Episode 115: The Life of Muhammad, Part 2: Community

Episode 115: The Life of Muhammad, Part 2: Community

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 115: The Life of Muhammad, Part 2: Community. This program is about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, from the Muslim immigration, or Hijra, to the city of Medina in 622, up to the year 627. During these five years, in the towns of Yathrib, or Medina, and Mecca to its south, Muhammad’s band of followers grew in population and determination, and nothing less than the future of much of the Earth was at stake. Though we’ll only cover five years of Muhammad’s life in this show, we’ll also get acquainted with the first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, all of whom had close relationships with the Prophet, and each of which had a major impact on the future of Islam in the world. We’ll get to know the Prophet’s household, and some of the wives he married after his first wife Khadija died. And we’ll learn about the social order of Medina as it came to be under the governance of the Prophet, a subject that’s been of intense interest to Islamic theology, scholars of Islamic law, and Muslims more generally, ever since.

Where we are now, in the year 622, the Prophet Muhammad is about fifty-two years old, having already lived an eventful, cosmopolitan life. Last time, we learned that Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe had established itself as the sovereign ruling group over the pilgrimage city of Mecca, very roughly around the year 500, several generations before Muhammad lived. The Prophet’s father died before he was born, and he spent his early years as the foster child of a Bedouin wet nurse named Halima. Later, Muhammad’s mother, Amina, confident that little Muhammad had been made strong by living out in the clear desert air for his earliest years, took him under her care when he was two or three to live in town in Mecca, though Amina died when Muhammad was six. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib became his guardian for a short while thereafter, but then Abd al-Muttalib passed away, and Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib became the boy’s guardian. As a child, then, Muhammad enjoyed some good luck, as well as some tragic losses. On one hand, he was born into a prosperous branch of the Quraysh tribe – the Hashim clan. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib had, according to tradition, rediscovered the ancient Zamzam well near Mecca’s Kaaba shrine, a well that dated all the way back to the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, and Muhammad’s immediate family had money and were a part of Mecca’s upper class. On the other hand, the Prophet lost his parents and grandfather as a young child, and rather than having a free ride, he had to go to work before he turned 10.

Between roughly the ages of 10 and 25, or the years between 580 and 595, Muhammad built a career. He was initially a herdsman, and, perhaps due to his experience with animals, began accompanying caravans up and down the Hijaz trade route between Mecca and Syria. The Hijaz, or west coast of present-day Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea, was a thriving commercial zone throughout antiquity, and by Muhammad’s lifetime, it was an economic nexus between Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. So as Muhammad traveled up and down the Hijaz, becoming increasingly respected as a trustworthy trade agent as the years passed, he also learned a great deal about the three empires that surrounded Arabia – the Byzantines to Arabia’s northwest, the Sasanians to Arabia’s northeast, and the Axumite, or Ethiopian empire to the southwest.

At 25, Muhammad had distinguished himself sufficiently to attract the attention of a woman named Khadija. About fifteen years older than the Prophet, Khadija was herself a successful businesswoman. Their marriage was not only a happy one, according to early biographies, resulting in six children. It was also socially and commercially advantageous to both. The years passed. The couple had two sons who passed away while very young, though their four daughters survived. And when Muhammad turned 40, in about 610, he had his first revelation. It was as much of a surprise to him as it was to everyone else, and he wondered if he might be losing his mind. But his revelations continued – bursts of incandescent words that later became verses of the Qur’an, and as the years of Muhammad’s 40s passed over the 610s, he slowly attracted followers – first family, then friends and family, and then acquaintances, and before long, people who had heard of him secondhand or thirdhand.

The earliest years of Islam, however, were not without strife for the earliest Muslims, who at this point simply called themselves mu’uminin, or “believers.” In Mecca, the ruling Quraysh tribe was a kin group, but also a business organization, and one of their main enterprises was profiting from Mecca’s annual pilgrimage cycle. Pilgrims spent money when they came to the sacred pre-Islamic sacred sites of Mecca – enough to make several powerful clans within the Quraysh tribe distinctly opposed to a new prophet, himself of their own Quraysh tribe, who was preaching radical new monotheistic doctrines. Muhammad, therefore, by 615, and much more by 620, was not only a threat to the faithful religious conservatives of Mecca. He was also a threat to a whole branch of the economy there, and those who controlled it.

Unfortunately for Muhammad, just as tensions were rising between the earliest Muslims and the Meccan traditionalists who opposed them, his wife Khadija died around 619, and he lost his uncle Abu Talib soon thereafter. The pair were beloved family members, but also, especially in the case of Abu Talib, mainstays of support within the greater Quraysh clan, and without them, Mecca was less secure than ever for Muhammad and his followers. Where we left off last time was once again the summer of 622, when Muhammad and many of his followers left Mecca, and joined a small community of Muslims up in Yathrib, or once again today, Medina.

Last time, we not only learned the history of Muhammad’s life up to the Hijra of 622. We also learned about some of the challenges that historians face when writing about Muhammad. Long after the Prophet passed away, when the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur rose to power in 754, he wanted someone to compile all the great many stories about Muhammad into a single biography. The historian ibn Ishaq first rose to the challenge, although the ibn Ishaq biography that we now have is based on the recension of a writer who lived two generations after ibn Ishaq. The earliest biographies of Muhammad that we now have thus date from the 800s. These lengthy texts – the biographies of ibn Ishaq and ibn Hisham, ibn Sa’d, al-Waqidi, and al-Tabari, offer us an immense amount of information. So, too, do compilations of short prophetic narratives – those sayings collections and anecdotes called hadiths, from around the same time. Muhammad’s early biographers and muhaddiths, or hadith chroniclers, don’t just extemporize and make things up. They generally cite sources and list chains of transmitters for the narratives they offer about Muhammad’s life, taking an approach that is reasonably scrupulous by the standards of historical works written during the 700s and 800s. Acknowledging the tenuousness of their own sources and chains of transmission from time to time, Muhammad’s early biographies often introduce dubiety about anecdotes that they offer, saying that God knows whether or not something is true, or simply noting “It is said that,” or “According to Source X, Source Y told Source Z that,” before offering a narrative.

Our earliest sources about the Prophet’s life, then, are complicated and imperfect ones – texts written by scholars and compilers who don’t consider themselves, or their own sources, infallible. Many elements of Muhammad’s biography that have come down to us are so idiosyncratic and specific that it’s hard to believe they don’t have some broad basis in truth. But other elements of Muhammad’s biography – ones with no Quranic basis, such as the many miracle stories about his childhood that we heard last time, so closely mirror Christian hagiography that it’s very likely that they involved creative embellishment in later centuries. Other elements of prophetic biography reflect the political biases of periods that produced them. The earliest biographers Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, writing under powerful Abbasid emperors long after Muhammad was gone, had a strong incentive to embellish stories about Muhammad’s uncle Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, because Abbas was the patriarch of the Abbasid dynasty under whom a number of our main sources for today lived and worked. In summation, then, early prophetic biographies and hadiths involved guesswork, ideological axe-grinding, political revisionism, and a great many long centipedes of sources, each only as strong as their weakest link. Early prophetic biographies and hadiths, however, as I emphasized last time, are still the closest we can come to understanding Muhammad and his world, and they’re hugely important texts in their own right.

So, to be clear, the program that you’re listening to is based on both the Medieval Islamic hadiths and biographies of the Muhammad, as well as modern academic biographies of Muhammad, and at a few crucial and famous junctures of the 620s, we can explore what different historical accounts tell us. As many listening to this are likely new to the subject of Muhammad’s biography, my overall goal is to go through the main events of these five years of the Prophet’s life as they are generally understood to have happened according to the earliest sources, and to explain why these events were so critical to what happened during the rest of the seventh century. As with any works of pietistic or ancient history written by humans, you’re going to hear some miracle stories, and you’re going to hear some exaggerated battlefield statistics, and you can take them or leave them as you’d like. If you’re curious about the texts cited, as always, there’s a link to this episode’s transcription in your podcast app, which has references and footnotes for you if you need them.

The Background and Logistics of the Hijra: Why Medina?

Our story begins today in Yathrib, or present-day Medina, Arabia, about 200 miles north of Mecca as the crow flies. Yathrib, in 622 CE, was a more fertile place than Mecca. An oasis there watered date palm orchards, and a few streams allowed for seasonal greenery. Although Muhammad sought religious refuge in the northern city in 622, Yathrib had been bad luck within his family in generations past. Back in 570, Muhammad’s father had caught a fever there, and died before the Prophet was born. In 577 or so, Muhammad’s mother, not long after returning to Mecca from Yathrib, passed away from an illness perhaps also caught in Yathrib. The oasis there that allowed for agriculture and irrigation also made waterborne diseases a hazard for all who inhabited and passed through the area. Still, notwithstanding the occasional prevalence of fever there during antiquity, Yathrib was a thriving town along the caravan route, with its own culture, attractions for visitors, and tribal and clan politics. Some Meccan patricians may have looked down on Yathrib as a town full of farmers and agricultural workers. The Quraysh tribe, with their monopoly on Mecca’s glitzy pilgrimage economy, understood Yathrib as a politically divided backwater – a place where no tribe held sway over politics and commerce like the Quraysh did down in Mecca.

The tribal politics of Yathrib, in fact, are quite relevant to what Muhammad was up to during the summer of 622. At this juncture, there were two different fissures in the city. First, for a long time, Yathrib had been home to a large Jewish population. A trio of Jewish Arab tribes had flourished there over the course of Late Antiquity, the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qurayza, and the Banu Qaynuqa, and Yathrib had, not long ago, been under Jewish control for several centuries. “Banu,” by the way, means “tribe” – banu, tribe. These Jewish tribes were peopled with craftsmen, artisans, and more generally an educated gentility who owned much of Yathrib’s palm orchards and vineyards, in contrast to the Arab population more tied to sheep and camels.¹ Thus, the first schism resident in Yathrib in 622 was an old one, between Jewish monotheists, and Arab polytheists, an ethnic and cultural division underscored by economic differences, too. The second schism in the city of Yathrib was a newer one. Around the time of Muhammad’s great-grandparents – say, 500 CE, two Arab tribes had assumed sovereignty over Yathrib. These tribes were feuding with one another, and they were called the Khazraj and the ‘Aws tribes. The Jewish population still resident in Yathrib had allied themselves variously with the Arab Khazraj and ‘Aws tribes, and so, put very simply, Yathrib was not a unified political bloc during the summer of 622, just before Muhammad left Mecca to move there.

In 622, something else had been happening up in Yathrib. Some of the Arab tribespeople had been converting to Islam. In fact, Muhammad, prior to the immigration, had already met with various members of each northern tribe who had already converted to Islam, and had already built an intertribal coalition of Muslim believers, telling his religious kinfolk at a meeting in a mountain pass near Mecca, “I am of you and you are of me. I will war against them that war against you and be at peace with those at peace with you.”² The small population of Muslims from Yathrib swore their loyalty to Muhammad, and thus the Prophet knew that he and his Meccan followers would have a place to go after departing from Mecca. The role that Muhammad planned to play in Yathrib, according to Islamic tradition, was that of a hakam, or arbitrator or judge. He had, after all, always had a sound sense of fairness in business and settling disputes, and perhaps those in Yathrib who knew him hoped that Muhammad’s perspective would help preserve fairness and order within the fractured social order of the northern city.

The Quraysh – that powerful tribe that controlled so much of Mecca’s economy – were not happy about so many Muslim neighbors, friends, and family members leaving to go north to Yathrib. In some cases, the new faith of many converts was sorely put to the test. But as weeks and months passed, Mecca lost more and more citizens, with some houses standing empty or nearly so. The Quraysh were sad, and scared, and angry. Those whom they had opposed had congregated into a mass and were now out of reach. With tensions at an all-time high, Muhammad’s enemies made a plot to murder him. In a story that survives in the biographer ibn Ishaq, a band of assassins waited outside of Muhammad’s house one night in the summer of 622 to kill him, just as the Prophet planned to leave for Yathrib the next day. The killers waited through the night for the opportunity to murder the Prophet. The leader of the assassins was speaking to his confederates while they waited for Muhammad to come out of the house and take his usual early morning walk. Sure enough, Muhammad came out of his house, but God blinded the assassins, while Muhammad sprinkled dust on their heads and chided them. Befuddled, some time later, the assassins were stunned to learn that the Prophet had gone right by them, and their plan failed.

