IN YATHRIB, THE Messenger of God is dreaming. He stands in a wide meadow. Cattle graze freely on the grass. There is something in his hand: a sword, unsheathed and glistening in the sun. A notch has been etched into the blade. War is approaching. But there is calm in the peaceful meadow, among the grazing beasts, in the warm light. Everything seems a good omen. Looking down at his body, he sees he is clad in an invulnerable coat of mail. There is nothing to worry about. Sword in hand, he faces the immeasurable horizon, tall and confident, waiting for the fight to come to him.
When he wakes, Muhammad understands at once the meaning of the dream: the Quraysh are coming. What he cannot know, however, is that they are at that moment charging toward Yathrib with three thousand heavily armed warriors and two hundred cavalrymen to put an end to Muhammad and his movement once and for all. As is the custom, the soldiers are trailed by a small group of women, bejeweled and dressed in their finest tunics.
The women are led by a powerful and enigmatic woman named Hind, the wife of Abu Sufyan, the new Shaykh of Quraysh. A year earlier, in 624 C.E., when the Quraysh first clashed with Muhammad and his followers at Badr, Hind’s brother and father had both been killed by Muhammad’s uncle, Hamzah. Now, as she trudges through the desert grasping the hem of her flowing white tunic in two clenched fists, Hind serves as a physical reminder of why the Quraysh are finally bringing the battle for control of Arabia directly to Muhammad’s doorstep.
“Quench my thirst for vengeance,” she shouts at the men marching in front of her, “and quench your own!”
Meanwhile, Yathrib buzzes with rumors of the impending attack. The Jewish clans, who want no part of this battle between Muhammad and Mecca, secure themselves inside their fortification, while the Ummah begin to frantically collect what weapons and provisions they can find in preparation for the siege. At dawn, the call to prayer draws the entire community to the mosque, where Muhammad calmly confirms the rumors.
It is true that the Quraysh are charging toward Yathrib, he announces; but rather than go out to meet them in battle, Muhammad reveals his plans to stay put and wait for their enemies to come to him. He is convinced that the coat of mail he wore in his dream represented Yathrib’s invulnerable defenses. If the Quraysh were truly foolish enough to attack this oasis, he proclaims, then the men will fight them in the streets and alleyways, while the women and children hurl stones at them from atop the palm trees.
His followers are skeptical about Muhammad’s plan. They remember well the beating they gave the Quraysh a year ago at Badr. Though ridiculously outnumbered, Muhammad’s small band had inflicted heavy casualties on the mighty Meccan army, forcing them to retreat in utter humiliation. Surely they would destroy them again in battle.
“O Messenger of God,” they declare, “lead us out to our enemies so that they may not think we are too cowardly and weak to face them.”
Their response confuses Muhammad, who had assumed his dream to be a message from God. But the more his men urge him to go out and meet the enemy, the more he wavers. Even his most trusted advisers are divided about what to do. Finally, exasperated by the debate and knowing a decision must be made, Muhammad stands and orders his coat of mail to be brought to him. They will face the Quraysh in the open desert.
With just a few hundred men and a handful of women—including Aisha and Umm Salamah, who almost always accompany him into battle—Muhammad sets off toward a plain situated a few miles northwest of Yathrib called Uhud, where he has heard the Quraysh have stopped to camp and plan their attack. At Uhud, he makes his way down into a gorge and sets his own camp on the opposite side of a dry riverbed, not far from the Meccan army. From here, he can make out the Quraysh’s tents. He takes stock of their massive numbers and superior weapons. His heart sinks when sees hundreds of their horses and camels grazing in a nearby pasture. His men have managed to round up only two horses; they have no camels.
Falling back, Muhammad orders his followers to make camp and wait for daybreak. In the morning, as the sky begins to redden, he leaps atop a horse and surveys his troops one final time. Among the men, he sees children armed with swords, some on their tiptoes trying to blend in. He angrily pulls them out of line and sends them home to their families, though a few manage to escape detection and return to fight. He then places his archers on top of a mountain near his flank, ordering them to “hold firm to your position, so that we will not be attacked from your direction.” To the rest of his men he shouts his final instructions: “Let no one fight until I command him to fight!” Then, as if sensing he has somehow violated the omens in his dream, he puts on a second coat of mail and orders his army to attack.
Almost immediately, the Quraysh are put to flight. Muhammad’s archers release a steady hail of arrows onto the battlefield, protecting his meager troops and forcing the Meccan army to retreat from their positions. But as the Quraysh pull back, the archers—in direct violation of Muhammad’s orders not to move from their position—run down the mountain to claim the booty left behind by the retreating army. It does not take long for the Quraysh to regroup, and with his flank unguarded, the Prophet and his warriors are quickly surrounded. The battle becomes a slaughter.
The massive Meccan army makes quick work of Muhammad’s forces on the ground. The bodies of the dead litter the battlefield. As the Quraysh draw closer, some of Muhammad’s men form a tight circle to shield him from the advancing army and the volley of arrows raining down on all sides. One by one the men fall at his feet, their bodies riddled with arrows, until only one man is left. Then he falls.
Now alone, Muhammad kneels beside his dead warriors and continues to fire his arrows blindly at the Quraysh until the bow snaps in his hands. He is defenseless and seriously wounded: his jaw cracked, his teeth broken, his lip split, his forehead cut and covered in blood. For a moment, he considers summoning what strength he has left and charging the enemy, when suddenly one of his men—a hefty warrior named Abu Dujanah—runs onto the battlefield, catches hold of him, and drags him into the mouth of the gorge, where the last of the survivors have gathered to attend their wounds.
The Prophet’s sudden disappearance from the battlefield launches a rumor that he has been killed, and ironically, this is exactly the reprieve Muhammad’s men need. For with news of his death, the Quraysh halt their assault and the battle is over. As the remnants of Muhammad’s army quietly creep back toward Yathrib—bloodied and humiliated—the victorious Abu Sufyan climbs atop a hill and, raising his bowed sword in the air, cries: “Be exalted, Hubal! Be exalted!”
Afterward, when a sense of calm has settled upon Uhud, Hind and the rest of the women of Quraysh roam the battlefield mutilating the bodies of the dead, a common practice in pre-Islamic Arabia. The women cut off the noses and ears of Muhammad’s fallen warriors so as to fashion necklaces and anklets from them. But Hind has a more urgent purpose. She separates from the rest to search the gorge for the body of Muhammad’s uncle, Hamzah—the man who had killed her father and brother at Badr. Finding him at last, she kneels beside his corpse, rips open his body, pulls out his liver with her bare hands, and bites into it, thus completing her vengeance against the Messenger of God.
Islam has so often been portrayed, even by contemporary scholars, as “a military religion, [with] fanatical warriors, engaged in spreading their faith and their law by armed might,” to quote historian Bernard Lewis, that the image of the Muslim horde charging wildly into battle like a swarm of locusts has become one of the most enduring stereotypes in the Western world. “Islam was never really a religion of salvation,” wrote the eminent sociologist Max Weber. “Islam is a warrior religion.” It is a religion that Samuel Huntington has portrayed as steeped “in bloody borders.”
