali got his first taste of combat. Muhammad raised an army of his faithful followers to stand against the aggression of Mecca, and Ali distinguished himself quickly within it. Ali was lethal with a sword and shield. By all accounts, it gave him no pleasure, but the Prophet's son-in-law knew how to use a sword better than most.

His skill on the battlefield was a sight to behold and a credit to the growing reputation of Islam. This talent was a blessing and a curse to Ali. He didn't crave violence at all, but he did crave the love and approval of his father-in-law as well as the affection of his new wife Fatima. He wanted a secure future for his sons, whose

Hussain and Hussein. He wanted them to know a life without persecution and fear and homelessness. Maybe if he fought hard enough or killed enough men, Islam might have a real future. So Ali did what he had to do.

Ali is described in these battles as being surrounded by bodies, piles and piles of them. The best warriors that Mecca could muster fell at his feet like leaves. The oral and written traditions of Islam attach an almost superhuman proficiency for killing to Ali. He's cutting down 20, 30, 40 men at a time, and he comes off like an Arabian Achilles in these battles.

And those are obviously exaggerations and the truth probably lies somewhere in between, but in all probability, Ali knew how to fight. Muhammad personally started calling him Asad-Allah, or "The Lion of God". And according to legend, after one particularly strenuous battle, Muhammad held Ali close, embracing his cherished son-in-law with palpable gratitude. Then he placed a gift in Ali's hands.

It was a sword, a curved saber with a blade that featured a split in the last few inches, forked like a snake's tongue. Muhammad told Ali that the sword was called Zulfikar, or the splitter.

Now, this sword is most likely a mythical invention by later Islamic historians rather than an actual sword that existed, but if you go to Shia communities throughout the world, you can find images of Zulfiqar pretty much everywhere. To this day, it is a potent symbol in Shia Islam, because Ali would go on to be a focal point in the infamous Sunni-Shia split, and his possession of a sword named Splitter is not an accident.

It was plain as could be that Muhammad loved his son-in-law Ali. Everybody seemed to love Ali. He was brave and kind and humble and strong. But there was one person who definitely did not like Ali. The Prophet's favorite wife, Aisha.

While Ali was cutting down the enemies of Islam, Aisha was watching from the rear of the army. Women were not permitted to fight, much less an important woman like the teenage wife of the prophet. But Aisha, like many Arabian women, had a crucial role to play on a 7th century battlefield. As their men fought, the women would scream and chant and shriek from the rear. They would taunt the enemy soldiers and cheer on their own husbands and brothers.

Shrill is a little bit of a no-no word these days, but shrill is exactly what women on Arabian battlefields were going for. High-pitched, unnerving, eardrum-piercing invective that served to distract the enemy and spur on allies.

They were meant to motivate the fighters in particular. As one of the chants went, quote, Advance and we'll embrace you on soft pillows. Falter and you'll get no tenderness from us. End quote. In other words, no victory, no sex. Aisha would have been there, screaming and shrieking along with the rest of the women in these early battles. She would have smelled blood and death and guts for the very first time. As Leslie Hazleton puts it, quote,

The women of 7th century Arabia were no shrinking violets. End quote. But the adrenaline rush of witnessing battle was soured for Aisha when Ali came swaggering back into camp, covered in blood and glory. His triumphs made more infuriating by his easy smile and approachable demeanor as she rolled her eyes when people sang the praises of Muhammad's favorite son-in-law, the Lion of God.

Aisha's resentment toward Ali and Fatima ran deep. They were the golden couple, the apples of Muhammad's eye. Fatima was the daughter of Muhammad's first wife, Khadija, that long-dead venerated woman who Aisha could never hope to surpass in her husband's mind, the only woman who had ever given the Prophet children.

Aisha and the other wives had not been able to achieve even that simple task, and that bitterness sat in Aisha's belly where a child should be, corrosive and unremitting. She projected all of her hatred of Khadijah and the disappointment of her failed pregnancies onto Ali and Fatima, who had been blessed with two sons, Husan and Hussein. It seemed they were the future of Islam, the next link in the bloodline that would guide generations of Muslims to come.

a future that did not include Aisha. It was only a matter of time before Muhammad's favorite wife and his closest family members came into conflict, and it all started with a lost necklace.