The Meccan Mu’minun Arrive

However successfully Muhammad had evaded this assassination attempt, he knew it was time to go. He and his friend Abu Bakr, the future first caliph of Islam, were smart, and they made a good plan. Knowing that the Quraysh would be looking for them in the north, they went south, covering their tracks, and hid in a cave, sending a relative to keep an ear to the ground in Mecca. They had been right to be careful. The Quraysh had offered a hundred camels as a reward for the Prophet, and the routes between Mecca and Yathrib were being scoured by patrols. A few patrols went south, one coming a hairsbreadth from the Prophet’s hiding place. This, by the way, is the point in the early biographies at which we read the story we discussed last time about spiders miraculously weaving webs over the fugitives’ cave entrance to keep them concealed there. However it happened, Muhammad and Abu Bakr remained safe until a Bedouin guide came to lead them up to Yathrib. Muhammad, Abu Bakr, and their guide went west first, and then south, and then up north along the Red Sea Road, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Mecca, until they saw travelers coming from the opposite direction. Muhammad and Abu Bakr were apprehensive at first, until they realized it was Abu Bakr’s cousin, and soon enough, the Prophet and Abu Bakr reached the green country south of Yathrib, where palm groves and orchards greeted their arrival after a harrowing journey. The Prophet’s younger cousin Ali arrived, too, and soon, Muhammad, his friend Abu Bakr, and his cousin Ali were lodged with an old man who had agreed to house them ahead of time.

For three days, Muhammad and his companions stayed there, just a few miles south of Yathrib, in what is today the city center of Medina. And rather than resting, according to tradition, Muhammad laid a stone foundation there, a foundation for the first mosque in all of Islamic history.³ Today, Masjid Quba, an enormous complex with a capacity for 30,000, having seen various reconstructions over the years, is one of the standard places to visit during pilgrimages to Mecca and the greater Hijaz region, its first stones said to have been laid by the Prophet himself in late September of 622 under the circumstances you just heard.⁴ While setting up Islam’s first mosque took place that week, another major tradition was also established. Muhammad paused in a valley on a Friday at noon to pray with some of his new allies from the Meccan tribes, delivering the first khutba, or public prayer and sermon, most often associated with Friday noontime gatherings, in Islamic history.

Then, Muhammad rode his camel north into town, flanked on each side by armed men from each of Yathrib’s main tribes who had sworn oaths to him in Mecca. In a much-loved story from the great ninth-century hadith scholar al-Bukhari, the Prophet, certain that his camel was under the command of God, allowed her to lead the company on a somewhat meandering route into the city of Yathrib, until the camel brought them into a place of no particular importance. Al-Bukhari writes, “Allah’s Messenger. . .mounted his she-camel and proceeded on, accompanied by the people till his she-camel knelt down at (the place of) the Mosque of Allah’s Messenger at Medina. Some Muslims used to pray there in those days, and that place was a yard for drying dates. . .When his she-camel knelt down, Allah’s Messenger said, ‘This place, Allah willing, will be our abiding place.’”⁵ This camel – her name was Qaswa – made a fateful decision that day, as, forever after, the spot became a mosque. Today, it is the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, and the resting place of the Prophet Muhammad, and the second holiest site in Islam, after the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca.

Moving on with the biography of Muhammad, then, after establishing the Friday prayer and two of Earth’s holiest worship sites over the course of an astounding couple of days, Muhammad superintended the second of the two sites – the one that would later be the Prophet’s Mosque of Medina. At that early point in the autumn of 622, of course, there was no gigantic mosque there – just a modest courtyard of brick walls covered with palm fronds for shade, but with a special niche for praying in the direction of Jerusalem. Arabia’s monotheists, including the earliest Muslims, prayed toward Jerusalem, as Mount Moriah was allegedly the spot where Abraham had almost sacrificed Isaac, and Temple Mount more generally was the epicenter of monotheism during antiquity. Getting even a provisional mosque, and more generally living quarters set up was hard work for the Meccan immigrants. Some of these immigrants were hard pressed to adjust to life in Yathrib, as they’d worked in commerce and tourism down in Mecca. The Meccans were city folk, many of them unaccustomed to hard labor. There is a very endearing story about Muhammad and his beloved younger cousin ‘Ali that happened around this time, and the story exists in several different versions. Muhammad, looking for his young cousin, asked around about where Ali was, and learned that the young man was in the mosque, asleep. Muhammad found Ali, sleeping on the mosque floor and covered in dust, and Muhammad said, “Get up, Abu Turab, get up, Abu Turab,” with “Abu Turab” meaning “father of dust.”⁶ The anecdote has many overtones – an elder upbraiding a young man for sleeping on the job, a military commander chiding a subordinate for being defenseless, with dust being an emblem for annihilation, as well. But it’s also, much more simply, illustrative of the hardscrabble, industrious lives the Meccan immigrants were living in their first months up in the more agricultural center of Yathrib. The migration, as the Abu Turab story tells us, involved a lot of backbreaking work, but it also involved some close bonding and banter among kin and friends that likely made the mu’uminin, or “believers” into a group knitted even closer through what they endured after fleeing from Mecca. [music]

The Muslims Settle in to Yathrib

With the new mosque in Yathrib set up, Muhammad brought fresh political and theological energy to the city. He was a new magnetic pole in Yathrib’s tribal discord, attracting followers from both of the major Arab tribes there, as well as Jewish citizens of the city. About the latter – the Jewish tribespeople – the Prophet was wary. He had a revelation that “many People of the Book wish they could turn you back to disbelief after you have believed,” in other words that Jews and Christians, the “People of the Book,” were especially liable to tempt believing Muslims with incorrect doctrines.⁷ As for the Jews of Yathrib, according to Islamic sources, at least, many saw Muhammad as more of an opportunity than a messenger of the divine. In their minds, a new prophet of monotheism, though regrettably not Jewish, was at least a potentially favorable alternative to the polytheistic Arab clans of the region.⁸

Muhammad, in short, found Yathrib a political tinderbox as the summer passed into autumn in the year 622, a place of both opportunity and danger. The different Arab and Jewish tribes there were all jockeying for position, and although the Prophet saw some opportunity for unification, he also knew that he needed to be very careful and strategic. Prominent men from each of the city’s dominant tribes became opposed to Muhammad fairly quickly, and as the weeks passed, the devout Muslim immigrants experienced a new peril – citizens of Yathrib who professed to convert, but felt no real confidence in Muhammad’s revelations. In fact, even genuine converts could bring danger. As had happened in Mecca, when a son, daughter, or mother, or father, or in one important case, a rabbi, converted to Islam, often old clan ties and oaths were broken, and thus the community of Muslims in Yathrib incurred anger in proportion to its growth.

Incredibly, even as Muhammad dealt with the tricky politics of Yathrib, he also continued to cement some of Islam’s sacred traditions. His congregation already fasted for Ramadan, the ninth month of the Late Antique Arabian calendar. The Muslims were already engaged in almsgiving. Following the Prophet’s visionary journey to Jerusalem not long before leaving Mecca, the Muslims of Yathrib were already performing the five daily prayers. In the autumn of 622, there were, of course, no clocks, and so it was a bit of a puzzle as to how to make sure that believers were remembering to perform their prayers at the required intervals. The solution to this puzzle came to one of Muhammad’s followers in a dream. Someone should simply call something out loudly, said the man – the call to prayer ought to be “God is most great. I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah. Come to prayer. Come to salvation. Allah is most great. There is no God but God.” Muhammad thought it was an excellent call to prayer. And he had just the person to deliver it – Bilal ibn Rabah, a former slave, half African and one of the first converts to Islam, had a sonorous, loud voice. And so it was that Muhammad, on the recommendation of one of his followers, established his longtime companion Bilal as the first muezzin of Islam. [music]

Muhammad’s Subsequent Marriages

It took seven months for the first iteration of the Prophet’s Mosque to be completed in Yathrib. And with the building now complete and functional, Muhammad took steps to secure himself some permanent lodgings in the city. The Prophet asked for two small structures to be attached to the eastern wall of the mosque – one for each of his new wives.

I haven’t mentioned these new wives yet. Polygamy was widely practiced in Late Antique Arabia. Having numerous wives allowed male clan leaders to cement political alliances and knit closer ties with outlying kin. With infant mortality rates being as high as they were, wealthy men in Late Antique Arabia and the Ancient Near East more generally stood a better chance of producing a healthy male heir if they sired children with multiple spouses, and thus in Arabia and other regions in 600, polygamy at certain social echelons was common. As Muhammad’s political power and influence grew after Khadija’s death in 619, he eventually married eleven wives. They varied greatly in background and age, as is evidenced by the first two women he married after Khadija.

The first was a widow named Sawdah. While we don’t know exactly how old Sawdah was when she married Muhammad, it’s fairly certain that she was around the Prophet’s age. Sawdah and her husband had fled to Ethiopia some years earlier to avoid persecution by the Quraysh, and her husband had passed away when the couple returned to Mecca. Sawdah had five or six children, and she had actually married Muhammad before he left Mecca.⁹ Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was not anywhere close to the Prophet’s age when they married. Both ninth-century scholars al-Bukhari and ibn Hanbal recount Aisha’s own hadith that she married Muhammad when she was six years old, and that she consummated the marriage with Muhammad when she was nine years old.¹⁰

Aisha’s age has been a subject of controversy over the centuries, and later ages of Aisha’s marriage and consummation have been hypothesized by various apologists. More generally, in fact, Muhammad’s numerous wives and private household, to those invested in criticizing Islam later in history, have been sources of intense interest. As we know from many episodes prior to this, it is normal and healthy to feel appalled and outraged at practices from antiquity that are radically different from our own. At the same time, as students of history it’s also important to remember that people from the ancient world did ancient world stuff. In Muhammad’s case, his first two wives after Khadija were recommended to him by his aunt, and marriage to young Aisha formalized his friendship with the wellborn and highly regarded Abu Bakr, who was Aisha’s father, and for centuries, neither Muslim scholars nor, in fact, their Christian counterparts during the Renaissance took any particular interest in Aisha’s age at marriage.¹¹

Muhammad, then, back in about 620, before leaving Mecca, had married the widow Sawdah, and contracted a marriage with Aisha, the 6-year-old daughter of his friend Abu Bakr. Around three years later, in the autumn of 622, where we currently are in this episode, Muhammad’s wives Sawdah and Aisha left Mecca to live in quarters adjacent to the Prophet’s Mosque.¹²

The Immigrants Begin Raids

So far in this episode, in addition to just now briefly discussing Muhammad’s second and third wives, we’ve explored the opening months of the Hijra. In some ways, the immigration was a success. The believers had left Mecca, where the ruling oligarchy was against them. And they’d come to Yathrib, where no tribe held a monopoly on power, and where the first Muslims could build mosques, pray, and seek out friendships and alliances as needed. Various anecdotes about the first months after immigration make it clear that Muhammad and his followers did not find Yathrib to be paradise. Fever and sickness struck the believers who’d moved from Mecca, and were unhabituated to Yathrib’s damper climate.¹³ And as we learned earlier, while the fractured leadership of Yathrib presented no consistent threat, the city’s shifting power politics made negotiating alliances, and even trusting new converts a tricky affair. While the ninth-century biographers don’t go into great detail about it, we can also guess that the immigrants weren’t swimming in money, having left behind their homes and in some cases having left families and suffered falls in fortune as a result. Then, in September of 623, something happened that changed the tenor of the immigration, and had a formative effect on the remainder of Muhammad’s life.

