The Islamic state was created by Arabic-speaking peoples during the course of the seventh century AD, and its political organization and the dissensions which troubled it had their origins in the Arabian background. According to the widely accepted historical narrative, the Arabs were ancient people who suddenly irrupted onto the world stage in the late sixth and early seventh centuries establishing an Arab-ruling elite and expressing themselves through the ancient Arabic language, now recorded in a newly developed Arabic script. The Islamic conquests, in fact, were given force by an existing Arab identity. Recently, this has been challenged by Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs, in which he argues that there are few if any references to the Arabs as a group at this time and that an Arab ethnic identity was essentially constructed in Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid times. In this argument, Arab identity was a product of, rather than a cause of, the great Arab conquests. In the account which follows, the term Arab will refer to Arabic speakers.
At the beginning of the seventh century, Arabic speakers inhabited the Arabian Peninsula and its northward extension, the Syrian Desert. Apart from some areas of south Arabia, where pre-Arabic languages were still spoken, Arabic was the language of the pastoral peoples throughout the Arabian Peninsula and as far north as the Euphrates. There was also some limited Persian settlement in Yemen and on the eastern, Gulf shore of Arabia. In the north, the frontier of the Arabic-speaking peoples coincided roughly with the borders between the steppe lands and the areas of settled agriculture. In southern Iraq, Arabs lived in the deserts along the lower Euphrates and colonized a few towns, like Ḥīra along the fringes of the alluvial plains. Further north, Arab nomads were found in the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates known as the Jazīra or “Island”, a vast expanse of sparse grazing which could support a considerable population of pastoralists. On the western, Syrian edge of the desert, the picture is complicated by the fact that many Arabs had become more or less integrated into the Byzantine state and mingled with non-Arabic-speaking groups. In the century before the Islamic conquest, Arab nomad tribes had penetrated into previously settled areas in northern Syria around Aleppo (Beroea) and Qinnasrīn (Chalcis), in the lands to the east of the Jordan and the southern borders of Palestine. In addition, much of the population of cities such as Damascus and Homs on the edge of the desert was of Arab origin. The divisions between Arab and non-Arab in these areas were blurred, and while we can probably assume that most of the nomadic pastoralists in the area were Arabic speakers, so too were the inhabitants of some of the settled areas. Some regions by contrast seem to have been almost completely unaffected by Arab immigration before the coming of Islam. These include the alluvial plains of southern Iraq, known as the Sawād, the mountain and coastal areas of Palestine and Syria and, in the north, the mountains of southeastern Anatolia. Neither Egypt nor Iran was in any sense an Arab country at this time.
These Arabic-speaking populations were united by a common language and the idea of a common kinship. There must have been widely differing dialects of Arabic over so vast an area, although little evidence of them has survived in the literary sources, but during the sixth century, there had developed, partly at the court of the Arab kings of Ḥīra, a common poetic language, generally understood throughout the Arabic-speaking lands. The possession of this common language was of vital importance for the development of the Islamic state. It meant that the fundamental teachings of Islam, as enshrined in the Qur’ān, were comprehensible to many different tribes and that communication was possible among groups from many different areas. If the Arab tribes had not enjoyed this common language, the achievements of the conquests and the Muslim empire would have been impossible. The Arabs also seem to have shared the idea that they came from one, or perhaps two, common ancestors, the second being introduced to account for the widespread cultural and later political differences between the northern (Qays/Muḍar) and southern (Yaman) Arabs. Later genealogists worked out elaborate structures to explain the kinship between different groups and, though these were in part later rationalizations, they could only have been developed if there was already an idea of common kinship.
Despite this linguistic and ethnic unity, the Arabs had no central political organization or administration. In previous centuries, there had been Arab kingdoms with some form of government, but these had usually been on the fringes of the Arab lands and under the patronage or protection of outside powers. The most famous of these were the Nabatean kingdom of Petra, taken over by the Romans in AD 106, and the third-century kingdom of Palmyra (Tadmur), both of which derived much of their wealth from the control of caravan routes and were heavily influenced by Greek and Roman cultures. In the extreme south of the peninsula, there were other kingdoms, based on the settled lands of south Arabia and Yemen but, like their northern counterparts, deriving much of their wealth from the organization of trade. In the fifth century AD, with the support of the Himyaritic rulers of south Arabia, the kings of Kinda established control over the tribes and commerce of much of central Arabia. By the second half of the sixth century, however, the kingdom of south Arabia had disintegrated and been taken over by Ethiopian and Persian invaders, while the tribes of central Arabia lacked any form of political authority. On the frontiers of the great empires, Arab client states had been established in the sixth century – the Ghassanids in Syria and the Lakhmids on the frontiers of Iraq. The Ghassanids, who organized much of the Syrian steppe for the Byzantines, were the leaders of a confederation of Arab tribes who lived a pastoral, nomadic existence along the borders of the settled lands. The Lakhmids had a fixed capital at Ḥīra; their kings enjoyed close relations with the Sasanian rulers of Iran and they managed the trade routes of much of eastern and central Arabia. By the beginning of the seventh century, however, these systems had been swept away because of changes of policy by both the Byzantines and the Sasanians and by the long, gruelling war between the two great powers from AD 602 to 628. The nascent Islamic state was faced by no rival power among the Arabs, and indeed it arose in part to fill the recently created political vacuum.
Such organized kingdoms were always, however, marginal to the lives of most nomad Arabs, for whom the tribe was the largest grouping to which they owed allegiance. In theory, the tribe was considered to be the descendants of a remote common ancestor from whom its members took their names. Thus, the descendants of a, probably mythical, Tamīm were referred to as the Banū Tamīm, or sons of Tamīm, and individuals would take the tribal designation al-Tamīmī as the last element in their names. Anthropological research suggests that in practice, tribal connections and genealogical links are developed to explain existing alliances and that if two groups wish to establish close links for pastoral, commercial or political reasons, they will tend to do so by “discovering” a common ancestor.
Not all tribes were equal in numbers, status or internal organization. Some tribes, notably those with a settled focus or nucleus, like the Quraysh of Mecca and the Banū Ḥanīfa of Yamāma in eastern Arabia, seem to have had a considerable degree of group solidarity. Others, like the Tamīm in northeastern Arabia and the Ghaṭafān in the Ḥijāz, for example, lacked any common unity of leadership or purpose. Some tribes seem to have been in the process of disintegration; the Bakr b. Wā’il, again in northeastern Arabia, never acted as a unit, and the most important groups were subdivisions like the Shaybān, whose leaders played a dynamic role in the conquest of Iraq. In the circumstances of pre-Islamic Arabia, most tribes never acted together, either for defence or for seeking pasture, nor was there any meeting place for the entire group. Instead, for most purposes, the bedouin of the seventh century, like the bedouin of the present day, identified with the much smaller lineage or clan which claims a common descent, often for five generations, and may share the ownership of wells vital for survival through the rainless summer, or with the tenting group who may or may not be related but who camp together and defend their members against attack. Early Islamic history is often described in terms of tribal rivalries, as if tribes had a common purpose and ambition. In fact, both detailed study of the early sources and the experience of modern anthropologists make it plain that tribes have no such unity and that, while tribal loyalties may help to cement an alliance, lineages and tenting groups make decisions according to their own perceived interest, rather than out of blind allegiance to a tribal leadership. Converts to Islam, for example, usually came as individuals or small groups, almost never as entire tribes. However, the ideological justification for alliances is often given in terms of kinship and a genealogical explanation produced. Thus, early Muslim writers may present in genealogical terms – that is, in terms of tribal solidarity and rivalry – conflicts that were in reality more concerned with down-to-earth matters like grazing and access to political power.
This kinship system, the identification of each individual with a group which would protect him against a rival group, is a logical response to the condition of ungovernment. In pre-Islamic Arabia, there was no law enforcement agency to protect persons and property, and safety was provided not by the state but by the kin and the principle of retaliation; if a man was robbed or murdered, then his kin were obliged to seek revenge or compensation. In this way, a measure of security for life and property was obtained without any formal structure of government, but it meant that the obligations of kinship were very important, since no one could survive without being a member of, or protected by, an effective kin. This system applied not only to the bedouin but also to the settled populations of towns such as Mecca and Yathrib (Medina) as well. One result of this method of maintaining order was that Arab society was a society geared to warfare; among full members of the tribe (as opposed to slaves and others of low status), there were no “civilians”. All adult males, and sometimes females, could be mobilized to defend the camp or participate in raids. At the time of the Islamic conquests, most Arab men would have had military training and experience, in contrast to the peoples of much of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, where the peasant and urban populations took little part in military activities.
Power within the tribe was invested in the hands of chiefs. Leadership in traditional Arab society was both hereditary and elective. Leaders were chosen from ruling kin or a lineage within the tribe, but among the members of the lineage, power was exercised by the most able and effective, rather than by the eldest son of the previous holder of power. Chieftainship might be held jointly among several members of the same clan, while a large tribe might have a number of different leaders, as the Tamīm seem to have had in Muḥammad’s time, and no paramount chiefs at all. In other cases, there were rival lineages which contested the chieftainship of the tribe, as in the Shaybān, where the different leaders sought alliance with either Muḥammad or the Persian authorities to strengthen their positions. The powers of the chief were very limited and were dependent on his abilities for their maintenance. His functions were to arbitrate in disputes, to find adequate grazing for his followers and to defend their wells and beasts against the depredations of rivals. He was also expected to be generous and to entertain visitors and his followers, and to this end he was sometimes allowed to collect contributions from the tribe. A reputation for generous hospitality had an important function, encouraging visitors who would provide information about grazing, the movement of other groups and other news vital for making effective choices of action. In general, there was not, in purely pastoral societies, an overwhelming difference in wealth between chiefs and others, since vast flocks and large sums of money were difficult to safeguard and provided no great advantage. A reputation for wisdom and generosity brought more power and influence than the accumulation of treasure or animals. The tribal chief had no coercive power. He could, if called on, give judgement in a case involving two parties within his own tribe, but there was no mechanism for enforcing it except insofar as public opinion sustained his verdict and put pressure on the parties concerned, since a man who consistently defied the opinion of his kinsmen would find himself friendless and exposed in time of danger. This lack of effective power has led to desert society being described as democratic and egalitarian, and there is some truth in this. Each family head had his own means of subsistence, his flocks, and could make his own decisions about where he camped and with whom he arranged marriage alliances. At the same time, there was a significant difference between the chief who was able to entertain guests to feasts and his poorer followers who could only scrape a meagre and insecure subsistence.
