Muhammad acquired six new wives during this time. After the Banu Qurayza Jews were executed or expelled, he took the chief’s daughter Rayhanah as a captive, and she became his servant. That meant concubine, but some narratives say that she entered Islam and became a full wife. Next, on that expedition in which A’isha’s necklace was lost, Juwayriyah was the beautiful daughter of the conquered Bedouin chief. A captive, she asked Muhammad what her ransom would be, and he immediately asked her to marry him. This exchange took place in A’isha’s tent, as told by her.
Then, after Khaybar’s conquest, there was the widow of the executed treasure-hiding chief. Her name was Safiyyah, and she was 17. She had been born in Medina. Now, she converted to Islam and agreed to become Muhammad’s wife. Safiyyah apparently brought some jewels along to use as gifts for the other wives to warm their reception of her. Back in Medina, the last of the Muslims from Abyssinia arrived home. With them came Umm Habibah, the widow who had been married by proxy to the Prophet while still in Abyssinia. She, too, moved into the house.
A year after the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, Muhammad made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and this time the treaty allowed him to enter the city and circle the Ka’abah. There, a Meccan woman (who was related to him in a dozen ways that I can’t keep track of) suggested marriage. Maymunah came home with Muhammad as his last wife.
Let’s review the total number and names of living wives at this point: Saudah, A’ishah, Hafsah, Zaynab, Umm Salamah, Rayhanah, Juwayriyah, Safiyyah, Umm Habibah, and Maymunah. Saudah was the only one among them who had never been considered a beauty and was now middle-aged. Umm Habibah and perhaps Zaynab were also young middle-aged, but both were known as beauties. The other women were under 30 and renowned for beauty. Umm Salamah and Umm Habibah were mothers, and Umm Salamah’s children were young, but we never hear about their kids. Did they live with their father’s clans, or were they communally looked after and just didn’t make it into hadiths? Ten wives is a very crowded household. The wives put their time into grinding wheat by hand, doing charitable work for the poor, and watching each other.
After Khaybar, so much wealth in dates came home to Medina that the family’s standard of living finally went up. By A’isha’s stories of life with the Prophet, each of them had a very small room with only a stone slab as a bed. Her room was so small, she said, that when the Prophet stood and knelt in his prayers, she could only stretch her legs out when he was standing. Until the Khaybar wealth, she said, she had never known what it was to eat dates until she was full. Now all of the wives wanted gifts and attention from Muhammad. When each got something, the others wanted more. They formed cliques: A’isha, Hafsah and Safiyyah, against all the rest.
Once, the wives asked Fatimah to intervene in a growing problem. The Prophet had a schedule, spending one night with each wife on rotation. People would bring gifts (and requests) to the Prophet as judge/ruler, and many had begun waiting until A’isha Day because Muhammad was in the most genial, generous mood then. I suppose this meant that A’isha got to keep the gift, while the wives outside her clique got nothing. One wife complained to Muhammad, but he declined to announce for everyone to stop favoring A’isha Day. He was fair to them all, was he supposed to police the rest of the community to be fair, too? So the wives asked Fatimah to try it. But when she shyly presented the complaint to her father, Muhammad just asked her, “Don’t you love whom I love?” Fatimah did not love A’isha, but when it was put this way, what could she say? And so things went on.
But A’isha too suffered much jealousy, since the others had all been brides before, with weddings and finery, but she had not. And with each beautiful wife, she lost more of her original status as “the young, pretty one.” A’isha later told people that the wife she was truly jealous of was the late Khadijah. Khadijah had had her husband’s full attention for years, raising children with him. He still spoke of her as the best of women. On one occasion, A’isha asked him why he cared for the memory of that old toothless woman when God had given him a better one (herself!), but Muhammad gave her a stinging answer: well at least Khadijah had babies.
The last straw for the wives came when the Egyptian ruler’s gift arrived, including the Coptic Christian slave girl Maria. The wives, led by A’isha and Hafsah, complained vocally that this was too much. Muhammad placed Maria in a separate building and visited her there, but finally, he stopped going home. Weeks passed. Rumors began to circulate: had he really divorced all of those women? The wives began to worry. Umar told his daughter Hafsah that she’d brought the trouble on her own head, yelling at Muhammad constantly. If she were divorced, she’d get little sympathy from him. Hafsah and the other women had little or no life outside their status as the Prophet’s wife. If he left them, it would mean the loss of everything.
After a month, Muhammad came back. He viewed the problem as mostly caused by the new wealth from Khaybar: the women were tired of the austerity he made them live in. He had received a revelation telling him to put a choice to each wife: she was free to go and marry another man, with his blessing. There, she would have more wealth. But if she chose Allah, His Messenger, and Paradise, she had to stop complaining. Every wife chose to stay. Whether they stopped complaining is left to our imagination.
But they were now the full set of women who would be known, after his death, as the Mothers of the Faithful. Having no children themselves, they were to consider all of the Muslims as their children, and as widows, they would never remarry. And they were set apart from other Muslim women by wearing a veil, to fulfill the requirement that believers speak to them only through a curtain. The most painful time for them came when, a year later, Maria the Egyptian girl gave birth to a son, an honor denied to the other wives. Islamic history might have been very different if this child, Ibrahim, had grown up, but like so many children he died as a toddler, apparently from an infectious disease.