The Historical Muhammad E-Book

Irving M. Zeitlin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In his quest for the historical Muhammad, Zeitlin's chief aim is to catch glimpses of the birth of Islam and the role played by its extraordinary founder. Islam, as its Prophet came to conceive it, was a strict and absolute monotheism. How Muhammad had arrived at this view is not a problem for Muslims, who believe that the Prophet received a revelation from Allah or God, mediated by the Angel Gabriel. For scholars, however, interested in placing Muhammad in the historical context of the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula, the source of the Prophets inspiration is a significant question. It is apparent that the two earlier monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, constituted an influential presence in the Hijaz, the region comprising Mecca and Medina. Indeed, Jewish communities were salient here, especially in Medina and other not-too-distant oases. Moreover, in addition to the presence of Jews and Christians, there existed a third category of individuals, the Hanifs, who, dissatisfied with their polytheistic beliefs, had developed monotheistic ideas. Zeitlin assesses the extent to which these various influences shaped the emergence of Islam and the development of the Prophets beliefs. He also seeks to understand how the process set in motion by Muhammad led, not long after his death, to the establishment of a world empire.

Leseprobe

The Historical Muhammad

The Historical Muhammad

Irving M. Zeitlin

polity

Copyright © Irving M. Zeitlin 2007

The right of Irving M. Zeitlin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5488-1

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Contents

Preface

Introduction and Overview of the Life of Muhammad

Donner’s Reply to the Skeptics

Enter Muhammad: An Overview

The Battle of the Trench

1  Ibn Khaldun’s Social and Economic Theory

Bedouins and Sedentary Peoples

Asabiyah

2  Pre-Islamic Arabia

The Hijaz on the Eve of the Rise of Islam

Pre-Islamic Religion

3  The Role of Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael

Who was the Sacrificial Son?

The Islamic Theory that Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar Traveled to the Valley of Mecca

Abraham, Ishmael, and the Kaaba

William Muir on the Abrahamic Question

Muir on the Founding of Mecca and the Abrahamic Legend

4  Recent and Current Scholarship

The Religion of Mecca

The Kaaba and its Devotees

Hanifiya and the Religion of Abraham

More on Pre-Islamic Religion in the Arabian Peninsula

5  Possible Influences on Muhammad’s Inspiration

Jewish Historians on the Jews of Arabia

Baron on Pre-Islamic, Arab–Jewish Relations in Arabia

6  The Jews of Arabia: A Recent Re-Examination

7  Richard Bell’s Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment

8  W. Montgomery Watt’s Muhammad

Watt’s Muhammad at Mecca

The Daughters of Allah or the So-Called Satanic Verses

More on the “Daughters of Allah” Affair

A Sociological Argument

Watt’s Muhammad at Medina

9  Muhammad at Medina: William Muir’s Analysis

Muhammad and the Jewish Tribes of Medina

The Battle of Badr

Current Research on the Massacre of the B. Qurayza

The Conquest of Khaybar

10  Muhammad and the Jews

Muhammad and the Jews: G. D. Newby’s Re-Examination of the Evidence

11  Concluding Sociological Reflections

Abu Bakr and the Ridda

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

It is entirely coincidental that this effort of mine to understand the Muhammad of history is seeing the light of day at a time when certain political individuals and groups are in the news, presuming to speak for and represent Islam. I need, therefore, to inform the reader that I began this project before the subject-matter might have been considered “topical,” and that I had intended it from the beginning as a scholarly affair. It was and continues to be my aim to catch a few relatively reliable glimpses of the birth of Islam and the role played by its extraordinary founder, Muhammad.

Islam, as its Prophet came to conceive it, was a strict and absolute monotheism. And since I am a student of religion and of the monotheistic religions in particular, I felt an inner need to study the origins of Islam carefully from a historical–sociological standpoint. In the course of my academic career, my primary intellectual interests have been in the history of social and political thought and the sociology of religion. I consider it my good fortune, then, that in my previously published studies of the two earlier monotheistic religions, I was able to employ some of the insights and conceptual tools of certain classical social theorists. The first such study I called Ancient Judaism, an analysis of key issues in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) as history. The second such study was titled Jesus and the Judaism of His Time, the aim of which was to gain an understanding of the man Jesus by situating him in the context of first-century Judaism.

During the last few years, as I began to immerse myself in the scholarly literature on Muhammad and early Islam, it occurred to me that more than thirty years ago, in my studies of the development of social thought, I had discovered Ibn Khaldun, who may be regarded as one of the greatest social thinkers of all time, and whose sociology anticipated the major theoretical contributions of several of the outstanding thinkers who wrote centuries later. One of Ibn Khaldun’s chief concerns was with what he termed the interplay between the desert and the sown, between the denizens of the desert, wherever they happen to be on this planet, and the neighboring sedentary cultures. The more I reflected on the literature on Muhammad and nascent Islam, the more I came to recognize the relevance and analytical power of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of that interplay as applied both to the pre-Islamic condition of the Arabian Peninsula, and to the Medinan phase of Muhammad’s prophetic career. Hence, it is Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima that constitutes, in a large measure, the theoretical framework guiding my quest for the historical Muhammad.