The pattern of tribal life was drastically changed by the Islamic conquests and the settlement often in large urban communities which followed. In some ways, tribal solidarity was enhanced because of the government policy of settling members of the same tribe in the same quarters of cities. Thus, Tamīmīs who were settled in the Tamīm quarter of Kūfa might find themselves next door to fellow tribesmen they had never met before but with whom they now had, for the first time, interests in common. As time passed, however, and the Umayyad government became more effective, tribal solidarity became less important, and men could pursue their own economic interests protected not by their kinsmen but by agents of the government.
The other important change caused by the post-Islamic settlement was to increase the distance between the ordinary tribesmen and the chiefs, the men the early Muslim writers refer to as the ashrāf (sing. sharīf ). From the fourth/tenth century, if not before, this term is used for members of the Alid family, and tribal leaders are referred to as mashāyikh (sing. shaykh). The ashrāf were able to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the newly won lands and wealth and above all from their position as intermediaries between the government and their followers. It was they who arranged for the distribution of salaries and assignment of land while they acted as channels through which their followers could bring their complaints and petitions to the governor or caliph. They also had opportunities for acquiring great wealth from government office and military campaigns and investing it in land, much more secure and easier to safeguard than flocks. In some cases, tribal chiefs seem to have bartered tribal lands in Arabia for estates in Iraq which became their own property. All this led to the development of social tensions within the tribe which had seldom existed in the circumstances of pastoral life. Especially in Iraq, hostility to the newly acquired power and wealth of the ashrāf was a constant source of violent discontent.
In inner Arabia, most of the Arabs were pagans. Their paganism took different forms and seems to have been fairly basic – the worship of local idols and the practice of various techniques of divination. As far as the bedouin were concerned, attachment to the honour of both individual and kin and to the ideals of generosity and military prowess, a set of ideals sometimes referred to as “tribal humanism”, was probably more important than attachment to any deity. The pagan deities seem to have been very localized and to have demanded favours and gifts more than worship and commitment. In Mecca itself, ideas of monotheism were not unknown before the coming of Muḥammad, but the worship of the idols of the Ka‘ba was too important to the prosperity of the community to be challenged seriously. Elsewhere, Christianity was by far the most important religion among the Arabs. The tribes of the Syrian steppe and those of the Jazīra seem to have been almost entirely Christian, mostly of the Monophysite creed – indeed, the Ghassanids had been among the most important patrons of Monophysite Christianity when it had been under attack from the Byzantine authorities in the sixth century. There were both Christians and Jews in the Ḥijāz as well, the Christians settled mostly in the south at Najrān on the Yemeni borders, while the Jews were concentrated in Yathrib and the nearby oases.
Most of the Arab population in pre-Islamic times depended on pastoralism, the rearing of camels or sheep and goats for their subsistence. The camel nomads were mostly found in the heartlands of Arabia, and the literature of the period makes very clear the importance of camels for both transport and subsistence. We hear much less about sheep-rearing tribes but it would seem likely that many bedouin, then as now, depended on flocks for their living. This is especially true in the semi-desert bordering the settled areas of Syria and Iraq, partly because the sheep are better adapted to the more moderate climate and partly because sheep products need a nearby market. Many members of the shepherd tribes, like the Tanūkh and Taghlib along the Euphrates, probably lived in villages for at least part of the year, and the distinction between the nomad and the sedentary was often blurred. But although sheep and camels alike could provide milk, meat and wool, the pastoral life was not self-sufficient, and even the camel nomads of inner Arabia needed to be able to acquire dates, weapons and other goods from outside their own circle. This meant that the tribesmen needed a source of wealth apart from their own herds. This wealth could be acquired in a number of ways. They could exchange the products of pastoralism – wool, meat, cheese and hides – at market towns. While those who lived near markets could probably provide for themselves in this way, it was much more difficult for the inhabitants of remoter areas. They could raid other tribes. These raids, called ghazw, were exciting and served to confirm the unity of the kin group and give its members military experience; they could also be profitable, but often resulted in a pattern of mutual raids which left no one much better off.
Another way of improving the standard of subsistence was by extracting taxes from the settled people, either by raiding and pillaging or by establishing protection and receiving payment in exchange; thus in the century before the advent of Islam, the Ghassanids in Syria had established themselves as protectors of the settled population, and their leaders had become wealthy and distinguished chiefs, patrons of poetry and builders of palaces. On a smaller scale, many tribes must have collected dues from the peoples of the small oases, but opportunities of this sort were limited and settled communities comparatively few. The last option was the taxation of traders. The relationship between traders and nomads was a very close one. Often, the merchants were themselves of nomad stock, like the Quraysh merchants of Mecca, but they also needed the protection of the nomads through whose areas they passed. A trade route could only be successful if the organizers could rely on a network of agreements with local tribes to secure the safe passage of goods in exchange for a subsidy. Such arrangements were still in operation as late as the nineteenth century when the subsidies paid by the Ottoman government to secure the safe passage of the ḥajj (pilgrimage) were an important source of income for Ḥijāzī tribes.
The nomad pastoral society was inherently unstable for economic reasons. Any government which sought to pacify the tribes, establish peace in Arabia and abolish the ghazw had to find a substitute; if the tribesmen were not to attack each other, then they had to attack someone else.
It would be wrong, however, to imagine that all the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula were nomads, and that livestock were the only means of subsistence or tribal leadership the only basis of authority. There were areas like Yemen and parts of ‘Umān where the rainfall in the mountains was sufficient to allow settled village agriculture, and even away from the mountains and the water-bearing monsoons of the south coast, there were oases where date palms grew in abundance or crops could be cultivated. Such were settlements like Taymā and Khaybar in the northern Ḥijāz – or Yathrib, later known as Medina, further south, with its date palms and barley fields cultivated by settled folk living in permanent houses. In the hills just to the east of Mecca lay the town of Ṭā’if, where the upland climate allowed wheat and vines to be grown. In eastern Arabia too, there were areas of settled habitation, notably in Yamāma, where the Banū Ḥanīfa grew wheat and dates and had a permanent settlement at Ḥajar, both a shrine and a trading centre, as their capital. Despite their settled way of life, the people of these oases did not produce centralized states of the sort that were common in other settled areas in the Near East; they were too small and scattered. They maintained close contacts with the neighbouring nomads and a pattern of society divided into tribes and lineages – indeed, some tribes, like the Banū Ḥanīfa of Yamāma, for example, had both a nomad and a settled division. On the whole, the agriculturalists were looked down on by their nomad neighbours and were not regarded as truly noble. Thus in the early Islamic period, the people of Medina, despite their great contribution to the success of Islam, were never able to produce an important political leader from their own ranks.
However, it was neither a nomad community nor an agricultural community which produced the Prophet Muḥammad. Probably since the beginning of the first millennium BC, Arabia had been an important highway for commerce, and this commerce had profoundly affected the history and society of the people of the area. In classical times, the commerce was of two main kinds. The first was transit trade in goods imported by the Roman Empire from the Indian Ocean basin. This meant above all spices but also other sorts of perfumes and high-value luxury products. The routes by which these goods reached the shores of the Mediterranean varied according to political circumstances. The easiest and most logical was by ship to the head of the Gulf and thence by the Euphrates route and entrepôts like Palmyra and Edessa to the cities of Syria and the Mediterranean ports. But this route lay through the heart of the Persian Empire; it was frequently interrupted by war, and even in times of peace, the Persians extracted considerable tolls. It was this which made the harder, western routes more attractive. The Red Sea could be used for shipping, but navigation was very hazardous and much of the commerce passed overland from south Arabia, through the Ḥijāz to the Syrian markets, Petra during the early Roman Empire, but later Gaza and Bostra (or Buṣrā, on the edge of the desert, about 80 miles south of Damascus).
The other kind of trade was in the products of south Arabia, called Arabia Felix by classical writers on account of its great prosperity. This meant above all frankincense and myrrh, which were in vast demand in the Roman Empire for ritual and funerary purposes. These precious perfumes were gathered from the trees of the south Arabian hills, and there is no doubt that their cultivation contributed greatly to the prosperity of the inhabitants of the area and those who controlled the camel caravans which transported these products from there to the markets in the north.
This traditional trade in high-value luxury products seems to have declined by the end of the sixth century. The economic problems of the Byzantine Empire in the second half of the sixth century coupled with the almost complete collapse of the Italian and western European urban economies can have left little money for importing incense, cloves and pepper, and even where such commerce did survive it was on a much reduced scale. The sources for the late sixth and early seventh centuries give few details about the nature of the trade, but it seems to have been essentially the exchange of locally produced goods. Hāshim, Muḥammad’s great-grandfather, is said to have received permission to bring skins and textiles (probably from Yemen) to Syria, and the Prophet himself is said to have traded in skins. In exchange, the merchants brought back grain and wine from Syria. In Iraq too, we are told that the tribes along the borders of the settled lands bought supplies from the kings of Ḥīra, presumably in exchange for animal products. In fact, the trade of Muḥammad’s time seems to have been more the exchange of the products of pastoralists and agriculturalists than the large-scale international trade of previous centuries. It seems likely, however, that trade was vital to the livelihood of the people of Mecca among whom the Prophet grew up and that he himself went on trading expeditions to Syria.
