After several false starts, Muhammad through his intermediaries negotiated an arrangement with several tribes in the oasis of Yathrib, later known as Medina, two hundred miles north of Mecca. They wanted Muhammad to become their chief. The tribes of Medina were at an impasse, and they were willing to turn to Muhammad because he could
act as a neutral arbiter. Having secured a home in Medina, Muhammad and his followers then began to leave Mecca, quietly, in small groups, so that the Quraysh would not notice.
The move from Mecca to Medina in 622, known as the Hijra, was one of the defining moments in Islamic history. It led to the establishment of an independent and increasingly powerful Muslim community. It also put this community in direct contact with three Jewish tribes. Muhammad expected that they would embrace him as the last in a long line of prophets. They did not.
THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
T
HE WORLD
of early-seventh-century Arabia was sparsely populated. Settlements centered on water sources, and these attracted traders and tribes. Some worshiped local deities; others not at all. But there were also a substantial number of Jews and Christians. The Christians were from several different sects, and few followed the doctrines established by the patriarchs in Constantinople. The Monophysite Christians of Egypt, believing that Christ’s human nature had been absorbed by his divine nature, were deeply disenchanted with the Byzantine emperor and the official interpretation of the Trinity; the Christians of Syria and Palestine were only slightly less disaffected; and the Assyrian (Nesto-rian) Christians of what is now Iraq, who had their own view of the nature of Christ, had long been seen as heretics by the church fathers further west. But even though the Christians of Arabia were disparate, Muhammad and the Meccans would have been familiar with the outlines of their faith, including the life of Christ and the basic precepts of the New Testament.
The Jews had been in Arabia for centuries. Before Muhammad’s birth, the Arabian king Dhu Nuwas had converted to Judaism and then launched what appears to have been a mini pogrom against the Christians. In many respects, Arabian Jews were indistinguishable from other tribes. The harsh realities of desert life and the way that people adapted and survived did not know from clan or creed. Jews dressed in the way everyone else dressed, and confronted the same challenges posed by nature. They traded with the Quraysh and other leading Arab tribes, and spoke a dialect of Arabic. Because of their God and certain aspects of
diet, marriage, and law, they were culturally distinct. On the whole, however, they were more familiar than alien to Muhammad, and that may explain his initial hope that they would welcome him and his message. The Quran is quite clear that there is an unbroken line from the Hebrew prophets through Jesus Christ leading ultimately to Muhammad. When the Jews of Medina refused to acknowledge that, Muhammad and his increasingly powerful followers began to treat them as enemies.
Initially, when Muhammad arrived in Medina, an agreement was reached between the two non-Jewish tribes, the three Jewish tribes, and the new community of Muhammad and his followers. Whether this was a written document or a verbal understanding, it became known as the Constitution of Medina, and it was a model of ecumenism. It was also a necessity. Given the circumstances of Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, it was essential that the various parties agree on how this new confederation would be governed. Without that, there would be no way to settle the conflicts that would inevitably arise.
Many of the constitution’s clauses dealt with relations between the newly arrived Muslims and the major tribes of Medina. “The believers and their dependents constitute a single community
[utntna]”
was the first clause, and in terms of later Islamic history, one of the most important. In that simple statement, the unity of Muslims everywhere was established. To this day, there is a deep sense in the Muslim world that all believers constitute one community. That means that state boundaries and doctrinal differences that separate Muslims are false and wrong.
Having established the principle of unity, the constitution laid out the responsibilities of the tribes: they would each police themselves and administer justice to their own members, and murder was forbidden. No individual Muslim was to act in a manner contrary to the will or needs of other Muslims, and believers were enjoined to take care of their dependents. And as for the Jews, they “belong to the community and are to retain their own religion; they and the Muslims are to render help to one another when it is needed.” Intertribal alliances were hardly unknown in pre-Islamic Arabia, and tribes did not need to share a religious system in order to act in concert. In that sense, Muhammad and the other interested parties could draw on past precedent in drawing up the Constitution of Medina.