IMZ

Introduction and Overview of the Life of Muhammad

If consequences – political and cultural – are the criteria by which to assess the role of an individual in history, then it is quite evident that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was an extraordinary historical individual. Indeed, there is a sense in which he made history, for he initiated the process that led to a world empire and a world religion. Muhammad had set the process in motion that made it possible for his first two successors, Abu Bakr (632–4) and Umar (634–44), to conquer Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in only twelve years after the Prophet’s death. And already in the reign of al-Walid (705–15), only 73 years after the Prophet’s death, the Islamic Empire reached its greatest extent, embracing all the lands from the Pyrenees through Spain and North Africa to the Indus Valley in the east.

It is probably true that we know little or nothing about the childhood and early youth of any of the great founders of the world religions. The likely reason is that no one took any special interest in them until they grew into adults and became known for their theory and practice. For example, we hear in the Hebrew Bible the story about Moses as an infant in the rushes of the marsh, but we learn nothing more about him until he has reached adulthood. In the New Testament we read about the birth of the man Jesus and his encounter, at age twelve, with wise men in the Temple. But we hear nothing about his youth, meeting him again at age thirty, when he already has begun his mission. The Gospels thus frustrate us with this eighteen-year-long gap, leaving us to speculate concerning Jesus’ education, work and general activities during those years. This lack of information appears to be true of Muhammad’s childhood and youth as well.

The distinguished contemporary scholar, F. E. Peters, has observed, that with regard to Muhammad’s Meccan period, practically nothing is known for sure except his marriage and his preaching. The Quran itself provides no coherent biographical narrative, and as Peters aptly observes, “For Muhammad, unlike Jesus, there is no Josephus to provide a contemporary political context, no literary apocrypha for a spiritual context and no Qumran scrolls to illuminate a Palestinian ‘sectarian milieu.’ ”1

The earliest biographer of Muhammad was Ibn Ishaq who died in 767 CE, which means that he lived and wrote about 145 years after the Hijra, that is, after Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca and his move to Medina in 622 CE. The original text of Ibn Ishaq’s biography was lost, and no extant copy of the original exists. All we have is the recension by Ibn Hisham who died more than 200 years after the Hijra. These earliest “biographies” were written from a religious–ideological standpoint, and are based on the oral traditions (hadiths) that had developed form the time of Muhammad’s death. The biographers’ narratives concerning the Prophet’s childhood and youth are a fusion of legendary and factual elements, obliging the scholar to distinguish between them.

The truth, then, is that the quest for the historical Muhammad is beset with difficulties and problems, the chief of which is the nature of the sources. One of the most recent and enlightening discussions of the sources is found in Fred M. Donner’s Narratives of Islamic Origins.2 It is the first half-century of Islamic history, from about 610 to about 660 CE, that is most problematic despite its importance. According to Islamic tradition, it was during those years that the formative events in the life of the Islamic community occurred: the preaching of Islam’s Prophet, Muhammad; the creation under his leadership of the first community of believers in Arabia; the rapid military expansion of that community throughout Western Asia following Muhammad’s death; the emergence of the first Islamic Empire; and the codification of Islam’s holy book, the Quran. Muslims of all eras have looked upon this period of Islamic origins as a “golden age,” from which to seek guidance in how to live their lives.

From the standpoint, however, of modern, intellectually rigorous historical research – carried out, ideally, in an objective attitude – the sources are highly problematic. Indeed, uncertainty about the reliability of the Islamic sources has tended to undermine historians’ confidence in almost every aspect of the traditional view of Islamic origins. Some sources, touching upon the rise of Islam, were produced outside the Islamic tradition, and scholars justifiably have tried to use them. But those sources too, are, for the most part, neither contemporary with the events they purport to describe, nor consistent in what they say. So Donner begins his critical analysis by turning our attention first to the copious literary sources in Arabic that purport to inform us about the earliest phase of Islamic history. These include, among other items, collections of hadiths, or sayings, attributed to the Prophet and his companions, in addition to the text of the Quran itself. The hadiths are also not contemporary sources, some having been written centuries after the events they discuss. Moreover, one finds in these collections chronological discrepancies, implausibilities, and contradictions. Many accounts are anachronistic; others show evidence not only of embellishment, but outright invention to serve some sort of political or religious purpose.

The first approach taken by Western scholars toward early Islamic history was to accept the traditional picture of Islamic origins presented by the Muslim sources. This was, of course, a decisive advance in historical method over the anti-Islamic polemic that dominated Western writing about Islam from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, and which had ignored Muslim sources. When Western scholars began to try to be more objective, they worked with three main assumptions about the Muslim sources: (1) that the text of the Quran contained documentary value for the life and teaching of the Prophet Muhammad; (2) that the akhbar, or copious reports making up the narratives about Islamic origins found in Muslim chronicles were reliable for reconstructing “what actually happened”; and (3) that the many hadiths attributed to the Prophet were a religious literature distinct from the akhbar and, therefore, not directly relevant to the task of historical reconstruction of the early Islamic period.