Recent research suggests that there may have been another factor at work. Historical and geographical sources mention a number of gold and silver mines in the Arabian Peninsula, mostly, but not entirely, in the Ḥijāz area. Archaeological work has confirmed the existence of extensive mining operations which flourished from the fifth century AD to the early ‘Abbasid period. More research is needed to substantiate the evidence, but it appears as if the development of precious-metal mining was a fundamental part of the emergence of Mecca as a commercial centre: the Arab population of the area now had money to spend on importing agricultural products and other luxuries. This supply of gold and silver certainly would account for the frequent mentions of large cash sums which we find in the traditional Arab accounts of the early history of Islam.
The control of these trade routes and the enjoyment of the profits they produced were perhaps the most important factor in the pre-Islamic politics of the Arabian Peninsula. The main problem faced by anyone attempting to organize the caravan traffic was to ensure the passage of valuable goods through the lands occupied by nomad tribes. Because of the vast distances and the difficulty of finding supplies, sending a large armed escort with each party was not a practical proposition. The alternative was to reach some sort of agreement with the tribes whereby the caravans would be allowed to pass in exchange for favours, support or protection.
At the beginning of the sixth century, the south Arabian kingdom was strong enough to be able to organize the caravan trade. To do this, a client tribal kingdom of Kinda was supported in central Arabia and seems to have arranged for the passage of caravans. During the first half of the sixth century, however, this system broke down. This was partly because Ghassanid–Lakhmid rivalry in the Fertile Crescent made trade unsafe, but it may also have reflected the impoverishment of the Mediterranean market, which resulted in reduced profits. The kingdom of Kinda disappeared leaving central Arabia in chaos, while in south Arabia itself the indigenous Himyaritic kingdom was taken over by the rulers of Ethiopia, probably acting in alliance with the Byzantines to forestall an attack by the Persians or their Lakhmid protégés. The period of Ethiopian rule, from about 530 to 575, saw attempts by various parties to reconstitute the system. The Lakhmid rulers of Ḥīra attempted to maintain a series of agreements with neighbouring tribes, notably the Tamīm and Bakr b. Wā’il in their own immediate vicinity but also with the Sulaym, who could ensure the passage of Lakhmid caravans to the Ḥijāz and the markets of western Arabia. The Lakhmid system was based on treaties, subsidies and diplomacy backed up by occasional raids, but despite Persian military support, the kings of Ḥīra could never enforce their authority much beyond the boundaries of the settled lands.
In Yemen, the Ethiopian viceroy, Abraha, attempted to revive a system based on the old Sabaean kingdom. Abraha was essentially independent of the ruler at Axum, and despite his attack on Mecca, he receives a good reputation in the Muslim sources. He repaired the great dams at Mārib in an attempt to revive the agricultural economy and his attack on Mecca was a clear indication of his intent to bring eastern Arabian trade under his control. In the 570s, however, his successors were removed by a rebellion of the local people aided by a Persian fleet under one Vahrīz, who eventually stayed on as Persian viceroy until after 628. Persian rule does not, however, seem to have been as strong as Ethiopian, and an attempt to control Arabian trade on a Ḥīra–Yemen axis and so bring it all under the indirect control of the Sasanian Empire was frustrated by the feebleness of Ḥīra and the Persian rulers of Yemen, as well as the rising power of a new trading centre, Mecca.
The site of the sanctuary at Mecca is without doubt an ancient one. The role of the sanctuary, known in Arabic as the ḥaram, was very important in pre-Islamic Arabia, and similar institutions, under the name of ḥawṭa, still exist in many areas of south Arabia today. In the conditions of tension and hostility which often existed between neighbouring tribes, it was essential to have some neutral area where members of different groups could meet to exchange goods and settle disputes: the ḥaram or ḥawṭa fulfilled this role. The ḥaram was originally founded (often on the borders between tribal territories or at the junction of several wādīs) by a holy man who declared it neutral ground. This inviolability extended not just to the shrine itself, usually a very simple structure, but also to the immediately surrounding area, often demarcated by stone posts. Within this area, no violence or killing was permitted and enemies could meet together confident of their security. The holy man (manṣab is the modern term) could also be resorted to for arbitration and accepted as a judge. Naturally, markets grew up in the ḥaram, where the property of the various merchants would be safe. Those who used the ḥaram and were attached to it were obliged to pay the holy man dues for his services, and in exchange the holy man would feed and entertain the tribesmen. In a country without a centralized law enforcement system, the ḥaram played a vital role in the social and economic life of the people, and the holy man could become a figure of great political power and influence. After his death, the authority usually passed to his family, who became thereby a “holy lineage”. They took over the duties of guarding the ḥaram, ensuring its inviolability and entertaining visitors and pilgrims. The foundation of the ḥaram at Mecca is ascribed by the Muslims to Abraham, but though the original founder had long since passed away, the ḥaram was held and administered by a series of lineages which became holy families for several generations before being replaced by new lineages who felt that they had a better right to the position. This happened probably in the first half of the sixth century when the existing guardians of the ḥaram at Mecca were replaced by one Quṣayy, who installed himself and his tribe, the Quraysh, as guardians and whose descendants became the new holy family. Among his direct descendants was Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh, the Prophet of God, and it is impossible to understand his background or success without remembering his position with regard to the ḥaram.
Although the ḥaram at Mecca was very ancient, the commercial network of which it was the centre by the early seventh century was comparatively recent. It does not seem that there was any city to speak of when Quṣayy and the Quraysh took over the ḥaram, and the urban development of Mecca must be seen as a phenomenon of the second half of the sixth and early seventh centuries. The foundation of the trading network probably belongs to the generation of Quṣayy’s grandsons. Under the protection of the ḥaram, fairs were held at ‘Ukāẓ a few miles east of Mecca, where goods, as well as poetry and ideas, could be exchanged between groups who would normally be at war. The traditional Muslim account, which probably has at least a symbolic accuracy, shows the four brothers all establishing commercial relations with different areas; ‘Abd Shams in Abyssinia, Hāshim in Syria, al-Muṭtalib in Yemen and Nawfal in Iraq, and all the brothers except ‘Abd Shams are said to have died in the countries they made contact with, Hāshim in Gaza. Until this point, the ḥaram at Mecca had been simply one of a number serving the surrounding tribes; even in the immediate vicinity, there were others like it managed by the Thaqīf at Ṭa’if and oneat Nakhla between Mecca and Medina, where the holy family came from the tribe of Sulaym. The commercial expertise of the Quraysh, both the direct descendants of Quṣayy and other clans, most notably the Makhzūm, transformed this position. They made the city the centre of what has been described as the “Meccan commonwealth”, a commercial and diplomatic network which enabled caravans organized in Mecca under Quraysh patronage to travel to Syria, Iraq and Yemen in comparative security. This was done by a variety of means. There were tribes which recognized the religious status of the ḥaram and the sanctity of the holy months, when violence was not supposed to be practised; these included not just the Quraysh but probably also the Khuzā‘a, Thaqīf and Kināna, who controlled the route south to Yemen, although the lists given in the sources are somewhat contradictory. Among those tribes who were not attached to the Ka‘ba in this way, the Quraysh entered into partnership. The alliance with other tribes who considered themselves part of the Muḍar group, like the Asad and especially the Tamīm, with whom the Quraysh established close links and who frequently acted as judges in the fair at ‘Ukāẓ, helped in this process. With them and other tribes – the Ṭayy, for example – they entered into profit-sharing agreements, called īlāf, with the chiefs, who were guaranteed payment in exchange for securing the passage of the caravans. The commonwealth was held together by the prestige of the sanctuary at Mecca and of its holy family, along with diplomacy, tact, payment and self-interest. The Quraysh had no army with which to enforce their rule, although they did occasionally go to war to defend their interests, as, for example, in the case of the war of Fijār, which occurred when the Prophet was a young man, the object of which was to ensure that caravans from Yemen to Iraq came under the patronage of the Quraysh.
External circumstances seem to have increased the importance of the Meccan commonwealth in the early seventh century. In 602 with the assassination of the Emperor Maurice, there began a generation of savage warfare between the Byzantines and the Sasanians, which meant that direct trading links across the frontier between the two empires must have become impossible. In 602 as well, the Persians executed al-Nu‘mān III, the last of their client kings of Ḥīra, and Ḥīra ceased to be an important independent political force in the northeast of Arabia. Tribes like the Tamīm, which had had close contacts with Ḥīra, now began to look to Mecca and the Quraysh for trading partners and even for arbitration in their quarrels. The victory of the Arab tribes over the Persian armies at Dhū Qār in 611 meant the final end of any pretensions of the Persians to exert authority over northeast Arabia and left the way open for the expansion of Quraysh influence. So during the lifetime of the Prophet, the Quraysh network, based on the ḥaram at Mecca, had become the leading commercial organization in northern and western Arabia but it must be remembered that its success was ultimately based on the prestige of the ḥaram and the popularity of the fairs that took place under its protection at ‘Ukāẓ. If the position of the ḥaram were to be challenged in any way, then the whole position of the city would be put in jeopardy.
Trade was no luxury for the people of Mecca. The site of the city is barren and rocky and no agriculture was possible except with great expense and difficulty. The water supply was dependent on wells, notably the sacred well of Zamzam, the maintenance of which played a large part in city life. This meant that virtually all food had to be imported. In the early days of Quraysh domination, no doubt much of the population remained nomadic pastoralists living from the produce of their herds, and the agriculture of the neighbouring towns of Ṭā’if and Yathrib probably sufficed for their needs. In about 570, for example, the Prophet’s grandfather possessed a herd of 200 camels as well as commercial interests in Mecca. But during the life of Muḥammad, there is no doubt that much of the population consisted of sedentary townspeople and merchants who produced no food themselves. The population was probably increasing with the prosperity of the city and in addition there was the burden of feeding the visitors and pilgrims whose visits were so vital to the prosperity of the town. These factors meant that Mecca was dependent on imported foodstuffs, not just from the surrounding area but from as far afield as Yamāma in the east and Syria and even Egypt to the north. Keeping the trade routes open was vital to the survival of the people of Mecca.