In the late 620s, Muhammad and his army were on an expedition, traveling across Arabia. Their objective had been to sway this or that tribe into joining Muhammad's constantly swelling coalition against Mecca. And after a successful campaign, the Prophet and his followers were heading home to Medina. Aisha had been brought along for this trip. For a teenage girl, it was heaven.

The thrill of adventure, the stark beauty of the desert. And when they were about a day's journey outside Medina, the group made camp to rest the camels and eat and recuperate. The next morning when they started to break camp, Aisha was wearing her favorite necklace, a gift from the prophet. We don't really know what kind of necklace it was, maybe pearls or gems or seashells, but as the caravan was preparing to move out, she realized it was missing.

She must have dropped it somewhere. So she jumps off her camel and retraces her steps, eventually arriving at a bush that she had used for a bathroom break earlier that morning. The necklace, it seemed, had snagged on a branch and broken, scattering the beads all over the sand. So she quickly gathers them up and turns back to return to the caravan. But when she looks back, she realizes they're gone.

The desert was completely empty, except for the hundreds of footprints left in the sand. They'd accidentally left her behind. Aisha immediately panics. To be left behind without so much as a camel or a skin of water in the Arabian desert was basically a death sentence. But then she takes a breath and calms herself.

She assured herself that they would soon realize she wasn't there and would send someone back to get her. As Aisha remembered in her own words, quote, I wrapped myself in my smock and then lay down where I was, knowing that when I was missed they would come back for me, end quote. But someone comes along much sooner than expected, a young warrior by the name of Safwan who had also fallen behind the expedition, and as he was racing to catch up on his camel he

he caught sight of Aisha laying in the sand, her dark henna-red hair peeking out from beneath her shawl. He offers her a ride, and she accepts. By nightfall, they were back in Medina, but their arrival together made for a very scandalous image. As Leslie Hazleton explains, quote,

The Prophet's youngest wife, traveling alone with a virile young warrior, parading through the series of villages strung along the valley of Medina. Word of it ran through the oasis in a matter of hours. A necklace indeed, people clucked. What could one expect of a childless teenager married to a man in his late fifties, alone the whole day in a desert with a young warrior? Why had she simply lain down and waited when she could have caught up with the expedition on foot?

Had it been a prearranged tryst, had the prophet been deceived by his spirited favorite?

End quote. This innocent act of hitchhiking exploded into a full-blown scandal that rocked Medina to the core. As Hazleton observes, quote, In the politics of 7th century Medina, as anywhere in the world today, the appearance of impropriety was as bad as impropriety itself. End quote. Muhammad trusted Aisha implicitly, and she would never, ever have cheated on him. Not only out of love and respect, but out of self-preservation. End quote.

But once the rumor mill got started, it was very difficult to stem the flow of juicy gossip across Medina. The Prophet's favorite wife sneaking around behind his back. It was unthinkable,

Aisha was horrified and hurt that people would say such things, but the deepest wound was yet to come. Muhammad seemed unsure whether he believed her story or not. For the time being, she was sent to live at home with her father. The shame and humiliation was unbearable. As Aisha remembered, quote, I could not stop crying. I thought the weeping would burst my liver.

End quote. But sending Aisha away was just a temporary solution. Muhammad needed to make a definitive decision. Would he believe her? Divorce her? Forgive her?

Allah was silent on this question. The Almighty seemed unconcerned with the bedroom drama of his prophet. So, Muhammad turns to someone else for advice, one of the men he trusted more than anyone else in the world, his son-in-law, the Lion of God, Ali. Ali had never liked Aisha, this young teenage girl with a sharp tongue and an air of self-importance.

She was Muhammad's favorite, his red-haired confidant, and she used that influence to pepper anyone she disliked with insults and jabs. Her favorite target had been Ali's wife and Muhammad's daughter, Fatima. Well, one day Fatima had had enough, and she complained to her father about the clear favoritism he showed towards Aisha. Muhammad reacted defensively, saying, quote, "'Dear little daughter, do you not love who I love?'

