Note 45 — Chapter X

If I am not mistaken, allusion is here made to Zeinah (Zenobia), the wife of Zaid. Muhammed, having gone one day to the house of the latter, who was not at home, found Zeinah in a dress which permitted him to remark her beauties, with which he was so smitten, that he could not refrain from an exclamation betraying his sensation. Zeinah did not fail to apprise her husband. Zeid then thought he could not do less than to place his wife by a divorce at the disposition of his master and benefactor, whose slave he had once been, and by whom he was not only affranchised, but adopted as a son. On that very account, Muhammed was prevented by law from marrying Zeinah; but he procured to himself an authorization from heaven, in a verse of the Koran (chap. XXXIII. v. 36), and after the term of Zeinah’s divorce, took to wife the object of his desires, at the latter end of the fifth year of the Hejira (A. D. 626).