In September of 623, word reached Muhammad that a caravan was passing by Yathrib. It was a Meccan caravan, funded by the Quraysh, and it was, according to intel, carrying an enormous quantity of merchandise, though it was guarded by a hundred men. Raiding the caravan would bring a financial windfall, and after what the Quraysh had subjected the Muslims to, the latter felt like they could undertake the raid in good conscience. Additionally, Muhammad had also had a revelation in Yathrib that “Those who have been attacked are permitted to take up arms because they have been wronged. . .those who have been driven unjustly from their homes only for saying, ‘Our Lord is God.’”¹⁴ The big caravan, however, with its hundred professional guards, was too large of a target for the Muslim community of Yathrib. The Prophet and his followers knew that there would be others.

Muhammad sent a small reconnaissance band of just nine men to scout out another, smaller caravan, northbound from Yemen. This was also a Quraysh caravan. Barely guarded, it was freighted with raisins and leather and other tradable merchandise. The Muslim scouts, though not having been ordered to do so, attacked, killing one of the Quraysh, and then bringing spoils back to Yathrib, along with a prisoner. This raid, though small, further heightened tensions in the region. The Quraysh heard of it, and they seethed with anger, though they sent ransoms for prisoners that the Muslims had captured. The non-Muslim Arabs and Jews of Yathrib were uncomfortable with the raid having taken place during the sacred month of Rajab, because even before Islam, fighting was forbidden during this sacred month. On the subject of Rajab, Muhammad had a revelation which is now part of the of the Qur’an – “They ask you [Prophet] about fighting in the sacred month. Say, ‘Fighting in that month is a great offence, but to bar others from God’s path, to disbelieve in Him. . .are still greater offences in God’s eyes’. . . Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hard for you” (2.217, 216).¹⁵

And while these militaristic revelations demonstrate some of what was going on in the Islamic community during this period, another revelation perhaps does even more so. The mu’uminin, again, believers, had up to that point prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. Muhammad heard the words, “Turn your face in the direction of the Sacred Mosque: wherever you [believers] may be, turn your faces to [the Kaaba]” (2.144).¹⁶ The mihrab, or the niche in a mosque indicating which direction believers should pray, of the Prophet’s Mosque was moved, then, to face south, toward Mecca, and ever since, Muslims have prayed in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. This structural change to the Prophet’s Mosque, in the late months of 622, signaled that Mecca, and not Jerusalem, would be the axis of the Islamic world. The change may have also signaled Muhammad’s ultimate intention to challenge the Quraysh tribe for control of the sacred city, just as he had recently decided to raid their caravans. [music]

The Battle of Badr

The fall of 622 deepened to winter, and then winter led to early spring, and in March of 623, Muhammad learned that a major caravan was headed up to Syria from Mecca. This caravan was led by Abu Sufyan, one of the main opponents of Islam in the city of Mecca. Muhammad sent scouts out to the coast to watch for the arrival of the caravan, so that the Prophet and his army could intercept the caravan when it came through the territory of Yathrib. The Muslim fighting men numbered just seventy-seven. Unfortunately for the Muslims, word of the planned ambush got out, and a messenger dashed down to Mecca to summon Quraysh reinforcements.

As for the Quraysh tribe, they felt no compunction about fielding an army against Muhammad. The Prophet, whom they considered false, anyway, had already raided one of their caravans before, albeit a small one. The raid had happened during a holy month. This was their chance to wipe Muhammad and his followers off of the map. Around 60 miles southwest of Yathrib, Muhammad scouted a small settlement with a few wells, learning that the Meccan caravan would be there the next day, or the day after that. What Muhammad didn’t know, however, was that Abu Sufyan, the Meccan leader, was already there at the settlement, performing his own reconnaissance. The settlement was called Badr, and Abu Sufyan, when he realized that Badr was the planned site of the Muslim ambush, hurried back to his caravan so as to take it on a different route – all the way over to the coast, and far away from Badr.

As for the Muslims, they received dire news. A Meccan army was now inbound toward their position at Badr. Muhammad considered his options, and then he opened up the floor for discussion. Two of his companions, the future caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar, were in favor of staying to fight. Their allies from the city of Yathrib also expressed willingness to battle the Quraysh. Still, the approaching army, as the Muslims gathered more intel, seemed like it would be no pushover. The Muslims learned that a force of more than 900 was headed their way, and when the Muslims captured two of the Quraysh’s servants, they learned that many of their arch-rivals from Mecca had come to meet them in battle, including Abu Jahl, who had been the most fervently opposed toward Islam of all the Quraysh. Hearing of so many enemies gathered in one place, Muhammad said to his troops, in the pages of the historian al-Waqidi, “This [coming army] is Mecca. It has thrown out to you its liver.”¹⁷ What an awesome line, there, by the way.

The nearly-1,000-man Meccan army was so large that some of its troops, knowing that they’d accomplished their purpose and prevented the loss of the large caravan, headed back home. Quraysh leaders who remained were particularly bent on the destruction of Muhammad and his followers, and they marched toward the lowland where the Muslims were. Meanwhile, the Muslims and their allies were able to undertake some tactical preparations. They stopped up some wells, and they made sure that only they had access to water. Then, some believers built Muhammad a shaded command structure out of palm branches, and everyone went to sleep.

The next morning, the Quraysh came into the valley. Although the Muslim army was small, many of the Quraysh remained ambivalent about facing them in battle. These were people who knew one another, after all, kin and family and friends, and with no immediate impetus for fighting, and some of the Quraysh, in particular, would have been content to call the whole thing off. The historian al-Waqidi left behind a long confrontation scene between a Quraysh leader named ‘Utba, who urged the Quraysh not to slay their own kinfolk, and the hardliner Abu Jahl, who accused this man of cowardice, and urged the Meccans onward to fight and kill. In the end, the Quraysh who had stayed were convinced to go and attack, and they marched on the small Muslim force at the north end of the lowland.

Thus began the Battle of Badr, the first military confrontation between the Muslims and the Quraysh. The battle, which again took place in March of 623, started with the Quraysh moving in on the valley’s water supply. The confrontation began first with duels – the Muslims triumphed in a one-on-one contest, and then again in a three-on-three contest. When the first Muslim fell due to an enemy arrow, Muhammad offered his men words of encouragement, telling them, in the early biographer ibn Ishaq, “By God in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, no man will be slain this day fighting against them with steadfast courage advancing not retreating but God will cause him to enter paradise.”¹⁸ These words steeled his men’s resolve to fight, and the combat began in earnest. The violence was considerable, and several secondhand and thirdhand accounts record divine intervention on the battlefield. A pair of pagans had positioned themselves on a nearby hill to watch the fight, and when they heard angelic horses neighing in a nearby cloud, one of them became so terrified that his heart burst.¹⁹ A Muslim later recalled that down on the battlefield, he was pursuing a Meccan pagan, but the Meccan pagan’s head just fell off.²⁰ That’s a new one, by the way. We’ve read a lot of factually challenged ancient warfare narratives in this podcast, but we haven’t heard that one.

More graphic violence than this was related by a Muslim combatant named Mu‘adh. If you’ll remember, Abu Jahl, or the “father of ignorance,” was perhaps the most notorious early enemy of Islam, and he had egged the ambivalent Quraysh on to attacking Muhammad’s army. Needless to say, Abu Jahl was a principal target for the Muslim army. The aforementioned Mu‘adh, as recorded in the historian ibn Ishaq, had this to say about Abu Jahl:

I heard the people saying. . .Abu Jahl was in a sort of thicket. . .When I heard that I made it my business, and I made for him. When I got within striking distance I fell upon him and fetched him a blow which sent his foot and half his shank flying. I can only liken it to a date-stone flying from the pestle when it is beaten. His son ‘Ikrima struck me on the shoulder and severed my arm until it hung by the skin from my side, and the battle compelled me to leave him. I fought the whole day dragging my arm behind me and when it became painful to me I put my foot on it and standing on it I tore it off.²¹

Mu‘adh, ibn Ishaq tells us, in spite of losing his arm like that, lived for a long time afterward. Abu Jahl, discovered by another Muslim warrior, was incapacitated, and later decapitated after admitting the righteousness of Muhammad.

Now there’s a lot to ponder in regards to what you just heard – our first full battlefield narration from Islamic history. In the narrative, around 80 Muslims, together with a couple of hundred allies from the tribes of present-day Medina, successfully defeated a much larger force of Quraysh. The victory is not completely farfetched. Many of the Quraysh, it seems, were on the fence about being there in the first place. Conversely, the Muslims were fighting for their lives, and their northern tribal allies, who hailed from a turbulent region torn by clan warfare, may have, on average, had more military experience than the Meccan city folk who came up from the south. Still, as we know from dozens of past episodes that have dealt with ancient history, human beings tend to exaggerate when war stories are involved, and in early Islamic battlefield narrations, warriors square off in Homeric duels, fighters vaunt and taunt in the midst of combat, and protagonists suffer stunningly few losses against antagonists with considerably larger forces.

To return to the story of Muhammad in mid-March of 623, the victory at Badr had not been without loss. The able-bodied Muslim men of Yathrib were few, and the deaths of any were mourned by the immigrant community there. Further, the believers hadn’t captured any of the intended caravan loot. Their position was more insecure than it had ever been. Still, they had held their own, and the Quraysh had lost both pride and many fighting men.

Speaking of the Quraysh, down in Mecca, the chiefs of the powerful tribe fumed. With Muhammad’s most vociferous enemy Abu Jahl now beheaded, and the Quraysh tribe now in turmoil, the tribe turned toward the leadership of Abu Sufyan. Abu Sufyan had a long, complex life in early Islamic history. He was a bad guy, then he converted, and became a good guy, then he had a son, the first Umayyad caliph, Mu’awiya, who was a bad guy who partially crossed out the good guy part in Abu Sufyan’s biography. To keep it simple, for most of today’s story, Abu Sufyan will be the main antagonist of the Prophet Muhammad. Abu Sufyan’s wife Hind, following the Battle of Badr, vowed bloody revenge against the Muslims – especially Muhammad’s uncle, the warrior Hamzah, who had killed Hind’s father and uncle. But Hind’s vow of blood vengeance was perhaps less formidable than the more collective action the Quraysh decided to take. Abu Sufyan knew he’d almost lost a substantial amount of Meccan revenue, not to mention his life. But since the revenue had come through, it could be used to raise an army – a real army, staffed with the Quraysh’s Arabian allies – to destroy the religious raiders in Yathrib and take Muhammad down once and for all.

This – say, April of 623 – this is one of the places where, in hindsight, the story is very unique, and in some ways distinctly Arabian. Had Mecca been, say, a Roman outpost up near Trier, and had the Muslims of Yathrib been a marauding tribe on the east of the Rhine, the Romans would have made a concerted military attack and likely triumphed. But the Hijaz, in 623 CE, was a porous place, and the Muslims of Yathrib were family, friends, and neighbors with the Meccans, and not some foreign plunderers. The looseness of tribal governance made it difficult to shutter off connections between family and friends separated by the Hijra, and in short, the Muslims and the Quraysh, who had been one and the same thing to begin with, continued to communicate even as official relations between Muhammad on one side, and the captains of Quraysh commerce on the other, became further and further estranged from one another. Meanwhile, the new religion of Islam, which heavily emphasized egalitarianism and the love of God for all, continued to do its work. Islam seeped in to heal the rifts between families even as it caused new rifts between other families. As the 620s wore onward, Muhammad’s overall message of monotheistic solidarity and social equality slowly became the most viable sounding solution to the social fissures so inveterate to the tribal world of west Arabia. At least, this was the case among the Arab tribes there. For Jewish tribes, the theological rift between the Arab tribes presented a new and unpredictable danger. The three Jewish tribes of Yathrib put themselves at a distance between the Muslim and Quraysh dispute. Though the Jewish tribes did not commit militarily to either faction, Muhammad learned from one of his Jewish converts that the Banu Qaynuqa of Yathrib were working with the Muslims’ Quraysh enemies. This back-channel connection broke a pact that the three Jewish tribes had sworn with Muhammad when he’d migrated to Yathrib. Tensions grew between the Muslims and the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe, the latter making light of Muhammad’s victory at the Battle of Badr. The disdain of the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe came out in the open one day in the marketplace of Yathrib, when a Muslim woman, according to the ninth-century biographer ibn Hisham, was tricked and rudely exposed in a Jewish goldsmith’s stall, after which Muslims killed a Jew, and then Jews killed a Muslim, raising temperatures between the two groups even higher than they’d been before.²² Muhammad exhorted the Jews of the Qaynuqa tribe to accept Islam. The Jewish Qaynuqa tribesmen told him that they would not, and further, they told Muhammad he’d find them much more substantial enemies than the Quraysh that Muhammad had already fought.