The rebuke in his tone was clear, and Fatima could only sigh and agree, quote, Yes, surely. So when Muhammad came to Ali asking for advice about Aisha's rumored infidelity, the latter's answer was instant and unambiguous, quote, There are many women like her. God has freed you from constraints. She is easily replaced, end quote.

That was not the answer Muhammad wanted. He had hoped Ali would urge him to dismiss the insinuations. Instead, his favorite son-in-law had just muddied the waters even further. Muhammad left Ali's tent more conflicted and dissatisfied than when he'd entered it.

Eventually, Muhammad realized he couldn't put it off any longer. He had to talk to Aisha in private and glean the truth for himself. He had to make a final decision. Once again, he asked Aisha if there was any truth to the rumors.

Aisha was nothing if not proud, and she bristled at the false accusation. She stood her ground with the prophet and defiantly quoted his own scripture back at him. Quote, End quote.

Then, she turned around, laid on her bed and gave him the cold shoulder. Lo and behold, Muhammad at that very moment received a revelation from God. "Good news, Aisha!" he exclaimed. An angel had come to him in a vision, just now, and proclaimed that she was innocent of the accusations. In Muhammad's later years, God really did seem to have impeccable timing.

But instead of rushing back into her husband's arms, Aisha stubbornly refused to see him, telling her parents, "...I shall neither come to him nor thank him, nor will I thank the both of you who listened to the slander and did not deny it. I shall rise and give thanks to Allah alone." Everything was eventually forgiven, but only a woman like Aisha was capable of putting God's prophet squarely in the doghouse.

There was one person, however, that Aisha could not forgive. The man who had urged Muhammad to divorce her, to get rid of her, to kick her to the curb without a second thought, Ali. Ali, with his fake humility and fancy sword, he was happy to use his own gilded, unassailable reputation to trample all over hers.

He would pay for that, Aisha decided, if it took her the rest of her life. She would despise Ali until her crimson hair was withered and gray. With Aisha exonerated and more influential than ever, Ali had just made a powerful adversary. And to make matters more complicated, Muhammad was getting older. The Prophet's looming mortality would soon set the twin pillars of his life against one another, with deadly results.

As the 620s came to a close, Muhammad was beginning to feel his age. His curly black beard was streaked with veins of silver. He was wracked by migraines and debilitating headaches that would come over him suddenly and without warning. The headaches were a souvenir of a battle wound he'd sustained against the Meccans at a place called Uhud. During the fighting, Muhammad had been hit in the head.

It was a glancing blow, from a lance or a mace or a rock, and the impact had split his helmet and forced the metal into the side of his face. His nose was broken, his cheek was split open, and his upper lip was cut. He recovered from the wound, but the intense waves of pain never left him. It was a very close call, too close, and it served as a reminder that the Prophet would not last forever.

Muhammad had never wanted to be immortal, or claimed to be, and he constantly reminded his followers that Islam was bigger than one man. Quote, Muhammad is but a messenger. Other messengers have come and gone before him, so how can it be that when he dies or is slain, you turn back on your heels?

But the war with his hometown of Mecca had left its mark in other ways. The prophet was tired. Tired of war, tired of raids and fighting and arbitration. By this time he had survived multiple assassination attempts. The night on the mountain when he had first received his message from God seemed so distant, so long ago. Was he even the same man anymore?

Muhammad had always preached peace and equality and kindness. As scholar Karen Armstrong writes, he wanted to, quote, create a society where the weak and vulnerable were treated with respect, end quote. But the practical and political realities of surviving in the cutthroat environment of 7th century Arabia had forced him to do things that he was not proud of. Binding the new community of believers, or Ummah as it's called in Arabic, had been a grueling thank

thankless task. Many tribes accepted Islam, not for the spiritual benefits, but for the political opportunity. They were quick to change sides and comfortable with betrayal if it served their purposes.