This deep-rooted stereotype of Islam as a warrior religion has its origins in the papal propaganda of the Crusades, when Muslims were depicted as the soldiers of the Antichrist in blasphemous occupation of the Holy Lands (and, far more importantly, of the silk route to China). In the Middle Ages, while Muslim philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians were preserving the knowledge of the past and determining the scholarship of the future, a belligerent and deeply fractured Holy Roman Empire tried to distinguish itself from the Turks who were strangling it from all sides by labeling Islam “the religion of the sword,” as though there were in that era an alternative means of territorial expansion besides war. And as the European colonialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries systematically plundered the natural resources of the Middle East and North Africa, inadvertently creating a rabid political and religious backlash that would produce what is now popularly called “Islamic fundamentalism,” the image of the dreaded Muslim warrior, “clad in a long robe and brandishing his scimitar, ready to slaughter any infidel that might come his way,” became a widely popular literary cliché. It still is.
Today, the traditional image of the Muslim horde has been more or less replaced by a new image: the Islamic terrorist, strapped with explosives, ready to be martyred for God, eager to take as many innocent people as possible with him. What has not changed, however, is the notion that Islam is a religion whose adherents have been embroiled in a perpetual state of holy war, or jihad, from the time of Muhammad to this very day.
Yet the doctrine of jihad, like so many doctrines in Islam, was not fully developed as an ideological expression until long after Muhammad’s death, when Muslim conquerors began absorbing the cultures and practices of the Near East. Islam, it must be remembered, was born in an era of grand empires and global conquests, a time in which the Byzantines and Sasanians—both theocratic kingdoms—were locked in a permanent state of religious war for territorial expansion. The Muslim armies that spread out of the Arabian Peninsula simply joined in the existing fracas; they neither created it nor defined it, though they quickly dominated it. Despite the common perception in the West, the Muslim conquerors did not force conversion upon the conquered peoples; indeed, they did not even encourage it. The fact is that the financial and social advantages of being an Arab Muslim in the eighth and ninth centuries were such that Islam quickly became an élite clique, which a non-Arab could join only through a complex process that involved becoming first the client of an Arab.
This was also an era in which religion and the state were one unified entity. With the exception of a few remarkable men and women, no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confessional experiences of individuals. Quite the contrary. Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship. Thus, the Holy Roman Empire had its officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Christianity, just as the Sasanian Empire had its officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Zoroastrianism. In the Indian subcontinent, Vaisnava kingdoms (devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations) vied with Saiva kingdoms (devotees of Shiva) for territorial control, while in China, Buddhist rulers fought Taoist rulers for political ascendancy. Throughout every one of these regions, but especially in the Near East, where religion explicitly sanctioned the state, territorial expansion was identical to religious proselytization. Thus, every religion was a “religion of the sword.”
As the Muslim conquerors set about developing the meaning and function of war in Islam, they had at their disposal the highly developed and imperially sanctioned ideals of religious warfare as defined and practiced by the Sasanian and Byzantine empires. In fact, the term “holy war” originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. “Holy war” was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as “war”; jihad is not one of them.
The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred to as “the greater jihad”), it means the struggle of the soul to overcome the sinful obstacles that keep a person from God. This is why the word jihad is nearly always followed in the Quran by the phrase “in the way of God.” However, because Islam considers this inward struggle for holiness and submission to be inseparable from the outward struggle for the welfare of humanity, jihad has more often been associated with its secondary connotation (“the lesser jihad”): that is, any exertion—military or otherwise—against oppression and tyranny. And while this definition of jihad has occasionally been manipulated by militants and extremists to give religious sanction to what are in actuality social and political agendas, that is not at all how Muhammad understood the term.
War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never “holy.” Indeed, jihad should best be understood as a primitive “just war theory”: a theory born out of necessity and developed in the midst of a bloody and often chaotic war that erupted in 624 C.E. between Muhammad’s small but growing community and the all-powerful, ever-present Quraysh.
STRANGELY, THE QURAYSH seemed at first to be completely untroubled by the success of Muhammad’s community in Yathrib. Certainly they were aware of what was taking place. The Quraysh preserved their dominant position in Arabia by maintaining spies throughout the peninsula; nothing that could endanger their authority or threaten their profits would have passed their notice. But while they may have been concerned with the growing number of his followers, as long as they remained confined to Yathrib, Mecca was content to forget all about Muhammad. Muhammad, however, was not willing to forget about Mecca.
Perhaps the greatest transformation that occurred in Yathrib was not in the traditional tribal system but in the Prophet himself. As the Revelation evolved from general statements about the goodness and power of God to specific legal and civil rules for constructing and maintaining a righteous and egalitarian society, so too did Muhammad’s prophetic consciousness evolve. No longer was his message to be addressed solely to “the mother of cities [Mecca] and those who dwell around it” (6:92). The dramatic success of the Ummah in Yathrib had convinced Muhammad that God was calling him to be more than just a warner to his “tribe and close kin” (26:214). He now understood his role as being “a mercy to all the creatures of the world” (21:107) and the Messenger “to all of humanity” (12:104; 81:27).
Of course, no matter how popular or successful his community became, it could never hope to expand beyond the borders of Yathrib if the religious, economic, and social center of Arabia continued to oppose it. Eventually, Muhammad would have to confront and, if possible, convert the Quraysh to his side. But first, he had to get their attention.
Having learned in Mecca that the only effective way to confront the Quraysh was through their pocketbooks, Muhammad made the extraordinarily bold decision of declaring Yathrib to be a sanctuary city (haram). This declaration—formalized in the Constitution of Medina—meant that Yathrib could now conceivably become both a religious pilgrimage site and a legitimate trading center (the two being almost inseparable in ancient Arabia). This was not merely a financial decision. By declaring Yathrib a sanctuary city, Muhammad was deliberately challenging Mecca’s religious and economic hegemony over the peninsula. And just to make sure the Quraysh got the message, he sent his followers out into the desert to take part in the time-honored Arab tradition of caravan raiding.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, caravan raiding was a legitimate means for small clans to benefit from the wealth of larger ones. It was in no way considered stealing, and as long as no violence occurred and no blood was shed, there was no need for retribution. The raiding party would quickly descend on a caravan—usually at its rear—and carry off whatever they could get their hands on before being discovered. These periodic raids were certainly a nuisance for the caravan leaders, but in general they were considered part of the innate hazards of transporting large amounts of goods through a vast and unprotected desert.
Though small and sporadic at first, Muhammad’s raids not only provided the Ummah with desperately needed supplies, they also effectively disrupted the trade flowing in and out of Mecca. It wasn’t long before caravans entering the sacred city began complaining to the Quraysh that they no longer felt safe traveling through the region. A few caravans even chose to detour to Yathrib instead to take advantage of the security Muhammad and his men were assuring. Trade began to dwindle in Mecca, profits were lost, and Muhammad finally got the attention he was seeking.
In 624, a full year before the disastrous defeat at Uhud, Muhammad received news that a large caravan was making its way to Mecca from Palestine, the sheer size of which made it too tempting to ignore. Summoning a band of three hundred volunteers—mostly Emigrants—he set out to raid it. But as his group arrived outside the city of Badr, they were suddenly confronted by a thousand Qurayshi warriors. Muhammad’s plans had been leaked to Mecca, and now the Quraysh were ready to give his small band of insurgents a lesson they would not forget.