The inhabitants of Mecca were not, of course, a homogeneous group. There were many slaves and others who were not members of the Quraysh and therefore did not share in the wealth and prestige of the tribe. Among the Quraysh, there were lineages with greater or lesser prestige and wealth, and there can be no doubt that by Muḥammad’s time, there were very sharp divisions between the richer and poorer members of the tribe. Despite their urban and sedentary ways of life, the Quraysh still retained their tribal organization. There was no system of public justice, no police and no courts; safety and security of goods and person depended, as it did in the desert, on the lineage, and a man from a weak lineage or one who lost the support of his close relations was in a very vulnerable position. Among the clans or lineages of the Quraysh, the descendants of Quṣayy held pride of place, and it was they who had inherited responsibilities in the ḥaram though there were other clans, notably the Makhzūm, whose commercial success had put them among the leaders of Meccan society. Quṣayy had left the guardianship of the ḥaram to his son ‘Abd al-Dār, but ‘Abd al-Dār and his descendants had failed to sustain their position against the claims of the more dynamic clan of ‘Abd Manāf, and by the time of the Prophet, they had largely fallen out of the leading group. As always in Arabia, leadership was both hereditary and elective. No one who was not of the Quraysh and the clan of Quṣayy could claim to lead the holy family, but among that group, leadership lay with the strong and the shrewd, not necessarily with the eldest or with the father’s choice. ‘Abd Manāf, in turn, had four sons whom tradition credits with establishing the fortunes of the Quraysh: ‘Abd Shams, Nawfal, Hāshim and al-Muṭṭalib. These four shared out among themselves the various offices connected with the ḥaram and the pilgrimage. As might be expected, there developed a rivalry between the clan of Hāshim (supported by the weaker descendants of al-Muṭṭalib) and the clan of ‘Abd Shams (later called after his son Umayya, usually but not always supported by the Nawfal and Makhzūm) for power and influence in Mecca which was to have profound and far-reaching effects on the early Islamic state.
Muḥammad belonged to the clan of Hāshim. The status of the clan in the years immediately before the emergence of Islam is not entirely clear and Western historians have suggested, perhaps wrongly, that the early Islamic sources exaggerated its importance in an attempt to magnify the social position of the Prophet. Hāshim was certainly a man of great importance among the Quraysh; besides being connected with the opening up of the Syrian trade route, he is also said to have been responsible for the feeding and watering of the pilgrims and people of Mecca, a man of wealth and generosity, in contrast to his brother ‘Abd Shams, who was constantly away on trading expeditions and was said to have been a poor man with a large family. After Hāshim’s death, however, the status of the clan seems to have declined. In contrast to the increasing commercial success of ‘Abd Shams, the clan of Hāshim suffered a number of disappointments. His son ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib was clearly a person of some consequence, however; at the time of Abraha’s expedition against Mecca – known to the Muslims as the Day of the Elephant (probably around 570) – he appears as the spokesman for the Quraysh in negotiations with Abraha. He was also responsible for the reopening of the well Zamzam, again emphasizing the close connections of the clan with the ḥaram. ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib had four sons, ‘Abd Allāh, who died young, and al-Zubayr, Abū Ṭālib and Abū Lahab, who succeeded each other as the head of the clan. It was shortly after ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib’s death (in the late 570s?) that the clan became one of the leading members of the ḥilf al-fuḍūl or “Confederation of the Virtuous”. This was probably an association of the less successful clans to ensure fair trading and prevent the establishment of trading monopolies by ‘Abd Shams and other dominant clans. This suggests that despite their close association with the ḥaram, the Banū Hāshim were no longer among the wealthiest or most politically powerful of the Meccan clans and that considerable social tensions were developing in the city between the richest clans and their poorer kinsmen.
It was into this family, direct descendants of Quṣayy, members of the holy family of Mecca and closely connected with the ḥaram, that Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh b. ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib b. Hāshim was born probably around the year 570 when Abraha the Abyssinian made his ill-fated attack on Mecca. Despite his illustrious family background, his immediate circumstances were not especially prosperous. His father had died before he was born, on a trading expedition to Syria, and his mother Amīna and his grandfather ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib supervised his early childhood. In accordance with Quraysh customs, he was found to be a wet-nurse, Ḥalīma, from the Hawāzin bedouin tribe and spent his early years with them in the desert; the Muslim sources relate how reluctant the bedouin women were to take on an orphan with no economic prospects. His early life was further clouded by the deaths of his mother when he was six and of his famous grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, when he was eight, but the clan looked after him, and his uncle Abū Ṭālib, now its head, saw to his upbringing. We have few details of his early life. He lived through a period of growing Meccan prosperity and influence; he is said to have taken part in the war of Fijār to secure the Quraysh hold over the trade route of western Arabia and is pictured on a caravan expedition to the Syrian city of Bostra, where his future greatness was recognized by the Christian monk Baḥīra. It was also a period of increasing social tensions, and as a child he was said to have been present at the foundation of the ḥilf al-fuḍūl.
It was natural that the young man sought to make a career for himself in commerce. Because of his honesty and trustworthiness, he was taken on, when in his twenties, as a business manager for a wealthy Qurashī widow, Khadīja, whom he married shortly afterwards. His marriage to Khadīja brought him material security and children, including Fāṭima, whose descendants were to prove so important in later Islamic history. It also seems to have been a genuinely companionate marriage, Khadīja bringing him comfort and moral support in times of difficulty.
Thus far, Muḥammad’s career had been quietly successful and he was clearly one of the leading young men of the Quraysh. We cannot be certain of the exact chronology of events, but it was probably in about 610, when he was around forty years old, that Muḥammad began to receive the Revelation of the Qur’ān. The circumstances are recorded by a number of early sources; the Prophet had retired from Mecca, probably for a period of meditation and reflection, to the neighbouring mountain of Ḥirā’ and it was here that the command came to him to recite the first sūra or “verse” (almost certainly 96: 1–5).
Recite: In the name of thy Lord who createth,
Createth man from a clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous,
Who teacheth by the pen,
Teacheth man that which he knew not.
The dating of the Revelation of the Qur’ān is problematic but it is generally accepted that the earliest sūras are those which come towards the end of the received text of the Qur’ān. Short and simple but very powerful, they stress the glory and majesty of Allah, his mercy and generosity, the importance of doing good, particularly the obligations of the rich to the poorer members of society, and the inevitability of the day of judgement.
In the year which followed the Revelation, Muḥammad began his public preaching, calling on people to acknowledge the glory of Allāh and pray to him. His first convert was his wife, followed by people closely related to him, his cousin ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and his freedman Zayd b. Ḥāritha. But the message soon spread beyond his immediate household, and Abū Bakr, certainly one of the first Muslims, was a prosperous merchant from the Quraysh clan of Taym. Most of the early converts came, as might be expected, from his own clan of Hāshim, and others, like Sa‘d b. Abī Waqqāṣ and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. ‘Awf from his mother’s clan of Zuhra. Most of them were young men and they seem to have come from clans of some standing in Mecca who had missed out on the great commercial successes of the recent years. It has been described as a movement of the “nearly hads” rather than of the “have nots” and there were few representatives of the wealthy clans of ‘Abd Shams (Umayya) or Makhzūm. It is interesting to note as well that they were all converted as individuals, not as clans. Even within Hāshim itself, there were important figures, Abū Tālib, the head of the clan, and his brother Abū Lahab, for example, who did not accept the Revelation, while, however, there was no clan of standing which did not provide at least one recruit for the new movement.
At first, there is no evidence that the preaching aroused any opposition among those who did not accept it, but as the Revelation became more specific and more widely accepted, conservative elements in Mecca began to see it as a threat to their position. A challenge to the ḥaram and its idols could be seen as a challenge to the religious and hence commercial standing of Mecca, and to acknowledge Muḥammad as the Prophet of God meant to accept that he had a status within the community superior to that of rich merchants like Abū Jahl of the Makhzūm and Abū Sufyān of the Umayya who were the leading figures in Mecca at the time. In addition, Muḥammad’s insistence that those who did not recognize Allāh were consigned to hell meant that many feared for the souls of their ancestors. At one stage, Muḥammad was persuaded to introduce the “Satanic verses” into the Revelation, which gave some status to the goddesses of neighbouring sanctuaries, and this may represent an attempt to come to terms with the Meccan leaders. If so, Muḥammad soon realized that he had been led astray and repudiated the verses, thus confirming that Allāh was the only God and that idols could have no place in the religion of Islam.
This seems to have marked the end of the period when Muḥammad’s activities had been tolerated, and his followers now found themselves under increasing pressure. This mostly took the form of ostracism, verbal attacks, commercial sanctions and, in the case of lower-class Muslims without influential protectors, actual physical violence. Against this background, a number of Muslims left Mecca to settle in Ethiopia, probably in 615, where they enjoyed the protection of the Christian ruler. There does not seem to have been any intention of removing the entire Muslim group from Mecca, however, and Muḥammad himself and the most prominent of the early converts remained in Mecca. That they were able to do so was because of the solidity of the clan system; Muḥammad himself was protected by the clan of Hāshim and its leader Abū Ṭālib. Even though Abū Ṭālib was not himself a Muslim, he felt it part of his duty to support a member of the clan who was under threat despite the fact that prominent Meccans urged him to disown the troublemaker. People became Muslims as individuals but they did not at this stage become a separate community, and when persecuted Muslims needed protection they still turned to their non-Muslim blood relatives rather than to their fellow Muslims. All that was to change when the community moved to Medina. The next stage of the opposition was to try to isolate the whole clan of Hāshim and to boycott them both commercially and socially. This attempt does not seem to have lasted very long and began to disintegrate when members of other clans who were related by marriage and other ties to Hāshim began to resume contacts.
