I want to write briefly about some of the very minor incidents that happened in the Medina Muslims vs. Mecca war. They’re important because they set up a context for understanding decisions that were made. In a war, emotions don’t start out running high, but with every death, they run higher. Arabia was a society that based its justice on the family’s right to hunt down and kill a killer. They had a second tradition, paying a heavy fine to stop the feud, called a “blood wite” or, in Anglo-Saxon, the wergild. But that was not relevant during a battle, where blood was going to be shed. So after a few battles, men on both sides had strong feelings of vengeance.
In the first incident, the Muslims had sent an assassin to kill a desert chief who was especially hostile to them. Looking for revenge, some men of that tribe came upon six Muslims who were giving religious instruction to some neighboring tribes, and in the fighting, they killed all but two of them. The two captives were sold to the Quraysh tribe in Mecca, both purchased as objects of vengeance. In Mecca, they executed both men in public, in the one case by giving battle-orphan boys spears and saying “go get ’em.”
In the second incident, Muhammad sent 40 men to instruct the Bani Amir tribe in Islamic principles, and they ended up dead. A chief of the Bani Amir had promised them protection, but nobody realized that this chief’s power was disputed, so one of his rivals killed one of the Muslims. The rest of the tribe didn’t want to get involved, so the rival sent word to an enemy tribe and asked them to do it, and they massacred the rest. Two of the Muslims in the party were away from their camp, and returned to find the scene of slaughter. One was killed in subsequent combat, while the other was interviewed and set free. On his way home, he killed two random Bani Amir men, since that tribe had started it.
Muhammad did not demand vengeance for the slain Muslims, because he considered them martyrs for Allah. One of the dead men had puzzled his killer by calling out something like “I win, by God!” when the spear ran him through. The Muslims had a very literal sense that the spirit was immediately carried away by angels to a better place, so that was a win. But the loss of 40 leading disciples of the Prophet all at once must still have left a real hole in the community. Their culture mandated vengeance which their new religion did not allow them to take.
But then Muhammad went further: because those last two men had been killed by mistake, he wanted to pay blood-wite to the Bani Amir tribe, to stop the vengeance cycle. This meant levying a tax among the people of Medina to come up with a significant payment. He decided, moreover, that one of the Jewish tribes had ties to the Bani Amir, so they should contribute to the payment. It was time to pay a formal call to their fortress: and that brings us to the next topic: the Jews of Medina.
- Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Meraj Mohiuddin and Sherman Jackson.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings.