by Reza Aslan
“O Prophet of God,” Abu Bakr said, “do not call upon your Lord so much; for God will assuredly fulfill what he has promised you.”
Muhammad agreed. Rising to his feet, he finally called upon his small band of followers to trust in God and advance in full against the enemy.
What followed was a fierce skirmish that the Italian historian Francesco Gabrieli has called “hardly more than a brawl.” A brawl it may have been, but when the fighting stopped and the battlefield was cleared of bodies, there was little doubt as to who had come out on top. Astonishingly, Muhammad had lost only a dozen men, while the Quraysh were thoroughly routed. News of the Prophet’s victory over the largest and most powerful tribe in Arabia reached Yathrib long before the victors did. The Ummah was ecstatic. The Battle of Badr proved that God had blessed the Messenger. There were rumors that angels had descended onto the battlefield to slay Muhammad’s enemies. After Badr, Muhammad was no longer a mere Shaykh or a Hakam; he and his followers were now the new political power in the Hijaz. And Yathrib was no longer just an agricultural oasis, but the seat of that power: the City of the Prophet. Medina.
Badr had essentially created two opposing groups in Arabia: those who favored Muhammad and those who remained loyal to the Quraysh. Sides were chosen. Clan representatives from throughout the peninsula flooded into Medina to ally themselves with Muhammad, while at the same time a rush of Qurayshi loyalists abandoned Medina for Mecca. Interestingly, many of these loyalists were Hanifs who had refused to convert to Muhammad’s movement despite its connection to “the religion of Abraham,” primarily because their Hanifism necessitated allegiance to the Ka‘ba and its keepers, the Quraysh.
However, neither the “reverse migration” from Medina to Mecca nor the defection of the Hanifs troubled Muhammad. He was concerned with a far more urgent matter: there was a traitor in Medina. Someone had informed the Quraysh of his plans to raid the caravan. And while there were many possibilities, Muhammad’s suspicions fell at once upon the Banu Qaynuqa, one of the largest and wealthiest Jewish clans in the oasis. Acting on his suspicions, he besieged the Qaynuqa fortification for fifteen days until the clan finally surrendered.
Muhammad’s fears about the Banu Qaynuqa’s treachery may not have been unfounded. Most of the Jewish clans in Medina had vital commercial links with the Quraysh and wanted no part in what they assumed would become a protracted war between the two cities. Muhammad’s presence in the oasis had already made things financially difficult for them. The political alliance between the Arab tribes and an increasingly powerful Muhammad had drastically eroded the power and authority of Medina’s Jewish clans. The Banu Qaynuqa suffered especially from the Prophet’s tax-free market, which had eradicated their economic monopoly over Medina and greatly reduced their wealth. A war with Mecca would only have worsened the situation of Medina’s Jewish clans by permanently severing their economic ties to the Quraysh, who were, after all, the primary consumers of their dates, wines, and arms. Despite the victory at Badr, there was still no reason to believe that Muhammad could actually conquer the Quraysh. Eventually the Meccans would regroup and return to defeat the Prophet. And when that happened, it would be imperative for the Jewish clans to make their loyalties to the Quraysh absolutely clear.
After Badr, Muhammad was likewise deeply concerned with clarifying loyalties, and it was for this reason that he cemented the agreements of mutual protection in the oasis by formalizing the Constitution of Medina. This document, which Moshe Gil aptly calls “an act of preparation for war,” made clear that the defense of Medina—or at the very least the sharing of the cost of such a defense—was the common responsibility of every inhabitant. And while the Constitution clarified the absolute religious and social freedom of Medina’s Jewish clans, stating “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion,” it nevertheless fully expected them to provide aid to “whoever wars against the people of this document.” In short, the Constitution of Medina provided the means through which Muhammad could ascertain who was and who was not on his side. Therefore, when he suspected that the Qaynuqa had betrayed their oath of mutual protection and shown themselves to be against him, he was quick to act.