In 627, Muhammad became aware of a certain Jewish tribe in Medina who had been working closely with his Meccan enemies. They had pledged to support him and had withdrawn their support in a moment of great need. Muhammad was faced with a terrible choice. On the one hand, he could exile them. And while that would remove the immediate danger, there was a strong possibility that they would just return as part of a much larger Meccan army. On the other hand, he could do something more drastic.

something that would ensure the safety of his fragile flock. In one of the most controversial and heart-wrenching episodes of the Prophet's life, he let his lieutenants deal harshly with the traitorous tribe. As a later Arabic historian described, it was decreed that, "...the men shall be killed, the property divided, the women and children made captives." Anywhere from 400 to 900 men in this tribe were sentenced to death.

But Muhammad was not one to pass a sentence and look away. For three days, he forced himself to watch the executions. From sundown to sunset, hundreds of heads fell one by one into a long trench dug for the purpose.

It's hard to know for sure if Ali was present for these executions, but he must have known that they occurred. Battle was one thing, the Lion of God might have thought, but all this blood spilled in an executioner's trench? It was necessary to the survival of the Yuma, the Islamic community, there was no doubt about that, but when would it all end? Would they ever achieve the peaceful utopia God had promised to them?

Ali's thoughts roiled with anxiety about the future. Muhammad was getting old. He'd seen the Prophet clutching his forehead, he'd seen the way he disappeared into Aisha's tent for comfort during his most debilitating headaches. When the Prophet died, the Ummah would turn to Ali for guidance. At least that's what made the most sense. After all, he was married to the Prophet's daughter, related to him by blood, and he was the first male convert to Muhammad's message.

Ali was not an ambitious man, but he was a dutiful one, and he was aware of the responsibility looming over his shoulders. In the year 628 AD, Muhammad decided that it was time to bring this war with Mecca to a close.

They had fought three major battles and countless smaller skirmishes. If he didn't find a way to decisively end the war, the cyclical violence would churn and churn and churn until the thimble full of potential Islam had was all dried up, and Arabia would collapse back into tribal paganism and crushing economic inequality. So, Muhammad decides to return to Mecca, to walk straight into the lion's den.

But when he explained his plan to his followers, he said something that surprised them. They would not be returning home as an army, but as pilgrims. No weapons, no violence. They would make the 250-mile journey from Medina to Mecca without a stitch of armor or a blade or a bow to defend themselves.

The pilgrimage to Mecca was a sacred thing for both monotheists and polytheists alike. To circle the Kaaba, the cube at the heart of the city, was a privilege the Meccan aristocracy could not deny to any man, not even their greatest enemy. At least that's what Muhammad was counting on. He was taking a gamble, not just with his own life but with those of his followers. He was betting on a more hopeful view of human nature than experience had taught him to expect.

They would either bring this conflict to a peaceful resolution, or the Prophet's journey would end right where it started. In the winter of that year, anywhere from 700 to 1,000 of Muhammad's followers set out across the desert, dressed all in white. In the context of their pilgrimage, the white robes they wore were a symbol of peace and piety.

It would be entirely up to the Meccans whether they respected these defenseless pilgrims or butchered them as enemies. Muhammad was placing his flock in the hands of people who despised him, but he knew that decisive results often require dramatic solutions. When Muhammad and his followers arrive at the outskirts of Mecca, they are immediately surrounded and stopped from entering the city. Grim-faced cavalrymen with long spears barred their entrance.

But to their surprise, they aren't attacked. By arriving without weapons or threat of violence to the city, Muhammad had put his enemies in a bind. If they killed a thousand unarmed pilgrims in cold blood, the whole of Arabia would turn against them. It was a spiritual catch-22 that Muhammad had engineered perfectly. After a brief period of tense uncertainty, a truce is signed between the city of Mecca and Muhammad's community at Medina. As Leslie Hazleton writes, quote,

Neither Gandhi nor Machiavelli could have done better. Muhammad had reversed the terms of engagement, turning apparent weakness into strength.

He had proved himself as effective unarmed as armed, and used the language of peace as forcefully as that of war. In fact, it was precisely this dual aspect of him that would so confound his critics and his followers alike. Whether in the 7th century or the 21st, he would frustrate the simplistic terms of those trying to pigeonhole him as either a prophet of peace or a prophet of war. This was not a matter of either-or.

