Note 520 — Chapter XXXVII · BATTLE OF THE CAMEL. Jumad II., A.H. XXXVI. December, A.D. 656.

There is a great abundance of tradition concerning Ayesha, both in the battle and after it. In the heat of the action, Aly’s soldiers taunted her as ‘the unnatural Mother of the Faithful.’ The soldiers on her side, in reply, extemporised a couplet, extolling her as ‘the noblest and best of Mothers.’ When they told it to her, she was much affected, and exclaimed, ‘Would that I had died twenty years before this!’ Aly also, when he heard it, said, ‘Would that I too had died twenty years ago!’

Ayesha, always ready in repartee, was not very particular in her language, and some of the speeches attributed to her are both coarse and intemperate. Asim approaching her litter on the field, she cursed him for the liberty he had taken. ‘It was but a little something red and white,’ he said, impudently, ‘that I caught a glimpse of.’ ‘The Lord uncover thy nakedness,’ she cried angrily; ‘cut off thy hands, and make thy wife a widow!’ All which, they say, came to pass. A saucy passage is related between her and the aged Ammâr, whose last words were, as she was leaving, ‘Praise be to the Lord that we shall hear no more that vile tongue of thine!’

Aly’s conduct was forbearing and generous. Of the family with which Ayesha was lodged at Bussorah, two sons had been killed fighting, one on the side of Aly, the other against him. The widow of the latter was loud in her lamentation, crying out against Aly as the cause of her sorrow. Aly was asked to punish her; but he refused, saying she was but a weak woman, and should not be touched. On the other hand, some one who spoke contumeliously of Ayesha was, by his order, beaten with shoes.

As Ayesha was starting for Mecca, Aly and a company gathered round her. When the time came to bid farewell, she said, ‘Let us not entertain hard thoughts one against the other; for verily, as regardeth Aly and myself, there happened not anything between us (alluding to her misadventure in the Prophet’s lifetime[521]) but that which is wont to happen between a wife and her husband’s family; and verily Aly was one of the best of them that entertained suspicions against me.’ Aly replied: ‘She speaketh the truth; there was nought, beyond what she saith, between her and me.’ And then he went on to say (quoting Mahomet’s own words) that ‘she was not only the Prophet’s wife in this world, but equally his spouse in the next.’