According to Arab tradition, the penalty for treason was clearly defined: the men were to be killed, the women and children sold into slavery, and their property dispersed as booty. This is precisely what everyone in Medina assumed would happen to the Banu Qaynuqa, including the Qaynuqa themselves. They were shocked, therefore, when Muhammad rejected traditional law and decided instead to exile the clan from Medina, even going so far as to allow them to take most of their property with them. It was a magnanimous decision on Muhammad’s part, one that was in many ways pressed upon him by his Medinan allies who did not wish to have the blood of their clients on their hands. But it was a decision he would be forced to make again a year later, after the disastrous defeat of his overconfident army at Uhud.
The Battle of Uhud crushed the morale of the Ummah. More importantly, it seemed to confirm the expectations of Medina’s Jewish clans, who reasoned that it would only be a matter of time before the Quraysh were victorious over Muhammad. The Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza, the two most dominant Jewish clans left in the oasis, were especially delighted by the outcome of Uhud. In fact, the Banu Nadir, whose Shaykh had met secretly with the Quraysh’s leader, Abu Sufyan, before the battle, tried to capitalize on Muhammad’s weakness by assassinating him. But even before he had recovered from his battle wounds, Muhammad discovered the plot and, just as he had done with the Qaynuqa, rushed what was left of his battered army to besiege the fortress of the Nadir. When the clan appealed to their fellow Jews for help, the Shaykh of Banu Qurayza, Ka’b ibn Asad, made it clear they were on their own. With this reply, the Nadir had no choice but to surrender to Muhammad, but only on the condition that they be given the same opportunity as the Banu Qaynuqa to lay down their arms and leave Medina in peace. Again, to the utter disgust of his followers, many of whom had been seriously wounded in the battle, Muhammad agreed. The Banu Nadir left Medina for Khaybar, taking their wealth and property with them.
After Uhud, the skirmishes between Mecca and Medina continued for two more years. These were bloody times rife with secret negotiations, clandestine assassinations, and horrific acts of violence on both sides. Finally, in 627 C.E., the Quraysh, having tired of the ongoing conflict, formed a massive coalition of Bedouin fighters and headed one last time for Medina, hoping to put a definitive end to the protracted war. This time, however, Muhammad decided to wait for the Quraysh to come to him. In an innovative military tactic that would be copied for centuries to come, he instructed his followers to dig a trench around Medina, from inside which he was able to defend the oasis indefinitely. After nearly a month of trying to overcome this ingenious trench defense, the Quraysh and their large Bedouin coalition gave up and returned home, exhausted and out of supplies.
While this was far from a victory for Muhammad, he could not have been displeased with the outcome, especially considering how poorly the Battle of Uhud had gone. There wasn’t much fighting; very few people died on either side. In reality, not much happened. But the Battle of the Trench, as it came to be known, is famous not for what occurred during the fight, but for what happened afterward.
During the month-long siege, while the Medinan army struggled to keep the Meccan invaders at bay, the Banu Qurayza—now the largest Jewish clan in the oasis—openly and actively supported the forces of the Quraysh, going so far as to provide them with weapons and supplies. Why the Qurayza would so openly have betrayed Muhammad is impossible to say. The brazenness with which they pursued negotiations with the Bedouin coalition—even while the battle was raging around them—indicates they may have thought this was the end of Muhammad’s movement and wanted to be on the right side when the dust settled. Even if Muhammad won the battle, the Qurayza probably assumed that at worst they would be exiled from Medina like the Qaynuqa and the Nadir, the latter already thriving among t
he large Jewish population of Khaybar. But Muhammad’s generosity had been pushed to its limit, and he was no longer in the mood for clemency.
For more than a month, he kept the Qurayza inside their fortress while he deliberated with his advisers about what to do. In the end, he turned to Arab tradition. This was a dispute; it could be settled only through the arbitration of a Hakam. But because this dispute involved Muhammad—who was obviously not a neutral party—the role of arbiter fell to Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, the Shaykh of the Aws.
