Princess: Stepping Out of the Shadows, стр. 8
Truthfully, history tells us that happiness eluded the majority of those born female. Even if a baby daughter was spared a sandy grave, she would endure a lifetime of desperate neglect and drudgery.
Girls would be married while still young children.
Females would never be companions or friends of their husbands, always servants.
A wife’s duty would be to tend to her husband’s needs.
A wife’s duty would be to produce many sons, who would grow to be warriors.
A wife could be divorced at any time and for any reason.
A mother’s children could be taken from her.
Females could be passed from man to man like an object, losing their identity, their pride and any sense of decency.
A woman, once abandoned by her husband, lived in fear of poverty and starvation. Without her man to provide for her, no one would offer food or shelter.
During that dark time in Arabia, this was the life experienced by most women. There was nothing to curb the cruelty of men – no laws, no social condemnation, and certainly no religion.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, the desert tribes did not practise an official, organized religion but instead had a primitive fear of deities in stars or in the centre of the earth, which they observed by performing various rituals for protection from these mysteries of life. No one knows for certain if people at that time believed in the afterlife, but ancient narratives describing the securing of camels foodless to the owner’s grave indicate that the deceased believed he would need a method of transport wherever it was he was going.
Their religion, if that is what we choose to call it, was primitive and lives were similarly archaic.
* * *
Everything changed in Arabia when the most important figure in medieval history was born in the city of Mecca. All that I learned about this important man was taught to me by my mother, a woman who lived the most virtuous life of anyone I have ever known. Every question in her life was solved by reading the pages of the Koran. Every action of her life was intricately bound with Islam.
Mother told me, ‘Sultana, you are a child of God. To live the good and pure life of a Muslim, you must know every aspect of Islam.’
How I wanted to be an image of my mother, but I was never able to attain her purity of spirit. I have been told by my sisters that I was born with what they describe as a double naughty gene! Despite my obvious shortcomings, I was fortunate to learn from Mother about the Prophet of God, who was responsible for bringing Islam to Arabia.
Mother told me in simple terms that this important individual was the child born to a man named Abdallah and a woman named Amina, who married in the year 568. Abdallah was with his bride for only three days before embarking on a mercantile expedition, dying at Medina on his return trip to Mecca. In 570, two months after Abdallah’s death, his wife, Amina, gave birth to a male child named Mohammed, meaning ‘highly praised’.
The child Mohammed’s ancestry was distinguished. His father’s uncle, Hashim, was a wealthy merchant, philanthropist and one of Mecca’s important chiefs. At Hashim’s death, his prestigious position was assumed by his younger brother, who was the father of Abdallah.
Despite the elevated position of the family, Mohammed’s patrimony was modest. His father had left him an unpretentious house, a flock of goats and five camels. There was also a slave who nursed Mohammed in his infancy.
When Amina died six years later Mohammed’s grandfather, an elderly man of seventy-six years, took over his care. At the grandfather’s death, Mohammed’s uncle Abu Talib assumed the obligation.
The men responsible for the child Mohammed treated him with enormous care and great affection, and despite his lack of formal education the man Mohammed would one day write what would become the most famous and eloquent book in the Arabic language.
The child Mohammed grew into a man of strength and dignity. As he aged, he became more and more absorbed in thoughts of religion, withdrawing alone or with his family to Mount Hira, three miles from Mecca. There he spent many nights and days in a cave, praying, meditating and fasting. It was in the year 610, while he was sleeping there alone, that Mohammed was approached by the angel Gabriel, ordering Mohammed, ‘Read!’
Mohammed replied, ‘I do not read.’
Gabriel pressed against Mohammed so tightly that he thought he would die. Gabriel ordered once more: ‘Read!’
Mohammed began to read loudly, and the angel Gabriel loosened his grip and disappeared from Mohammed’s dream. When Mohammed awoke the following morning, he said that the words he had read were written in his heart, never to be forgotten. When he left the mountain, he heard a voice from heaven. ‘O Mohammed, thou art the messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel.’
Mohammed raised his head towards heaven to see Gabriel in the form of a man.
Gabriel repeated the words: ‘O Mohammed, thou art the messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel.’
The newly defined Prophet Mohammed returned to Mecca in a flash, where he told his wife Khadija of his astonishing visions. Khadija accepted them as a true revelation from heaven, encouraging her husband to announce his mission for God.
After Prophet Mohammed endured many struggles and fought many battles, the creation of a new religion called Islam was a great triumph. The subsequent explosion of the Islamic Arab armies in invading, occupying and converting half of the Mediterranean