te apartments round the house of the
apostle, and enjoyed in their turns the favor of his conjugal society.
What is singular enough, they were all widows, excepting only Ayesha,
the daughter of Abubeker. She was doubtless a virgin, since Mahomet
consummated his nuptials (such is the premature ripeness of the climate)
when she was only nine years of age. The youth, the beauty, the spirit
of Ayesha, gave her a superior ascendant: she was beloved and trusted
by the prophet; and, after his death, the daughter of Abubeker was long
revered as the mother of the faithful. Her behavior had been ambiguous
and indiscreet: in a nocturnal march she was accidentally left behind;
and in the morning Ayesha returned to the camp with a man. The temper of
Mahomet was inclined to jealousy; but a divine revelation assured him
of her innocence: he chastised her accusers, and published a law of
domestic peace, that no woman should be condemned unless four male
witnesses had seen her in the act of adultery. [161] In his adventures
with Zeineb, the wife of Zeid, and with Mary, an Egyptian captive, the
amorous prophet forgot the interest of his reputation. At the house of
Zeid, his freedman and adopted son, he beheld, in a loose undress, the
beauty of Zeineb, and burst forth into an ejaculation of devotion and
desire. The servile, or grateful, freedman understood the hint, and
yielded without hesitation to the love of his benefactor. But as the
filial relation had excited some doubt and scandal, the angel Gabriel
descended from heaven to ratify the deed, to annul the adoption, and
gently to reprove the apostle for distrusting the indulgence of his God.
One of his wives, Hafna, the daughter of Omar, surprised him on her own
bed, in the embraces of his Egyptian captive: she promised secrecy and
forgiveness, he swore that he would renounce the possession of Mary.
Both parties forgot their engagements; and Gabriel again descended with
a chapter of the Koran, to absolve him from his oath, and to exhort him
freely to enjoy his captives and concubines, without listening to the
clamors of his wives. In a solitary retreat of thirty days, he labored,
alone with Mary, to fulfil the commands of the angel. When his love and
revenge were satiated, he summoned to his presence his eleven wives,
reproached their disobedience and indiscretion, and threatened them with
a sentence of divorce, both in this world and in the next; a dreadful
sentence, since those who ha