On the surface, it seemed Sa‘d was anything but a neutral party. After all, the Banu Qurayza were clients of the Aws and so, technically, fell under Sa‘d’s direct protection. This may have been why the Qurayza were so eager to accept him as Hakam. But when Sa‘d came out of his tent, where he had been recovering from his battle wounds, his decision was the clearest sign yet that the old social order no longer applied.
“I pass judgment on them,” Sa‘d declared, “that their fighters shall be killed and their children [and wives] made captives and that their property shall be divided.”
UNDERSTANDABLY, THE EXECUTION of the Banu Qurayza has received a great deal of scrutiny from scholars of all disciplines. Heinrich Graetz, writing in the nineteenth century, painted the event as a barbarous act of genocide reflecting Islam’s inherently anti-Jewish sentiments. S. W. Baron’s Social and Religious History of the Jews somewhat fantastically likened the Banu Qurayza to the rebels of Masada—the legendary Jews who heroically chose mass suicide over submission to the Romans in 72 C.E. Early in the twentieth century, a number of Orientalist scholars pointed to this episode in Islamic history as proof that Islam was a violent and backward religion. In his masterwork, Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, Francesco Gabrieli claimed that Muhammad’s execution of the Qurayza reaffirms “our consciousness as Christian and civilized men, that this God, or at least this aspect of Him, is not ours.”
In response to these accusations, some Muslim scholars have done considerable research to prove that the execution of the Banu Qurayza never happened, at least not in the way it has been recorded. Both Barakat Ahmad and W. N. Arafat, for example, have noted that the story of the Qurayza is not only inconsistent with Quranic values and Islamic precedent, but is based upon highly dubious and contradictory accounts derived from Jewish chroniclers who wished to portray the Qurayza as heroic martyrs of God.
In recent years, contemporary scholars of Islam, arguing that Muhammad’s actions cannot be judged according to our modern ethical standards, have striven to place the execution of the Qurayza in its historical context. Karen Armstrong, in her beautiful biography of the Prophet, notes that the massacre, while revolting to a contemporary audience, was neither illegal nor immoral according to the tribal ethic of the time. Likewise, Norman Stillman, in his The Jews of Arab Lands, argues that the fate of the Banu Qurayza was “not unusual according to the harsh rules of war during that period.” Stillman goes on to write that the fact that no other Jewish clan in Medina either objected to Muhammad’s actions or attempted to intervene in any way on behalf of the Qurayza is proof that the Jews themselves considered this event “a tribal and political affair of the traditional Arabian kind.”
And yet, even Armstrong and Stillman continue to advocate the enduring view that the execution of the Qurayza, while understandable for historical and cultural reasons, was nonetheless the tragic result of a deeply rooted ideological conflict between the Muslims and Jews of Medina, a conflict that can still be observed in the modern Middle East. The Swedish scholar Tor Andrae most clearly encapsulates this view, arguing that the execution was the result of Muhammad’s belief “that the Jews were the sworn enemies of Allah and His revelation. [Therefore] any mercy toward them was out of the question.”
But Andrae’s view, and the views of so many others who agree with him, is at best ignorant of Muslim history and religion and at worst bigoted and obtuse. The fact is that the execution of the Banu Qurayza, while undeniably a dreadful event, was neither an act of genocide nor part of some comprehensive anti-Jewish agenda on the part of Muhammad. And it most certainly was not the result of an entrenched and innate religious conflict between Islam and Judaism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To begin with, the Banu Qurayza were not executed for being Jews. As Michael Lecker has demonstrated, a significant number of the Banu Kilab—Arab clients of the Qurayza who allied with them as an auxiliary force outside Medina—were also executed for treason. And while reports of the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source), the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs. Even if one excludes the Qaynuqa and Nadir clans, thousands of Jews still remained in the oasis, living amicably alongside their Muslim neighbors for many years after the execution of the Qurayza. Only under the leadership of Umar near the end of the seventh century C.E. were the remaining Jewish clans in Medina expelled—peacefully—as part of a larger Islamization process throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Describing the death of only slightly more than one percent of Medina’s Jewish population as a “genocidal act” is not only a preposterous exaggeration, it is an affront to the memory of those millions of Jews who truly have suffered the horrors of genocide.