The collapse of the boycott was not, however, the end of the Prophet’s troubles. In 619, his beloved wife Khadīja and his uncle Abū Ṭālib both died. It had been Abū Ṭālib who had united Hāshim in their support of Muḥammad, but he was succeeded as the head of the clan by his brother Abū Lahab, who had different ideas. Abū Lahab was not prepared to protect his nephew in the same way, and Muḥammad’s position in Mecca soon became increasingly difficult. In response to this pressure, Muḥammad began to look outside his native city for support. The first and most obvious area was the neighbouring city of Ṭā’if, where many of the Quraysh had property and contacts. However, Ṭā’if was no more welcoming than Mecca had been. The Prophet then tried to approach some of the neighbouring bedouin tribes with the intention of preaching to them, but once again he was rebuffed. The period from 619 to the Hijra in 622 was really the crisis of Muḥammad’s ministry and the biggest test he faced since he had begun to preach his message.
At this crucial point, however, Muḥammad was approached by the inhabitants of the settlement of Yathrib (known after 622 as Medina, meaning “the city”). The people of this community made their living from agriculture in their oasis. Despite their sedentary life, they, like the Quraysh, had maintained their tribal distinctions and their systems of clan security. The Arabs of this oasis were divided into two main tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj, who were said to have migrated from south Arabia to settle the area in the mid-sixth century. In addition to these two main groups, there were three small tribes of Jews or Judaized Arabs, the Banū Qurayz-a, the Banū’l-Naḍīr and the Banū Qaynuqā‘. The Aws and Khazraj had been feuding for many years but in the years before the Hijra these feuds had become more serious and general, culminating in the battle of Bu‘āth in about 617, which had resulted in a peace of exhaustion. Clearly, it was a community in need of a leader and arbitrator to put an end to this murderous internecine strife. Clearly too, this leader would have to be an outsider, since no local person would be acceptable to the entire population.
It was in these circumstances that a group of Medinese first approached Muḥammad, probably in 620. They went home to Medina and returned the next year for the pilgrimage. In 622, about seventy people from Medina, all converts to Islam, met the Prophet by night at ‘Aqaba outside the city; Muḥammad was careful to ensure that they swore to obey him and fight for him and to ensure that he was invited by men of both Aws and Khazraj and so would not be the candidate of only one party. He also insisted that twelve naqībs be appointed to represent his interests in Yathrib. Muḥammad then was careful to safeguard his position in advance and be sure that his position would be accepted by a considerable proportion of the population. The Muslims then began to move in small groups, careful not to attract attention to themselves, while the Prophet remained behind until he and Abū Bakr made their way by obscure paths to Medina, which they reached on the 24 September 622. A new era had begun.
The Hijra, or migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina during the summer of 622, marked a major turning point in the history of the Islamic movement. His followers in Mecca, later known as the Muhājirūn or Emigrants, some seventy in number, had left in small groups through July, August and September. The Hijra meant that the Muslims were now free of the hostility of the leaders of the Quraysh and the restricting atmosphere of Mecca and were now settled among people who had invited them and at least some of whom were Muslims; Muḥammad could preach and they worship with an openness which had been impossible before. But the emigration from Mecca also meant that the Muhājirūn had abandoned the traditional clan links which had guaranteed their security and clearly they could no longer rely for protection on relatives they had left behind. The traditional system may not have been perfect and in the case of the Prophet himself, it had become increasingly ineffective, but it had provided a framework in which they could live. The early converts had become Muslims as individuals, not in clans, and even after they had adopted Islam, the clan remained the basic social link. Now with the move to Medina, a new form of social organization was required.
To begin with, the Emigrants were quartered in the houses of those among the people of Medina who had invited them, now known as the Anṣār or Helpers of the Prophet, but if this arrangement had continued, they might have become little more than hangers-on, constantly needing help and protection. To avoid this, a series of agreements were drawn up in the first two or three years after the Hijra, agreements which are known collectively as the “Constitution of Medina”. This takes the form of agreements between the Muhājirūn and the people of Yathrib. All the believers are described as umma, a community apart from the surrounding pagan society, and they are to make war as one. The bond between members of the umma transcends any bonds or agreements between them and the pagans, and they are all to seek revenge if any Muslim is killed fighting “in the way of God”. If, however, one Muslim kills another, then the normal rules of retaliation continue to operate, with the proviso that the Muhājirūn, who had no close relatives in the city, were to be considered as a clan like any of the native clans of Medina. There are also clauses dealing with relations with the Jews, who are partners in the affairs of Medina and bear their share of the expenses of warfare as long as there is no treachery between them and the Muslims, although both Muslims and Jews would keep their own religion. Muḥammad is mentioned only twice, both times to emphasize that the arbitration of any disputes belongs to God and Muḥammad; no other arbitrators are mentioned. The documents, then, tried to solve the problems of justice within the city and relations with outsiders, but they do not suggest that the power of Muḥammad was absolute or lay any emphasis on religious affairs. Medina was to be a ḥaram as Mecca was, for its people, and Muḥammad was to be its founding holy man.
Clearly, the Constitution of Medina only illustrates some aspects of Muḥammad’s authority in the early years after the Hijra. In the eight momentous years which followed, his energies and those of his followers were devoted to establishing his unquestioned authority within Medina, conducting an effective struggle against Mecca, attracting the alliance of as many of the surrounding nomad tribes as would cooperate and working out the rules and role of the Muslim community. All these processes went hand in hand and the struggle against the Meccans was instrumental in the establishment of power within Medina, while the support of outside tribes contributed materially to his eventual success.
The stages by which Muḥammad established his power in Medina are difficult to distinguish, and both traditional accounts and modern commentators have tended to lay more emphasis on the external conflicts, since here the issues and chronology are clearer. Muḥammad seems to have begun the struggle against the Meccans almost as soon as he arrived at Medina; he must have realized that successful aggressive warfare was one of the best ways of providing for his supporters and of attracting new recruits, but he also knew that until the Quraysh, with their great prestige and widespread contacts, were subdued and won over, Islam would never be more than a local cult in Medina; the struggle against Mecca was essential for the success of the new religion. Attacking the city of Mecca was impractical, and so it was to the trade caravans to Syria which were forced to pass fairly close to Medina that Muḥammad and his followers turned their attentions. This would not only destroy the commerce on which the prosperity of the enemy depended but would also eventually starve the city into surrender, since it relied on imported food.
Preliminary raids by small numbers of Muslims took place during the first eighteen months of the Hijra but the first real trial of strength came in the spring of 2/624 when a large caravan with some 50,000 dīnārs worth of goods set out from Gaza to Mecca. It was led by one of the most important figures in Meccan politics at the time, Abū Sufyān, of the clan of Umayya and father of the future Caliph Mu‘āwiya, who had with him an escort of about 70 men. Even by the standards of Meccan commerce, this was a very valuable convoy indeed, and its safe passage was vital to the continuing prosperity of the city. Alarmed by the prospect that Muḥammad might intercept it, the Meccans gathered a large force of 950 men under the leadership of Abū Jahl to come and protect it on the last, difficult stages. The caravan passed along the coast road and as a result of Abū Sufyān’s quick thinking escaped to Meccan territory without injury. The relief force, however, continued to advance, determined to put an end to the menace of Muḥammad for good and all. Muḥammad, with a much smaller force of 86 Mubājirūn and 230 Anṣār, was waiting for them by the wells at Badr and, as a result of their possession of the water source and the Prophet’s leadership, they were able to score a major victory. Abū Jahl himself was killed and numerous valuable prisoners and animals were taken.
Badr was a total triumph and for later Muslims marked a decisive turning point; participation in the battle of Badr was a sure sign of early commitment to Islam, and the names of those who had been prepared to risk their lives for Allāh and his Prophet were immortalized in tradition. The victory solved many of the Prophet’s immediate problems; the profits of the ransoms and booty provided for the needs of both Emigrants and Helpers, and a fifth of all the spoils, which was the Prophet’s share, was used to provide for the needs of those Muslims who were in distress. The victory did not dispose of the Meccan threat; the caravan had got through and the number of dead had not been crippling, but it must have destroyed much of the prestige on which the reputation and trade of the Quraysh rested; bedouin tribes would no longer look on Meccan leaders with the same respect. But the most important result of the victory was the consolidation of Muḥammad’s position within Medina. In the aftermath of the Hijra, the attitudes of the population towards their new leader were varied. Some, like the important leader Sa‘d b. Mu‘ādh, became enthusiastic adherents of the new religion, but there were others who were less convinced. Some no doubt remained pagans, though they do not seem to have been a very significant group, but many more remained sceptical or half-committed. Among these was ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy, an important figure in the town before the arrival of Muḥammad and a man who might have aspired to the role of arbiter and leader himself. He had adopted Islam, no doubt hoping that it would benefit his position, but he resented the authority of the newcomer, and his allegiance was doubtful. Such doubters, Munāfiqūn or Hypocrites the Muslim sources call them, were temporarily silenced by the Prophet’s success; many of them were no doubt permanently won over to Islam and even those who remained sceptical were silenced for the time being. The success at Badr also allowed Muḥammad to move against the Jews. The Jewish clans of Medina had been invited to accept Islam but few had responded. Unlike the pagans, they provided a real ideological challenge to Muḥammad and in the years which followed Badr, acceptance of his political authority became impossible without also accepting his claims to Prophethood. It was impossible for Muḥammad to allow Jews to coexist with Muslims in Medina without putting his whole achievement and position in jeopardy.
The first of the Jewish groups to be attacked in the aftermath of Badr were the Banū Qaynuqā‘, the silversmiths who controlled much of the commerce of the town. There were good reasons why they should be singled out; there were Muslims, like ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. ‘Awf, who had earlier shown an interest in commerce, which offered a livelihood to Emigrants who had no agricultural land. In addition, they were allies of ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy, the one man in the oasis whom Muḥammad could still fear as a rival. A trivial quarrel in the market, a dead Jew and a dead Muslim, was the occasion for Muḥammad to demonstrate his power. He ordered the execution of the entire clan and ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy was able to secure no more for his allies than the commutation of the sentence to banishment and confiscation of property.
The Meccans meanwhile could not afford to sit back and do nothing. Their prestige had been severely damaged and the trade route cut. An attempt to find an alternative route through Iraq proved disastrous when the caravan was captured by Muḥammad’s forces after the defenders had fled. Besides, the dead of Badr had to be avenged and it was unthinkable that retribution should not be sought. Accordingly, the next spring when there was ample grazing for the Meccan cavalry and the crops of Medina would be especially vulnerable, a large-scale expedition was organized in Mecca, led by Abū Sufyān, who had taken over Abū Jahl’s role as a leader of the city. The army also had with it some volunteers from the Thaqīf, the leading tribe of Ṭā’if, a sign that the conflict was beginning to take on a wider dimension. The army of about 3,000 camped on the outskirts of Medina, near the hill of Uḥud, where they could raid the crops of the townspeople but would not become involved in fighting among the palm groves or attacking the fortresses of the oasis where their superiority in cavalry would be useless; probably, their objective was to destroy Muḥammad’s prestige and his offensive power rather than to conquer the city; if they defeated him in battle, the Medinese might no longer accept him as their leader. The arrival of the Meccans put Muḥammad in a quandary; if he failed to take action against them, they would destroy the crops, and the townspeople could well accuse him of failing to protect them. If, however, he went out to meet them, he was risking battle against a superior enemy on terrain of their choosing. In the end, he decided to do battle but many people in the oasis, including ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy and a number of his followers, doubted the wisdom of the strategy and did not join in. In addition, the two main Jewish clans who remained stayed neutral; the strain of the Meccan attack showed how deep the rifts within the city still were and how Muḥammad was far from being accepted as the unquestioned leader. The fight (Shawwāl 3/March 625) was bitter and hard but the Meccan cavalry, under Khālid b. al-Walīd, later famous for his role in the Islamic conquests, drove the Medinese from the plain and forced them to take refuge among the lava flows, where the horses and camels were unable to penetrate. The Prophet himself was cut off with a small band of followers on the hill of Uḥud and was forced to defend himself vigorously, sustaining slight injuries; his uncle Ḥamza, one of the heroes of early Islamic tradition, was killed. At nightfall, the Meccans retired from the scene and made their way back to their home town, unwilling to press their victory. The scattered remains of the Muslim army made their way back to the oasis while a party set out as if in pursuit of the Meccans, although they were careful to keep their distance.
The indecisive result of the battle made the Prophet’s position less secure than it had been at any time since Badr, and his enemies in Medina, especially ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy and the Jews, were anxious to take advantage of this setback. However, the Meccans had failed to dislodge Muḥammad or secure the caravan route to the north, and both sides realized that there was more fighting to be done. Within Medina, the Prophet realized that he had to reassert his authority in a decisive manner; not to do so could see his position gradually eroded. Muḥammad felt that the main obstacle to his overall control lay in the Jews, who could not accept the religious message which was the basis of his position. As long as they remained, he could never be totally secure in Medina. The Qur’ān laid increasing stress on the differences between Muslim and Jew and accused the Jews of spurning their prophets and falsifying the Revelation. It was probably shortly after Uḥud that he decided to take positive action against the Banū’l-Naḍr, the most wealthy among the surviving Jewish clans. Claiming that they were plotting treachery against him, Muḥammad and his followers besieged the clan in its fortresses, while the allies they had relied on, Ibn Ubayy and the bedouin Ghaṭafān tribe, failed to make any move to help them. After a short time, terms were arranged, the Jews were to leave Medina with all they could carry except their arms, and 600 camels laden with goods set out for the oasis of Khaybar to the north, where there was a large Jewish population. The vacant lands were divided up, mostly among the Muhājirūn, many of whom, like Muḥammad himself, became landowners in the oasis for the first time. This show of strength also humiliated Ibn Ubayy, who had been unable to save his allies, and his attempt to exploit the setback at Uḥud to restore his position had failed.
Apart from Muḥammad’s assertion of authority within Medina, the two years between the battle of Uḥud in March 625 and the siege of Medina in Dhū’l-Qa‘da 5/March 627 were spent by both sides trying to win over the hearts and minds of the bedouin of the surrounding areas. Uḥud had shown that neither side was strong enough to eliminate the other entirely and that only with overwhelming nomad support could either side be victorious. The spring raiding season of 4/626 was spent by both sides in a show of strength at the annual fair held by the wells at Badr; armies from both sides put in an appearance, no doubt to convince the bedouin that they were still powerful, but they seem to have been careful not to come into conflict. Apart from this, both Muḥammad in Medina and Abū Sufyān in Mecca attempted, by alliances, raids and bribery, to find allies among the Ḥijāzī tribes. The dispute was no longer confined to the two cities and the settled populations but now embraced most of the nomads of western Arabia as well.
The results of these manoeuvres became apparent in the spring of 5/627. Abū Sufyān had by this time gathered an impressive coalition of some 10,000 men, from Quraysh itself and from the Sulaym and Ghaṭafān. As at Uḥud two years before, the attackers tried to assault the city from the north, the only side on which it was not protected by lava flows, those choppy seas of almost impenetrable black stone which are so common from Syria south to the Ḥijāz. This time, however, the battle was different; the coalition had arrived at Medina slightly later, the barley crop was already in and Muḥammad was not under pressure to risk taking the offensive. With only about 3,000 men under his command, he could not afford an open conflict, so he caused a trench, or khandaq, to be dug (the Persian word was used, perhaps suggesting that this was an un-Arab technique of warfare). The besiegers had no equipment or supplies for a siege; they had come for battle and for booty, not for a war of attrition. Insults were exchanged for about three weeks and there were some sporadic skirmishes, but there was no serious attempt to breach the trench which protected the city. The Meccans may well have hoped that dissident elements in Medina, notably the remaining Jewish tribe of Qurayz-a and perhaps Ibn Ubayy as well, would give them aid from within the city and attack the Muslims from behind. But nothing happened, and the vast force, unable to supply itself for long and unwilling to continue what was clearly a profitless campaign, simply melted away.
The failure of the Meccans at the khandaq was the last episode in the struggle that established Medina as an equal rival power to Mecca; neither side could win absolute victory, but both could make life intolerable for the other. But the khandaq marked an important stage in Muḥammad’s battle for undisputed authority within the city as well. He had obviously been anxious at the prospect that the Jews would in fact cooperate with his external enemies and he was determined that such a weakness should not be allowed to continue. Besides, their continuing presence in the city where Muḥammad was regarded not just as a secular leader but also as a Prophet and the chosen spokesman of God was a continuing irritation. After the threat from outside had disappeared, the Muslims attacked the Jews, eventually forcing them into unconditional surrender. Muḥammad appointed a member of the Aws, the tribe to which they were traditionally allied, to be their judge, but the man he chose, Sa‘d b. Mu‘ādh, one of the earliest and most influential converts to Islam in the oasis, was no friend of theirs. He was already dying from wounds received at the khandaq but he ordered that all the male Jews should be executed, while the women and children were sold into slavery. When the sentence had been carried out, Muḥammad could consider himself undisputed master of Medina. Apart from a few individuals, the Jews had been expelled or killed. ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy, the one man in the city who had by his personal status and charisma been a serious rival to the Prophet, was now powerless and ageing, and was finally reconciled a couple of years later. From now on, Muḥammad could negotiate with the Quraysh, confident that Medina and the Muslim umma there were entirely behind him.
The events of the khandaq had shown that neither the Muslims nor the Meccans were in a position to overcome their opponents by military force and that Muḥammad would not be removed by internal dissension in Medina. Furthermore, both sides had good reason to seek some sort of compromise. The Meccans were suffering serious trading losses; caravans were unable to get through and were having difficulty securing food supplies. Although Muḥammad was in a strong position, he realized that he too needed to reach an agreement. He was always far-sighted in practical matters and knew that the Islamic community would never reach its full potential without the energy and expertise of the Meccans. Without the talents of the Quraysh, Islam might be no more than a local Medinese cult. But despite these incentives, one major stumbling block remained: Muḥammad’s claim that Allāh was the one and only God and that he, Muḥammad, was his Prophet; for many in Mecca, attached to the cults of their ancestors and remembering the modest beginnings of Islam and the contempt in which Muḥammad had been held by the Meccans, this was very difficult to swallow, while for Muḥammad this was the cornerstone of his position, an item of faith on which no compromise whatever was possible. These considerations meant that two more years of hostility, struggle and diplomacy were necessary before Muḥammad could again be accepted in his native city.
In the immediate aftermath of the khandaq, Muḥammad, free of the dangers of internal subversion and Meccan attack, began to spread his interests further afield. The main object of his policy was to bring the trade route to Syria under Medinese control, perhaps with the object of developing Medina as the centre of western Arabian trade. Muḥammad sent a messenger to arrange terms with a Byzantine official, probably the governor of Bostra, the normal market for Arabian goods in the north, and began to reach agreements with some of the tribes, mostly Christian, who controlled the southeastern marches of Syria. Some of the Judhām, a tribe which was to play an important role in southern Palestine for several centuries to come, were converted to Islam while ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. ‘Awf, the Muslim merchant par excellence, led an expedition to the desert market centre of Dūmat al-Jandal, where the Christian ruler, from the tribe of Kalb, was prepared to make a treaty and marriage alliance. There is no evidence that at this stage Muḥammad was doing more than trying to reconstruct the Meccan trading commonwealth using Medina as a centre, but there were important differences; the Meccan commonwealth had worked on partnership and diplomacy, while Muḥammad’s men were summoning the tribes not just to alliance but to Islam, which meant submission to the will of Allāh and, more immediately, the authority of his Prophet. While Muḥammad was engaged in these northern expeditions, he also took care to win over or at least secure the neutrality of the local Ḥijāzī tribes, especially those who had joined the Meccan alliance at the khandaq, but there was no attempt at this stage to launch an attack on the enemy city itself; Muḥammad was more keen to win over Mecca than to destroy it in bitterness and violence.
The next spring (6/628) Muḥammad decided to take the initiative and lead an expedition to Mecca. This was not to be a military attack but a peaceful pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba. The Muslims had originally prayed in the direction of Jerusalem but during the break with the Jews, the direction of prayer (qibla) had been changed to Mecca. Furthermore, the status of the Ka‘ba was assured in the Qur’ān, which explained how the shrine had been founded by Abraham and his son Ismā‘īl, the ancestor of the Arabs. True, it had been profaned in more recent times by the worship of idols, but it still remained the dwelling place of the “friend of God” Abraham and deserved the reverence of true believers. This being so, Muḥammad requested permission for himself and his followers to come and pay their respects, and a large party of about 1,500 set out, reached the outskirts of the Meccan ḥaram area and camped by the well at Ḥudaybiyya. Their arrival put the Meccans in a difficult position, and it seems to have exacerbated existing tensions within the city. To accede to Muḥammad’s request would be an admission of weakness and an acceptance of his status, but to oppose him by force was probably beyond their military power. So a truce was worked out; there was to be peace between Muḥammad and the Meccans for the next ten years. The Muslims were not to enter Mecca that year for the pilgrimage, but the next year the Meccans were to abandon their city for three days, while the Muslims were permitted to visit the Ka‘ba. No doubt, there were people in Mecca who felt that too much had been given away, and there were certainly Muslims who had hoped for an outright victory, the humiliation of the Quraysh and booty for all. But the Prophet’s political instinct was sounder than theirs and he was well aware how valuable the Quraysh could be to him as supporters, not enemies.
In the aftermath of Ḥudaybiyya, Muḥammad continued his previous policies, continuing to make converts and allies among the local tribes but also continuing the northward expansion. The trade blockade against Mecca may have lifted and there is evidence that the Quraysh of Mecca tried to resume their commercial activities as before. Muḥammad, however, continued his policy of securing the routes to the north with vigour and determination. In order to secure the acquiescence of the Arab tribes, settled along the southeastern marches of the Byzantine Empire, he sent a large expedition of some 3,000 men in the autumn of 8/629 commanded by his adopted son Zayd b. Ḥāritha. According to the Muslim sources, they found that the Emperor Heraclius himself was campaigning in the area but most of the fighting seems to have been with the tribesmen of Judhām, Lakhm and Balī. The Muslims met the opposition near the village of Mu’ta on the edge of the cultivated lands east of the Dead Sea and were severely defeated. Zayd himself and the second in command, Ja‘far b. Abī Ṭālib, brother of ‘Alī, were both killed and it was left to Khālid b. al-Walīd, a recent defector from the Meccan camp, to lead the remains of the army back to Medina.
Despite this reverse, the pressure on the Meccans was growing and divisions began to appear in their ranks. When in the spring of 8/629 the Muslims performed the pilgrimage agreed on at Ḥudaybiyya, the Meccans abandoned their city for three days but refused his proffered reconciliation. Clearly, this was a position which could not last. Some leading citizens, like Abū Sufyān, favoured a compromise, attempting to enter into secret negotiations with the Prophet, while others, like the brilliant military leader Khālid b. al-Walīd and ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ, were actually converted to Islam and moved to Medina. There remained, however, a diehard party, mostly from the clan of Makhzūm, led by ṣafwān b. Umayya and Abū Jahl’s son ‘Ikrima, who were opposed to any concessions. But they could only postpone the inevitable; the next January (Ramaḍān 8), Muḥammad set out from Medina with 10,000 men, including allies from some of the local tribes. The Meccans do not seem to have known of the expedition until it was almost upon them and there were few who refused to accept his offers of security of life and property. The Muslim army divided and it entered the city from several different directions; only Khālid b. al-Walīd, commanding a group of bedouin allies, encountered any resistance, but this was crushed and the diehard leaders, Ṣafwān b. Umayya and ‘Ikrima fled. The Prophet’s attitude was conciliatory; the ḥaram was cleansed of idols but the Ka‘ba remained, as it is today, the focus of Muslim worship and the Prophet demonstrated openly how important the Meccan shrine was to be. There were few killings and those in the Muslim army, like Sa‘d b. ‘Ubāda, the leading figure among the Anṣār after the death of Sa‘d b. Mu‘ādh, who wanted a bloody war of conquest and pillage, were restrained. There were a small number of executions, not of leaders of the Quraysh but of men who had apostatized from Islam or singers who had mocked the Prophet. Even Ṣafwān and ‘Ikrima soon returned from exile to be reconciled. It was a great triumph for Muḥammad; the Quraysh had been won over and even the most sceptical of them were to use their talents in the service of the new movement.
The importance of this was demonstrated very shortly afterwards. Muslim Mecca was threatened barely three weeks later by a great confederation of bedouin tribes called the Hawāzin, led by the Thaqīf, the ruling tribe of the nearby city of Ṭā’if. The concentration of power in the hands of Muḥammad seriously threatened the position of Ṭā’if, which had frequently been a rival to Mecca in the past. But Muḥammad and his followers were equal to the task, and the vast nomad army, said to have numbered 20,000, was decisively defeated at Ḥunayn. This victory was almost as important as the capture of Mecca. Not only did it confirm Muḥammad’s prestige among a large group of tribesmen, among whom he had not hitherto had many contacts, but it also cemented his alliance with the Quraysh. Meccan leaders like Abū Sufyān could see how the new movement had enabled them to humiliate a traditional enemy whom their own forces had been unable to crush, and the Prophet went out of his way to be more than generous to the Meccan leadership when dividing the spoils.
The fall of Ṭā’if followed soon after Ḥunayn. The idols of the town were destroyed and it lost its religious status. However, members of the ruling clans of the Thaqīf were incorporated into the umma. Here, they made use of their new opportunities, and the Thaqīf were to play a major role in the conquest and administration of Iraq. Once again, Muḥammad had secured the allegiance and services of an able and experienced group.
In this triumph, there was one group of Muslims who had some reason to feel uneasy about the way things had gone; these were the Anṣār of Medina. We have already seen how one of their leaders, Sa‘d b. ‘Ubāda, had wished to destroy Mecca. Was this new-found closeness between Muḥammad and his fellow-citizens and relatives to leave the Medinese out in the cold after all they had done for Islam? After the victory at Ḥunayn, Muḥammad had given most of the spoils to the Quraysh and the Meccans, and the Anṣār, led by Sa‘d b. ‘Ubāda, held a protest meeting, complaining that the Prophet was neglecting them, but they were mollified when he announced that he would continue to live in Medina and, but for the accident of birth, he would have considered himself a true Medinese in every way.
The last two years of his life, from the victory at Ḥunayn in Shawwāl 8/January 630 to his death in 11/632, Muḥammad devoted his energies to expanding his influence among the Arabs.
While Muḥammad devoted most of his military efforts to securing the control of the road to Syria, the Islamic community began to find friends and allies in other areas of the Arabian Peninsula. This was accomplished more by diplomatic means than by military expeditions, and often it was the other tribes which took the initiative, anxious to enter into friendly relations with so powerful an organization as the new umma. In the year 9/630, numerous tribes sent delegations (wufūd) to make terms with the Prophet. They came to acknowledge Muḥammad as the Prophet of Allāh and, in many but by no means all cases, agreed to pay the ṣadaqa or alms to Medina. In many cases, like the Tamīm in northeast Arabia, for example, these were tribes which had long enjoyed good relations with the Quraysh, some of whose members now saw the necessity of regularizing their position with Muḥammad. The collapse of Persian influence in the area also helped attract men to ally with the rising power in the Ḥijāz. Among the ‘Abd al-Qays in Baḥrayn, for example, it seems to have been the pro-Persian party which now appealed to Muḥammad for an alliance, while the Bakr b. Wā’il and Taghlib, along the frontiers of settled Iraq, negotiated a treaty, probably so that they and the Muslims could launch joint raids on the Persian territory. In Yamāma, the major tribe, the Banū Ḥanīfa, seems to have been split between the larger, settled group who supported Musaylima, the “local” prophet of the area, and a smaller nomad faction who joined the Muslims. Even in faraway ‘Umān, there was a faction in the leadership which was prepared to accept Islam and a Muslim finance officer, ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ, in order to secure Muḥammad’s alliance against their rivals.
