Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/215

 186 but two of these, preferring to remain at Mecca, separated from him, At Medīna, he married five more, one of whom, however, he divorced. The last marriage was in the eighth year of his reign, when near sixty years of age. Three years previously he had married a granddaughter of the Prophet, under circumstances casting a curious light on his domestic ways. He conceived a liking for Um Kulthūm, the maiden daughter of Abu Bekr, and sister of ʿĀisha, through whom a betrothal was arranged. But ʿĀisha found the light-hearted damsel with no desire to wed the aged Caliph. In this dilemma she had recourse to the astute ʿAmr, who readily undertook to break the marriage off. He broached the subject to ʿOmar, who thereupon imagined that ʿAmr wished the maiden for himself. "Nay," said ʿAmr, "that I do not; but she hath been bred softly in the family of her father Abu Bekr, and I fear she may ill brook thine austere manners, and the gravity of thy house." "But," replied ʿOmar, "I have already engaged to marry her; how can I break it off?" "Leave that to me," said ʿAmr; "thou hast indeed a duty to provide for Abu Bekr's family, but the heart of this maiden is not with thee. Let her alone, and I will show thee a better than she, another Um Kulthūm, even the daughter of ʿAlī and of Fāṭima." So ʿOmar married this other maiden, and she bore him a son and a daughter.

Many of those names we have been familiar with were now dropping off the scene;—Fāṭima, the daughter, and Ṣafīya, the aunt of Moḥammad, Zeinab one of his wives, and Mary his Coptic bond-maid; Abu ʿObeida, Khālid, and the Muëzzin Bilāl. Many others who also bore a conspicuous part in the great rôle of the Prophet's life had now passed away, and a new race was springing up in their place.

Abu Sufyān survived till 32, and died 88 years of age. One eye he lost at the siege of Aṭ-Ṭāif, and the other at the battle on the Yarmūk, so that he had long been blind. He divorced Hind, the mother of Muʿāwiya—she who "chewed the liver" of Ḥamza at the battle of Oḥod! The reason for the divorce does not appear.