The Jewel Of Medina by Sherry Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

himself in Muhammad’s red robe and lay on his bed, pretending to sleep. I, Asma, and my mother and her sister-wives went to Muhammad’s home—me bouncing in my saddle all the way across town, thrilling at the adventure and the fresh air. We climbed the stairs to a bedroom and watched from the windows as a gang of men crept toward the house. When they banged on the door, we stuck our heads outside as Muhammad had told us to.
    “Come back tomorrow,” Muhammad’s wife Sawdah called in a calm voice, although she gripped her Evil-Eye amulet as though it held her rooted to the earth. “The Prophet is sleeping. He will be ready enough to see you in the morning.”
    Unwilling to force their way inside and kill Muhammad while women were in the house, they waited outside the door, murmuring and watching him sleep—or so they thought. In the morning, when
abi
and Muhammad had had plenty of time to get away, Ali stepped outside, dropped the robe, and whipped out his sword, scattering the sons of Quraysh like so many flies. When the assassins were gone, we women went home and packed our belongings. The time had come for us to leave Mecca.
    We fled on a moonless night, cloaked by a darkness as close as the grave. Tears choked our whispered good-byes to our motherland, the city of our ancestors, the home of our births and our blessed temple, the Ka’ba. We carried almost nothing with us, just food and water and a few clothes. Leaving our dirty dishes behind. Tossing our family histories into the fire. What good had our relatives done for us? We had the
umma—
the Believers—and Muhammad. Our caravan included me; Muhammad’s daughters Fatima and Umm Kulthum; his wife, Sawdah; my mother and Qutailah; my brother Abd al-Rahman, and my sister. We left behind myfather’s wife Alia, who refused our God. She pressed her idol Manat between her palms as she watched us slip away. She would pray for us, she said, that we would realize our error before it was too late.
    “You’d better pray for yourself,” I muttered, but my mother wept and clung to her until Qutailah pulled them apart.
    I would have cried, also, except for my resolve to become a warrior. Mecca was the only home I had ever known, and even in my
purdah
I’d dreamt of her colorful market, her craggy mountains, her enormous, cube-shaped Ka’ba crowded inside and out with scary, beautiful carved gods. Would I ever see my beloved city again? Would I ever see my friend Nadida, who could turn her long face and wide mouth into likenesses of the Ka’ba’s idols, making us laugh so hard our sides ached? Would Safwan’s family join us, or would they remain in Mecca and marry him to someone else? I looked back at the city as we rode away, yearning for a glimpse of my friends, but it was late and the houses of Mecca slept as if assassins had never roamed her streets.
    We rode north to Yathrib, the Jewish town, where the Arabic tribes living there—Aws and Khazraj—had agreed to offer refuge to Muhammad and his followers. The journey was long, through desert sands so deep we had to place blankets before our camels’ feet so they wouldn’t sink to their knees. Over vast, desolate plains of jagged black rock and desert wilderness where a single misstep could break a bone. Through forests of palms so dense we had to shout to keep from losing one another. Beside the foreboding ridge of Mount Subh rising like a massive
djinni
between us and the Red Sea. Onward we pressed, to our Prophet and my father and a new life, free, we hoped, of fear.
    At the break of our twelfth day we arrived, me weeping and rubbing my eyes against the onslaught of green. Green glowed in bawdy profusion over the daisy-strewn fields, the hills blaring with lushness and lavender, the promenade of grasses and shrubs and trees. It dripped from delicate green limbs dangling unripe pomegranates, from gnarled and woody acacias, and, in whispers, from pale-leafed olives dappling the terrain with dabs of blue and