The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (21 page)

There was no reason for the helpers and other Medinans to take part in these early raids ordered by Muhammad, but the emigrants had every reason. Since all the good arable land in Medina was already taken, they could only work as hired hands, if at all. They had relied so far on the kindness of the helpers, but they needed to prove themselves, especially in a culture so strongly based on the idea of virility and honor. Eager to transform the stigma of exile into a banner of proud defiance, they saw raiding as a way to get back at the Meccans where it would hurt them most: in their traders’ pockets. Instead of being acted upon, the exiles would be the ones to act.

The early Islamic histories would call these raids military expeditions, but all through the year 623 they were hardly on that level. In fact they were strikingly unsuccessful. In March, for instance, seven months after the hijra, thirty emigrants under the command of Muhammad’s uncle Hamza tried to intercept a Meccan caravan led by abu-Jahl but “separated without a battle” after the local Beduin chieftain intervened. A month later, the emigrants tried again with double the force, this time attacking a caravan led by abu-Sufyan, but there was “no hand-to-hand fighting” and again the would-be raiders returned with nothing. Several further expeditions “in search of Quraysh” were headed by Muhammad himself, but all with the same non-result. The emigrants seemed to be so ineffective a fighting force that even when Beduin raided their milk camels just outside Medina and they set off in pursuit, they lost track of them.

But Muhammad can’t have expected success in terms of goods and booty. His years of experience on the trade caravans meant that he knew better than most about the arrangements made for protection, and he certainly never expected local Beduin chieftains to give his raiders free rein. He was not aiming for material success so much as to disrupt the smooth working of the caravans. He was making a point, establishing his presence beyond Medina as a force to be reckoned with, and doing so at very little cost. Until, almost by mistake, someone was killed.

t happened in January 624. Muhammad had sent a band of eight emigrants two hundred miles south, deep inside Meccan territory. It’s unclear what he intended. His orders were to scout, not to attack, so he may have been aiming for information on the upcoming spring caravan to Damascus. But whatever their mission was, the men he sent had been miserably unsuccessful. Two had carelessly forgotten to hobble their riding camels one night, so had been forced to stay behind and search for them after they’d wandered off into the desert. The

remaining six got as far as Nakhla, between Mecca and Taif, where they came across four Meccans traveling with a few camels loaded with raisins and leather. After weeks of frustration and mistakes, the six emigrants couldn’t resist such an easy target, however insignificant. No matter that it was the final day of the last of Mecca’s three holy months, when fighting was forbidden: they attacked. One of the Meccans escaped, a second was killed, and the remaining two were taken captive.

Expecting a hero’s welcome, the emigrants returned to Medina triumphant, captives and laden camels in tow. But any celebration was quickly scotched by Muhammad himself. Mecca was the main market for Medinan produce, and the last thing most Medinans wanted was to disrupt their livelihoods by so openly antagonizing their prime customers. They had doubted the wisdom of even attempting to raid Meccan caravans, and now they feared that what had happened at Nakhla would only invite retaliation. How could it not? It had taken place on the doorstep of Mecca, as it were, which meant that the Meccans had suffered severe loss of face. To kill a Meccan for the sake of a few loads of leather and raisins? This was pure provocation. Had they really invited Muhammad to Medina to make peace between them, only to have him then declare war on someone else?

The whole arbitration agreement he had worked so hard to achieve was suddenly in jeopardy. The mutual self-defense clause was exactly that: for defense, not offense. Yet the fatal Nakhla raid had been undeniably offensive, and doubly so for having taken place during a sacred month. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not begin hostilities, for God does not like the aggressor,” the Quran would say—the crux, of course, being to define the aggressor. The Medinans had agreed on self-defense, but if that was necessary because of prior aggression, they were not agreed at all. In the seventh century as today, there was the ineluctable problem of the difference between self-defense and offense. And then as now, that difference was generally defined by who was doing the defining.

The only way Muhammad could deflect the growing criticism inside Medina was to take the initiative by calling on a recognized higher authority. Revelation was needed, and it came. “They question you with regard to warfare in the sacred month,” the Quranic voice told him. “Say: ‘Fighting in that month is a great offense, but still greater offenses in God’s eyes are to bar others from God’s path, to disbelieve in him, to prevent access to the Kaaba, and to expel its people. Persecution is worse than killing.’ ”

And to clarify things further: “Permission is granted to those who fight because they have been wronged . . . those who have been driven out of their houses without right only because they said our god is God.” In other words, offense was now sanctioned in the name of ex post facto defense. What the Nakhla raiders had done may not have been desirable but it was justified, since as exiles they had been the prior victims here. For the believers, at least, the issue was settled. For everyone else, it had only just begun.

he word used in this initial Quranic sanction of fighting was qital, which unequivocally means “physical combat.” But then the following verse of the Quran as it was eventually written down and arranged, which was not definitively done until two decades after Muhammad’s death, seems to expand on the idea: “Those who have believed, migrated, and striven in God’s cause can look forward to God’s mercy.”

Proximity promotes an association of ideas in which “striving in God’s cause” is another way of saying “fighting.” But there is no way of knowing whether this sequence of verses reflects the original order or timing of revelation, let alone what exactly is meant by “striving in God’s cause.” The word usually translated as “striving” is not qital but jihad, which would only later gain the additional meaning of “holy war.”

To some degree, this is a problem of translation. Or rather, of interpretation. With a text as allusive and often mysterious as the Quran, a direct one-to-one correspondence between Arabic and English does not necessarily exist. Like all Semitic languages, Arabic plays on words, taking a three-consonant root and building on it to create what sometimes seems an infinite number of meanings. Even the exact same word can have different connotations depending on the context. And the Quran, God-like, provides no context. It assumes that those who hear it share its frame of reference. But what could be assumed in the seventh century cannot be assumed in the twenty-first; both the language and the frame of reference have changed. Nobody today speaks the seventh-century Hijaz dialect in which the Quran is written, so that Islamic scholars still engage in lifelong arguments about the meaning of specific words, let alone verses.