What happened next was one of the major confrontations between Jews and Muslims that took place during the life of Muhammad. I am going to stick to the record of the historian al-Tabari, who himself is using ibn Ishaq, and try to tell you the generally accepted facts, although as you can imagine, these passages in the ninth century biographies have been picked apart for a long time. According to the medieval historian al-Tabari, the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe escalated from saber rattling to armed conflict, taking up residence in a fortified encampment, and calling upon Arab militias who had agreed to aid them to help them fight the Muslims. These Arab allies did not come. Some of them had converted to Islam, and some of them had sworn oaths of peace with Muhammad, and the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe soon found themselves besieged – first for a week, and then for two weeks. Muhammad was furious at the Qaynuqa for helping his Quraysh enemies. The leader of the Arab Khazraj tribe in Yathrib, whose name was ibn Ubayy, urged Muhammad to be lenient with the besieged Jews. The Prophet appeared implacable. But ibn Ubayy, who knew the Qaynuqa tribe and had lived alongside of them in Yathrib for a long time, insisted, telling Muhammad, in the al-Tabari biography, “I will not let you go until you treat my [former clients] well. Four hundred men without armor and three hundred with coats of mail, who defended me from the Arab and the non-Arab alike, and you [Muhammad] would mow them down in a single morning? By God, I do not feel safe and am afraid of what the future may have in store.”²³ Muhammad, thus counseled and warned, told ibn Ubayy that he could do what he saw fit with the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe. The Muslims thereafter took all of the Qaynuqa’s possessions, with Muhammad himself receiving a fifth of all the loot. The Jews – the first of Yathrib’s three Jewish tribes – were then exiled, eventually making their way up to Syria. [music]

The Leadup to the Battle of Uhud

In the aftermath of the Battle of Badr, the Muslims in Yathrib strategized to get the best ransom money for their captives. A few Meccans who’d come to retrieve their relatives even stayed, and some converted. One of the Prophet’s daughters had passed away, and he mourned her. Another daughter, Fatima, was now twenty, and ready to be married. She was a desirable match, and Muhammad’s friends Abu Bakr and Umar had both sought unions with the young woman. Both would later be caliphs, as would the man Fatima ended up marrying. This was the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved younger cousin, Ali. Ali, in Shiism, is second only to Muhammad in importance, and the younger man’s righteousness, fealty to Muhammad, and selfless conduct during the first caliphate have always given him a revered place in all branches of Islam. As highly as Ali is regarded today, though, in the year 623, he didn’t think of himself as a particularly good catch. He wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t going to inherit anything. He lived in modest quarters. But Muhammad loved his younger cousin, and the son of his uncle Abu Talib, who had taken in Muhammad when the Prophet was a youngster, and so Ali was convinced to marry Fatima. The pair had a fine wedding. Afterward, they had to work, with Ali working as a water carrier, and Fatima as a corn grinder, and when an Arab tribesman from Yathrib donated his house to the Prophet, Ali and Fatima were able to move closer to Muhammad.

More weddings took place around this time. Muhammad married his friend Umar’s daughter Hafsa. Umar married Muhammad’s daughter Umm Kulthum. Marrying Hafsa, as marrying Aisha had been, was a way for Muhammad to join together with one of the more powerful families in the community of mu’uminin. And as Muhammad consolidated relations with those who would be future caliphs, he also saw more and more converts trickling in. The Battle of Badr helped spread news of Islam, and in the Prophet’s Mosque in Yathrib, there was a special space reserved for moneyless arrivals interested in the new religion. But while things were going well enough for the Muslims of Yathrib, further afield, the Quraysh elites in Mecca were also forging alliances to protect their own interests.

Muhammad’s slow consolidation of power in Yathrib was a serious disturbance toward all of the Quraysh’s northbound trade. While licking wounds from the Battle of Badr, the Quraysh tribe sought alliances with tribes from Najd, or central inland territory of the Arabian Peninsula where ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad had lived a generation or two before. This meant that the eastern fringes of Yathrib were under the threat of raids from regions beyond the Hijaz. Muhammad undertook a scouting mission to the east, and was able to elicit a conversion out of an eastern tribe due to a miracle from the angel Gabriel. Less miraculous was the way Muhammad dealt with a slanderous poet who lived near Yathrib. The poet, Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, had taken a staunch position against Muhammad and his followers, satirizing the Muslims and telling the Quraysh to seek vengeance for what happened at the Battle of Badr. Muhammad, assuring his followers that trickery was permissible, since the poet Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf had effectively waged a war of words against them, said he wanted the writer killed. Accordingly, the poet was lured out of his fortress, and murdered at the Prophet’s behest.

The Battle of Uhud

As for the Quraysh elites in Mecca, there seemed to be fewer and fewer alternatives to a full-scale war with the Muslims. The old caravan roads north to Syria were no longer safe. Their allies in the central peninsula hadn’t solved the problem of Muhammad. The poet whom the Quraysh may have commissioned to turn the tide of public opinion had been killed. And worse, in the autumn of 624, the Muslims managed to ambush a rich Meccan caravan going northward through the central peninsula. Muhammad, flush with success, also welcomed a grandson around this time – a baby who was named Hasan. In the face of all of this prosperity on the part of the Muslims up north, the Quraysh began their march up to Yathrib and destroy them.

The approaching enemy forces, Muhammad saw, were substantial, bringing with them five hundred mounts – camels and horses – that gobbled up the pasturelands of Yathrib. The Prophet had a dream, and, interpreting it himself, he decided that the Muslims should secure a position and allow the Quraysh to assault them, rather than going out and meeting the enemy in open battle. Yet when discussing strategy with his troops, Muhammad learned that most of them were in favor of attacking. The Muslims armed themselves. Muhammad’s troops respectfully confirmed that he was okay with attacking in the open, as they had wanted, rather than defending behind siege walls, and Muhammad said he was. The Prophet’s forces raised three flags – one for the Muslim immigrants, one for their allies in the ‘Aws tribe, and the other for their allies in the Khazraj tribe. All told, about a thousand fighting men left Yathrib, marching toward where they knew the Quraysh forces were to the west.

Internal divisions led to the defections of three hundred men within Muhammad’s army. It was bad news. Working with what he had, Muhammad organized his diminished forces and donned a second layer of armor. The next morning, on a spring day of 625, the armies formed ranks, the Quraysh significantly outnumbering the forces of the Prophet. A parley was organized, and the Meccan leader Abu Sufyan said that they would go away if the northerners just gave them Muhammad. The Muslims scoffed at the offer. The women who had accompanied the Meccans northward beat drums and sang war songs. Then, the fighting began in what history would know as the Battle of Uhud.

Young ‘Ali, in his early 20s at this juncture and with a newborn son, took down an enemy leader. Muhammad’s uncle Hamzah killed the leader’s brother. Adding to the drama of the battle, wives and mothers were present this time on both sides, urging the fighting men on to victory. A Meccan slave who had been promised freedom for doing so killed the Prophet’s uncle Hamzah. Nonetheless, the opening of the battle seemed to strongly favor the Muslims, and the Meccans were pushed backward, toward their camp. The Meccan lines broke. The Muslim bowmen, ignoring the Prophet’s orders in a momentary desire for plunder, as they thought that the battle was already won, surged toward the Meccan base. Just as this contingent of Muslim archers broke away, the Meccan cavalry attacked, going not toward the center of the Muslim army, but toward their archers, massacring Muslim bowmen. The leader of this enemy cavalry charge was a Meccan tribesman named Khalid ibn al-Walid. The tide of the battle turned with terrifying suddenness against the Prophet’s army after the charge of Khalid ibn al-Walid, and Muhammad himself took a sharp stone to the mouth, which lacerated his lip and broke one of his teeth. Undaunted, Muhammad continued to lead, the archers around him dangerously low on arrows, until one of the Quraysh dashed in on horseback and nearly cut the Prophet down, striking Muhammad’s helmet, though not with a very direct blow.

Chaos erupted in the Muslim ranks. Some were under the impression that the Prophet had fallen. Some attempted to regroup; others fled. Muhammad regained consciousness, and two of his companions helped remove the ring mail that had been driven into his cheek by the enemy sword blow. The immediate band around the Prophet fought a final skirmish on their way away from the battlefield, before retreating to a safe and defensible spot. It had just reached noon. The Muslims had lost an engagement that, again, history would know as the Battle of Uhud. The cavalryman who had turned the tides against the Muslims, again a Meccan tribesman named Khalid ibn al-Walid, would later convert to Islam, and Khalid become perhaps the most ingenious and successful field general in the Middle Ages, so successful, in fact, that his reputation would threaten the otherwise unflappable second caliph Umar. But that’s a story for later in this series. Let’s return to the aftermath of the Battle of Uhud, again in the spring of 625.

Down on the battlefield, the Quraysh took turns gloating and taking care of their wounded. The battle, like so many medieval battles we read about in later history, did not have enormous casualties, with just 22 of the 3000 Meccans killed, and 65 of the 700 Muslims.²⁴ At this juncture, the wife of the enemy leader Abu Sufyan – again her name was Hind – revealed herself as a memorably vindictive person. Muhammad’s uncle Hamzah had killed some of Hind’s close relatives, and so Hind ate some of Hamzah’s liver. Then, Hind and other Quraysh women began mutilating Muslim corpses and carving off parts of them – noses and ears and such – to wear. The Bedouin allies of the Quraysh, not privy to the long conflict into which they had waded and, being sane and compassionate human beings, were disgusted at these awful acts of mutilation, and expressed their understandable apprehension. The Quraysh leader, Abu Sufyan, knew it wasn’t the end, as he soon learned that Muhammad was still alive.

Muhammad and his followers also, later that afternoon after the Quraysh had left, returned to the battlefield to bury their dead, appalled at the mutilations that had taken place. They dressed and buried the Muslims and allies that had fallen in battle, and Fatima tended to her father’s wounds. The Muslims walked and rode down the gorge, over a lowland of igneous rock, and when they reached its end, they paused to pray. [music]

The Exile of the Banu Nadir

Many Muslims had been wounded at the Battle of Uhud, which, again, took place in March of 625, and in Yathrib, the Muslims rested and took care of themselves for a night. Yet with the large Quraysh army close by, the Prophet’s forces knew they’d have no respite. Muhammad mustered his troops, and yet his mission was subterfuge, rather than attack. The Muslims gathered as much wood and shrubs as they could find, and that night, in sight of the Quraysh army, they ignited it in a wide area to give the appearance of a massive army. The Meccans, on the fence about whether or not to return home, decided to turn tail, and this chicanery and retreat marked the true end of the Battle of Uhud.

Two months passed. The Quraysh, safe in Mecca, encouraged central Arabian tribes from Najd to badger Yathrib, thus keeping the Muslims there under constant strain. Around this time – the late spring of 625, Muhammad took another wife. Her name was Zaynab, and she’d been a widow for a year. Inclined to charity and public service, she became the Prophet’s fourth wife after Khadija died – his fifth in total, if Khadija is included.