For days the two armies surveyed each other from opposite sides of a sizable valley: the Quraysh arrayed in white tunics, straddling ornately painted horses and tall, brawny camels; the Ummah, dressed in rags and prepared for a raid, not a war. In truth, neither side seemed eager for a fight. The Quraysh probably assumed their overwhelming numbers would elicit immediate surrender or, at the very least, contrition. And Muhammad, who must have known that fighting the Quraysh under these circumstances would result not only in his own death, but in the end of the Ummah, was anxiously awaiting instructions from God.
“O God,” he kept praying, “if this band of people perishes, you will no longer be worshipped.”
There was something more to Muhammad’s reluctance at Badr than fear of annihilation. Although he had known for some time that his message could not expand outside Arabia without the capitulation of the Quraysh, and while he must have recognized that such capitulation would not come without a fight, Muhammad understood that just as the Revelation had forever transformed the socioeconomic landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia, so must it alter the methods and morals of pre-Islamic warfare.
It is not that Arabia was short on “rules of war.” A host of regulations existed among the pagan tribes with regard to when and where fighting could take place. But for the most part these rules were meant to contain and limit fighting to ensure the tribe’s survival, not to establish a code of conduct in warfare. In the same way that absolute morality did not play a significant role in tribal concepts of law and order, neither did it play a role in tribal notions of war and peace.
The doctrine of jihad, as it slowly developed in the Quran, was specifically meant to differentiate between pre-Islamic and Islamic notions of warfare, and to infuse the latter with what Mustansir Mir calls an “ideological-cum-ethical dimension” that, until that point, did not exist in the Arabian Peninsula. At the heart of the doctrine of jihad was the heretofore unrecognized distinction between combatant and noncombatant. Thus, the killing of women, children, monks, rabbis, the elderly, or any other noncombatant was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances. Muslim law eventually expanded on these prohibitions to outlaw the torture of prisoners of war; the mutilation of the dead; rape, molestation, or any kind of sexual violence during combat; the killing of diplomats; the wanton destruction of property; and the demolition of religious or medical institutions—regulations that, many centuries later, would be incorporated into the modern international laws of war.
But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed … who have been driven from their homes for saying, ‘God is our Lord’ ” (22:39; emphasis added).
It is true that some verses in the Quran instruct Muhammad and his followers to “slay the polytheists wherever you confront them” (9:5); to “carry the struggle to the hypocrites who deny the faith” (9:73); and, especially, to “fight those who do not believe in God and the Last Day” (9:29). However, it must be understood that these verses were directed specifically at the Quraysh and their clandestine partisans in Yathrib—specifically named in the Quran as “the polytheists” and “the hypocrites,” respectively—with whom the Ummah was locked in a terrible war.
Nevertheless, these verses have long been used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to suggest that Islam advocates fighting unbelievers until they convert. But this is not a view that either the Quran or Muhammad endorsed. This view was put forth during the height of the Crusades, and partly in response to them, by later generations of Islamic legal scholars who developed what is now referred to as “the classical doctrine of jihad”: a doctrine that, among other things, partitioned the world into two spheres, the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the House of War (dar al-Harb), with the former in constant pursuit of the latter.
As the Crusades drew to a close and Rome’s attention turned away from the Muslim menace and toward the Christian reform movements cropping up throughout Europe, the classical doctrine of jihad was vigorously challenged by a new generation of Muslim scholars. The most important of these scholars was Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), whose influence in shaping Muslim ideology is matched only by St. Augustine’s influence in shaping Christianity. Ibn Taymiyya argued that the idea of killing nonbelievers who refused to convert to Islam—the foundation of the classical doctrine of jihad—not only defied the example of Muhammad but also violated one of the most important principles in the Quran: that “there can be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). Indeed, on this point the Quran is adamant. “The truth is from your Lord,” it says; “believe it if you like, or do not” (18:29). The Quran also asks rhetorically, “Can you compel people to believe against their will?” (10:100). Obviously not; the Quran therefore commands believers to say to those who do not believe, “To you your religion; to me mine” (109:6).
Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of the classical doctrine of jihad fueled the works of a number of Muslim political and religious thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In India, Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–98) used Ibn Taymiyya’s argument to claim that jihad could not be properly applied to the struggle for independence against British occupation because the British had not suppressed the religious freedom of India’s Muslim community—a Quranic requirement for sanctioning jihad (as one can imagine, this was an unpopular argument in colonial India). Chiragh Ali (1844–95), a protégé of Ahmed Khan and one of the first Muslim scholars to push Quranic scholarship toward rational contextualization, argued that the modern Muslim community could not take Muhammad’s historical Ummah as a legitimate example of how and when to wage war, because that community developed in a time when, as mentioned, the whole of the known world was in a state of permanent conflict. Early in the twentieth century, the Egyptian reformer Mahmud Shaltut (1897–1963) used Chiragh Ali’s contextualization of the Quran to show that Islam outlaws not only wars that are not made in direct response to aggression, but also those that are not officially sanctioned by a qualified Muslim jurist, or mujtahid.
Over the last century, however, and especially after the colonial experience gave birth to a new kind of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East, the classical doctrine of jihad has undergone a massive resurgence in the pulpits and classrooms of a few prominent Muslim intellectuals. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) relied on a militant interpretation of jihad, first to energize the anti-imperialist revolution of 1979 and then to fuel his destructive eight-year war with Iraq. It was Khomeini’s vision of jihad as a weapon of war that helped found the Islamic militant group Hizbullah, whose tactical use of the suicide bomber launched an appalling new era of international terrorism.
In Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–89), professor of Islamic philosophy at King Abdulaziz University, used his influence among the country’s disaffected youth to promote an uncompromisingly belligerent interpretation of jihad that, he argued, was incumbent on all Muslims. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” Dr. Azzam proclaimed to his students. “No negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.” Azzam’s views laid the foundations for the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which adopted Hizbullah’s tactics in their resistance against the Israeli occupation. His teachings had an exceptional impact on one student in particular: Osama bin Laden, who eventually put into practice his mentor’s ideology by calling for a worldwide Muslim campaign of jihad against the West, thus launching a horrifying wave of terrorism that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
The bloody terror organization that Osama bin Laden ultimately founded, al-Qaeda, is but one manifestation of a much larger movement of militant Islamic puritanism commonly called Jihadism (jahadiyyah). What makes Jihadism unique—indeed, what gives the movement its name—is its radical reinterpretation of the concept of jihad. What has for centuries been defined as a collective duty that can be waged solely in defense of life, faith, and property has, in Jihadism, been transformed into a radically individualistic obligation, totally divorced from any institutional power. In the hands of al-Qaeda and like-minded Jihadist organizations around the world, jihad has become an offensive weapon, one that can be wielded against all perceived “enemies” of Islam, whether Muslim or not. In fact, a recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that between 2004 and 2006, Muslims accounted for 85 percent of the casualties from al-Qaeda attacks (between 2006 and 2008, that number surged to 98 percent!). Women, children, the elderly, the sick, the lame—these are all legitimate targets according to Jihadism, regardless of the Quran’s clear prohibition against harming noncombatants. That is why, despite common perception in the West, the actions of Jihadist groups like al-Qaeda have been so roundly condemned not only by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, but even by other militant groups like the Palestinian Hamas or Lebanon’s Hizbullah.