Donner reminds us that this approach has resulted in the fact that the majority of Western surveys of Islamic history have presented the story of Islamic origins along lines remarkably similar to those laid down in the traditional Islamic sources. He cites as examples a long list of such studies, including some on which I rely in my own re-examination of issues in the present work. Donner illustrates the reliance on traditional Islamic sources by showing that it applies not only to early works like those of William Muir and Philip K. Hitti, but also to recent works by G. E. von Grunebaum, M. A. Shaban, M. G. S. Hodgson, Hugh Kennedy, Albert Hourani, and many others. This comfortable replication of the Islamic tradition’s own view, Donner remarks, would be perfectly acceptable if it could withstand critical scrutiny. But it became more and more evident in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the Islamic texts contained contradictions among different sources, logical and chronological absurdities, implausibilities, and, on top of it all, patent sectarian political bias.

This gave rise to a second approach that Donner calls the Source-Critical Approach. It was a central premise of this “school” that the existing narrative sources contained much accurate, early historical material, but that it was intermixed with unreliable material, presumably also of early date. The aim, therefore, was somehow to distinguish between the trustworthy, less trustworthy and untrustworthy accounts. A second premise was, that non-Muslim sources (particularly Christian sources in Syriac and Greek) provided an independent source of evidence against which one could compare specific accounts in the Muslim narratives, to determine whether they were reliable. The third and fourth assumptions of this school were that the hadith material was of marginal importance because of its non-historical and religious concerns. Famous scholars like Julius Wellhausen sought to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources, thus establishing tentative criteria for fairly comprehensive syntheses of early Islamic history; he addressed, in particular, the ridda wars (the revolt of certain Arabian tribes after the death of Muhammad), the early Islamic conquests, and the history of the Umayyads, subject-matter for which the evidence seemed to be more sound. He refrained, however, from tackling directly the life of the Prophet Muhammad, perhaps, Donner surmises, “because of uncertainty over how to use the hadith material” (11). This source-critical approach, Donner avers, contributed some sound insights that continue to be of value, such as the role of later interpolation for dogmatic or political reasons, the misplacement of individual accounts, and the question of the interdependence of different written sources. This method marked a definite advance over the approach of simply relying on and repeating the traditional Muslim narratives.

However, although this source-critical method was an advance, it was most useful only as applied to cases where one could safely assume that the texts in question were transmitted in written form. As it became evident, however, that in the earliest period of Islamic writing first and second centuries AH, i.e., After the Hijra, material was often if not usually transmitted orally or in only partially written form, a new methodological approach emerged, which Donner dubs the traditional-critical approach, inaugurated by the publication in 1890 of Ignaz Goldziher’s epochal study of hadith. Donner describes this study as

the first by a Western scholar to view the hadith in the context of conflicting political, religious, and social interests in the Islamic community during its first several centuries, and thus to see it [the hadith] as of central importance to an understanding of the whole of early Islamic civilization. Goldziher demonstrated convincingly that many of the hadiths,far from being authentic sayings of the Prophet, could only be understood as reflections of those later interests, despite the fact that each hadith was equipped with an isnad, or chain of informants, who were supposedly the ones through whom the saying had been handed down from the Prophet to later generations of hadith collectors. (13–14)

What made Goldziher’s findings especially significant is that he had analyzed the supposedly sound hadiths, many of which turned out to be forgeries. His work therefore called into question the whole corpus of hadiths and the presumed authenticity of isnads as records of a hadith’s origins and transmission.

Goldziher, however, despite his deep skepticism regarding the transmission of the hadiths, remained quite positive where the reliability of the Islamic historiographical tradition was concerned. He and some of the later critical scholars continued to maintain that there was a valid “historical kernel” in the traditional material, even if uncovering it in the mass of accretions was an extraordinarily difficult task. But there were also scholars who contended that the application of the source-critical and tradition-critical methods to reports about Islamic origins seemed to reduce the “historical kernel” to the vanishing point. “It was pointed out,” Donner writes,

That isnads were found not only in the hadiths, but also in many historical accounts, and that it had been on the basis of such isnads that source-critics like de Goeje and Wellhausen had relied to identify their different historio-graphic “schools.” If some hadiths could be shown by various means to be not the words of the Prophet, but inventions of the second, or third, or fourth centuries A. H., despite an apparently flawless chain of transmitters, how could we be sure that other hadiths were not also forgeries which had simply escaped detection? And if forgeries were rife among even the most apparently trustworthy hadiths, how could we be sure that other kinds of accounts, including apparently early historical ones relying on similar chains of authorities for their warrant of authenticity, were not also merely later fabrications made for political, religious, or other ends? (19–20)