Second, as scholars almost unanimously agree, the execution of the Banu Qurayza did not in any way set a precedent for future treatment of Jews in Islamic territories. On the contrary, Jews throve under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and non-Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians “protected peoples” (dhimmi), neither required nor encouraged their conversion to Islam. (Pagans and polytheists, however, were often given a choice between conversion and death.)
Muslim persecution of the dhimmi was not only forbidden by Islamic law, it was in direct defiance of Muhammad’s orders to his expanding armies never to trouble Jews in their practice of Judaism, and always to preserve the Christian institutions they encountered. Thus, when Umar ordered the demolition of a mosque in Damascus that had been illegally constructed by forcibly expropriating the house of a Jew, he was merely following the Prophet’s warning that “he who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.”
In return for a special “protection tax” called jizyah, Muslim law allowed Jews and Christians both religious autonomy and the opportunity to share in the social and economic institutions of the Muslim world. Nowhere was this tolerance more evident than in medieval Spain—the supreme example of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cooperation—where Jews especially were able to rise to the highest positions in society and government. Indeed, one of the most powerful men in all of Muslim Spain was a Jew named Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who for many decades served as the trusted vizier to the Caliph, Abd al-Rahman III. It is no wonder, then, that Jewish documents written during this period refer to Islam as “an act of God’s mercy.”
Of course, even in Muslim Spain there were periods of intolerance and religious persecution. Moreover, Islamic law did prohibit Jews and Christians from openly proselytizing their faith in public places. But, as Maria Menocal notes, such prohibitions affected Christians more than they did Jews, who have been historically disinclined toward both proselytizing and public displays of their religious rituals. This may explain why Christianity gradually disappeared in most of the Islamic lands, while Jewish communities increased and prospered. In any case, even during the most oppressive periods in Islamic history, Jews under Muslim rule received far better treatment and had far greater rights than when they were under Christian rule. It is no accident that a few months after Muslim Spain fell to Ferdinand’s Christian armies in 1492, most of Spain’s Jews were summarily expelled from the realm. The Inquisition took care of those who remained.
/> Finally, and most importantly, the execution of the Banu Qurayza was not, as it has so often been presented, reflective of an intrinsic religious conflict between Muhammad and the Jews. This theory, which is sometimes presented as an incontestable doctrine in both Islamic and Judaic studies, is founded on the belief that Muhammad, who considered his message to be a continuation of the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition, came to Medina fully expecting the Jews to confirm his identity as a prophet. Supposedly, to facilitate the Jews’ acceptance of his prophetic identity, Muhammad connected his community to theirs by adopting a number of Jewish rituals and practices. To his surprise, however, the Jews not only rejected him but strenuously argued against the authenticity of the Quran as divine revelation. Worried that the rejection of the Jews would somehow discredit his prophetic claims, Muhammad had no choice but to turn violently against them, separate his community from theirs, and, in the words of F. E. Peters, “refashion Islam as an alternative to Judaism.”
There are two problems with this theory. First, it fails to appreciate Muhammad’s own religious and political acumen. It is not as though the Prophet were an ignorant Bedouin worshipping the elements or bowing before slabs of stone. This was a man who, for nearly half a century, had lived in the religious capital of the Arabian Peninsula, where he was a sophisticated merchant with firm economic and cultural ties to both Jewish and Christian tribes. It would have been ridiculously naïve for Muhammad to assume that his prophetic mission would be “as obvious to the Jews as it was to him,” to quote Montgomery Watt. He would need only have been familiar with the most rudimentary doctrine of Judaism to know that they would not have necessarily accepted his identity as one of their prophets. Certainly he was aware that the Jews did not recognize Jesus as a prophet; why would he have assumed they would recognize him as such?