The fact is that nearly one out of five people in the world are Muslims. And while some of them may share bin Laden’s grievances against the Western powers, very few share his interpretation of jihad. Indeed, despite the ways in which this doctrine has been manipulated to justify either personal prejudices or political ideologies, jihad is neither a universally recognized nor a unanimously defined concept in the Muslim world. It is true that the struggle against injustice and tyranny is incumbent on all Muslims. After all, if there was no one to stand up to despots and tyrants, then, as the Quran states, our “monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques—places where the name of God is honored—would all be razed to the ground” (22:40). But it is nevertheless solely as a defensive response to oppression and injustice, and only within the clearly outlined rules of ethical conduct in battle, that the Quranic vision of jihad is to be understood. For if, as political theorist Michael Walzer claims, the determining factor of a “just war” is the establishment of specific regulations covering both jus in bello (justice in war) and jus ad bellum (justice of war), then there can be no better way to describe Muhammad’s doctrine of jihad than as an ancient Arabian “just war” theory.
The Battle of Badr, in 624 C.E., became the first opportunity for Muhammad to put this theory of jihad into practice. As the days passed and the two armies steadily inched closer to each other, Muhammad refused to fight until attacked. Even as the fighting began—in traditional Arab fashion, with hand-to-hand combat between two or three individuals from both sides, at the end of which the field was cleared and another set of individuals chosen to fight—Muhammad remained on his knees, waiting for a message from God. It was Abu Bakr who, having had enough of the Prophet’s indecisiveness, finally urged him to rise and take part in the battle that, despite Muhammad’s reluctance, had already begun.
“O Prophet of God,” Abu Bakr said, “do not call upon your Lord so much; for God will assuredly fulfill what he has promised you.”
Muhammad agreed. Rising to his feet, he finally called upon his small band of followers to trust in God and advance in full against the enemy.
What followed was a fierce skirmish that the Italian historian Francesco Gabrieli has called “hardly more than a brawl.” A brawl it may have been, but when the fighting stopped and the battlefield was cleared of bodies, there was little doubt as to who had come out on top. Astonishingly, Muhammad had lost only a dozen men, while the Quraysh were thoroughly routed. News of the Prophet’s victory over the largest and most powerful tribe in Arabia reached Yathrib long before the victors did. The Ummah was ecstatic. The Battle of Badr proved that God had blessed the Messenger. There were rumors that angels had descended onto the battlefield to slay Muhammad’s enemies. After Badr, Muhammad was no longer a mere Shaykh or a Hakam; he and his followers were now the new political power in the Hijaz. And Yathrib was no longer just an agricultural oasis, but the seat of that power: the City of the Prophet. Medina.
Badr had essentially created two opposing groups in Arabia: those who favored Muhammad and those who remained loyal to the Quraysh. Sides were chosen. Clan representatives from throughout the peninsula flooded into Medina to ally themselves with Muhammad, while at the same time a rush of Qurayshi loyalists abandoned Medina for Mecca. Interestingly, many of these loyalists were Hanifs who had refused to convert to Muhammad’s movement despite its connection to “the religion of Abraham,” primarily because their Hanifism necessitated allegiance to the Ka‘ba and its keepers, the Quraysh.
However, neither the “reverse migration” from Medina to Mecca nor the defection of the Hanifs troubled Muhammad. He was concerned with a far more urgent matter: there was a traitor in Medina. Someone had informed the Quraysh of his plans to raid the caravan. And while there were many possibilities, Muhammad’s suspicions fell at once upon the Banu Qaynuqa, one of the largest and wealthiest Jewish clans in the oasis. Acting on his suspicions, he besieged the Qaynuqa fortification for fifteen days until the clan finally surrendered.
Muhammad’s fears about the Banu Qaynuqa’s treachery may not have been unfounded. Most of the Jewish clans in Medina had vital commercial links with the Quraysh and wanted no part in what they assumed would become a protracted war between the two cities. Muhammad’s presence in the oasis had already made things financially difficult for them. The political alliance between the Arab tribes and an increasingly powerful Muhammad had drastically eroded the power and authority of Medina’s Jewish clans. The Banu Qaynuqa suffered especially from the Prophet’s tax-free market, which had eradicated their economic monopoly over Medina and greatly reduced their wealth. A war with Mecca would only have worsened the situation of Medina’s Jewish clans by permanently severing their economic ties to the Quraysh, who were, after all, the primary consumers of their dates, wines, and arms. Despite the victory at Badr, there was still no reason to believe that Muhammad could actually conquer the Quraysh. Eventually the Meccans would regroup and return to defeat the Prophet. And when that happened, it would be imperative for the Jewish clans to make their loyalties to the Quraysh absolutely clear.
After Badr, Muhammad was likewise deeply concerned with clarifying loyalties, and it was for this reason that he cemented the agreements of mutual protection in the oasis by formalizing the Constitution of Medina. This document, which Moshe Gil aptly calls “an act of preparation for war,” made clear that the defense of Medina—or at the very least the sharing of the cost of such a defense—was the common responsibility of every inhabitant. And while the Constitution clarified the absolute religious and social freedom of Medina’s Jewish clans, stating “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion,” it nevertheless fully expected them to provide aid to “whoever wars against the people of this document.” In short, the Constitution of Medina provided the means through which Muhammad could ascertain who was and who was not on his side. Therefore, when he suspected that the Qaynuqa had betrayed their oath of mutual protection and shown themselves to be against him, he was quick to act.
According to Arab tradition, the penalty for treason was clearly defined: the men were to be killed, the women and children sold into slavery, and their property dispersed as booty. This is precisely what everyone in Medina assumed would happen to the Banu Qaynuqa, including the Qaynuqa themselves. They were shocked, therefore, when Muhammad rejected traditional law and decided instead to exile the clan from Medina, even going so far as to allow them to take most of their property with them. It was a magnanimous decision on Muhammad’s part, one that was in many ways pressed upon him by his Medinan allies who did not wish to have the blood of their clients on their hands. But it was a decision he would be forced to make again a year later, after the disastrous defeat of his overconfident army at Uhud.
The Battle of Uhud crushed the morale of the Ummah. More importantly, it seemed to confirm the expectations of Medina’s Jewish clans, who reasoned that it would only be a matter of time before the Quraysh were victorious over Muhammad. The Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza, the two most dominant Jewish clans left in the oasis, were especially delighted by the outcome of Uhud. In fact, the Banu Nadir, whose Shaykh had met secretly with the Quraysh’s leader, Abu Sufyan, before the battle, tried to capitalize on Muhammad’s weakness by assassinating him. But even before he had recovered from his battle wounds, Muhammad discovered the plot and, just as he had done with the Qaynuqa, rushed what was left of his battered army to besiege the fortress of the Nadir. When the clan appealed to their fellow Jews for help, the Shaykh of Banu Qurayza, Ka’b ibn Asad, made it clear they were on their own. With this reply, the Nadir had no choice but to surrender to Muhammad, but only on the condition that they be given the same opportunity as the Banu Qaynuqa to lay down their arms and leave Medina in peace. Again, to the utter disgust of his followers, many of whom had been seriously wounded in the battle, Muhammad agreed. The Banu Nadir left Medina for Khaybar, taking their wealth and property with them.