At this juncture, the Muslims of Yathrib kept up tenuous relations with various inland tribes to their east. One of these, the Banu Amir, expressed interest in Islam, and at their request, Muhammad sent forty Muslims to live with them and teach them about the religion. The Amir tribe was not under unified leadership, however, and an unfortunate imbroglio unfolded in which many Muslims were killed, and some men of the Amir tribe were also killed. Though the Amir tribesmen were the initial aggressors, the Muslims, in vengeance, had inadvertently killed some Amir tribespeople who’d been innocent of any violence against Muslims, and Muhammad was compelled to pay the blood penalty money for their deceased.

Needing cash, Muhammad contacted one of the two Jewish tribes still remaining in Yathrib. This was the Banu Nadir. While sharing a meal with some of their officials, Muhammad had a vision from the Angel Gabriel that the men of the Nadir tribe planned to murder him. Muhammad left without a word, and later sent the Nadir elders a message that the Jewish tribe were now required to leave the region of Yathrib within ten days, or face decapitation. The planned exile pulled at the delicate social order that existed in the oasis town at that point. Muhammad’s ally from the Khazraj tribe, ibn Ubayy, the same ibn Ubayy who had urged Muhammad to be lenient with the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe, came to the support of the Jewish Nadir tribe, urging the Nadir tribe to stay in Yathrib, and rely on the support of a third Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah, along with Bedouin allies accustomed to working with the Jewish tribes of the oasis. In Muhammad’s mind, then, the Nadir tribe had made an attempt on his life, and then, rather than accepting the banishment that he’d mandated, had tightened bonds with regional allies and refused to leave. The Prophet interpreted these actions on the part of the Jewish Nadir tribe as a declaration of war.

Muhammad brought his followers to encircle the Nadir fortress. The Jewish tribe’s allies, including Jews from the neighboring Banu Qurayzah, were uncertain of how to proceed. Days passed, and then ten days, until Muhammad ordered some of the Banu Nadir’s prized date palms chopped down. Knowing that this was just the beginning of the destruction the Prophet was prepared to undertake, the Jewish Nadir tribe agreed to the banishment Muhammad had originally ordered. As the historian al-Waqidi records,

While they were [still] besieged, the Jews were destroying their own homes that were on their side, and the Muslims were destroying what was on their side, until peace was settled. [The Jewish tribespeople] loaded, and they carried the wood and the lintels of the doors. . .They gave their women and children beasts upon which to ride. . .then went over the bridge until they. . .crossed the market of Medina. The women in the howdas were dressed in their silks and brocade and green and velvet coats. The people lined up for them. They proceeded, one camel train in the tracks of another. They were carried on six hundred camels.²⁵

This was the second of Yathrib’s three Jewish tribes that Muhammad and his followers had driven out of the oasis town. The emigrants from Mecca looted the land and property of the Jewish Nadir tribe, dividing it among themselves. As had happened previously with the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe, when the Banu Nadir called on their Arab allies, according to agreements brokered previously, those Arab allies did not come to help, resulting in a second exodus of Jewish tribespeople northward, out of the Hijaz, in the 620s. [music]

Muhammad’s Faily Life in Mecca, 625-6

As 625 gave way to 626, Muhammad saw both a gain and a loss. His daughter Fatima, the wife of his much-loved cousin and son-in-law Ali, gave birth to another baby boy, and he was named Husayn. But the wife whom the Prophet had most recently married, Zaynab, passed away. Muhammad also lost a cousin who died of a lingering infection from wounds at the Battle of Uhud. He married that cousin’s wife soon thereafter, lodging her in the quarters of the departed Zaynab. The marriage caused a slight upset in the Prophet’s household. Aisha, now fourteen, felt a bit threatened by the new wife, Umm Salamah, who was still in her twenties, though the Prophet, according to ancient sources, always took steps to keep the peace between his many wives.

Something else was on Muhammad’s mind in the early months of 626, as well. After the Muslims suffered a defeat at the Battle of Uhud, Muhammad had promised Abu Sufyan that the Quraysh would meet the Muslims on the field of battle again soon. Though both the Muslims and the Meccans were preparing for a war over the spring of 626, the first military mission the Prophet’s fighting men undertook that year wasn’t until June, when they marched inland, into Najd, to face a band of raiders who never showed up.

One of the more interesting people whom the Prophet met during the summer of 626 was a slave known in Islamic history as Salman the Persian. Salman was a slave of the final remaining Jewish tribe of Yathrib, the Banu Qurayza. Salman was interested in Islam, but hadn’t been allowed much contact with the Muslims of Yathrib. His master wanted an astronomical price to free him – forty ounces of gold, and three hundred date palms. Muhammad, for whatever reason very interested in an acquaintanceship with Salman the Persian, paid Salman’s price and arranged for the trees to be planted. Salman would indeed prove a very useful ally to the Muslims in the near future.

The Prophet, at this juncture, was paying close attention to the potentially useful citizens of Yathrib, to Bedouin raiders from the central peninsula, and to potential Quraysh incursions from the south. But he was also paying attention to the north, where Quraysh representatives were rumored to be forming partnerships with marauders who lived in an oasis up near the Syrian border. Thus, Muhammad took a thousand fighting men north, more as a show of force than an actual attack mission. This march had its desired effect. Four years after the Hijra, Muhammad had locked down Yathrib as a stable base of operations, and what his fighting force lacked in size, it made up for in complete loyalty and relative fearlessness. Having accomplished their mission of intimidation up north, the Muslim fighting force returned to Yathrib.

There, when not working, or praying, Muhammad spent time with his family. He rotated between spending the night with each of his four wives, Sawdah, Aisha, Hafsah, and Umm Salamah. He played with his grandchildren – Fatima’s sons Hasan and Husayn, and Zaynab’s daughter. He also threw himself into helping members of the Muslim community of the oasis, settling disputes, issuing verdicts, and offering advice. One day, according to the medieval historian ibn Sa’ad, the Prophet went to see his adopted son, Zayd. Zayd wasn’t home, but his wife Zaynab was. If you’ll recall, Muhammad’s fourth wife was named Zaynab, and she had recently passed away – this is a new Zaynab, and I’ll use her full name and call her Zaynab bint Jahsh for clarification. So, Muhammad came to the door, and Zaynab bint Jahsh answered, and the Prophet was so struck by her beauty that he refused to enter the house. The news of Muhammad’s strange behavior reached his adopted son, Zayd. Zayd put two and two together, realizing that Muhammad was attracted to Zaynab bint Jahsh. Muhammad’s adopted son Zayd then offered to divorce his wife so that Muhammad could marry her. Muhammad initially refused. First of all, as the Hadith scholar Abu Dawud recorded, Muhammad had called divorce “hateful unto God.”²⁶ Second, one could not marry an adopted son’s former wife in seventh-century Arab culture. Now, the events that I’ve just described – the Prophet happening upon a beautiful daughter-in-law, survive in the pages of just one historian, and the scene, according to many scholars in Islamic history, is just a fabrication.

A sturdier historical record of what happened between Muhammad and Zaynab bint Jahsh can be found in the Qur’an. Surat al-Ahzab, the 33rd Surah of the Qur’an, says,

When you [Prophet] said to the man who had been favored by God and you, ‘Keep your wife and be mindful of God,’ you hid in your heart what God would later reveal: you were afraid of people, but it is more fitting that you fear God. When Zayd no longer wanted her, [God] gave you to her in marriage so that there might be no fault in believers marrying the wives of their adopted sons after they no longer wanted them. God’s command must be carried out: the Prophet is not at fault for what God has ordained for him. (33:37-38)²⁷

This revelation thus told Muhammad that it was alright to marry Zaynab bint Jahsh, as, even though there was social pressure against marrying one’s adopted son’s former wife, doing so did not constitute incest. Thus, when Muhammad’s adopted son Zayd divorced Zaynab bint Jahsh, Muhammad married her. This was the seventh wife he had married in total, and the fifth living wife he currently had.

Having a fifth wife in itself was a potential source of controversy. The Qur’an tells believers that “you may marry whichever women seem good to you, two, three, or four” (4.4), and four was, in the seventh century, understood as the maximum number of wives that a man could have.²⁸ Yet at this juncture, approaching the age of sixty and holding the unique status of a Prophet, Muhammad gradually made it clear that special regulations governed his household. His wives, for instance, were given the titles of “mothers of the faithful,” and a long revelation in Surat al-Ahzab in the Qu’ran was issued to establish the special rules and prerogatives governing his household. As this Surah proclaims in the Qur’an,

Believers, do not enter the Prophet’s apartments for a meal unless you are given permission to do so; do not linger until [a meal] is ready. When you are invited, go in; then, when you have taken your meal, leave. Do not stay on and talk, for that would offend the Prophet, though he would shrink from asking you to leave. God does not shrink from the truth. When you ask his wives for something, do so from behind a screen: this is purer both for your hearts and for theirs. It is not right for you to offend God’s Messenger, just as you should never marry his wives after him: that would be grievous in God’s eyes. (33:53)²⁹

This revelation is a particularly important one. It suggests that Muhammad wound up socially exhausted from time to time, and often wanted dinner guests to leave him alone to rest, though he was too polite to say so. The surah we just heard is also often cited in Islamic history as a scriptural justification for the hijab, though, as in other ancient cultures we’ve encountered in our podcast, aristocratic women in Arabia were often compelled to cover themselves or otherwise minimize their time intermixing with other cultures prior to Islam. Finally, the surah we just heard is also a useful case study of the way that the Qur’an itself is often a strong source text on Muhammad’s life. [music]

The Battle of the Trench

The summer of 626 fell into autumn, and as the days grew shorter, the Muslims of Yathrib knew that the Quraysh were coming for them. Muhammad now had enemies to the north and east, as well as the south. The Jews of the exiled Bani Nadir, now settled up toward Syria, wanted their property back. Various tribes of the inland expanses of Najd, either for profit or out of various vendettas, were also keen to march on Yathrib. Quraysh fighting forces of four thousand planned to unify with six thousand more from the regions north and east, bringing an army of ten thousand against the believers in Yathrib. By March of 627, this army was headed toward Muhammad, and the Prophet and his followers had just a week to prepare.

The recent convert Salman the Persian suggested a strategy for defending against significantly greater forces. A deep defensive trench would help stall the enemy cavalry. The Muslims agreed that this was be a good idea. Meeting the enemy in the open had not gone well two years prior at the Battle of Uhud. And so a substantial trench was dug around much of Yathrib, with Salman the Persian, himself accustomed to hard labor from his years of slavery, leading the other believers by example. As for Muhammad, the Prophet dug the trench along with the others. Ibn Ishaq relates accounts of the Muslims, already threatened by the coming battle, having to deal with formidably sized rocks in the hard earth around Yathrib.³⁰ A pair of miracle stories survive from this juncture at which Muhammad multiplied mutton and barley, and then dates, in order to feed his hungry followers.³¹

Six days of backbreaking work completed the trench, and not a moment too soon, because the Quraysh-led confederation soon came within sight to the north of the now-fortified basin of Yathrib. The arriving armies were furious to see that the Muslims had stripped the upper valley of fodder, meaning that much of the Quraysh cavalry would have to subsist on rations. Preliminary investigations of the trench showed the Quraysh that it was a formidable fortification – mounts would not cross it, and approaching meant that the invading fighters were within bowshot of well-positioned archers. However, secure as the Muslims were behind the trench, they soon found that they faced an unexpected danger from within the city.

This danger came from the third and final tribe of Jews still resident in the city, the Banu Qurayza. The Qurayza had previously sworn a pact of solidarity with Muhammad. At the same time, though, the Qurayza had watched Muhammad nearly slaughter the Jewish Qaynuqa tribe before exiling them several years prior, and just two years prior, exile the Jewish Nadir tribe and take their property. The Qurayza tribe, then, seeing a force of 10,000 Meccans and their allies, and under strong urging from an influential Jew of the exiled Nadir tribe, renounced their pact with the Muslims. Their desire was likely to restore the previous status quo of Arab-Jewish relations that had existed for centuries in the Hijaz, and soon, the Jewish Qurayza tribe was funneling fighting men from the Meccan army into the city of Yathrib. If you’ve never heard this history, by the way, the names of the two tribes are confusingly similar, so I will remind you that the Quraysh tribe was the Arab tribe that controlled Mecca during most of Muhammad’s life, and the Qurayza tribe was a Jewish tribe up in Yathrib that will now figure into a very controversial moment in Islamic history in April of 627 CE. The names, again, are similar, so just remember – Quraysh, Arab, Mecca; Qurayza, Jewish, Yathrib.

