A.H. 36.
Baṣra.ʿAlī did not stay long in Al-Baṣra. Having appointed his cousin, ʿAbdallah son of Al-ʿAbbās, governor of the city, with Ziyād, the able administrator, to aid him in charge of the treasury, he set out for Al-Kūfa.
side, in reply, extemporised a couplet, extolling her as "the noblest and best of Mothers." When they told this to her, she was much affected, and exclaimed, "Would that I had died twenty years before this!" ʿAlī, also, when he heard it, said, "Would that I too had died twenty years ago!"
ʿĀisha, always ready in repartee, was not very particular in her language. ʿĀṣim approaching her litter on the field, she cursed him for the liberty he had taken. "It was but a little something red and white," he said impudently, "that I caught a glimpse of." "The Lord uncover thy nakedness," she cried angrily; "cut off thy hands, and make thy wife a widow!" All which (they say) came to pass. A saucy passage is related between her and the aged ʿAmmār, who said, as she was leaving, "Praise be to the Lord that we shall hear no more that vile tongue of thine."
When starting for Mecca, with ʿAlī and a company around her, she said, "Let us not entertain hard thoughts one against the other; for verily, as regardeth ʿAlī and myself, there happened not anything between us" (alluding to her misadventure in the Prophet's lifetime, Life of Moḥammad, p. 301), "but that which is wont to happen between a wife and her husband's family; and verily ʿAlī was one of the best of them that entertained suspicions against me." ʿAlī replied: "She speaketh the truth; there was not beyond what she saith, between her and me." And then he went on to quote Moḥammad's own words regarding ʿĀisha, that "she was not only his wife in this world, but would be equally his wife in the world to come."