A complex man, carving a huge profile in history, his vision went beyond seemingly irreconcilable opposites." But in the aftermath of this uneasy truce, Mecca inevitably breached their side of the arrangement.

And for Muhammad, even the smallest infraction was all the excuse he needed. The Prophet marched on the city with 10,000 men. And the Meccan leaders, seeing this vast army, realized that they had lost the spiritual war. They surrendered unconditionally, without a single life lost.

Ten long years after he had first fled the assassination attempt in Mecca, Muhammad finally returned to his hometown, uniting it with Medina under the tenets of Islam, all without shedding a single drop of blood. Muhammad never once believed that he was starting a new religion. Islam was just a continuation of the Abrahamic faiths that came before it. He thought of the Quran as an amendment to existing belief systems rather than a wholesale invention of a new one.

But as we all know, Islam was destined to carve out its own unique place in the religious tapestry. The scrawny little weed of belief that struggled to survive in the Arabian desert began to thrive, and tribe after tribe pledged themselves to the Prophet and his interpretation of monotheism. All they had to do was say the words, quote, "...there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger."

Then, they became part of the Ummah, or community of believers. No believer was to raise a hand against another believer in anger, greed, or violence. They were all family now, at least on paper. As a later Arabic historian named Ibn Ishaq, hopefully I didn't mess that up too bad, wrote, quote,

End quote.

But not everyone in Mecca wanted to convert, obviously, and they were not punished for that choice either. Everyone was free to worship as they wished, but from that moment on, Islam would hold sway over Arabia, and Mecca would be its cradle and seat of spiritual power. The Kaaba, the sacred cube in the heart of Mecca, was rededicated to the one God, Allah. And to this day, pilgrims flock to Mecca from all over the world to circle the colossal black cube and pay homage to Allah.

It had to have been a surreal moment for Aisha. She'd left the city a scared little girl, unsure of her place in the world and married to a hunted man. Now she was the favorite wife of God's last prophet, and he had accomplished his mission. They no longer had to fear for their lives, or cross the desert in an endless chain of bloody campaigns. In the twilight of his life, the prophet of peace might get a chance to experience a little for himself.

But over the next two years, Aisha noticed a change in Muhammad. He was exhausted all the time, and the decades of conflict, strife, and persecution had finally caught up with him.

A weariness seemed to pull at him and weigh him down. He seemed to crave solitude, and he would stand alone in the graveyards of Medina all night and pray over the dead, even old enemies who were long gone. Aisha overheard him one night saying softly to himself, Peace be upon you, O people of the graves. Happy are you, so much better off than men here."

His headaches got worse and worse. Aisha would often cradle Muhammad's head and place a cool cloth against his forehead to ease the pain. It was in one of these quiet moments Muhammad must have looked up at his wife and saw the truth of her reality. She was 21 years old, young and beautiful.

He saw her bright, crimson hair, mingled against the dried-out gray of his own. He was an old man, tired and dying. Aisha, on the other hand, was just a young woman, with her whole life ahead of her. And in that moment, Muhammad received one of his final revelations from God.

It would come to be known as the verse of the choice. End quote.

And Leslie Hazelton translates that for us, quote: "The wives were free to choose divorce, that is, and Muhammad would make sure that they were well provided for. Or, they could freely accept their public role and everything it entailed." That too was spelled out. "The Messenger is closer to the believers than their own selves, and his wives are their mothers," the voice instructed. "It is not for you to marry the Messenger's wives after him.

Truly, that is grievous in the sight of God. If the women chose to stay married to Muhammad, they now had to accept that their role went far beyond that of a normal spouse. They would be bound so tightly into the familial fabric of the new Arabia that they would not merely be his wives but the mothers of all believers, the mothers of the faithful.

What this meant, in a practical sense, is that if Aisha chose to stay married to Muhammad, she could never remarry after he died.

