Domestic Life. Until the death of Khadija the Prophet's private life seems to have been normal and happy, for though the loss of his sons in infancy is said to have earned him a contemptuous epithet, he was fortunate in his adoption of Zaid b. Harithah, apparently a prisoner ransomed by Khadija or one of her relatives, who appears as dutiful almost to excess and competent in affairs. The marriages of his daughters seem all to have been happy, with, curiously, the exception of that between Fatima and Ali. His domestic troubles, to which an unreasonable amount of space seems to be devoted, even in the Koran, began after the Migration, when, probably in the main for political reasons, he instituted a royal harem. One of these political motives was the principle which long survived, that the conquest of a state was consummated by possession of the former monarch's wife, or daughter; another, as has been seen, the desire to obtain the securest possible hold on his ministers. In his marriage with the daughter of his arch-enemy Abu Sofian, before the latter's conversion, we can see a combination of the two. Few, therefore, of these marriages occasioned scandal; yet public morality seemed to be violated when the Prophet took to himself the wife of his adopted son Zaid, whose name has in consequence the honour of mention in the Koran in the revelation which was delivered in defence of this act. Its purpose was, according to this, to establish the difference between adoptive and real filiation. Serious trouble was occasioned by a charge of adultery brought against the youthful favourite Ayesha, and this had to be refuted by a special revelation; the charge, which was backed up apparently by Ali, seems to have been connected with some deeper scheme for causing dissension between the Prophet and his friends. Yet another revelation is concerned with a mutiny in the harem organized by Omar's daughter Hafsa, owing to undue favour shown to a Coptic concubine (Mary, mother of a son called Ibrahim, who died in infancy; his death was marked by an eclipse, January 27, 632); and various details of factions within the harem are told us by Mahomet's biographers.