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In later life, it was Aisha’s rising power that prompted a man named Abu Bakra to recount that he had heard the Prophet say, “Those who entrust power to a woman will never know prosperity.”

Hundreds of years after Abu Bakra’s revelation, the 16th-century Safavid queen Pari Khanum was removed from power because the new king believed that a woman handling the affairs of state is “demeaning to the king’s honor.”

It is a saying that has haunted Muslim women and Muslim feminists — including Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, who points out that “Abu Bakra must have had a fabulous memory” because he didn’t recall this line until a quarter century after the Prophet Muhammad died.

Furniture was broken, as were pieces of African art and some of the musical instruments that the family used for their band, Bakra Bata, and for Shantz’s work as a music educator.

The bakra, descended from the colonials, tend to ride around in motorcycle gangs while small squadrons of young blonde Dutch women—many on nursing internships—whizz around the city on bicycles.