After Uhud, the skirmishes between Mecca and Medina continued for two more years. These were bloody times rife with secret negotiations, clandestine assassinations, and horrific acts of violence on both sides. Finally, in 627 C.E., the Quraysh, having tired of the ongoing conflict, formed a massive coalition of Bedouin fighters and headed one last time for Medina, hoping to put a definitive end to the protracted war. This time, however, Muhammad decided to wait for the Quraysh to come to him. In an innovative military tactic that would be copied for centuries to come, he instructed his followers to dig a trench around Medina, from inside which he was able to defend the oasis indefinitely. After nearly a month of trying to overcome this ingenious trench defense, the Quraysh and their large Bedouin coalition gave up and returned home, exhausted and out of supplies.
While this was far from a victory for Muhammad, he could not have been displeased with the outcome, especially considering how poorly the Battle of Uhud had gone. There wasn’t much fighting; very few people died on either side. In reality, not much happened. But the Battle of the Trench, as it came to be known, is famous not for what occurred during the fight, but for what happened afterward.
During the month-long siege, while the Medinan army struggled to keep the Meccan invaders at bay, the Banu Qurayza—now the largest Jewish clan in the oasis—openly and actively supported the forces of the Quraysh, going so far as to provide them with weapons and supplies. Why the Qurayza would so openly have betrayed Muhammad is impossible to say. The brazenness with which they pursued negotiations with the Bedouin coalition—even while the battle was raging around them—indicates they may have thought this was the end of Muhammad’s movement and wanted to be on the right side when the dust settled. Even if Muhammad won the battle, the Qurayza probably assumed that at worst they would be exiled from Medina like the Qaynuqa and the Nadir, the latter already thriving among the large Jewish population of Khaybar. But Muhammad’s generosity had been pushed to its limit, and he was no longer in the mood for clemency.
For more than a month, he kept the Qurayza inside their fortress while he deliberated with his advisers about what to do. In the end, he turned to Arab tradition. This was a dispute; it could be settled only through the arbitration of a Hakam. But because this dispute involved Muhammad—who was obviously not a neutral party—the role of arbiter fell to Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, the Shaykh of the Aws.
On the surface, it seemed Sa‘d was anything but a neutral party. After all, the Banu Qurayza were clients of the Aws and so, technically, fell under Sa‘d’s direct protection. This may have been why the Qurayza were so eager to accept him as Hakam. But when Sa‘d came out of his tent, where he had been recovering from his battle wounds, his decision was the clearest sign yet that the old social order no longer applied.
“I pass judgment on them,” Sa‘d declared, “that their fighters shall be killed and their children [and wives] made captives and that their property shall be divided.”
UNDERSTANDABLY, THE EXECUTION of the Banu Qurayza has received a great deal of scrutiny from scholars of all disciplines. Heinrich Graetz, writing in the nineteenth century, painted the event as a barbarous act of genocide reflecting Islam’s inherently anti-Jewish sentiments. S. W. Baron’s Social and Religious History of the Jews somewhat fantastically likened the Banu Qurayza to the rebels of Masada—the legendary Jews who heroically chose mass suicide over submission to the Romans in 72 C.E. Early in the twentieth century, a number of Orientalist scholars pointed to this episode in Islamic history as proof that Islam was a violent and backward religion. In his masterwork, Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, Francesco Gabrieli claimed that Muhammad’s execution of the Qurayza reaffirms “our consciousness as Christian and civilized men, that this God, or at least this aspect of Him, is not ours.”
In response to these accusations, some Muslim scholars have done considerable research to prove that the execution of the Banu Qurayza never happened, at least not in the way it has been recorded. Both Barakat Ahmad and W. N. Arafat, for example, have noted that the story of the Qurayza is not only inconsistent with Quranic values and Islamic precedent, but is based upon highly dubious and contradictory accounts derived from Jewish chroniclers who wished to portray the Qurayza as heroic martyrs of God.
In recent years, contemporary scholars of Islam, arguing that Muhammad’s actions cannot be judged according to our modern ethical standards, have striven to place the execution of the Qurayza in its historical context. Karen Armstrong, in her beautiful biography of the Prophet, notes that the massacre, while revolting to a contemporary audience, was neither illegal nor immoral according to the tribal ethic of the time. Likewise, Norman Stillman, in his The Jews of Arab Lands, argues that the fate of the Banu Qurayza was “not unusual according to the harsh rules of war during that period.” Stillman goes on to write that the fact that no other Jewish clan in Medina either objected to Muhammad’s actions or attempted to intervene in any way on behalf of the Qurayza is proof that the Jews themselves considered this event “a tribal and political affair of the traditional Arabian kind.”
And yet, even Armstrong and Stillman continue to advocate the enduring view that the execution of the Qurayza, while understandable for historical and cultural reasons, was nonetheless the tragic result of a deeply rooted ideological conflict between the Muslims and Jews of Medina, a conflict that can still be observed in the modern Middle East. The Swedish scholar Tor Andrae most clearly encapsulates this view, arguing that the execution was the result of Muhammad’s belief “that the Jews were the sworn enemies of Allah and His revelation. [Therefore] any mercy toward them was out of the question.”
But Andrae’s view, and the views of so many others who agree with him, is at best ignorant of Muslim history and religion and at worst bigoted and obtuse. The fact is that the execution of the Banu Qurayza, while undeniably a dreadful event, was neither an act of genocide nor part of some comprehensive anti-Jewish agenda on the part of Muhammad. And it most certainly was not the result of an entrenched and innate religious conflict between Islam and Judaism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To begin with, the Banu Qurayza were not executed for being Jews. As Michael Lecker has demonstrated, a significant number of the Banu Kilab—Arab clients of the Qurayza who allied with them as an auxiliary force outside Medina—were also executed for treason. And while reports of the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source), the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs. Even if one excludes the Qaynuqa and Nadir clans, thousands of Jews still remained in the oasis, living amicably alongside their Muslim neighbors for many years after the execution of the Qurayza. Only under the leadership of Umar near the end of the seventh century C.E. were the remaining Jewish clans in Medina expelled—peacefully—as part of a larger Islamization process throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Describing the death of only slightly more than one percent of Medina’s Jewish population as a “genocidal act” is not only a preposterous exaggeration, it is an affront to the memory of those millions of Jews who truly have suffered the horrors of genocide.
Second, as scholars almost unanimously agree, the execution of the Banu Qurayza did not in any way set a precedent for future treatment of Jews in Islamic territories. On the contrary, Jews throve under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and non-Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians “protected peoples” (dhimmi), neither required nor encouraged their conversion to Islam. (Pagans and polytheists, however, were often given a choice between conversion and death.)
Muslim persecution of the dhimmi was not only forbidden by Islamic law, it was in direct defiance of Muhammad’s orders to his expanding armies never to trouble Jews in their practice of Judaism, and always to preserve the Christian institutions they encountered. Thus, when Umar ordered the demolition of a mosque in Damascus that had been illegally constructed by forcibly expropriating the house of a Jew, he was merely following the Prophet’s warning that “he who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.”
In return for a special “protection tax” called jizyah, Muslim law allowed Jews and Christians both religious autonomy and the opportunity to share in the social and economic institutions of the Muslim world. Nowhere was this tolerance more evident than in medieval Spain—the supreme example of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cooperation—where Jews especially were able to rise to the highest positions in society and government. Indeed, one of the most powerful men in all of Muslim Spain was a Jew named Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who for many decades served as the trusted vizier to the Caliph, Abd al-Rahman III. It is no wonder, then, that Jewish documents written during this period refer to Islam as “an act of God’s mercy.”