Due to the Qurayza breaking their pact with the Muslims, Muhammad had to have patrols defend the city of Yathrib, as well as the trench up at the north end of the city. Under these circumstances, the siege began in earnest. For several days, the Quraysh army probed at the trench, suffering Muslim arrows at every incursion. We should pause for a moment here and remember neither army engaged in this conflict was particularly battle-hardened. The Muslims, at least, had central leadership, but as for the Quraysh-led division, they were a patchwork of different forces led by merchants defending their commercial interests, and it was unlikely that very many present had much experience with siege warfare. In spite of their adversaries being unprepared for Yathrib’s siegeworks, though, Muhammad’s forces were troubled. Their food supplies were hardly limitless. The army that faced them was enormous. Hardship fissured the faith of the newly converted. They could not hold out there indefinitely.

Nonetheless, the enemy forces also suffered from a gradual loss of zeal. Muhammad established contact with some of the Quraysh’s allies – a coalition of tribes called the Ghatafan, and though the Prophet set up a treaty to give the Ghatafan tribe much of Yathrib’s date harvest to leave the battlefield, Muhammad’s men were against doing so, and thus the treaty was annulled. However, a fissure nonetheless appeared on the enemy side that the Muslims were able to exploit.

One of the clans allied with the Quraysh was led by a man named Nu‘aym, and Nu‘aym had converted to Islam. This clan leader went to speak with the Qurayza – that Jewish tribe who had turned on Muhammad and his forces in Yathrib. Nu‘aym pointed out to the Qurayza their current danger in Yathrib – if the Quraysh forces lost, the Jewish Qurayza tribe would be at the mercy of Muhammad. The Qurayza, therefore, needed to have an absolutely secure alliance with the Quraysh. The Jewish Qurayza tribe, Nu‘aym said, should ask for hostages from Mecca’s Quraysh confederacy to seal their partnership. The Qurayza tribe, understanding their vulnerability, agreed to ask for Meccan hostages. However, the recent convert Nu‘aym had tricked the final tribe of Jews still living in Medina.

Nu‘aym went to the Quraysh leader Abu Sufyan. And the recent convert Nu‘aym lied to the Meccan leadership. Nu‘aym told them that the Qurayza, within the walls of Yathrib, had actually changed sides to ally with the Muslims, and were planning on asking for Arab hostages from Mecca, only to kill these hostages. The Quraysh leader Abu Sufyan, soon thereafter, indeed heard requests for Quraysh hostages. Thus, the Arab Quraysh tribe of Mecca, and the Jewish Qurayza tribe of Yathrib had a strategic misunderstanding, engineered by the recent convert Nu‘aym, who had enacted the subterfuge on behalf of Muhammad.

The Quraysh tribe’s ties with other allies were fraying, as well. Their Bedouin allies from Najd to the east, who had just wanted to plunder and didn’t care about Islam one way or another, had been out on the battlefield for two weeks, and were losing mounts due to low provisions. Then a fearsome storm came in, the already cold weather turning into a squall with heavy rain, flattening the Quraysh coalition’s tents, and sinking their morale even further. The next morning, as the wind finally slackened, the Quraysh leader Abu Sufyan had had enough. He called for a retreat. The so-called Battle of the Trench, while it was a pivotal juncture in the earliest years of Islam, had hardly been a battle at all, with historical sources reporting less than a dozen casualties in total.

The Massacre of the Qurayza

The Muslims of Yathrib, then, as a wet morning rose in mid-April of 627, knew that they had survived to fight another day. Muhammad felt jubilation mixed with continued wariness. The Jewish Qurayza tribe had sworn allegiance to him, and then betrayed the Muslims to their enemies. Muhammad marshalled his force of three thousand to besiege the Qurayza fortress. The siege went on for a week, and then a second week, until the Qurayza had been trapped for 25 nights. The Qurayza chief, knowing that the walls were closing in, gave the tribe’s Jews three alternatives. The first was to embrace Islam. The Qurayza would not do this. The second choice was to kill their wives and children and then charge into battle with Muhammad. The Qurayza men would not kill their families. The third choice was to make a surprise attack on the Muslims on the night of the Sabbath. The Jews of the Qurayza did not want to profane the sabbath, either.³² Just two of the Qurayza tribe converted to Islam. As for the rest, having no choice, they flung open the gates of their fortress and submitted themselves to Muhammad’s judgement.

Muhammad had been in this position in Yathrib before. When the Qaynuqa tribe had surrendered to his judgment, Muhammad had deferred to the chief of their Arab tribal allies, who had pushed for exile rather than execution. Muhammad did the same thing with the Qurayza, deciding to let the chief of the Arab ‘Aws tribe, with whom the Qurayza were closely knit, to pass judgment on the last Jewish tribe of Yathrib. The chief’s name was Sa‘d. He had converted to Islam, along with his clan. Sa‘d had been wounded by an arrow at the Battle of the Trench, and he was recovering. A donkey carried him from his tent to the Qurayza fortress, and the ‘Aws chief Sa‘d, arriving, solemnly asked if everyone agreed to accept his judgment on the Jewish Qurayza tribe. The Muslims did. The ‘Aws chief announced, in ibn Ishaq, “Then I give judgment that the men should be killed, the property divided, and the women and children taken as captives.”³³ The historian Ibn Ishaq continues,

Then the apostle [Muhammad] went out to the market of Medina. . .and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900. As [the Jews] were being taken out in batches to the apostle they asked [their chief] what he thought would be done with them. [The Qurayza chief] said, “Will you never understand? Don’t you see that the summoner never stops and those who are taken away do not return? By [God], it is death.” This went on until the apostle made an end of them.³⁴

The beheadings took all day, and then in the evening the killing continued by torchlight, with, according to the historian al-Waqidi, executioners searching for pubic hair on young men to rule as to whether or not to kill them.³⁵ In the dark, the trenches were filled with dirt. In a chilling story that survives in the ninth-century Hadith scholar Abu Dawud, Muhammad’s young wife Aisha, during the executions, saw a Jewish woman of the Qurayza laughing madly while lying on her stomach and back, and gibbering. The woman was escorted away to be beheaded in the pits, as well, the only female casualty of the mass-executions in Yathrib that followed the Battle of the Trench.³⁶ [music]

The Aftermath of the Battle of the Trench

The women and children of the Qurayza tribe were enslaved, and divided as spoils among the believers in Yathrib. Muhammad received a beautiful female captive named Rayhana as a slave and concubine. As ibn Ishaq records, Muhammad proposed to marry Rayhana, but the girl, who “had shown repugnance towards Islam when she was captured and clung to Judaism. . .said: ‘Nay, leave me in your power, for that will be easier for me and for you.’”³⁷ According to some accounts, by the way, Rayhana ended up marrying the Prophet, rather than being his slave. In any case, as the Muslims gathered up their spoils, the ‘Aws chief Sa‘d, who had issued the execution order on the Qurayza men, died of wounds suffered at the Battle of the Trench. Months passed, with Yathrib gradually adjusting to a new social order, until it was the autumn of 627, and Muhammad caught word of a Quraysh caravan southbound from Syria, freighted with silver. He sent raiders to rob the caravan, and they were successful.

Yet in a curious turnabout, the loot ended up being returned to the Meccans after all. Muhammad had an estranged son-in-law named Abu l-‘As, who had never converted to Islam. This son-in-law had been one of the Meccan caravan leaders. Heading forlornly back to Mecca after losing the caravan’s loot, Abu l-‘As stopped in Yathrib, unable to resist the temptation of seeing his beloved and estranged wife. There in the city, Muhammad offered Abu l-‘As safety and protection, and Abu l-‘As said that the loss of the caravan property was a terrible thing for him to endure. Muhammad, perhaps out of ties of kin, contacted his raiders. He told them that though technically, the loot of the robbery was theirs, it would mean a lot to him if they could return the stolen goods to his son-in-law Abu l-‘As. The raiders did so, and Abu l-‘As was able to get the goods the rest of the way to Mecca. However, Abu l-‘As was so taken by his father-in-law’s consideration, and the welcoming climate of Yathrib, that he decided to convert to Islam and immigrate to the northern city, and thus, for the price of a caravan worth of silver, the Prophet was able to reunite his daughter with her husband.

As 627 wore onward, Muhammad’s presence was becoming controversial throughout the Hijaz, and western Arabia more generally. The Quraysh were finding it more difficult to hire Bedouin tribes to harry the territories of Yathrib. The same tribes were also cagey toward Muhammad. The position of the Muslims in Yathrib, notwithstanding recent victories against the Quraysh, was still delicate. Their ideology was clearly appealing, and their Prophet was a talented and capable leader. At the same time, with the battles they’d fought, the caravans they’d raided, and the recent killing and enslavement of an entire Jewish tribe, their safety was guaranteed only by a shifting network of agreements, understandings, and intel that had to be managed at all times in all directions.

The Affair of the Necklace

During the busy months of late 627, Muhammad and a band followers subdued a tribe called the Banu Mustaliq, perhaps half a year after the Battle of the Trench. The tribe lived near Mecca, though close to the sea, and the Muslims were able to defeat them with minimal casualties, receiving as a result some 200 families as captives, together with a substantial quantity of livestock. It was during the Muslim march home afterward that that a minor, but extremely famous incident occurred involving the Prophet’s young wife Aisha, now around the age of 14, an incident that is often called “The Affair of the Necklace.” This is the story of the Affair of the Necklace.

What happened was that Aisha and Muhammad’s other younger wife, Umm Salamah, were traveling with him on an unusually brisk expedition with a group of believers. The travelers were trekking through some especially arid back country when Aisha lost a cherished necklace. Though the expedition halted for a search, the teenager was unable to find her prized trinket. The next morning, fortunately, the necklace was discovered. Later in the journey, though, Aisha lost the necklace again, this time while taking a bathroom break just before the caravan departed. She searched for her necklace, and found it rather quickly, but by this time, the caravan had left without her.

Scared, and unsure of how to proceed, Aisha went back to where she’d missed the camel train and waited to see if it would return to her. She waited a long time, and she fell asleep, and when she awakened, she saw a young man named Safwan, whom she knew. Safwan had been traveling with the Prophet and his group, too, and Safwan had fallen behind, as well. Aisha donned her veil, and Safwan dismounted from his camel, knowing that the teenager was the Prophet’s wife. He let the girl ride on his camel, and the young pair caught up with Muhammad’s main force at the next watering hole. Muhammad and the others were surprised to see Aisha riding Safwan’s camel – they hadn’t even realized she wasn’t in her covered howdah – but in any case, the girl was safe. Though the incident should have been a forgettable one perhaps resulting only in a new necklace clasp for Aisha, it would later come back to haunt the Prophet’s household.

In the meantime, Muhammad and his men were still fresh from their most recent triumph over the Banu Mustaliq. One of their captives was the beautiful daughter of the Mustaliq clan chief. Her name was Juwayriya. She had been made a slave, and was trying to secure her freedom, and told Muhammad so. Muhammad proposed that she marry him, thus being freed in that fashion. Juwayriya agreed, becoming the Prophet’s eighth wife. Following the marriage, he freed a hundred of the families from the Banu Mustaliq that the Muslims had recently enslaved.