This gave rise to what Donner calls the skeptical approach. Like the tradition-critics, the skeptics view the traditions about Islamic origins as the products of long and partly oral development, but unlike the tradition-critics, “they deny that there is any recoverable kernel of historical fact that might tell us ‘what actually happened’ ” (20). Donner cites as a precursor of the radically skeptical position the works of the Jesuit scholar Henri Lammens who around the beginning of the twentieth century published a series of detailed studies of the background and rise of early Islam. It was his conviction that the Sira material, the traditional biography of the Prophet, was not an independent set of recollections of the Prophet’s life, but rather an outgrowth of earlier works of Quran commentary (tafsir) and hadith, or sayings, attributed to the Prophet, most of the latter of which were, in Lammens’ view, false. Donner applies the term “skeptical” to this school because “they exhibit a radical skepticism toward the whole received picture of Islamic origins” (20, fn. 47). Among contemporary scholars, it is Patricia Crone whom Donner regards as the most articulate of the recent wave of skeptical writers. In her study, Slaves on Horses, she contends that “whether one approaches Islamic historiography from the angle of the religious or the tribal tradition, its overall character remains the same: the bulk of it is debris of an obliterated past” (Crone, p. 10).

Donner cites in addition to Crone, several other skeptics whose names one runs across in the specialist literature: John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Suliman Bashear, Gerald Hawting, Moshe Sharon, Judith Koren and Yehuda D. Nevo, and Norman Calder. Underlying the work of these radical skeptics are three propositions: (1) the Quran was codified as a closed canon of sacred text much later than assumed by the Muslim tradition – during the second or even the third century A. H., not in the first century as Muslims and most Western scholars have assumed. The Quran itself, therefore, cannot be used as evidence for the origins of Islam, but only for its later development. (2) The narratives of Islamic origins are idealized or polemicized visions of the past that originated in a later period; they contain no “kernel” of historical information, for such information “either was never conveyed, or was completely suppressed, or if it did survive is inextricably entangled with later interpolations” (23). (3) The narratives about the life of the Prophet contain no evidence about Islamic origins independent of the Quran text itself or of later legal traditions. Of these three revisionist propositions, the notion that the Quranic text crystallized generations or perhaps even centuries after Islam’s beginnings is the most radical. What the radical, skeptical position implies, in effect, is either that one should look elsewhere for evidence or give up trying altogether.

Donner’s Reply to the Skeptics

Donner counters the extreme methodological pessimism of these skeptics by reminding them and us that it is quite unlikely, a priori, that the whole tradition has been totally reshaped. For such a notion implies that certain unnamed “authorities,” “whoever they were, could have tracked down every book and tradition contained in every manuscript in the whole Islamic community, from India to Spain, so that no view dissenting from the standard orthodox position was allowed to survive” (27). For Donner, the traditional material, taken as a whole, and notwithstanding extensive redaction of particular portions of it, contains within it enough material to enable us to catch at least a few reliable glimpses of the early Islamic period. For, as Donner convincingly observes, there are many accounts in the Islamic tradition that seem to contain vestigial evidence of very early historical matters relevant to our quest for the historical Muhammad. We can, for example, glimpse in the sources some of the very early tensions in the community of believers: the rivalry between the Muhajirun, Muhammad’s emigrants from Mecca, and the Ansar, his helpers in Medina; concerns over the proliferation of wealth among the believers during the conquest period, and more.

One of Donner’s most persuasive arguments against the radical skeptics is based on his comparative analysis of the Quran and the hadiths. He calls attention to their radically different content in order to defend the Quran text as a literary product of the earliest community of believers in Arabia. One of the most striking aspects of the corpus of the hadith is the degree to which it reflects the salient political issues of the first and second centuries A. H. Donner remarks on a humorous anachronism: that in the hadith literature the Prophet even has a considerable amount to say about the Caliphate, even though the office of the Caliph (Khalifa) did not arise until after his death. In sharp contrast, however, to the deep concerns in the hadith literature over questions of political leadership, the Quran text has almost nothing to say about political or religious leadership except as it relates to Muhammad himself. The discrepancy between the Quran and hadith, where political leadership is concerned, suggests strongly that the two bodies of material came not from a so-called common “sectarian milieu,” but from different historical contexts. Moreover, Donner avers, a “much more natural way to explain the Quran’s virtual silence on the question of political leadership is to assume that the Quran text, as we now have it, antedates the political concerns enshrined so prominently in the hadith literature” (45). Donner notes, in addition, the frequent references in the hadith to such figures as Muhammad’s cousin Ali, his uncles Abu Talib and al-Abbas, the Meccan clan chief, Abu Sufyan, and more; while the Quran, in contrast, makes absolutely no mention of these figures, even in the most innocuous way. And the most telling of Donner’s critical responses to the radical skeptics is his recognition of the most obvious and fundamental discrepancy between the Quran and hadith: “the fact that the Quran itself is totally devoid of obviously anachronistic references to people, groups, or events dating to periods long after the life of Muhammad” (47–8).