Of course, even in Muslim Spain there were periods of intolerance and religious persecution. Moreover, Islamic law did prohibit Jews and Christians from openly proselytizing their faith in public places. But, as Maria Menocal notes, such prohibitions affected Christians more than they did Jews, who have been historically disinclined toward both proselytizing and public displays of their religious rituals. This may explain why Christianity gradually disappeared in most of the Islamic lands, while Jewish communities increased and prospered. In any case, even during the most oppressive periods in Islamic history, Jews under Muslim rule received far better treatment and had far greater rights than when they were under Christian rule. It is no accident that a few months after Muslim Spain fell to Ferdinand’s Christian armies in 1492, most of Spain’s Jews were summarily expelled from the realm. The Inquisition took care of those who remained.
Finally, and most importantly, the execution of the Banu Qurayza was not, as it has so often been presented, reflective of an intrinsic religious conflict between Muhammad and the Jews. This theory, which is sometimes presented as an incontestable doctrine in both Islamic and Judaic studies, is founded on the belief that Muhammad, who considered his message to be a continuation of the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition, came to Medina fully expecting the Jews to confirm his identity as a prophet. Supposedly, to facilitate the Jews’ acceptance of his prophetic identity, Muhammad connected his community to theirs by adopting a number of Jewish rituals and practices. To his surprise, however, the Jews not only rejected him but strenuously argued against the authenticity of the Quran as divine revelation. Worried that the rejection of the Jews would somehow discredit his prophetic claims, Muhammad had no choice but to turn violently against them, separate his community from theirs, and, in the words of F. E. Peters, “refashion Islam as an alternative to Judaism.”
There are two problems with this theory. First, it fails to appreciate Muhammad’s own religious and political acumen. It is not as though the Prophet were an ignorant Bedouin worshipping the elements or bowing before slabs of stone. This was a man who, for nearly half a century, had lived in the religious capital of the Arabian Peninsula, where he was a sophisticated merchant with firm economic and cultural ties to both Jewish and Christian tribes. It would have been ridiculously naïve for Muhammad to assume that his prophetic mission would be “as obvious to the Jews as it was to him,” to quote Montgomery Watt. He would need only have been familiar with the most rudimentary doctrine of Judaism to know that they would not have necessarily accepted his identity as one of their prophets. Certainly he was aware that the Jews did not recognize Jesus as a prophet; why would he have assumed they would recognize him as such?
But the most glaring problem with this theory is not how little credit it gives to Muhammad, but how much credit it gives to Medina’s Jews. As mentioned, the Jewish clans in Medina—themselves Arab converts—were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously. This was not a particularly literate group. The Arabic sources describe Medina’s Jewish clans as speaking a language of their own called ratan, which al-Tabari claims was Persian but which was probably a hybrid of Arabic and Aramaic. There is no evidence that they either spoke or understood Hebrew. Indeed, their knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was likely limited to just a few scrolls of law, some prayer books, and a handful of fragmentary Arabic translations of the Torah—what S. W. Baron refers to as a “garbled, oral tradition.”
So limited was their knowledge of Judaism that some scholars do not believe them to have been genuinely Jewish. D. S. Margoliouth considers the Jews of Medina to have been little more than a loose band of monotheists—not unlike the Hanifs—who should more properly be termed “Rahmanists” (Rahman being an alternative title for Allah). While many disagree with Margoliouth’s analysis, there are other reasons to question the extent to which Medina’s Jewish clans would have identified themselves with the Jewish faith. Consider, for example, that by the sixth century C.E., there was, as noted by H. G. Reissener, complete agreement among Diaspora Jewish communities that a non-Israelite could be considered a Jew only if he was “a follower of the Mosaic Law … in accordance with the principles laid down in the Talmud.” Such a restriction would immediately have ruled out Medina’s Jewish clans, who were not Israelites, and who neither strictly observed Mosaic law nor seemed to have any real knowledge of the Talmud. Moreover, there is a conspicuous absence in Medina of what should be easily identifiable archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence. According to Jonathan Reed, certain archeological indicators—such as the remnants of stone vessels, the ruins of immersion pools (miqva’ot), and the interment of ossuaries—must be present at a site in order to confirm the existence there of an established Jewish religious identity. As far as we know, none of these indicators have been unearthed in Medina.
Naturally, there are those who continue to assert the religious identity of Medina’s Jewish clans. Gordon Newby, for example, thinks Medina’s Jews may have comprised distinct communities with their own schools and books, though no archeological evidence exists to confirm this hypothesis. In any case, even Newby admits that with regard to their culture, ethics, and even their religion, Medina’s Jews were not only quite different from other Jewish communities in the Arabian Peninsula, they were practically identical to Medina’s pagan community, with whom they freely interacted and (against Mosaic law) frequently intermarried.
Simply put, the Jewish clans of Medina were in no way a religiously observant group; they may not even have been Jews, if Margoliouth and others are correct. So it is highly doubtful that they would have engaged in complex polemical debates with Muhammad over the Quran’s correlation to Hebrew Scriptures that they neither could read, nor likely even owned.
The fact is that nothing Muhammad either said or did would necessarily have been objectionable to Medina’s Jews. As Newby writes in A History of the Jews of Arabia, Islam and Judaism in seventh-century Arabia operated within “the same sphere of religious discourse,” in that both shared the same religious characters, stories, and anecdotes, both discussed the same fundamental questions from similar perspectives, and both had nearly identical moral and ethical values. Where there was disagreement between the two faiths, Newby suggests it was “over interpretation of shared topics, not over two mutually exclusive views of the world.” To quote S. D. Goiten, there was simply “nothing repugnant to the Jewish religion in Muhammad’s preaching.”
Even Muhammad’s claim to be the Prophet and Apostle of God, on the model of the great Jewish patriarchs, would not necessarily have been unacceptable to Medina’s Jews. Not only did his words and actions correspond perfectly to the widely accepted pattern of Arabian Jewish mysticism, but Muhammad was not even the only person in Medina making these kinds of prophetic claims. Medina was also the home of a Jewish mystic and Kohen named Ibn Sayyad, who, like Muhammad, wrapped himself in a prophetic mantle, recited divinely inspired messages from heaven, and called himself “the Apostle of God.” Remarkably, not only did most of Medina’s Jewish clans accept Ibn Sayyad’s prophetic claims, but the sources depict Ibn Sayyad as openly acknowledging Muhammad as a fellow apostle and prophet.
It would be simplistic to argue that no polemical conflict existed between Muhammad and the Jews of his time. But this conflict had far more to do with political alliances and economic ties than with a theological debate over scripture. This was a conflict fueled primarily by tribal partnerships and tax-free markets, not religious zeal. And while Muhammad’s biographers like to present him as debating theology with belligerent groups of “rabbis” who show “hostility to the apostle in envy, hatred, and malice, because God had chosen His apostle from the Arabs,” the similarities in both the tone and manner of these events and the stories of the quarrels Jesus had with the Pharisees points to their function as literary topoi, not historical fact. Indeed, scholars have for centuries been aware of the intentional connection the early Muslims tried to draw between Jesus and Muhammad in an attempt to connect the mission and message of the two prophets.