She could never touch another man again. She could never love or have children or feel the intimate embrace of another person. She would be a mother to the faithful. And to have a relationship with the mother to all Muslims was tantamount to incest. She would have to spend her days alone, celibate, an untouchable widow for as long as she lived. But it was her choice to make. Muhammad, at the end of his life, felt at least he owed her that. She was his humayrah,

his little redhead after all. Now it's impossible to ever really know the inner workings of a mind belonging to a person who lived 14 centuries ago, much less a teenage girl who'd experienced more in her first couple decades alive than most people experience in a lifetime. We have no idea what Aisha truly wanted when presented this choice. How could we? Did she feel pressured to stay married to Muhammad? Did she resent being married so young and being used as a political prop?

Maybe she just wanted to be left alone and not have to deal with the rigors of married life. Maybe she enjoyed the prestige and power that came with her position. Well, whatever went through her brain, Aisha chose to stay married to Muhammad. And his other wives did too, all eight of them. But for a young woman like Aisha with so much life left to live, the choice must have weighed particularly heavy.

Her fears about an uncertain future came to fruition in the summer of 632 AD. In June of that year, Muhammad came down with a fever. The piercing migraines that had plagued him ever since he'd sustained his head injury at the Battle of Uhud were more agonizing than ever. And this time, they would not relent. The pain was debilitating and Muhammad could barely move. And his health starts to deteriorate really, really fast.

He develops extreme sensitivity to light and noise, and the fever drags on for days and days. Modern experts have identified Muhammad's illness as a form of bacterial meningitis. Probably. But even with today's medicine, it can be a fatal infection.

For ten days, Muhammad clung to life, drifting in and out of sweat-soaked consciousness. Every noise, every whisper was a piercing stab into his eardrums. Every ray of light that filtered into the sick room was a spike in his brain. All the followers of the Prophet could do was just make him comfortable and wait for a miracle.

Surely, God would not let his prophet die at this critical moment, when the newly established power of Islam would need his guidance more than ever. And most disturbing of all, Muhammad, in all his time since the revelations, had never designated a successor. This is very important. He had never made it explicitly clear who would lead the community after he died.

There were those who assumed it would be Ali, his son-in-law, the Lion of God. Muhammad had certainly expressed his admiration for the young man, saying, quote, I am from Ali, and Ali is from me. He is the guardian of every believer after me. None but a believer loves Ali, and none but an apostate hates him. End quote.

To some people that sounded pretty clear cut, but there were also those who said it should not be Ali. A community based on fairness and equality should not devolve into a hereditary monarchy. Egalitarianism and meritocracy was the very bedrock Islam rested upon. The best among them should lead, the wisest, the most qualified.

Ali was not guaranteed the position just because he was related to Muhammad and married to his daughter. The sad truth was no one knew for sure what Muhammad wanted. He had never made it categorically clear who should take over when he died. But there was a moment during his illness where he appeared to want to make his wishes known.

It was the ninth day of his illness. Muhammad was half-conscious, soaked in sweat, and paralyzed from excruciating migraines. Aisha held him in her arms, trying to soothe the pain with a cool washcloth, and suddenly the Prophet jolts awake and he asks the room, which was full of people, to send for Ali. He had something to tell his son-in-law, something urgent.

Nobody moves. Aisha's eyes dart around the room, her commanding stare freezing them in their tracks. Her resentment for the Prophet's son-in-law flared up like a reflex. Ali, the so-called Lion of God, the upjumped warrior who advised the Prophet to freeze her out, to divorce her, to believe the wicked, slanderous accusations of adultery laid against her? That Ali? That's who you want me to send for?

In a pivotal moment, Aisha looks down at her husband and asks if he would rather see her father, Abu Bakr. If you'll recall, Abu Bakr was one of Muhammad's closest friends and oldest confidants. He had been the first important man in Mecca to convert. He was a mover and a shaker in Muhammad's court, and Aisha cooed, quote, Wouldn't you rather see Abu Bakr? Muhammad nodded through the delirious pain, and Abu Bakr arrived shortly after.

Ali was never sent for, and he was never told that Muhammad had asked to see him. After Aisha's father, Abu Bakr, arrived, Muhammad seemed to gain a sense of clarity. He felt a little better. He sipped some water, sat up in bed. Maybe the illness had passed. Maybe God had delivered the prophet from the clutches of death.