Still another indisputable contrast between the Quran and hadith, is their fundamentally different treatments of Muhammad. The overwhelming majority of Quranic passages involving prophets and prophethood are devoted to the many prophets who preceded Muhammad, not to Muhammad himself. In the Quran Muhammad’s mortality is affirmed; and although he is the recipient and vehicle of God’s revelations, he is in all other respects an ordinary mortal. Indeed, as Donner observes, “the Quran presents Muhammad as suffering indignities from those who, in view of Muhammad’s ordinariness and the absence of miracles, could not believe he was truly a prophet: they say: ‘what is with this apostle? He eats food and walks in the market. Why has no angel been sent down to be a warner (nadhir) with him?’ ” (Sura 25; Donner, 51). In the hadith, in contrast, Muhammad is no ordinary mortal. There he is frequently portrayed as a miracle-worker who, in Donner’s words,

is able to feed multitudes, heal the sick with his spittle, procure water by pressing the ground with his heel, see behind himself, predict the future, or divine hidden knowledge such as the names of people whom he has not yet met or the origins of a piece of stolen meat served to him. This vision of Muhammad … does not coincide with the Quranic image of Muhammad as a normal man, and once again casts doubt on Wansbrough’s [and other radical skeptics’] proposition that the Quran originated in the same cultural environment that produced the countless miracle-stories related in the hadith literature and origins narratives. (51–2)

In Donner’s superb analysis of the issues concerning the narratives of Islamic origins, he makes a strong case for not giving up the quest for the historical Muhammad. A historical–sociological method can, perhaps, help us in this quest – a method derived from the great Ibn Khaldun, whose substantive and methodological insights will be presented in chapter 1 to illustrate their fruitfulness. But first we need a brief overview of the life of Muhammad, basing it on traditional sources while trying to take into account their problematic character.

Enter Muhammad: An Overview

Fortunately, the biographical narratives regarding the Prophet’s Medinan period are largely reliable; for as F. E. Peters explains, the biographies by Ibn Ishaq and the others, were little more than accounts of the “ … raids conducted by or under Muhammad; and they took the watershed battle of Badr as their starting point and anchor, and dated major events in Muhammad’s life from it. But for the years from Badr (624 CE) back to the migration to Medina (622 CE) there is great uncertainty and, for the entire span of the Prophet’s life at Mecca, hardly any chronological data at all (264).” In what follows, then, we shall rely not only on Ibn Hisham, Tabari, and other Muslim historians, but also on outstanding Western scholars.

According to tradition, a child was born to the Quraysh at Mecca in or about 570 or 571 CE, and called by his tribe al-Amin, “the faithful,” apparently an honorific title. In the Quran (3: 138; 33: 40; 48: 29; 47: 2) his name is Muhammad (highly praised), a quite common name, and he is referred to once as Ahmad. The baby’s father, Abdullah, died before the child’s birth, and the mother, Aminah, when he was about six years of age. It therefore became the responsibility of the grandfather, Abd-al-Muttalib, to raise the boy and, after the grandfather’s death, the duty fell upon Muhammad’s uncle, Abu-Talib.

The tradition tells us that when Muhammad was twelve years old, he accompanied his uncle on a caravan journey to Syria where he met a Christian monk to whom legend has given the name Bahira. We use words like “tradition” and “legend” because there is no way to confirm the reliability of stories about the Prophet’s early life. There are no non-Arabic, non-Muslim sources for the early period of nascent Islam. The first Byzantine chronicle to record some events of Muhammad’s career was Theophanis who wrote in the ninth century.

What does seem to be a fact, however, is Muhammad’s marriage at the age of twenty-five to a wealthy widow named Khadijah, fifteen years his senior. She was a member of the Quraysh tribe and a well-to-do merchant’s widow – now conducting the business herself and independently – who employed Muhammad and gave him considerable responsibility. Thus lifted out of the relative poverty of his childhood, Muhammad now had the leisure to follow his inclinations, and was often noticed secluding himself and meditating in a small cave on a hillside called Hira, outside of Mecca. Sura 93 seems to confirm that before marrying Khadijah he had been poor, and that until the age of forty or thereabouts, he followed the religion of his tribe and countrymen: “Did He [the Lord] not find thee an orphan and gave thee a home? And found thee erring and guided thee, and found thee needy and enriched thee.”

It was during one of those periods of seclusion that he is said to have heard a voice commanding him to “recite” in the name of the Lord. The word qaraa, which is the root of the word Quran, parallel to the rabbinic mikra, means to recite or address, and its etymology and use in related dialects means to call, cry aloud, proclaim. The speaker in this as in most of the Suras, is Gabriel of whom Muhammad had, as he believed, a vision on the hill, Hira. After a brief interval, the second vision came, and Muhammad, feeling the chill of great emotional stress, rushed home to Khadijah, asking her to enwrap him in his mantle. The call and the message he was told to recite was this: God is one, all-powerful and the creator of the universe. There is a judgment day at which great rewards in paradise await those who obey God’s commandments; and terrible punishments in hell await those who ignore or disobey them.

