The aftermath of the first Battle of Badr has many details and incidents that show just how revolutionary Muhammad’s new way was. His message was one of radical individualism pitted against the old systems of clan solidarity and social class. Every person had to submit to Allah himself; the same surah that says there is no compulsion in religion also says that on the day of judgment, your soul won’t have a lawyer or a friend to help out. Nor would the old traditional ways, the sunnah, be enough any more. Leaving Mecca at all had been a radical statement of tearing free from the clan system, and the choice to fight at Badr even more so.
Umar, one of the men closest to Muhammad and later a Caliph, lobbied for the captives to be executed, not ransomed. He reasoned that radically cutting ties with their clans should be pushed to the limit: let each man execute his brother, uncle, or father. This tells us a lot about Umar, of course. He was a warrior at base; he always chose the most aggressive, lethal way of solving things, and as Caliph he would lead the wave of rapid military conquest. But Muhammad and Abu Bakr overruled Umar, choosing to host the captives in Medina until they were ransomed. Each close relative was responsible for negotiating the ransom price with the other family members in Mecca. That, alone, was a gross violation of Arab clan values.
The dilemmas began in the Prophet’s own family. Dilemma #1: his second wife, Saudah, found her cousin as a captive with his hands tied to his neck. She was convulsed with grief and cried out that it was better if he had died in battle than to be a captive. For a moment, she was on the Meccans’ side, because she reacted mainly as a kinswoman and cousin. But Muhammad heard her, and he remined her not to cause trouble for the Muslims by siding with their enemies.
Dilemma #2: Muhammad’s uncle Abbas was a captive. They had always been on excellent terms, and Abbas’s wife was an early Muslim convert. Further, the men of Medina viewed Abbas (like Muhammad) as a Medinan through his grandmother, so they were in favor of just letting him go. But in a clear break with clan custom, Muhammad insisted that Abbas must ransom himself and several others. Abbas claimed poverty, but his nephew repeated back to him a private conversation Abbas had had with his wife, laying out who would inherit what, if he died at Badr. Abbas was shocked. How could Muhammad know what he had said? On the spot, he recited the creed, saying that Muhammad was Allah’s prophet. He also chose to pay the ransoms, now as a donation since he was no longer a hostage but a Muslim!
Dilemma #3: Muhammad’s oldest daughter’s husband was also a captive. Of course she was a Muslim, but he was not, so he had not moved to Medina, and he had turned out for his clan’s war roster. When daughter Zaynab sent an emissary with ransom money, she included an onyx necklace that Khadijah had given her as a wedding gift. It had the intended effect: her father was aghast at seeing his dead wife’s necklace in the pay-off packet. He wanted these ties to mean nothing, but in this case, it was too hard. Muhammad stepped away from the negotiation and his son-in-law was just sent home for free, but with an agreement to send his wife and child to Medina.
It was a marital separation. Muhammad liked his son-in-law Abu al-As, but since the time they had been married, he had received a revelation that forbade believers to be married to unbelievers. This new rule was another point of radical individualism: the wife was not the property of the husband, she was an independent moral agent who could profess faith and step away from her family. Zaynab and her little daughter came to Medina, and although the family was reunited when Abu al-As converted, the separation lasted four years, which may have looked like forever.
The disruption of family ties comes out also in the story of how Muhammad’s youngest daughter Fatimah came to marry his adopted son/cousin Ali. The match was the Prophet’s idea, perhaps sentimentally viewing the pair as a younger replication of himself and Khadijah. Ali, however, was reluctant to be married, because he was very poor. But why was Ali poor? We can brush right past that detail, but in fact Ali was the youngest son of Abu Talib, a chief of the mercantile Quraysh.
Abu Talib’s fortunes had waned, but surely when he died, he left something? It appears that only Abu Talib’s oldest sons inherited. A revelation had forbidden believers to inherit from unbelievers, and both of the younger sons were among the first converts. At least, that’s the Sunni version; the Shi’ite version has Abu Talib confessing faith privately, so the rule against inheriting from an unbeliever would not apply. Ali was definitely poor, so Shi’ites may believe that Ali gave his possessions away, as Abu Bakr had done. In any case, the revelation had disrupted family inheritance: and perhaps even in the Prophet’s own family.
Further, when Fatimah and Ali were married, they lived in poverty. Fatimah ground their wheat with a hand-operated grindstone, and Ali hired himself out as a water-carrier, back-breaking work for low pay. A hadith tells us that they were exhausted and asked Muhammad for assistance, specifically a servant to help Fatimah with the hard work. As ruler of Medina, Muhammad was receiving one-fifth of all caravan-raiding spoils, and the same fraction of the battle spoils, as Arabian chiefs had always taken one-quarter of these things. But Muhammad viewed it as income to the faith, not his personal wealth. He used it for increasing defense capability and supporting the poor. A growing number of refugees and beggars lived in the courtyard of the mosque, supported primarily by Muhammad’s household. He told Ali and Fatimah that as long as there were poor to support, he would give them nothing. He recommended that they strengthen their wills by giving thanks to Allah many times each day.
It’s a staggering break from Arab custom for the chieftain’s daughter to live in poverty with blisters on her hands. What about a dowry, such as the older sisters certainly had? Shouldn’t Fatimah have had some camels to help carry water, at least? But in leaving Mecca, Muhammad may have walked away from Khadijah’s wealth. This may be one reason that the younger daughters stayed home, unmarried, for a number of years; Martin Lings says Fatimah was 20 when she married Ali, whereas the older girls had been married much younger. (Lings, 167) These two may not have had dowries. The second daughter, Ruqayyah, had just died from an illness, leaving Uthman a widower. Though still grieving, Uthman accepted Muhammad’s offer of Ruqayyah’s sister Umm Kulthum. In some ways, one dowry stood for both sisters, and Uthman had his own wealth. This left Fatimah as uniquely ungifted, nor was any of the community’s wealth passed to her.
It’s in these details that we really see just how revolutionary Muhammad’s new way was. In a society that based customs on the sunnah of the tribe’s patriarch, he was asking people to conceive of themselves as individuals with a primary allegiance to an idea. In America, we believe that immigrants become Americans by understanding and loving the same ideals. Back in the 7th century, Muhammad had a notion very much like that. He wanted to set up a theocracy in which people became citizens by professing a simple creed and adopting a handful of daily customs. He wanted that theocracy to be sincere: that citizens would truly see each other as family, forsaking prior family, and that the ruler would truly be Allah, not himself. And in this new society, new customs would be needed, however radical or difficult they might seem.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings.