by Reza Aslan
This was a serious concern for the Quraysh, whose chief complaint against Muhammad (at least publicly) was neither his call for social and financial reform, nor his radical monotheism. Indeed, as Richard Bell has noted, in the whole of the Quran there exists not a single Qurayshi defense of polytheism that rests on the conviction of its truth. Rather, as indicated by their warnings to the pilgrims, the Quraysh seemed more disturbed with Muhammad’s insistent derision of the rituals and traditional values of their forefathers, traditions upon which the social, religious, and economic foundation of the city rested, than they were by his message of monotheism.
Predictably, however, their warning to ignore “the sorcerer” standing at the Ka‘ba only increased interest in Muhammad’s message, so that by the time the pilgrimage cycle and the desert fairs were complete and the pilgrims had departed for their homes, Muhammad—the man who had so frightened the untouchable Quraysh—was talked about throughout Arabia.
After failing to silence Muhammad during the pilgrimage fair, the Quraysh decided to take a page out of the Prophet’s book and attack Muhammad in the same way he had attacked them: economically. A boycott was placed not just on Muhammad and his Companions, but, in true tribal fashion, on Muhammad’s entire clan. Henceforth, no one in Mecca was allowed to marry into, buy merchandise from, or sell goods (including food and water) to any member of the Banu Hashim, regardless of whether they were followers of Muhammad. The boycott was not an attempt by the Quraysh to starve the Companions out of Mecca; it was merely a way of demonstrating the consequences of removing oneself from the tribe. If Muhammad and his Companions wished to be separated from the social and religious activities of Mecca, then they must be prepared to be separated from its economy. After all, if religion and trade were inseparable in Mecca, no one could so brazenly deny the former and still expect to participate in the latter.
As intended, the boycott was devastating to the Companions, most of whom, including Muhammad, were still making their living from trade. In fact, the boycott was so destructive that it was protested by prominent members of the Quraysh who had rejected Muhammad but who could no longer bear to “eat food, drink drink, and wear clothes, while the Banu Hashim were perishing.” After some months, the boycott was lifted, and the Banu Hashim were once again allowed to join in the commerce of the city. But just as he seemed to be regaining ground in Mecca, tragedy struck Muhammad in the form of the nearly simultaneous deaths of his uncle and protector, Abu Talib, and his wife and confidante, Khadija.
The significance of losing Abu Talib is obvious: Muhammad could no longer rely on his uncle’s unwavering protection to keep him from harm. The new Shaykh of Banu Hashim, Abu Lahab, loathed Muhammad personally and made a formal withdrawal of his protection. The results were immediate. Muhammad was openly abused on the streets of Mecca. He could no longer preach or pray in public. When he tried to do so, one person poured dirt over his head; another threw a sheep’s uterus at him.
The loss of Abu Talib may have placed Muhammad in a precarious situation, but the death of Khadija left him absolutely devastated. She was, after all, not only his wife, but also his support and comfort, the person who had lifted him out of his poverty, who had quite literally saved his life. In a polygamous society, in which both men and women were allowed an unlimited number of spouses, Muhammad’s monogamous relationship with a woman fifteen years his elder was remarkable, to say the least. Maxime Rodinson’s assertion that it is unlikely Muhammad would have felt any physical passion for Khadija, given her age, is both unsubstantiated and offensive. The loss of Abu Talib’s protection was certainly demoralizing, if not detrimental to Muhammad’s physical security. But returning home after one of his painfully violent revelatory experiences, or after suffering another indignity from the Quraysh—his head covered in dirt, his tunic defiled with blood—and not having Khadija there to wrap him in her cloak and hold him in her arms until the terror subsided must have been an unimaginable sorrow for the Prophet.
With the loss of both his physical and his emotional support, Muhammad could no longer remain in Mecca. Some time earlier, he had sent a small group of his followers—those without any form of protection in Meccan society—temporarily to Abyssinia, partly to seek asylum from its Christian emperor or “Negus,” partly in an attempt to ally himself with one of the Quraysh’s chief commercial rivals. But now Muhammad needed a permanent home where he and his Companions could be free from the unrestrained wrath of the Quraysh.
He tried Mecca’s sister city, Ta’if, but its tribal leaders were not inclined to antagonize the Quraysh by giving refuge to their enemy. He visited the local fairs around Mecca—places where he must have been well known both as a merchant and as a troublemaker—but to no avail. Finally, the answer came in the form of an invitation from a small clan called the Khazraj, who lived in an agricultural oasis some two hundred fifty miles north of Mecca—a conglomeration of villages known collectively as Yathrib. Although Yathrib was a distant and totally foreign city, Muhammad had no choice but to accept the invitation and prepare his Companions to do the unthinkable: abandon their tribe and their families for an uncertain future in a place where they would be without protection.
The emigration to Yathrib occurred slowly and stealthily, with the Companions heading out toward the oasis a few at a time. By the time the Quraysh realized what was happening, only Muhammad, Abu Bakr, and Ali were left. Fearing that Muhammad was leaving Mecca to raise an army, the various clan Shaykhs decided to choose one man from each family, “a young, powerful, well-born, aristocratic warrior,” who would sneak into Muhammad’s house while he was asleep and simultaneously drive their swords into his body, thereby placing the responsibility for his death upon everyone in the tribe. But when the assassins arrived at Muhammad’s house, they found Ali asleep in his bed pretending to be the Prophet. Having learned about the attempt on his life the night before, Muhammad and Abu Bakr had slipped out of the house through a window and fled the city.
The Quraysh were furious. They offered a massive bounty of a hundred she-camels to anyone who could find Muhammad and bring him back to Mecca. The unusually high reward attracted dozens of Bedouin tribesmen who combed the surrounding area night and day looking for the Prophet and his friend.
Meanwhile, Muhammad and Abu Bakr had taken cover in a cave not far from Mecca. For three days they hid from view, waiting for the hunt to subside and the Bedouin to return to their camps. On the third night, they carefully crept out of the cave and, making sure no one was following, mounted two camels brought to them by a sympathetic conspirator. They then quietly disappeared into the desert on their way to Yathrib.
It is a wonder—some would say a miracle—that this same man, who had been forced to sneak out of his home under cover of night to join the seventy or so followers anxiously awaiting him in a foreign land hundreds of miles away, would, in a few short years, return to the city of his birth, not covertly or in darkness, but in the full light of day, with ten thousand men trailing peacefully behind him; and the same people who once tried to murder him in his sleep would instead offer up to him both the sacred city and the keys to the Ka‘ba—unconditionally and without a fight, like a consecrated sacrifice.
3. The City of the Prophet
THE FIRST MUSLIMS
IN THE EVENING, the sun in the desert is a glowing white orb set low in the sky. It dips into the horizon, and its light is eclipsed by the dunes, making them appear as heaving black swells in the distance. At the edge of Yathrib, a hedge of lofty palm trees forms a boundary separating the oasis from the advancing desert. Here, the small band of Companions wait—hands shading their eyes—staring out over the vast expanse for any sign of Muhammad. They’ve been standing at the edge of the desert for days and nights. What else can they do? Many of them have no homes in Yathrib. Most of their possessions were left behind in Mecca. Their journey was not a grand exodus through the desert, camels laden with goods. The Hijra, as the migration from Mecca to Yathrib is known, was
a secret operation: daughters sneaking out of their fathers’ homes at night, young men gathering whatever provisions they could carry on their backs for the arduous week-long journey through the barren wilderness. The few possessions they brought with them have become communal property; they will not last.
The problem is that the Companions—now more properly termed the Emigrants, or Muhajirun (literally, “those who have made the Hijra”)—are primarily traders and merchants, but Yathrib is not a city built on trade; Yathrib is not a city at all. It is a loose federation of villages inhabited by farmers and orchardists, tillers of the earth. It is nothing like the bustling, prosperous city the Emigrants left behind. Even if they could transform themselves from traders to farmers, all the best agricultural lands in Yathrib are already occupied.
How are they to survive here except on the charity and goodwill of the Ansar, or “Helpers,” that handful of Yathrib’s villagers who have also accepted Muhammad’s message and converted to his movement? And what is to happen to them now that they have abandoned the protection of the Quraysh? Will the most powerful tribe in Arabia simply allow them to leave Mecca without consequence? Have they really chosen to cast off their homes, their families, their very identities, all at the command of an extraordinary but untested prophet who is now nowhere to be found?
Just before the sun vanishes, two smoldering silhouettes are spotted in the desert, lurching toward Yathrib. A cry spreads among the Emigrants: “The Messenger is here! The Messenger has come!” The men jump up and run out to meet Muhammad and Abu Bakr as they cross into the oasis. The women join hands and dance in circles around the two men, their ululations rolling from house to house, announcing the Prophet’s arrival.
Muhammad, parched and blistered from the journey, sits back in his saddle and lets the reins of his camel hang loose. A crowd gathers, offering food and water. A few of the Ansar struggle to grab hold of the camel’s reins and steer it toward their villages. They shout, “Come, O Messenger of God, to a settlement which has many defenders and is well-provisioned and impregnable.”
But Muhammad, not wishing to ally himself with any particular clan in Yathrib, refuses their offers. “Let go her reins,” he commands.
The crowd backs off, and Muhammad’s camel staggers forward a few more steps. It circles an abandoned burial ground now used for drying dates, then stops and kneels, lowering its neck for the Prophet to dismount. Of the owners of the land, Muhammad asks a price.
“We do not want money for it,” the owners reply. “Only the reward we shall receive from God.”
Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation, but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E., will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina.
There exists an enduring mythology about Muhammad’s time in the city that came to bear his name, a mythology that has defined the religion and politics of Islam for fourteen hundred years. It is in Medina that the Muslim community was born, and where Muhammad’s Arab social reform movement transformed into a universal religious ideology.