Bear in mind, Muhammad’s biographies were written at a time when the Jewish minority in the Muslim state was Islam’s only remaining theological rival. It is not surprising, therefore, that Muslim historians and theologians would have buttressed their arguments against the rabbinical authorities of their time by planting their words in Muhammad’s mouth. If Muhammad’s biographies reveal anything at all, it is the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Prophet’s biographers, not of the Prophet himself. To understand Muhammad’s actual beliefs regarding the Jews and Christians of his time, one must look not to the words that chroniclers put into his mouth hundreds of years after his death, but rather to the words that God put into his mouth while he was alive.
The Quran, as a holy and revealed scripture, repeatedly reminds Muslims that what they are hearing is not a new message but the “confirmation of previous scriptures” (12:111). In fact, the Quran proposes the unprecedented notion that all revealed scriptures are derived from a single concealed book in heaven called the Umm al-Kitab, or “Mother of Books” (13:39). That means that as far as Muhammad understood, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran must be read as a single, cohesive narrative about humanity’s relationship to God, in which the prophetic consciousness of one prophet is passed spiritually to the next: from Adam to Muhammad. For this reason, the Quran advises Muslims to say to the Jews and Christians:
We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed to us, which is that
which was revealed to Abraham and Ismail and
Jacob and the tribes [of Israel], as well as that which the Lord
revealed to Moses and to Jesus and to all the other Prophets.
We make no distinction between any of them;
we submit ourselves to God. (3:84)
Of course, Muslims believe that the Quran is the final revelation in this sequence of scriptures, just as they believe Muhammad to be “the Seal of the Prophets.” But the Quran never claims to annul the previous scriptures, only to complete them. And while the notion of one scripture giving authenticity to others is, to say the least, a remarkable event in the history of religions, the concept of the Umm al-Kitab may indicate an even more profound principle.
As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah. As far as Muhammad was concerned, the Jews and the Christians were “People of the Book” (ahl al-Kitab), spiritual cousins who, as opposed to the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, worshipped the same God, read the same scriptures, and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community. Although each faith comprised its own distinct religious community (its own individual Ummah), together they formed one united Ummah, an extraordinary idea that Mohammed Bamyeh calls “monotheistic pluralism.” Thus, the Quran promises that “all those who believe—the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians—anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret” (5:69; emphasis added).
It was this conviction of the existence of a unified, monotheistic Ummah that led Muhammad to connect his community to the Jews, not that he felt the need to emulate the Jewish clans, nor that he wanted to facilitate their acceptance of him as a prophet. Muhammad aligned his community with the Jews in Medina because he considered them, as well as the Christians, to be part of his Ummah. Consequently, when he came to Medina, he made Jerusalem—the site of the Temple (long since destroyed) and the direction in which the Diaspora Jews turned during worship—the direction of prayer, or qiblah, for all Muslims. He imposed a mandatory fast upon his community, which was to take place annually on the tenth day (Ashura) of the first month of the Jewish calendar, the day more commonly known as Yom Kippur. He purposely set the day of Muslim congregation at noon on Friday so that it would coincide with, but not disrupt, Jewish preparations for the Sabbath. He adopted many of the Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements, and encouraged his followers to marry Jews, as he himself did (5:5–7).
And while it is true that after a few years, Muhammad both changed the qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca, and set the annual fast at Ramadan (the month in which the Quran was first revealed) instead of Yom Kippur, these decisions should not be interpreted as “a break with the Jews,” but as the maturing of Islam into its own independent religion. Despite the changes, Muhammad continued to encourage his followers to fast on Yom Kippur, and he never ceased to venerate Jerusalem as a holy city; indeed, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the most sacred city in the whole of the Muslim world. Moreover, the Prophet maintained most of the dietary, purity, and marriage restrictions he had adopted from the Jews. And until the day he died, Muhammad continued to engage in peaceful discourse—not theological debate—with the Jewish communities of Arabia, just as the Quran had commanded him to do: “Do not argue with the People of the Book—apart from those individuals who act unjustly toward you—unless it is in a fair way” (29:46). Muhammad’s example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.
Certainly, Muhammad understood that there were distinct theological differences between Islam and the other Peoples of the Book. But he saw these differences as part of the divine plan of God, who could have created a single Ummah if he had wanted to but instead preferred that “every Ummah have its own Messenger” (10:47). Thus, to the Jews, God sent the Torah, “which contains guidance and light”; to the Christians, God sent Jesus, who “confirms the Torah”; and finally, to the Arabs, God sent the Quran, which “confirms the earlier revelations.” In this way, the ideological differences among the Peoples of the Book is explained by the Quran as indicating God’s desire to give each people its own “law and path and way of life” (5:42–48).
That being said, there were some theological differences that Muhammad considered to be intolerable innovations created by ignorance and error. Chief among these was the concept of the Trinity. “God is one,” the Quran states definitively. “God is eternal. He has neither begotten anyone, nor is he begotten of anyone” (112:1–3).
Yet this verse, and the many others like it in the Quran, is in no way a condemnation of Christianity per se but of Imperial Byzantine (Trinitarian) Orthodoxy, which, as noted, was neither the sole nor the dominant Christian position in the Arabian Peninsula. From the beginning of his ministry, Muhammad revered Jesus as the greatest of God’s messengers. Much of the Gospel narrative is recounted in the Quran, though in a somewhat abridged version, including Jesus’ virgin birth (3:47), his miracles (3:49), his identity as Messiah (3:45), and the expectation of his judgment over humanity at the end of time (4:159).
What the Quran does not accept, however, is the belief of those Orthodox Trinitarians who argued that Jesus was himself God. These Christians Muhammad did not even consider to be Peoples of the Book: “It is the unbeliever who says, ‘God is the third of three,’ ” the Quran declares. “There is only God the One!” (5:73). It was Muhammad’s belief that Orthodox Christians had corrupted the original message of Jesus, who the Quran contends never claimed divinity and never asked to be worshipped (5:116–18), but rather commanded his disciples to “worship God, who is my Lord and your Lord” (5:72).
At the same time, Muhammad lashed out at those Jews in Arabia who had “forsaken the community of Abraham” (2:130) and “who were trusted with the laws of the Torah, but who fail to observe them” (62:5). Again, this was not a condemnation of Judaism. The respect and reverence that Muhammad had for the great Jewish patriarchs is evidenced by the fact that almost every biblical prophet is mentioned in the Quran (Moses nearly one hundred and forty times!). Rather, Muhammad was addressing those Jews in the Arabian Peninsula—and only in the Arabian Peninsula—who had in both belief and practice “breached their covenant with God” (5:13). And, if the Jewish clans in Medina were any indication, there were many of them.
Muhammad’s complaints in the Quran were not directed against the religions of Judaism and Christianity, which he considered to be nearly identical to Islam: “We believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you [Jews and Christians],” the Quran says. “Our God and your God are the same; and it is to Him we submit” (29:46). His complaint was against those Jews and Christians he had encountered in Arabia who, in his opinion, had forsaken their covenant with God and perverted the teachings of the Torah and Gospels. These were unbelievers with whom the Quran warns Muslims not to ally themselves: “O believers, do not make friends with those who mock you and make fun of your faith.… Instead say to them: ‘O People of the Book, why do you dislike us? Is it because we believe in God and in what has been sent down to us [the Quran], and what was sent down before that [the Torah and Gospels], while most of you are disobedient?’ ” (5:57–59).