While the Quran consistently uses terms such as qital for combat, its use of jihad—struggling or striving—is far less specific. In time, the word would achieve a double meaning: both the inner striving to live a moral life and attain a higher level of spiritual consciousness, and the external armed struggle against those seen as the enemies of Islam. This dual meaning would be enshrined in a famed hadith—literally a report, as in a news report, one of the vast body of such reports compiled after Muhammad’s death from claimed memories of what he had said or done—in which he distinguished between the lesser jihad and the greater jihad. The lesser one, he said, was taking up arms in defense of Islam; the greater one was the striving within oneself to come closer to God. The terms themselves indicated which was superior.

For now, it was clear that if Muhammad had once hoped to achieve his mission without violence, this was no longer possible. The central question, and one to which the Quranic voice would return several times over the next few years, was no longer whether to fight, but under what conditions. And how Muhammad dealt with this question is still the subject of heated debate. The use of violence was destined to become the “hot button” of Islam as the politics of seventhcentury Arabia were used, interpreted, and distorted through the centuries by both militant “Islamists” and equally militant anti-Islamists, very few of whom would even be aware of the raid at Nakhla that had begun the debate.

Nakhla forced a turning point. However defense and offense were defined, one thing was clear. Up to now, the revelations had insisted that Muhammad ignore his enemies. He was to turn aside from them and forgive them their ignorance, and the man who patiently put up with years of harassment and concerted opposition in Mecca achieves great moral stature because of this principled refusal to return violence with violence. But that Gandhi-like stand had cost him his home, and almost his life. Now that he was in a position of leadership, the politics of power would dictate a major change.

The term “power politics” might well be considered a tautology, since politics is essentially about power, or as the dictionary would have it, “the science and art of government.” Nonetheless, the term now carries a strong negative connotation, one that was challenged by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his appreciation of the man practically identified with the idea: Niccolò Machiavelli. Berlin saw him not as the ruthless stereotype imagined by those who have never read his classic The Prince, but as the skilled political pragmatist he was. “If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark on them because they are too frightening,” Berlin wrote, “then Machiavelli’s answer is that you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But in that event, you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.” Or as Machiavelli himself famously put it: “All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief.”

Muhammad had been ignored in the past, and almost been destroyed. He had no intention of being either ever again. Where the Quranic voice had formerly been insistent on eschewing violence, it now at least conditionally endorsed it. A new chapter had begun, and just two months later it would erupt into open warfare.

he Battle of Badr was fought on March 17, 624, and if it was not quite what Muhammad had sought, it would turn out to be exactly what he needed. It would be recorded in the early Islamic histories as the first great victory of Islam: a decisive armed

encounter that would redound to the honor and reputation of Medina, especially among the surrounding Beduin tribes, who would begin to support Muhammad once he had shown that he could challenge the Meccan monopoly on power and wealth. Yet it appears that it happened as much by miscalculation as by intent.

Badr, between Medina and the Red Sea, was where a large wadi opened out into the coastal flatland. Several wells had been dug into its sides, and cisterns had been hollowed out to hold the residue of winter flash floods. The place was thus a major watering spot, and never more so than when Mecca’s big spring caravan stopped there on its way back from Damascus.

To even conceive of a raid on this caravan was a daring proposition. Until now, Muhammad had sent out raiding parties of no more than twenty or thirty men, and the only successful one, Nakhla, had been highly controversial. Most Medinans, particularly those with family and business ties to the merchant city to the south, had no desire to aggravate the situation further. Nakhla had been bad enough. To follow that up with a challenge of this magnitude risked provoking Mecca into open war. Yet this was a risk Muhammad seemed willing and even eager to take. Minor raids like that at Nakhla had made him merely a thorn in Mecca’s side; a major one at Badr would establish him not as a disgruntled exile but as an enemy to be reckoned with. Plus it would bolster his support inside Medina itself, since while their elders advocated caution, younger Medinans were energized by the prospect of challenging the big city, especially when the potential gains were so large.

This would not be a matter of a few loads of leather and raisins. Under the command of the head of Mecca’s Umayyad clan, abuSufyan, there would be more than two thousand camels returning from Damascus, loaded with luxury goods. And they’d be an easy target: Muhammad’s scouts had reported the presence of only seventy armed guards.

Given the size and value of the caravan, seventy guards was a surprisingly low number. The Quraysh leadership seemed to have either failed to register Muhammad’s new determination, or were still misled by their disdain for “the provinces.” The Nakhla raid had been small fry, after all; an attack on the big annual caravan would be something else altogether, and from their position of power and entitlement, it must have seemed inconceivable. How would anyone dare? But if they underestimated Muhammad, he also seems to have underestimated them.

y the time he led his followers out of Medina for the two-day ride to Badr, they were no longer a mere raiding party but a solid force of over three hundred men. No bloodshed was anticipated, since the caravan’s guards would surely act rationally in the face of such numbers and flee. This was intended as a demonstration of presence, not as an armed showdown, much less a battle. On that premise, native Medinans rode out along with emigrants for the first time, and in a sign of Muhammad’s growing authority, the helpers outnumbered the emigrants. Expectations ran high, as did talk about them.

Inevitably, with this many people involved, the desert grapevine hummed with information. Word of the impending raid reached the caravan well in advance, and abu-Sufyan sent a fast rider ahead to Mecca with directions for a defensive force to be dispatched immediately. “Come protect your merchandise” was the message.