Now regarding himself as the messenger (rasul) of Allah, Muhammad began to go among his own people, preaching, teaching, and bringing his new message. But they failed to take him seriously, and even laughed at his pretension, which turned him into a nadhir,a “warner” (Quran 67: 26; 51: 50, 51) aiming to win over converts by means of vivid descriptions of the joys of paradise and the terrors of hell. That is the impression we get from the early revelations, the Meccan Suras. However, he gained few converts, and it was his wife Khadija, influenced by her hanif or Christian cousin Waraqa-ibn-Nawfal, who became the first of the few who responded to his call. Muhammad’s cousin Ali and his kinsman Abu-Bakr followed; but Abu-Sufyan, representing the privileged and influential Umayyad branch of Quraysh, continued to oppose the Prophet. For them, Muhammad’s views not only flouted the sacred principles of their polytheism, but also threatened the economic interests of the Quraysh as custodians of the center for Arabian pilgrimages. It seems to be highly probable that Muhammad’s few other converts came primarily from the slave and lower strata, and were even what Ibn Hisham calls a “despised minority.”3 The reaction of the Quraysh leaders to Muhammad’s success with these recruits was to switch from sarcasm and ridicule, which had become less-than-effective weapons, to active persecution. This, in turn, prompted the new converts to flee to Abyssinia and to seek refuge there.

In the year 615, eleven Meccan families followed by 83 other men, found asylum in the domain of the Christian Negus, who adamantly refused to deliver them into the hands of their oppressors (Ibn Hisham, pp. 146–51). The beliefs of these fugitives were so close in some ways to those of the Christians, that the Negus might have viewed them as Christians. Meanwhile, revelations continued to descend upon Muhammad.

Soon Umar ibn-al-Khattab (also transliterated as Omar), who would later play a key role in establishing the Islamic state, became a follower of the Prophet’s new view of Allah. It was in this period too, about three years before the Hijra, that the Prophet’s beloved Khadija died, followed soon afterward by Abu-Talib, who though he never professed Islam, never ceased to defend his nephew, his protégé. Abu-Talib’s defense and protection of Muhammad explains why he had no need to flee with the other persecuted Muslims to Abyssinia. In reality it was the Prophet’s clan and not merely his uncle who protected him in accordance with the powerful Arabian custom. The fact that Muhammad’s followers had to flee from persecution suggests strongly that they were, as Ibn Hisham stated, a “despised minority” recruited from slaves and the lowest strata of Meccan society. In this pre-Hijra period there also occurs the dramatic isra, the night journey in which the Prophet is said to have been carried from the sacred temple of Mecca “to the temple that is more remote,” that is, Jerusalem (Sura 17: 1). Although Muslim tradition interprets the phrase, “temple that is more remote” as referring to Jerusalem, the city’s name does not actually appear in the passage. Nevertheless, Jerusalem, already sacred to the Jews and Christians, became in the Muslim world, the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina.

In the year 620 some people from Yathrib-Medina, mainly of the Khazraj tribe, or perhaps from both the Aws and the Khazraj tribes, met Muhammad at the Ukaz fair and showed interest in what he had to say. Living in close proximity to the Medinan Jews, they had learned that the Jews were looking forward to the coming of a Messiah. The men of the Arab tribes, having heard by this time of the Prophet of Mecca, believed that he might in fact be the prophet eagerly awaited by the Jews. The Yathribites hoped that by inviting Muhammad to make Medina his home, they would accomplish two things to their advantage: they would win him over to their cause instead of that of the Jews; and they would gain a prophet-mediator who might succeed in reconciling the mutually hostile Aws and Khazraj tribes. Muhammad, on his part, having had even less success in Taif than in his native town, allowed or encouraged about 200 followers to escape from the Quraysh and make their way to Medina. He himself followed soon afterward, arriving there on September 24, 622 – the famous Hijra, the migration that apparently had been carefully considered for two years. It was the second Caliph, Umar, who, seventeen years later, designated the lunar year in which the Hijra had taken place, as the official beginning of the Muslim era.