To return to the Affair of the Necklace story, when the Muslim war band returned to Yathrib with new captives, Muhammad’s young wife Aisha fell ill. She noticed that Muhammad was a bit distant, and she went to stay with her mother. Twenty days passed. And soon Aisha heard some bad news. There had been gossip about her and Safwan. The teenage wife of the Prophet, after all, had been alone with the young man, if only for the duration of time it had taken the pair to return to the main band of travelers after Aisha had inadvertently been left behind. Those who stood to benefit from a schism in the Prophet’s family thus spread calumny about a sexual indiscretion on Aisha’s behalf. Muhammad himself caught wind of the rumor, and he asked around about it. Everyone close to Muhammad, including Aisha’s maid, said that the rumor was silly.

Muhammad himself defended Aisha’s integrity in public. The rumor of infidelity, however, was still pernicious, and its public circulation, to any who still doubted Muhammad, was a morsel to repeat and spread widely. Muhammad asked for counsel from his advisors, and his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali proclaimed that regardless of whether or not the rumor was true, it was sufficiently scandalous that the Prophet needed to divorce Aisha. Aisha’s father Abu Bakr, needless to say, was not happy about Ali declaration. Abu Bakr believed in his daughter’s loyalty and knew that any divorce would reflect very poorly on him and his clan. Muhammad felt that he needed proof before making a decision. After speaking with Aisha, and hoping for divine aid, he had a revelation that freed Aisha from any guilt, and he prescribed punishments for those who had spread the nasty rumor.

The Affair of the Necklace is a not just a gossipy story. Here’s why. At a critical juncture in the events you just heard me recount, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali recommended that Muhammad preemptively divorce Aisha. Aisha herself, and her father Abu Bakr, were appalled at Ali’s recommendation. This disagreement had historical consequences. Later, in 632, after Muhammad passed away and it was time to determine who would be Islam’s next leader, the affair of the necklace may have worsened tensions between Abu Bakr and Ali, who were both eligible to become caliph.³⁸ Far later still, in 656, when Aisha led an insurrection against Ali when Ali was caliph, the memory of the Affair of the Necklace, thirty years prior, may have lingered in both of their minds. Because Shias believe that Ali should have been caliph from the beginning, in 632, and because Ali’s battle with Aisha in the First Fitna, or the first Islamic civil war, weakened the solidarity of his followers in 656 and created a band of separatists who later assassinated him, Aisha’s lost necklace may have had an astonishingly far-reaching impact on subsequent world history. We’ll discuss the caliphates and the fitnas soon – for now, let’s return to the biography of Muhammad.

The year of 627 wound down, and as 628 began, Muhammad had a dream. He dreamt that he had shaved his head in the style of a pilgrim. And in this dream, Muhammad entered the Kaaba of Mecca, with its key in his hand. This dream was an omen, and an inspiration to the Prophet, because the next morning, he convened a meeting with his companions. And in this meeting, Muhammad told them that he had a plan. The Muslims would return, he said. They would return as pilgrims, having not been to the place that was home to so many of them for five years. They would return to Mecca. [music]

“The Total Society in which He Was a Member”

So that takes us to the first months of 628 CE. Muhammad is about 58 years old, having lived a great deal of life in his fifties thus far. The mu’uminin are no longer refugees, absconding from Mecca in small bands to try and find a better life in Yathrib. Muhammad and his followers have become a substantial regional power, capable of major raids, battles, forming and breaking coalitions, and constantly adapting in order to respond to the threat posed by the Quraysh. By 628, the mu’uminin had become, in the words of historian Marshall Hodgson, “[a] neo-tribe,” a group whose nucleus was knit with the old tribal ties of consanguinity and shared culture, but whose proselytization and indifference to the kith and kin of converts would allow for its infinite expansion.³⁹

The history that we’ve covered in this episode is immensely important. Muhammad’s mid-50s were the years during which the Prophet made many of his most impactful, and most controversial decisions. His many marriages, particularly to young Aisha, have long been fodder for recrimination in non-Islamic scholarship.⁴⁰ The Prophet’s private life more generally, in European scholarship over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been subjected to what scholar Irvin Schick calls, “a combination of moral outrage and irrepressible concupiscence focused on the trope of ‘oriental sexuality.’”⁴¹ Non-Islamic critics who have sought to disparage Muhammad, whatever their reasons, have often focused on the Prophet’s polygamy. They have also focused on the severer issue of what happened to the Jewish tribes of Yathrib in the 620s. The stories that the early source texts tell us about the exile of the Banu Qaynuqa and the Banu Nadir from Yathrib, and then the full-scale execution of the men from the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe – these are heartbreaking stories to hear. On one hand, it is important to remember that the official decision to execute the Banu Qurayza was that of the ‘Aws tribe’s sheikh, Sa’d ibn Mu‘adh, and that the Qurayza tribe had double crossed the Muslims at a moment when Muhammad and his people were extremely vulnerable. On the other hand, reading about the mass execution of Jewish tribespeople in the pages of the early biographies conjures up a nightmarish scene of retributive violence that is impossible to forget. What historian Kecia Ali rightly calls “the bloodiest event of Muhammad’s career,” then, has deservedly drawn a lot of attention over the centuries, along with his marriage to the prepubescent Aisha.⁴²

We’ve traveled a long road in our podcast, and thus, I hope we’re a little better able to understand some of the more controversial junctures of Muhammad’s life than people who are unfamiliar with antiquity. Mass executions of barbarians, revolting slaves, insurgent provincial subjects, and political enemies are woefully common in the pages of ancient Greek and Roman historians, and before them, in the obelisks of ancient Egypt and Assyria. Contemporary with Muhammad, in 630 CE, as the embers of the long Byzantine-Sasanian war still smoldered, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius led a massacre of the Jewish citizens of the city of Edessa, and elsewhere, Heraclius also, yielding to the demands of Christian clergy and laity, permitted a mass execution of Jews in Jerusalem.⁴³ For very obvious reasons, the Muslim execution of the Arabian Qurayza tribe in the spring of 627 has a tragic and important place in the history of Abrahamic religion. It is a tragedy that should be remembered, which is why I wanted to dwell on it for a moment at the close of this episode. But in its historical context – within the workaday carnage of the sixth and seventh centuries, with Merovingian and Byzantine and Sasanian empires all on record with retributive brutality on a large scale, the Qurayza massacre was akin to other mass executions, such as antiquity had seen for a long time. In considering the most controversial junctures of Muhammad’s life, the best quote I can summon to mind actually comes from the theologian and Anglican priest, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, considering Saint Augustine’s marital engagement to a 10-year-old Roman girl, writes, “The modern criticism is not of Augustine so much as the total society in which he was a member.”⁴⁴ The same, to some extent, can be said about the elements of Muhammad’s biography that have proved the most controversial to posterity. [music]

The Constitution of Medina

What I want to do now is talk about a document. This document is called the Constitution of Medina, and it’s relevant to some of the controversial junctures of the Muhammad’s career that we’ve just been discussing. In fact, if there are any students of Islamic history listening, they have probably been waiting for me to mention the Constitution of Medina, the most important document that most of us have never heard of. The Constitution of Medina is sometimes called the ‘ahd al-umma, or in a recent study, just the Kitab, or “book.”⁴⁵ Whatever we call the document, it is a window into the intertribal agreements the Muhammad and his fellow emigrants from Mecca made with the citizens of Yathrib. Earlier in this episode, we learned that back in 622, during the Prophet’s last days in Mecca, he opened lines of communication with tribal groups up in Yathrib. The northern oasis and agriculture town was full of economic opportunity, but it was also splintered along tribal lines into the Arab ‘Aws tribe, and the Arab Khazraj tribe, the Jewish tribes who supported these two groups, and then various smaller tribe and clan groups, including inland Bedouins whose sphere of operations included Yathrib. At some point before the migration to Yathrib, Muhammad entered into an agreement with various segments of the town’s citizenry. This agreement today exists as a hybrid document – a work of 64 separate clauses, preserved in the historians ibn Hisham and Abu Ubayd al-Qasim bin Salam, both at work during the early 800s. The document, one again called the “Constitution of Medina,” according to scholar Michael Lecker, “was preserved more or less in its original form.”⁴⁶ This is a fascinating anecdote, by the way, if you’ve never heard it – that we actually have a written charter, engineered either in part or entirely by the Prophet Muhammad, laying out ground rules for how the earliest Muslims and their allies should conduct themselves and deal with one another.

The Constitution of Medina, according to scholar Muhammad Hamidullah, is “the earliest written constitution, promulgated by a sovereign for his own statal conduct, both in internal and foreign affairs [, and] the declaration of independence, be that against the pagan Mecca, the Byzantine Empire, Iran or any other state in the world.”⁴⁷ These are impressive credentials for any document to have, and when we read the Constitution’s 64 clauses today, it’s easy to be impressed by the document’s farsightedness, fairmindedness, and relative egalitarianism. These clauses are important today for a number of reasons. First, most obviously, for Muslims, the Constitution offers a glimpse, although a fairly brief and fragmented one, of the actual, boots-on-the-ground governance that Muhammad undertook in Medina while in the role of a statesman or sheikh there. Second, the Constitution helps historians understand decisions that the Prophet made over these crucial years of his 50s that he spent in Yathrib, including the decision to allow the massacre of the Qurayza tribe. And third and finally, the Constitution of Medina gives us a sense of what sorts of customs and agreements more generally governed the tribes and tribal coalitions of Arabia prior to Islam.

I’m going to walk you through the contents of the Constitution of Medina, now – again it’s a pretty short document of just 64 clauses. I’m quoting from Michael Lecker’s book, The Constitution of Medina: Muhammad’s First Legal Document, published by the Darwin Press in 2004. The document, again surviving in two early ninth-century historians, begins as follows:

(§1) THIS IS A COMPACT FROM MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET BETWEEN THE MU’MINŪN. . .OF QURAYSH AND YATHRIB AND THOSE WHO JOIN THEM AS CLIENTS, ATTACH THEMSELVES TO THEM AND FIGHT THE HOLY WAR WITH THEM. (§2) THEY FORM ONE PEOPLE TO THE EXCLUSION OF OTHERS. (§3) THE MUHĀJIRŪN [or emigrants] FROM QURAYSH KEEP TO THEIR TRIBAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP, CO-OPERATING WITH EACH OTHER REGARDING BLOOD MONEY [and related matters] AND RANSOMING THEIR CAPTIVES ACCORDING TO WHAT IS CUSTOMARY AND EQUITABLE AMONG THE MU’MINŪN.⁴⁸

There is some terminology here that would have been extremely pertinent to Yathrib in the 620s. The word muhajirun describes those very early converts to Islam who moved from Mecca to Medina in 622. The word ansar, often translated as “helpers” in the early biographies, describes those non-Quraysh tribespeople who converted to Islam, though they weren’t a part of the earliest population of Muslims. In Yathrib, in, say, 626, the muhajirun and the ansar, though all of them were Muslims, were also distinct social groups from different tribal backgrounds, and so a legal framework was needed that honored the traditional tribal and social structure and laws of each contingent of converts, but that also subjected all converts to the same set of rules. As an example, in describing the powerful ‘Aws tribe, the Constitution of Medina says, “THE BANŪ L-AWS KEEP TO THEIR TRIBAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP [CONTINUING TO CO-OPERATE WITH EACH OTHER IN ACCORANCE WITH THEIR FORMAL MUTUAL AID AGREEMENTS. . .AND EVERY SUB-GROUP RANSOMS ITS CAPTIVES ACCORDING TO WHAT IS CUSTOMARY AND EQUITABLE AMONG THE MU’MINŪN]” (§11, 33), the mu’minun meaning Muslims. In other words, you do your thing, Banu ‘Aws, but there are certain mu’minun rules that you need to follow, since you’re a convert, now.