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For a brief moment, Medina became a unified Jewish-Muslim community. In the words of the constitution, “The Jews have their religion, and the Muslims have their religion,” and yet the two lived side by side as equals and supported each other when and where support was needed. Muhammad saw himself as the last in a series of Jewish prophets, and he instructed his followers to face Jerusalem when they prayed. In this hybrid community, Muhammad had the role of first among equals and the arbiter of disputes. The Constitution of Medina created a precedent for peaceful and cordial coexistence. Unfortunately, it did not last long.
There were three powerful Jewish tribes, and the first that Muhammad confronted was the Banu Qaynuqa. The precise reason for the fissure isn’t clear. The ninth-century chronicler al-Baladhuri reported only that “the Jews of Qaynuqa were the first to violate the covenant and the Prophet expelled them from Medina.”
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Al-Bukhari, also writing in the ninth century, mentioned that as the Muslim community grew, the Muslim immigrants needed more land and more date groves, and the reluctance of the Jews to accede to Muhammad’s authority made them a legitimate target. Another aggravating factor was the refusal of theJewish tribes to come to Muhammad’s aid during the battle of Badr, when the Muslims of Medina, to the astonishment of the Quraysh, defeated a small army sent from Mecca. Still others claim that hostilities erupted because an Arab woman was the victim of a practical joke that resulted in her skirt riding up too high, which led a Muslim man to kill the perpetrator, who happened to be Jewish. Whatever the proximate cause, the Jews of the Banu Qaynuqa refused to validate Muhammad’s claims to prophethood. After a standoff, they were expelled, and that led to a symbolic shift in how Muslims prayed. Instead of facing Jerusalem, they now turned toward Mecca.Jerusalem would remain a holy city for Muslims, but after the banishment of the Banu Qaynuqa, Mecca became the focal point.
Over the next three years, the Muslims of Medina gained converts, including some Jews. Events alternated between skirmishes with the Quraysh and confrontation with the remaining Jewish tribes. After Muhammad led his followers to a battlefield victory against the Mec-cans, he broke with the second Jewish tribe, the Banu Nadir. They were expelled after a two-week siege, but unlike their predecessors, they were not allowed to take their weapons.
The final tribe, the Banu Qurayza, having watched as Muhammad
consolidated his power, made a fateful choice: they cast their lot with the Meccans, who were preparing a final assault on Medina. The Muslims had taken control of the trade caravans, and had cut Mecca off from the source of its wealth and strength. While the Banu Qurayza did not actually consummate an alliance with the Meccans, they did not support Muhammad, and may well have been in negotiations with his enemies. Either way, they were in a difficult position. A victory for the Meccans would reduce the autonomy and influence of Medina, and lessen the power of the remaining Jewish tribe even if it removed the threat of Muhammad. A victory for the Muslims was hardly much better, and indeed turned out to be much worse. After the Meccans failed to take Medina in 627 and were forced to retreat, Muhammad ordered an attack on the Qurayza, who succumbed after a siege that lasted nearly a month. This time, the penalty wasn’t expulsion; it was execution.
The fate of Medina’s Jews did not establish a good precedent for future relations, but subsequent history has magnified the conflict. Some of the animosity between the Muslims and Jews of Medina was about God and prophecy, but just as much was about power and who had it. After their flight to Medina, Muhammad and the Muslims struggled to build a viable state, and the Jews of Medina as well as the Meccans represented real threats. In seventh century Arabia, when tribes fought, expulsion was the typical consequence of defeat, and the execution of all adult males, while extreme, was not beyond the pale. In truth, it would not have been beyond the pale anywhere in the world at that time, and much greater acts of brutality were commonplace.
The Jews may have been a threat to Muhammad, but Muhammad was also a threat to the Jews. He offered a vision of the world that was at once similar to the Torah and yet not. Many of the stories in the Quran were part of the Jewish tradition and familiar to the Jews. But Muhammad’s telling of those stories was different, in both subtle and significant ways. For instance, in the Quran, Joseph is imprisoned for refusing the advances of a powerful woman, but that woman is not Pharaoh’s wife but rather a governor’s wife, and in a scene not in the Bible she is then made to recant her accusations when Joseph is brought into Pharaoh’s court. The theological consequences of these discrepancies may be minor, but the problem for both Jews and Muslims was the fact they existed at all. Moses, Noah, Jacob, and other biblical heroes figure prominently in the Quran, and while their stories are largely the same as in the Torah, they
are not precisely the same. And that in itself opened a fissure between Muhammad and the Jews.