The Hijra definitely marked a turning point in the life of Muhammad. He left the city of his birth as a despised prophet and entered his newly adopted city as an honored chief. The prophet-preacher in him now recedes, and the man of practical politics comes to the fore. What becomes most salient in Medina is his role as political leader, military strategist and warrior. We come now to the circumstances that led to the battle of Badr, and its long-range consequences. It was under the leadership of the new chief, during the months of the “holy truce,” that the Medinan Muslims, now termed Ansar (supporters), developed a scheme by which to offer sustenance to the Muhajirun (emigrants). They intercepted a summer caravan on its return from Syria to Mecca. The caravan leader, Abu-Sufyan, had got wind of the scheme and sent to Mecca for reinforcements. The clash between the reinforcements and the Medinans, mostly Emigrants, took place at Badr, 85 miles southwest of Medina in Ramadan, 624 CE. The victory of the Medinans under the inspired leadership of the Prophet, acquired long-range, religious significance; for it was a complete victory of 300 Muslims over 1,000 Meccans of the Quraysh. The solidarity of the Medinan Muslims was immeasurably strengthened by the meaning assigned to the victory as divine sanction of the new faith. As Philip Hitti observed, “the spirit of discipline and contempt of death manifested at this first armed encounter of Islam proved characteristic of it in all its later and greater conquests.”4

In the following year (625), however, the Muslims suffered defeat at the battle of Uhud (Ibn Hisham, pp. 370f). The Meccans, under the leadership of Abu-Sufyan, avenged their earlier defeat and even wounded the Prophet. But this proved to be only a temporary setback, for after Uhud, Islam recovered and turned from the defensive to the offensive in which military victories and the propagation of its faith went hand-in-hand and seemed always assured. In Mecca, nascent Islam was a religion; in Medina after Badr, it became more than a religion – it became what the world has ever since recognized it to be, a religion and a militant polity.

The Battle of the Trench

In 627, some three years after Badr, an alliance which the Quran calls “confederates,” consisting of Meccans, Bedouins, and Abyssinian mercenaries, gathered for the invasion of Medina (Sura 33: 9–25). In the face of so formidable a force, it seemed to the Medinans that there was no way they could successfully defend themselves against it. But a Persian follower, it is said, advised Muhammad to dig a wide trench around Medina, a military innovation that struck the Bedouins as the most unfair tactic they had ever seen. Disgusted, they lifted the month-long siege and withdrew with the loss of some twenty men on both sides.

We come now to Muhammad’s relations with the Yathrib–Medinan Jewish tribes, to which later chapters will be devoted. After the besiegers in the Battle of the Trench withdrew, Muhammad launched a campaign against the Jewish tribes on the pretext of their having “sided with the confederates.” To grasp adequately the underlying socioeconomic causes of the growing antagonism between Muhammad and the Jews, we have to invoke Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the interplay between the desert and the sown, between Bedouins and sedentary cultures, a theory discussed in detail in the next chapter. In the context of Yathrib–Medina and its environs, the Jews represented the sown and were correspondingly better off than the Emigrants and the Medinan supporters of Muhammad. It was, therefore, not merely religious–ideological differences, but also and, primarily, material economic and political differences that resulted in the killing of between 600 and 900 men of the Jewish tribe, Banu-Qurayza, and the selling of the women and children into slavery. These men were systematically beheaded after they had surrendered, which appears to have been an unprecedented atrocity in the Hijaz. Muhammad then turned over the now-ownerless date plantations of the Jews to the Emigrants. A year before the massacre, Muhammad had sent into exile the Banu-al-Nadir, a second Jewish tribe of Medina, and confiscated their land as well. The Jews of Khaybar, a strongly fortified oasis north of Medina, came next. Most of the settlements surrendered in the year 628, and, in order to save their lives, agreed to pay as tribute 50 percent of their yield. Muhammad agreed to this arrangement, most likely because by this time he had come to understand that he had more to gain from such an arrangement than from killing or expelling the Khaybar Jews: he realized that his Bedouin followers possessed neither the knowledge, the skills, nor the will to engage in agricultural labor.

It was in the Medinan period that Muhammad decisively severed his relationship with both Judaism and Christianity. More than earlier his self-understanding defined him as a prophet sent to the Arabs, which meant that all the institutions of the new religion ought to be Arabianized so as to appeal to the latent Arabian national sentiment. This was the apparent motive behind the substitution of Friday for the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths; for the adhan (the call from the minaret) in place of trumpets and gongs; for Ramadan as a definite month of fasting; for Mecca as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer) instead of Jerusalem; for the pilgrimage to the Kaaba; and for sanctioning the kissing of the Black Stone, a pre-Islamic fetish. In sum, Muhammad’s Arabianization of Islam was accomplished by retaining virtually all of the key elements of the old faith and by infusing these elements with new meaning – a meaning that would not only continue to resonate with the ethnic sentiments of the Bedouin, but create an inter-tribal “group feeling” in Ibn Khaldun’s sense.

Muhammad’s “group feeling” or solidarity with his own tribe never waned. On the contrary, it remained strong and intense in spite of their treatment of him and his followers. He had left Mecca and his tribe as a prophet without honor. But now that he was an armed prophet, he was determined to regain his honor with the Quraysh. His attachment to his tribe is so great that he eventually places them in positions of leadership and privilege in his militant Islamic polity. In the year 628 Muhammad deliberately led a small group of some 200 followers – so as not to appear intent upon aggression – to a settlement, al-Hudaybiya, nine miles from Mecca, where he exacted a pact from the Meccans in which they and the Muslims were to be treated on equal terms. This treaty brought to an end the war with his own people, the Quraysh. Members of his tribe, including several who had been the Prophet’s bitter opponents, were recruited to his cause. Most notable were Khalid ibn-al-Walid and Amr ibn-al-As, who became the two “mighty swords” of militant Islam. In January 630, the murder of a Muslim by a Meccan in what appears to have been a personal quarrel, served as casus belli for the final attack and conquest of Mecca. Entering its sanctuary, Muhammad smashed the hundreds of idols and exclaimed that “truth has come and falsehood has vanished” (Hitti, 118; Quran 17: 83).