The point is that when Muhammad reminded the Jews of Arabia of the “favors [God] bestowed on you, making you the most exalted nation in the world” (2:47), when he raged against the Christians for abandoning their faith and confounding the truth of their scriptures, when he complained that both groups “no longer follow the teachings of the Torah and the Gospel, and what has been revealed to them by their Lord” (5:66), he was merely following in the footsteps of the prophets who had come before him. He was, in other words, Isaiah calling his fellow Jews “a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers” (Isaiah 1:4); he was John the Baptist lashing out against “the brood of vipers” who assumed that their status as “sons of Abraham” would keep them safe from judgment (Luke 3:7–8); he was Jesus promising damnation for the hypocrites who “for the sake of tradition, have made void the word of God” (Matthew 15:6). After all, isn’t this exactly the message a prophet is supposed to deliver?
It is no coincidence that just as they reversed many of Muhammad’s social reforms aimed at empowering women, the Muslim scriptural and legal scholars of the following centuries rejected the notion that Jews and Christians were part of the Ummah, and instead designated both groups as unbelievers. These scholars reinterpreted the Revelation to declare that the Quran had superseded, rather than supplemented, the Torah and the Gospels, and called on Muslims to distinguish themselves from the People of the Book. This was largely an attempt to differentiate the nascent religion of Islam from other communities so it could establish its own religious independence, much as the early Christians gradually dissociated themselves from the Jewish practices and rituals that had given birth to their movement by demonizing the Jews as the killers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the actions of these scriptural scholars were in direct defiance of Muhammad’s example and the teachings of the Quran. For even though Muhammad recognized the theological differences that existed among the Peoples of the Book, he never called for a partitioning of the faiths. On the contrary, to those Jews who say “the Christians are wrong!” and to those Christians who say “the Jews are wrong!” (2:113), and to both groups who claim that “no one will go to heaven except the Jews and Christians” (2:111), Muhammad offered a compromise. “Let us come to an agreement on the things we hold in common,” the Quran suggests: “that we worship none but God; that we make none God’s equal; and that we take no other as lord except God” (3:64).
It is a tragedy that after fourteen hundred years, this simple compromise has yet to overcome the sometimes petty yet often binding ideological differences between the three faiths of Abraham.
AFTER THE BATTLE of the Trench, with Medina firmly in his control, Muhammad once again turned toward Mecca, not as the Messenger of God but as something the Quraysh in their role as Keepers of the Keys could not refuse: a pilgrim.
In 628, Muhammad unexpectedly announced that he was going to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage rites at the Ka‘ba. Considering that he was in the middle of a bloody and protracted war with the Meccans, this was an absurd decision. He could not have thought the Quraysh, who had spent the past six years trying to kill him, would simply move out of the way while he and his followers circumambulated the sanctuary. But Muhammad remained undaunted. With more than a thousand of his followers marching behind him, he crossed the desert on his way to the city of his birth, shouting fearlessly along the way the pilgrim’s chant: “Here I am, O Allah! Here I am!”
The sound of Muhammad and his followers, unarmed and dressed in pilgrim’s clothes, loudly proclaiming their presence to their enemies, must have rung like a death knell in Mecca. Surely the end was near if this man could be so audacious as to think he could walk into the sacred city unmolested. The Quraysh, who rushed out to halt Muhammad before he could enter Mecca, were confounded. Meeting him just outside the city, in a place called Hudaybiyyah, they made one last attempt to preserve their control of Mecca by offering the Prophet a cease-fire, the conditions of which were so against Muhammad’s interests that it must have appeared to the Muslims to be a joke.
The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah proposed that in return for his immediate withdrawal and the unconditional cessation of all caravan raids in the vicinity of Mecca, Muhammad would be allowed to return in the following pilgrimage season, when the sanctuary would be evacuated for a brief time so that he and his followers could perform the pilgrimage rites undisturbed. Adding insult to injury, Muhammad would be required to sign the treaty not as the Apostle of God but only as the tribal head of his community. Given Muhammad’s rapidly growing position in the Hijaz, the treaty was preposterous; more than anything, it demonstrated the certainty of Mecca’s impending defeat. Perhaps that is why Muhammad’s followers, who sensed victory lingering only a few kilometers in front of them, were so incensed when the Prophet actually accepted the terms.
Umar—ever the impetuous one—could barely contain himself. He jumped up and went to Abu Bakr. “Abu Bakr,” he asked, pointing to Muhammad, “is he not the Messenger of God?”
“Yes,” Abu Bakr replied.
“And are we not Muslims?”
“Yes.”
“And are they not polytheists?”
“Yes.”
At this Umar shouted, “Then why should we grant what is detrimental to our religion?”
Abu Bakr, who probably felt the same way, replied with the only words in which he could take solace: “I bear witness that he is the Messenger of God.”
It is difficult to say why Muhammad accepted the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. He may have been hoping to regroup and wait for an opportune time to return and conquer Mecca by force. He may have been observing the Quranic mandate to “fight until oppression ends and God’s law prevails. But if [the enemy] desists, then you must also cease hostilities” (2:193). Whatever the case, the decision to accept the cease-fire and return the following year turned out to be the most decisive moment in the battle between Mecca and Medina. For when ordinary Meccans saw the respect and devotion with which their supposed enemy and his band of “religious zealots” entered their city and circled the Ka‘ba, there seemed little incentive to continue supporting the war. Indeed, a year after that pilgrimage, in 630 C.E., after Muhammad interpreted a skirmish between the Quraysh and some of his followers as a breach of the cease-fire, he marched once more toward Mecca, this time with ten thousand men behind him, only to find the city’s inhabitants welcoming him with open arms.
After accepting Mecca’s surrender, Muhammad declared a general amnesty for most of his enemies, including those he had fought in battle. Despite the fact that tribal law now made the Quraysh his slaves, Muhammad declared all of Mecca’s inhabitants (including its slaves) to be free. Only six men and four women were put to death for various crimes, and no one was forced to convert to Islam, though everyone had to take an oath of allegiance never again to wage war against the Prophet. Among the last of the Quraysh to take that oath were its Shaykh, Abu Sufyan, and his wife, Hind, who, even as she formally converted to Islam, remained proudly defiant, barely masking her disgust with Muhammad and his “provincial” faith.
When this business was complete, the Prophet made his way to the Ka‘ba. With the help of his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, he lifted the heavy veil covering the sanctuary door and entered the sacred interior. One by one, he carried the idols out before the assembled crowd and, raising them over his head, smashed them to the ground. The various depictions of gods and prophets, such as that of Abraham holding divining rods, were all washed away with Zamzam water; all, that is, except for the one of Jesus and his mother, Mary. This image the Prophet put his hands over reverently, saying, “Wash out all except what is beneath my hands.”
Finally, Muhammad brought out the idol representing the great Syrian god, Hubal. As Abu Sufyan watched, the Prophet unsheathed his sword and hacked the idol into pieces, forever ending the worship of pagan deities at Mecca. The remains of Hubal’s statue Muhammad used as a doorstep leading up to the new, sanctified Ka‘ba, the sanctuary that would henceforth be known as “the House of God,” the seat of a wholly new and universal faith: Islam.