Pagan Mecca and Muslim Medina continued to put on shows of strength and seek out alliances that would hurt the other. One of the most significant events in Muhammad’s family happened when he had led a contingent to the coast of the Red Sea to make a new treaty. He usually took a wife along on trips, sometimes two; A’isha traveled along on this trip. By Sunni calculations, she was 14 by now (though by Shi’ite estimates, she was more like 21). And most famously, she chose to bring along a necklace that she prized.
On the return trip, A’isha lost her necklace and got the whole caravan to pause while she looked. It turned out that her camel had lain down on it. Her father scolded her for making such a fuss, so the next day, when they were getting ready to move on and again she could not find her necklace, she said nothing. On this second occasion, she had walked off to use a bush as a toilet, and she thought perhaps the string had broken there. Slipping from her curtained howdah, she ran back to find the exact bush and pick up the scattered beads. Her maid didn’t see her go, so when the signal came for the camels to start, there was nobody to tell them to wait. They assumed that silence in her howdah meant she napped the whole way.
But A’isha had returned with her beads to find the caravan gone. Her behavior seems strange: instead of walking after them, she chose to lie down under a tree and wait. Lesley Hazelton, in After the Prophet, chalks it up to teenage “entitled” behavior. A Bedouin girl would have walked quickly to catch up, but A’isha was a city girl who looked down on those ways. She assumed that her maid would notice her absence, but the hours passed with no messenger to come back for her. A young man on a camel did arrive at the oasis, though. He was of their party, but he had been delayed starting out. Although A’isha put on her hijab as soon as she woke up, he had seen her face in the non-veiling past and recognized her. He put her on his camel while he walked, and they caught up with the caravan some time after dark.
Back in Medina, A’isha went to stay with her parents for a while, because she was sick. During those weeks, gossip went around the city to the effect that A’isha had committed adultery with the young man. This accusation threw the whole family into crisis. The long and the short of it was that after about four weeks, Muhammad had a revelation that spoke to the point, saying A’isha was innocent and the gossipers who spread libel should be punished.
But during those weeks, at least one thing of lasting significance happened. When Muhammad asked Ali, his cousin/adopted son, what to do, Ali advised him to divorce A’isha and find another wife. He pointed out that it wasn’t hard to find other women like her. A’isha heard of Ali’s harsh, unforgiving advice, and she never forgave him. In later years, this came to matter a great deal.
The revelation that said A’isha was innocent made the point that her accusers did not present four witnesses, which would have established their point. This verse, part of Surah an-Noor, set up the standard of four witnesses to establish an allegation of sexual impropriety. The new standard made it very difficult, almost impossible, to convict someone of adultery, unless they confessed. This protected women from hostile gossip attacks. But many years later, in our time, sometimes when girls claim they were raped, they are challenged to produce four witnesses. Since they can’t, the rapist goes free. Worse, the revelation that declared A’isha innocent also said that the people who spread the evil gossip should receive the punishment that the accused might have gotten. In A’isha’s case, three people were flogged. But in our current times, some girls who say they were raped also end up flogged for gossip. So it’s maybe not the best evidentiary standard, at least not as the only rule.