Among the more settled peoples of south Arabia, the Muslim cause was spread by letters and messengers and, as in the east, tribal leaders and others came on delegations to the Prophet. In many cases, this was a result of struggles for leadership within a tribe, or the attempt of one tribe to gain advantage over another. Farwa b. Musayk al-Murādī, for example, came to visit the Prophet as his own tribe had recently been worsted in a tribal encounter. In return for his conversion, he was made the Prophet’s governor over the neighbouring tribes of Zubayd and Madhḥij as well as his own Murād. Like the Azd of ‘Umān, he was assigned a Qurashī Muslim finance officer, Khālid b. Sa‘īd b. al-‘Āṣ, to manage the ṣadaqa. Also from south Arabia was a delegation of Kinda, led by al-Ash‘ath b. Qays, with their makeup and their silken clothes, who were obliged to put away their finery on accepting Islam. In Yemen proper, the position was very complex, with the disintegration of Persian rule allowing native Arab leaders to assert themselves once more. Here, it seems that many of the local Persian abnā’ (i.e. sons), that is, the descendants of the Persian settlers of the late sixth century, turned to Islam to find support against the local Arab rebels, and their leader, Fayrūz al-Daylamī, was to play an important role on the Muslim side in the Ridda wars which followed the Prophet’s death.
By the end of his life, the Prophet had secured a measure of acknowledgement in most of the Arabian Peninsula. Propaganda and diplomacy had played a much bigger part in this process than warfare, and Muḥammad had certainly used the diplomatic talents and experience of the Quraysh to good effect. But this does not mean that all Arabia was under the control of Muḥammad or that all its people had become Muslims. To begin with, Muḥammad had spread his influence in many cases by supporting one faction in a local dispute, and this inevitably made their opponents into enemies of Islam as well. Nor is it entirely clear how far the people of these areas acknowledged Muḥammad as the Prophet of Allāh. In the case of the Bakr b. Wā’il and Taghlib on the Persian frontier, for example, the tribes seem to have made an alliance with Medina while retaining their own, mostly Christian faith. In the early campaigns to Syria as well, it had been possible for tribes to remain Christian and yet be full allies of Muḥammad. Towards the end of his life, however, this became less possible, and Christians, like those of Najrān on the northern border of Yemen, were obliged to pay the jizya (in the earliest Islamic usage, jizya seems to have meant tribute in a general sense; by the third/ninth century, it referred specifically to the poll tax paid by non-Muslims) and so adopt an inferior but secure role in the new order of things. Paganism, however, was fiercely opposed. Jarīr b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Bajalī, for example, came to the Prophet and accepted Islam and was sent off to destroy the idol, Dhu’l-Khalaṣa, which was worshipped by his own and neighbouring tribes; and there are other stories to show that Muḥammad deliberately tried to break down pagan taboos – about food, for example. Despite the efforts of messengers and letters, however, there must have been a vast number of people in eastern and southern Arabia whose knowledge of Islam was effectively nonexistent and whose commitment to the Muslim alliance was very tenuous – both of these were problems which became apparent as soon as Muḥammad died.
The last two years of the Prophet’s life were spent in his adopted home of Medina. In the spring of 632, he announced his intention of making the pilgrimage to Mecca once again. This time, however, it would not be the ‘umra, the lesser pilgrimage which he had made the year after the agreement with the Quraysh at Ḥudaybiyya, but the great pilgrimage, or ḥajj. His behaviour on this ḥajj, known as the Farewell Pilgrimage, was to define the correct procedure for this important ritual. On his return to Medina, he set about preparations for another great Syrian expedition, led this time by Usāma, the young son of Zayd b. Hāritha, who had been killed by the Byzantines at Mu’ta. It was shortly before this expedition set out that Muḥammad became seriously ill, and he was soon too weak to lead the community in prayers, a responsibility he entrusted to Abū Bakr. On 13 Rabī‘ I/8 June 632, he died in the house of ‘Ā’isha, Abū Bakr’s daughter and perhaps his favourite wife. He was about sixty years old.
The Muslim community at the time of his death was an impressive and very personal achievement. In some ways, his career had been similar to the guardians who had established and built up ḥarams in other areas of Arabia. He himself came from the holy family of the ḥaram in Mecca and had established another ḥaram, at first in competition, later in alliance, at Medina and moved on to attract tribes which would attach themselves to the ḥaram and its ruling group. Muḥammad had also competed with and eventually incorporated the alliances which had formed part of the Meccan commercial commonwealth; especially after the taking of Mecca, many of the tribes which had had links with the Quraysh in pre-Islamic times shifted those ties to the newly emergent Muslim community and Muḥammad inherited and took over a network of contacts throughout Arabia and beyond. Equally, the Muslim umma had some of the features of a traditional tribe and has indeed been described as a “super-tribe”; it defended its members against outside attack, organized raids to supplement their incomes and provided a framework for the solving of internal disputes. The seeking of retaliation or blood money remained the responsibility of the individual, not of the state, but there was a strong emphasis on settling disputes within the community peacefully, accepting arbitration and compensation rather than demanding blood.
Having acknowledged the debt that Muḥammad owed to traditional forms, it must be said that the umma by the time of his death was a community which had no parallels in traditional Arabian society. The most important difference, of course, was Muḥammad’s uncompromising monotheism and his own status as the Apostle of God. Previous temples and their holy families had had an authority limited to their own areas and accepted as natural that there should be others in different places. For Allāh and his Prophet, however, the whole world was their area and other deities had no place in it. It was this factor above all others which distinguished Muḥammad from other “prophets” who appeared in his wake, notably Musaylima among the Banū Ḥanīfa of Yamāma; for them, a fair division of influence was only reasonable; for Muḥammad, it was totally unacceptable. Pagans could not be treated as equals, since anyone who refused to accept the Revelation of Islam was thereby damned, but, however, no one was excluded for reasons of social status or tribal origin from joining the umma and they could do this as individuals. This universality of Islam marked a radical break with the pagan cults which had preceded it and accounts for much of the dynamism of the emerging community.
The question of whether Islam can be said to have been a distinct religion at this stage is very uncertain. The Muslim tradition is clear: this was indeed a new religion. You either accept the role of the Prophet as the Messenger of God and the Qur’an as God’s word or you did not. This historical reality seems to have been more complex. To the outside world, the new movement was recognized as a heresy or a new variant within a monotheistic spectrum. In his book, Muhammad and the Believers (2010), Fred Donner made a powerful argument that Muhammad’s movement attracts followers from across the monotheistic spectrum and it was only later that the “Muslims” established a distinct confessional identity.
In the same way, Muḥammad’s authority within the umma was vastly greater than a traditional tribal leader’s among his followers. Muḥammad was the one and only Prophet of Allāh; to disagree with him was to challenge God Himself. This is not to say that Muḥammad acted in a dictatorial or high-handed way. When he first arrived in Medina, he had needed all of his skills and diplomacy, and considerable determination, to establish his position as the undisputed secular leader as well as religious sage. The Muslims were careful to distinguish between the Revelation of the Qur’ān, which could not be questioned, and decisions on day-to-day matters on which the Apostle often consulted his closest followers and took their advice. But behind all his pronouncements was the knowledge that Muḥammad was the chosen of Allāh and that there would be divine punishment, horrible and unrelenting, for those who disobeyed his command, while those who followed his ways could be sure of everlasting bliss. His practices and decisions, known as the Sunna, were to be the future guidelines in the Muslim community. These considerations made Muḥammad as superior to a traditional tribal leader as the umma was to a traditional tribe.
The emergence of the umma meant the emergence of a new kind of élite. The traditional tribal criteria for choosing chiefs – membership in the ruling clan; skill at warfare, counsel and mediation; bravery and generosity – were only partly applicable to the umma. The Qur’ān (49: 13) says, “The noblest of you in the sight of Allāh is the best in conduct”; that is that religious excellence rather than wealth or breeding was going to decide membership in the new ruling class. In practice, since excellence of conduct is impossible for any man to judge, this meant that priority in Islam (sābiqa) and closeness to the Prophet were the most important signs of distinction. It was above all the Muhājirūn, who had endured the persecutions of the Meccans with the Prophet and then left home, clan and security to follow him, who had the highest status. With them were the first of the Anṣār, especially those who had fought at Badr when the umma was in its infancy. But few of the leaders of the Anṣār – Sa‘d b. Mu‘ādh perhaps, and his successor Sa‘d b. Ubāda – attained the intimacy with the Prophet which was enjoyed by Muhājir leaders like Abū Bakr, ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, ‘Uthmān b. ‘Affān and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. ‘Awf, and none of the Prophet’s wives, was chosen from among the women of his adopted hometown.
The takeover of Mecca added a new and very important element to the new élite, the Meccan leaders. The incorporation into the Muslim umma of the Quraysh and their rivals the Thaqīf of Ṭā’if meant that they brought all their expertise, experience and contacts to the service of the community, and these talents were to prove vital for the expansion and administration of the Muslim territories. At the same time, their incorporation introduced new tensions, since noble families of Mecca – the Umayyads led by Abū Sufyān and his sons Yazīd and Mu‘āwiya, for example – felt that they had natural rights to positions of leadership, while these claims were naturally resented by many among the Anṣār and Muhājirūn who had endured so much for Islam. The new leadership was also overwhelmingly urban in origin, and nomad tribal leaders enjoyed little prestige. Muḥammad and his advisers viewed the bedouin lifestyle with considerable suspicion; those who became Muslims were enjoined to abandon not only their old religion but also their nomad ways and to settle down in urban communities.
Despite the role played by the Meccans, it would be wrong to suggest that Muḥammad had simply restored the old Meccan trading commonwealth under new management. The old system had been a series of agreements among equals, whereas the expansion of Islam was to mean the imposition of the authority of the Muslim élite by force if necessary. The umma could not stand still, it had to expand or disintegrate. So long as there were Arabs who did not accept the authority of Muḥammad, the ideological position of Islam would be challenged. If raiding within the community was to be abolished, another outlet had to be found for the martial energies of the tribesmen and another source of revenue for the impoverished nomads. Muḥammad had understood this well, and his expeditions in the direction of Syria pointed the way. But Islam was to be the religion of all humanity, not just the Arabs, and there was no reason why the authority of the umma in Medina should be confined to the Arabic-speaking peoples; the Islamic conquests were a natural continuation of the Prophet’s work.