Another sign of the affection Muhammad felt for his tribe, is the magnanimity with which he treated the people. Scholars propose that it was at this time that Muhammad declared the environs of the Kaaba as haram (sacred), and dictated the passage in Sura 9: 28: “O Believers! Only those who join gods with God are unclean! Let them not, therefore, after this … year, come near the sacred Temple.” This verse was evidently intended to forbid only polytheists from approaching the Kaaba during the annual pilgrimage, but the verse was later interpreted as prohibiting all non-Muslims from approaching the sacred shrine.

In 631, Muhammad’s forces were numerous and strong enough for him to station a garrison as far north as Tabuk on the frontier of the Ghassanids, and without a single military engagement to conclude peace treaties with the Christian chief of Aqaba and the Jewish tribes of the oases to the south. The Jews and the Christians were now taken under the protection of the Islamic community in return for a payment of tribute later called jizyah. This became a precedent largely followed by the Caliphs. It was also in the years 630–1 that delegations came even from great distances to offer allegiance to the Prophet who had now become a prince. Tribes joined largely out of material considerations – the allure of booty – and the extent of their religious conviction was demonstrated by a brief verbal profession of faith and a payment of zakah (poor tax). Arabia, which had never before bowed to the will of one man, appeared now willing to be ruled by Muhammad and incorporated into his political and religious movement.

Ten years after the Hijra, Muhammad, at the head of the annual pilgrimage, entered Mecca, his new religious capital, peacefully. Three months after his return to Medina, he became ill and, complaining of a headache, died (June 8, 632). Scholars agree that even in the height of his glory, Muhammad had led a modest and unpretentious life. He was often seen mending his own clothes, and he stayed at all times within the reach of his people.

The new community of Emigrants and Supporters that Muhammad had established in Medina was the first attempt in the history of Arabia at a social organization based on religion rather than on kinship. In his last sermon, Muhammad enjoined his followers to take these words to heart, that every Muslim is a brother to every other Muslim. As Hitti observes,

thus by one stroke the most vital bond of Arab relationship, that of tribal kinship, was replaced by a new bond, that of faith; a sort of Pax Islamica was instituted for Arabia … Its mosque was its public forum and military drill ground as well as its place of common worship. The leader in prayer, the Imam, was also to be commander-in-chief of the army of the faithful, who were enjoined to protect one another against the entire world. All Arabians who remained heathen were outside the pale, almost outlaws. Islam cancelled the past. Wine and gambling – next to women the two indulgences dearest to the Arabian heart – were abolished in one verse [Quran 5: 92] … (Hitti, 120–1).4

In this brief overview, much of importance has been left unsaid. So we need to start again and address key questions, problems and issues. And to do so most effectively, we need to introduce the great Ibn Khaldun.

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Ibn Khaldun’s Social and Economic Theory

Bedouins and Sedentary Peoples

For Ibn Khaldun, Bedouins and sedentary peoples are what he calls “natural groups,” by which he means socio-economically determined groups.1 The differences of condition among people are largely the result of the different ways in which they make their living. Social organization enables them to cooperate, starting with the provision of the basic necessities of life. From the earliest periods of history, some people were able to adopt agriculture – the cultivation of vegetables and grains – as their way of making a living, while others adopted animal husbandry, the raising of sheep, goats, bees, and silkworms for breeding and for their products. Those who live by animal husbandry cannot avoid the call of the desert. Their way of life seldom takes them beyond the bare subsistence level. If and when they do produce surpluses, they use them to build large houses and towns for their protection. This brings with it comfort and ease and the development of luxurious customs. They thus become sedentary, the inhabitants of cities, some adopting crafts as their way of making a living, others choosing commerce. They therefore earn more and live more comfortably than Bedouins.

In contrast to sedentary peoples, the Arabs2 use tents of hair and wool, or houses of wood, clay or stone, and provide themselves with the other bare necessities of life: food, shade, and shelter, and nothing beyond that. All this was true of the Arabs of pre-Islamic Arabia. Those who cultivate grain and practice agriculture are bound to remain stationary, settling in small communities and villages. In early history they were predominantly non-Arabs. Those who raise sheep, goats, and cattle are frequently on the move, seeking pasture and water for their animals. They go not deep into the desert because good pastures are rare there. But those who make their living by raising camels, as did the Arabs of the Hijaz (the region about Mecca and