The Constitution then proceeds with a few more specific rules. The mu’minun, it says, are all equal, as “THE LEAST OF THEM IS ENTITLED TO GRANT PROTECTION THAT IS BINDING FOR ALL OF THEM” (§16, 33). They must regulate one another, not forming special alliances with each other (§13), and never demanding exorbitant quantities of retributive payments after an injustice has been committed (§14). The document attests that the believers are allied with one another to the exclusion of other people (§17). The Constitution binds the mu’minun in their obligation to fight holy wars together (§19), and perhaps most concisely, in binding the diverse believers together, it emphasizes that “THE PROTECTED NEIGHBOR IS LIKE ONE’S SELF, AS LONG AS HE DOES NOT CAUSE DAMAGE OR ACT SINFULLY” (§50, 37).

So far, the Constitution of Medina seems quite straightforward. It binds together a diverse array of believers, emphasizing that their participation in a trans-tribal union of what would soon be called Islam rendered all of their previous allegiances secondary. Whether you were a Meccan convert from the Quraysh tribe, or a date harvester from Yathrib who’d joined the mu’minun a little later, you were equal with all other believers. And when questions arose related to disputes between the mu’minun, as the Constitution stipulates, Muhammad himself would weigh in and decide on what was fair. A great many hadiths, or prophetic sayings, tell of Muhammad in just this role – an adjudicator in a complex, religiously diverse society, and Islamic jurisprudence has naturally taken a great interest in the Prophet’s role as a legislator and arbitrator during his mid-50s in Yathrib.

While the Constitution of Medina lays out these foundational laws for conduct between and among the mu’minun, the document also sets out rules for how Jews who partner with the mu’minun will be treated. The Constitution says, “THE JEWS WHO JOIN US AS CLIENTS WILL RECEIVE AID AND EQUAL RIGHTS; THEY WILL NOT BE WRONGED, NOR WILL THEIR ENEMIES BE AIDED AGAINST THEM” (§18, 34). Later, the Constitution announces, “THE JEWS OF [the] AWS [tribe], THEIR ALLIES AND THEIR PERSONS, HAVE THE SAME STANDING AS THE PEOPLE OF THIS TREATY, TOGETHER WITH THE RIGHTEOUS AND SINCERE OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS TREATY” (§57, 38). Finally, the treaty says, “THE JEWS OF BANŪ ‘AWF ARE SECURE FROM THE MU’MINŪN. THE JEWS HAVE THEIR RELIGION AND THE [mu’minun] HAVE THEIRS. [This applies to] THEIR ALLIES AND THEIR PERSONS. . .THE NOMADIC ALLIES OF THE JEWS ARE ON A PAR WITH THEM” (§28, 35; §39, 36). There are certainly, by the standards of modern pluralistic societies, some stirring statements in those clauses. Jews allied with the mu’minun are explicitly specified as equals. Jewish allies are safe. Even, as Clause 62 reads, “HE [of the Jews] WHO GOES OUT [opting not to participate in the compact] IS SAFE AND HE WHO STAYS IS SAFE, EXCEPT HE WHO ACTS UNJUSTLY” (§62, 39).⁴⁹ In other words, Jews are safe in Yathrib even if they’re not part of the binding agreement between Muhammad’s mu’minun and other Jewish tribes who have partnered with Muhammad.

Again, the Constitution of Medina, for a document drafted in the 620s at the daybreak of a new monotheistic movement, is impressively realistic. It does not proclaim that everyone must convert. It does not vilify Jewish people. What it does do is to try and create a new political solidarity in Yathrib that will be able to weather assaults from Mecca or anywhere else. As for the Quraysh of Mecca, the document announces, “NO PROTECTION WILL BE GRANTED TO QURAYSH NOR TO WHOEVER SUPPORTS THEM. . .A POLYTHEIST WILL NOT GRANT PROTECTION TO ANY PROPERTY OR TO ANY PERSON OF QURAYSH, NOR WILL HE INTERVENE BETWEEN [the Quraysh]. . .AND A [mu’minun]” (§54, 38, §23, 34). While Muhammad, when the Constitution was drafted, was not quite sure of who his friends would be, he had a firm idea of who his enemies were, and so the document emphasized that those who sided with the Quraysh were not under any protection from the believers.

The Constitution of Medina and the Jewish Tribes

What starts to emerge, here, with these many quotes in seventh-century legalese, is a vivid picture of how Yathrib began to be held together during the mid-620s – by a delicate and hybrid mesh made up of zeal, tribal ties, cross-tribal partnerships, and more generally, collective pragmatism. A major part of the Constitution of Medina discusses war, and the obligations that the mu’minun and their fellow signatories will have to one another in the event of an attack on Yathrib. The document states, twice, that the mu’minun and the Jews who have partnered with them will share war expenses together (§27, §44). In doing so, states Clause 55, all parties participating in the Constitution “UNDERTAKE TO AID EACH OTHER AGAINST WHOSOEVER ATTACKS YATHRIB” (§55, 38). And there, in many ways, we see the bottom line of the Constitution of Medina. It is a pact of mutual defense. Its participants agree that all signatories are equal. They agree that both Muhammad’s religion and Judaism are permitted within the city. They agree that general tribal customs of all groups will proceed. In the Constitution of Medina, we see the efficiency with which Muhammad thought, and the expediency with which he solved complex problems. But still, a very thorny question remains – why, after the authorship of this fairly pluralistic constitution, and the solidarity that it fostered, was Yathrib still disunified during the Battle of the Trench? Why did a leader who appears to have had been open to the idea that Jews and mu’minun were equal before the law allow the massacre of an entire tribe?

There is a simple answer to this question – an elephant in the room – that we must acknowledge, now. As Al-Tabari’s translator Michael Fishbein writes “The brutality of the punishment [of the Qurayza] (extermination of all adult males, rather than expulsion or enslavement) points to darker motives of ethnic hatred and vengeance,” although Fishbein adds that the mass execution that followed the Battle of the Trench was a uniquely violent episode in the early history of Islam, and did not ultimately reflect the policy of Muhammad or the caliphs who followed him.⁵⁰ To acknowledge the elephant in the room, though, once more, perhaps beneath the well-intentioned Constitution of Medina, there still seethed old resentment from the Arab tribespeople of Yathrib predominantly involved in animal husbandry toward the more well-off Jewish tribes whose income came from date palm orchards and fine craftsmanship.⁵¹

And there’s actually another simple answer to the question of why Muhammad allowed the massacre of the Qurayza tribe. That is that he and the Qurayza had agreed, in a constitution, that the Muslims and Qurayza tribespeople would aid one another when Yathrib was attacked, and that no one who aided the Meccan Quraysh tribe would be protected. It is possible to read the Constitution of Medina, then, and conclude that the Qurayza were massacred because they violated two crucial clauses of a treaty to which they had agreed. They had chosen not to aid the mu’minun in the defense of Yathrib, and they had instead chosen to help the Quraysh.

If, indeed, the Qurayza did break a treaty with the mu’minun in the spring of 627, the retributive violence against them may have had been based on the violation of a defense pact. However, the Qurayza are not actually mentioned by name in the Constitution of Medina, and whether or not they were actually privy to the constitution is an important question still being debated today.⁵² Whether or not the Qurayza directly violated an agreement with Muhammad is an important question, but it’s also one best left to specialists poring over the Arabic of the two surviving versions of the Constitution of Medina, together with related manuscript variants. What we can take away from the Constitution of Medina, as non-specialists, and even newcomers to early Islamic history, is this.

The document shows us a world of tribes that don’t look like our own. There are Muslims, certainly, but they are muhajirun and ansar – Meccan converts and converts from Yathrib, at a moment during which Muhammad was still having revelations, and some proselytes barely understood the customs of the nascent religion to which they had converted. There are Jews in the Constitution, but they are not a unified population – they are tribes, each with their own commercial specializations, regional alliances, ethnic makeup and history. And then, in the region all around Yathrib, although the Constitution does not dwell on them, there are other tribal groups, sewn together through aristocratic marriages, economic consortiums, and charters likely very much like the Constitution of Medina itself. This was the Hijaz in the 620s. It is a place and time that has been discussed so much, and written about so much, that the volume of printed information that exists on it today can lull us into a false sense of familiarity with it. The nineteenth-century French orientalist Ernest Renan proclaimed that Muhammad and Islam were “born in the full light of history,” but indeed they were not.⁵³ The story of Muhammad’s life comes down to us through a cobweb of hadiths, isnads, and very old and imperfect books written under Abbasid caliphs like al-Mansur and al-Rashid in cosmopolitan empires very different than the west Arabia of two centuries prior. Actually reading these books reminds us to be cautious about the conclusions that we make, and to remember that as much proponents and enemies of Islam want to confidently tell us about the religion’s roots, there is still a lot about the Prophet Muhammad and his world that we will never know. [music]

Moving on to the Last Years of Muhammad’s Life

Well, everybody, this completes episode 2 of 3 on the life of the Muhammad. In the next program, we’ll hear of the Prophet’s final years, the continued conflict between the mu’minun and the Quraysh hegemony, the Muslim conquest of Mecca, and then how, following the great shock of Muhammad’s passing in 632, the first generation of Muslims largely rallied behind the Prophet’s successor Abu Bakr and continued securing control over the Arabian Peninsula. In addition to hearing about how some of Muhammad’s very last words and deeds established major Islamic traditions, we’ll also learn about the roots of the Caliphate as an institution of leadership, and the origin of what would eventually be the Sunni-Shia split.

If you are new to the history of the early caliphates, it is tempting to overestimate the years between 632 and 750 – years which we’ll soon study in detail – as an epoch of Islamic unification. The story that we’ve been hearing, especially in this program, has been one of amalgamation – people of various echelons and tribes all swearing ultimate fealty to Islam over their own tribes and clans. If we look at a map of the Umayyad caliphate at its greatest extent, it seems as though by about 732, exactly a century after Muhammad passed away, much of the Earth had gone Muslim. There is some truth to this. Arab-Islamic leadership indeed took control of much of the planet during the century between 632 and 732. However, by 732, there had already been two Fitnas, or Islamic civil wars, and there was about to be a third one. And even by the mid-700s, when the Umayyad caliphate controlled so much territory, by one modern estimate, 90% of the caliphate was not Muslim, but continued to practice Christianity or Zoroastrianism or Judaism or some other religion, or none at all.⁵⁴ As we come to the final five years of Muhammad’s life, and its immediate aftermath, then, we’ll see that although Muhammad had done astonishing things during his fifties, he had not, in two decades, somehow created a wholly unified polity indifferent to the entire past history of the world. After his death, the confederation of different groups Muhammad had catalyzed began to eye one another with increasing suspicion, and by the 650s, sectarian schisms within Islam itself had joined the ancient rifts of clan and tribe. And the roots of all of these later fissures, more often than not, lay the events of the 620s and just after – the Prophet’s wishes for the future of Islam, the Prophet’s household and family, and the many Meccans, Medinans, and others whom Muhammad knew.

There’s a quiz on this program at literatureandhistory.com – give it a try and make sure you remember the differences between muhajirun and ansar. As I noted last time, my ad hoc advisory panel has recommended that I give the comedy songs a rest as we go through this core section on Muhammad and the Qur’an. And a quick announcement. It’s now easier than ever to listen to Literature and History’s bonus episodes – that 71-hour mass of programs of the same quality as this main sequence. You used to only be able to buy them and download them as MP3s on the podcast’s website, and you can still do that. However, I’ve also set up a separate feed for the bonus episodes on Spotify – you can listen to all of them for $20/month – subscribe while you’re listening, and then unsubscribe when you’re done. Additionally, you can buy the bonus episodes on Patreon, too. I released a whole bonus series on history’s earliest novels back in March of this year, and to put it gently, that 11-hour bonus sequence on ancient Greek prose fiction did not exactly sell like hotcakes, so that series, The Actual First Novels, together with Before Yahweh, the Astounding Apocrypha, Rad Greek Myths, More Greek Plays, Christianity’s Roots, and the Rejected Scriptures are all easier than ever to check out – just click the Bonus Episodes link in the notes section of your podcast app. So, everyone, thanks for listening and for your interest in early Islamic history and next time, we’ll wrap up the Prophet’s story in The Life of Muhammad, Part 3: Conquest.



References

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