“Muhammad in Medina” became the paradigm for the Arab empire that expanded throughout the Middle East after the Prophet’s death, and the standard that every Islamic kingdom and sultanate struggled to meet during the Middle Ages. The Medinan ideal inspired the various Islamic revivalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all of which strove to return to the original values of Muhammad’s unadulterated community as a means to wrest control of Muslim lands from colonial rule (though they had radically different ideas about how to define those original values). And with the demise of colonialism in the twentieth century, it was the memory of Medina that launched the notion of the “Islamic state.”
Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 1966) pointed to Muhammad’s community in Medina as proof that Islam advocated the separation of religious and temporal power, while Muslim extremists in Afghanistan and Iran have used the same community to fashion various models of Islamic theocracy. In their struggle for equal rights, Muslim feminists have consistently drawn inspiration from the legal reforms Muhammad instituted in Medina, while at the same time, Muslim traditionalists have construed those same legal reforms as grounds for maintaining the subjugation of women in Islamic society. For some, Muhammad’s actions in Medina serve as the model for Muslim-Jewish relations; for others, they demonstrate the insurmountable conflict that has always existed, and will always exist, between the two sons of Abraham. Yet regardless of whether one is labeled a Modernist or a Traditionalist, a reformist or a fundamentalist, a feminist or a chauvinist, all Muslims regard Medina as the model of Islamic perfection. Simply put, Medina is what Islam was meant to be.
As with all mythologies of this magnitude, it is often difficult to separate factual history from sacred history. Part of the problem is that the historical traditions dealing with Muhammad’s time in Medina were written hundreds of years after the Prophet’s death by Muslim historians who were keen to emphasize the universal recognition and immediate success of Muhammad’s divine mission. Remember that Muhammad’s biographers were living at a time in which the Muslim community had already become an enormously powerful empire. As a result, their accounts more often reflect the political and religious ideologies of ninth-century Damascus, or eleventh-century Baghdad, than of seventh-century Medina.
To understand what really happened in Medina and why, one must sift through these sources to uncover not the holy city that would become the capital of the Muslim community, but rather the remote desert oasis that nurtured and cultivated that community in its infancy. After all, long before there was a “City of the Prophet,” there was only Yathrib.
YATHRIB IN THE seventh century was a thriving agricultural oasis thick with palm orchards and vast arable fields, most of which were dominated by some twenty Jewish clans of varying sizes. Unlike the Jews who had settled throughout western Arabia (the Hijaz), most of whom were immigrants from Palestine, Yathrib’s Jews were mostly Arabs who had converted to Judaism. Apart from their religious designation as Jews, little differentiated them from their pagan neighbors. Like all Arabs, the Jews of Yathrib considered themselves first and foremost members of their own individual clans—each of which acted as a sovereign entity—rather than as a single community of Jews. And while a few Jewish clans may have had alliances with one another, even these in no way constituted a united Jewish tribe.
As the earliest settlers in the region, the Jews occupied Yathrib’s most fertile agricultural lands, called “the Heights,” quickly becoming masters of Arabia’s most prized crop: dates. The Jews were also skilled jewelers, clothiers, arms makers, and vintners (Jewish wine was considered the best in the peninsula). But it was Yathrib’s dates, coveted throughout the Hijaz, that had made them rich. As a matter of fact, five of the largest Jewish clans in the oasis—the Banu Thalabah, the Banu Hadl, the Banu Qurayza, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qaynuqa (who also controlled the city’s sole market)—enjoyed an almost complete monopoly over Yathrib’s economy.
By the time a number of Bedouin tribes gave up their nomadic existence and also settled in Yathrib, all the most fertile lands had al
ready been claimed. What remained were the barely cultivable lots situated in a region termed “the Bottom.” The competition over limited resources had not only created some conflict between the “pagan” (i.e., Arab) and Jewish clans, it had also resulted in a gradual decline of the Jews’ authority and influence in Yathrib. For the most part, however, the two groups lived in relative peace through strategic tribal affiliations and economic alliances. The Jews regularly employed the Arabs to transport their dates to nearby markets (especially in Mecca), while the Arabs maintained a high esteem for the learning, craftsmanship, and heritage of their Jewish neighbors, who were, in the words of the Arab chronicler al-Waqidi, “a people of high lineage and of properties, whereas we were but an Arab tribe who did not possess any palm trees nor vineyards, being people of only sheep and camels.”
The real conflict in the oasis was not between the Jews and Arabs, but among the Arabs themselves, and more specifically between its two largest Arab tribes: the Aws and the Khazraj, the tribe that had originally invited Muhammad and his followers to Yathrib. While the origins of this conflict have been lost to history, what seems clear is that the Law of Retribution, the purpose of which was to deter precisely this kind of ongoing tribal conflict, had failed to solve the longstanding quarrel. By the time Muhammad arrived in Yathrib, what had probably begun as a disagreement over limited resources had escalated into a bloody feud which had spilled over even to the Jewish clans, with the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza supporting the Aws, and the Banu Qaynuqa siding with the Khazraj. In short, this conflict was splitting the oasis in two.