Then Muhammad asks the room, full of attendants, wives, and advisors, quote, End quote. Like most Arabs of the period, Muhammad was illiterate, and he could not write his message himself.

There was a little talk of summoning a scribe, but everyone in the room just starts bickering about what to do. In the clutches of unbearable pain and illness, Muhammad had a hard time expressing himself, and his closest advisors had their own ideas and preferences about the true meaning of his words. Leslie Hazelton describes this scene, quote, "...there was every sign that the man they were all so deeply devoted to was ready to make his dying wishes known."

perhaps even to designate a successor once and for all. It was the one thing everyone in the room wanted to know, but at the same time the one thing nobody wanted to know. Yet it is an altogether human scene.

Everyone was concerned, everyone trying to protect Muhammad, to stop the importuning of others, and to ease his life even as it seeped out of him. They were all doing their best, and doing it heatedly, their voices rising so that every angry note and high-pitched syllable seemed to pierce the sick man's ears until he could take it no more. Leave me, he finally said. Let there be no more quarreling in my presence. End quote.

One of Muhammad's closest advisors, a man named Omar, told the room, "...the Messenger of God is overcome by pain. We have the Quran, the Book of God, and that will be sufficient for us." On the morning of Monday, June 8, 632 AD, the Prophet Muhammad died.

He breathed his last breaths in the arms of someone he loved. Although which loved one has been debated and argued for the better part of 1400 years. In one version of the story, it's Aisha who is cradling him as he dies. As Hazelton writes, quote, She had been holding him and realized suddenly how heavy his head had become and had looked down to find the empty glaze of death in his eyes. End quote.

In the other version of the story, his son-in-law Ali is holding him when he dies. Ali had been able to save his prophet from assassination all those years ago from the long knives of the Meccan aristocrats. He had defended him from armies and bandits and desert skirmishers, but even the Lion of God could not save his prophet from the ravages of old age.

For all his wisdom, Muhammad had made a glaring mistake. By not designating a successor unequivocally, he had left a seed of discontent within his flock. When Muhammad's heart stopped, a civil war began. One that would consume thousands of lives and engender generations of mistrust, strife, and confusion.

The Prophet of Peace had given a gift to the world, but his successors, unable to reconcile their differing views of it, would split the faith in two. Muhammad died surrounded by his closest friends and loved ones, the stewards of his legacy, and within just a few short years they would find themselves lined up on opposite sides of battlefields, from Iraq to Syria to Egypt. The Prophet's followers later referred to his death as "the closing of a gate."

But it had also opened the door to a new world power, an empire that would influence the long arc of history for 14 centuries to come. Well guys, that is all the time we have for today. Next time, in part 2 of The Prophet's Dilemma, we'll continue the story of the Sunni-Shia split, not only through the eyes of Aisha and Ali, but through an expanded cast of other characters that I think you're really going to like.

When I first started writing this episode, I initially wanted to get to Muhammad's death much sooner, but as time went on, it became clear that so much of what happens in this story is the result of dynamics and relationships that developed while he was alive. You can't understand what people like Aisha, Ali, Fatima, Abu Bakr, and others do without understanding the nature of their connection with Muhammad while he was alive.

The decisions they make and the crises that arise make no sense without doing the legwork we've done this episode. So believe it or not, the best is yet to come. This is a hell of a story and we're going to take as long as we need to to do it justice. So with that being said, I hope you enjoyed the opening salvo of the story and I'll have another chapter ready for you real soon. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Be sure to follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for teasers, updates about new episodes, and supplementary visual material. You can also find full show notes and transcripts for each episode at conflictedhistory.com. And lastly, if you like what you heard today, please consider giving the show a nice review, assuming your preferred platform allows for that. And as always, thanks so much for listening, and have an awesome day.

Twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History. Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for speaking with me. Well, thank you for having me on, Peter. Hi, everyone. My name is Peter Zablocki, a historian and a host of the History Shorts podcast. If you are a fan of serious yet fun history, then it might be time to squeeze history shorts into your daily routine. From everyday 10-minute episodes on often stupefying history to weekly interviews with top historians, the History Shorts podcast is your one-stop shop for easily accessible history.

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