The reaction of the Jewish tribes was a mixture of bemusement and derision. They viewed Muhammad as a bumpkin, and assumed that he couldn’t get the Bible right. At least that is the impression given by later sources. It’s difficult to be sure of any of what happened in Muhammad’s lifetime, given the long remove between the written record of what transpired and the actual events. While the gospels, for instance, were composed within decades after the death of Jesus, the most authoritative written biographies of Muhammad date from more than two centuries after his death. Even so, it is hard to imagine that the Jews of Arabia, believing themselves to be the heirs of two thousand years of tradition, would have rushed to embrace a man from Mecca claiming to wear the mantle of a prophet. Initially, they could stand apart from Muhammad, and still hope to use him to keep the peace in Medina. As his political and military power increased, and as he began to attract more converts, he became a threat. The Jewish tribes did what they could to undermine Muhammad. They failed, but the way they were then treated had little to do with their Jewishness.
To a considerable degree, how Muhammad confronted the Jews was little different from how his immediate successors dealt with Arabian tribes who refused to bow to the Muslim caliphs. In fact, it was little different from the way the warring tribes of Israel dealt with one another during the rise and fall of the kingdom of David and Solomon, recounted in the Bible. What was distilled and preserved in historical memory, however, was that from its founding days, Islam did not tolerate Judaism. That memory seeped into Muslim cultures and into Western culture, while the context evaporated.
THE PASSAGES
from the Quran that speak about the Jews are often linked to passages that speak about Christians. Muhammad encountered fewer Christians than Jews, but Christians were also part of the theological landscape. To the north and across the Red Sea to the west, the Byzantine Empire was ruled by a Christian emperor, and while Muhammad and the other inhabitants of the west coast of Arabia were not immersed in the issues that troubled the Byzantines, bits and pieces of news made their way along the trade routes. So did bits and pieces of
Christian theology, which was lumped with Jewish traditions to form from Muhammad’s perspective (and that of other Arabs as well) a single continuum, from Noah to Abraham to Joseph, leading inexorably to Jesus.
In the Quran, Jews and Christians are often treated as one people, related to each other but distinct from the new community of Muslims. Together, Jews and Christians were called the
ahi al-kitab
, the People of the Book; the “Book” is the Bible. The Quran is ambivalent about the People of the Book, and the verses that discuss them alternate between respect and scorn. On the one hand, the People of the Book, like the Muslims, had been chosen by Allah to receive his message. That entitled them to recognition and honor. According to Quran 28:63, “Those to whom we gave the Book before this believe in it, and when it is recited to them, they say, ‘We believe in it; surely it is the truth from our Lord. Indeed even before we had surrendered.’ These shall be given their wage twice over for what they patiently endured.” Or 29:46: “Dispute not with the People of the Book, save in the fairer manner… and say, ‘We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is One, and to him we have surrendered.’ “ These are two of many passages where Muslims are ordered to treat Christians and Jews with the utmost respect, because they answered God’s call earlier and stayed true to their faith.
But other passages adopt a different tone and criticize the People of the Book for losing their way. “We sent Noah, and Abraham, and We appointed the Prophecy and the Book to be among their seed; and some of them are guided, and many of them are ungodly. Then We sent, following in their footsteps, Our Messengers; and We sent, following, Jesus son of Mary, and gave unto him the Gospel. And we set in the hearts of those who followed him tenderness and mercy… but many of them are ungodly” (57:26-27). Other passages drip with antagonism. “The Jews say, ‘Ezra is the son of God’; the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the Son of God.’ That is the utterance of their mouths, conforming with the unbelievers before them. God assail them. How they are perverted!” (9:30).
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