The Mothers of the Faithful

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Ruth

Muhammad acquired six new wives during this time. After the Banu Qurayza Jews were executed or expelled, he took the chief’s daughter Rayhanah as a captive, and she became his servant. That meant concubine, but some narratives say that she entered Islam and became a full wife. Next, on that expedition in which A’isha’s necklace was lost, Juwayriyah was the beautiful daughter of the conquered Bedouin chief. A captive, she asked Muhammad what her ransom would be, and he immediately asked her to marry him. This exchange took place in A’isha’s tent, as told by her.

Then, after Khaybar’s conquest, there was the widow of the executed treasure-hiding chief. Her name was Safiyyah, and she was 17. She had been born in Medina. Now, she converted to Islam and agreed to become Muhammad’s wife. Safiyyah apparently brought some jewels along to use as gifts for the other wives to warm their reception of her. Back in Medina, the last of the Muslims from Abyssinia arrived home. With them came Umm Habibah, the widow who had been married by proxy to the Prophet while still in Abyssinia. She, too, moved into the house.

A year after the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, Muhammad made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and this time the treaty allowed him to enter the city and circle the Ka’abah. There, a Meccan woman (who was related to him in a dozen ways that I can’t keep track of) suggested marriage. Maymunah came home with Muhammad as his last wife.

Let’s review the total number and names of living wives at this point: Saudah, A’ishah, Hafsah, Zaynab, Umm Salamah, Rayhanah, Juwayriyah, Safiyyah, Umm Habibah, and Maymunah. Saudah was the only one among them who had never been considered a beauty and was now middle-aged. Umm Habibah and perhaps Zaynab were also young middle-aged, but both were known as beauties. The other women were under 30 and renowned for beauty. Umm Salamah and Umm Habibah were mothers, and Umm Salamah’s children were young, but we never hear about their kids. Did they live with their father’s clans, or were they communally looked after and just didn’t make it into hadiths? Ten wives is a very crowded household. The wives put their time into grinding wheat by hand, doing charitable work for the poor, and watching each other.

After Khaybar, so much wealth in dates came home to Medina that the family’s standard of living finally went up. By A’isha’s stories of life with the Prophet, each of them had a very small room with only a stone slab as a bed. Her room was so small, she said, that when the Prophet stood and knelt in his prayers, she could only stretch her legs out when he was standing. Until the Khaybar wealth, she said, she had never known what it was to eat dates until she was full. Now all of the wives wanted gifts and attention from Muhammad. When each got something, the others wanted more. They formed cliques: A’isha, Hafsah and Safiyyah, against all the rest.

Once, the wives asked Fatimah to intervene in a growing problem. The Prophet had a schedule, spending one night with each wife on rotation. People would bring gifts (and requests) to the Prophet as judge/ruler, and many had begun waiting until A’isha Day because Muhammad was in the most genial, generous mood then. I suppose this meant that A’isha got to keep the gift, while the wives outside her clique got nothing. One wife complained to Muhammad, but he declined to announce for everyone to stop favoring A’isha Day. He was fair to them all, was he supposed to police the rest of the community to be fair, too? So the wives asked Fatimah to try it. But when she shyly presented the complaint to her father, Muhammad just asked her, “Don’t you love whom I love?” Fatimah did not love A’isha, but when it was put this way, what could she say? And so things went on.

But A’isha too suffered much jealousy, since the others had all been brides before, with weddings and finery, but she had not. And with each beautiful wife, she lost more of her original status as “the young, pretty one.” A’isha later told people that the wife she was truly jealous of was the late Khadijah. Khadijah had had her husband’s full attention for years, raising children with him. He still spoke of her as the best of women. On one occasion, A’isha asked him why he cared for the memory of that old toothless woman when God had given him a better one (herself!), but Muhammad gave her a stinging answer: well at least Khadijah had babies.

The last straw for the wives came when the Egyptian ruler’s gift arrived, including the Coptic Christian slave girl Maria. The wives, led by A’isha and Hafsah, complained vocally that this was too much. Muhammad placed Maria in a separate building and visited her there, but finally, he stopped going home. Weeks passed. Rumors began to circulate: had he really divorced all of those women? The wives began to worry. Umar told his daughter Hafsah that she’d brought the trouble on her own head, yelling at Muhammad constantly. If she were divorced, she’d get little sympathy from him. Hafsah and the other women had little or no life outside their status as the Prophet’s wife. If he left them, it would mean the loss of everything.

After a month, Muhammad came back. He viewed the problem as mostly caused by the new wealth from Khaybar: the women were tired of the austerity he made them live in. He had received a revelation telling him to put a choice to each wife: she was free to go and marry another man, with his blessing. There, she would have more wealth. But if she chose Allah, His Messenger, and Paradise, she had to stop complaining. Every wife chose to stay. Whether they stopped complaining is left to our imagination.

But they were now the full set of women who would be known, after his death, as the Mothers of the Faithful. Having no children themselves, they were to consider all of the Muslims as their children, and as widows, they would never remarry. And they were set apart from other Muslim women by wearing a veil, to fulfill the requirement that believers speak to them only through a curtain. The most painful time for them came when, a year later, Maria the Egyptian girl gave birth to a son, an honor denied to the other wives. Islamic history might have been very different if this child, Ibrahim, had grown up, but like so many children he died as a toddler, apparently from an infectious disease.

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Khaybar, the last Jewish fortress

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Ruth

The main Jewish tribes of Medina had left, but various Jewish individuals and families still lived there. Many of the Jews had moved to Khaybar, a much larger town to the north. It may have been mostly Jewish; it certainly had defensive walls and fortresses. From this base, some of the Jews had joined the attack on Medina (which was fended off by the trench). The Islamic state of Medina was also tacitly threatened by the Bedouin tribes of Ghatafan, who lived near Khaybar and were allied with it.

The trigger for open war came when Muhammad and those around him believed that he had been oppressed by a curse put on him by a Jewish magician in Medina. (His name, given as Labid, is recognizable as the Hebrew word lapid which means torch.) He confessed to receiving a bribe from Jews in Khaybar so that he would tie 11 knots in a strand of Muhammad’s hair and hide it in a well, with hostile spells woven into the knots. Two short surahs of the Quran are lines to say to reverse such spells; Ali spoke them over the well, and then the well was filled in. In the 7th century, of course, nobody doubted that this was all possible, so it was considered entirely factual.

An attempt on a ruler’s life was considered a fair casus belli. Muhammad told the Muslims that they would now attack Khaybar, but only those who had gone along on the pilgrimage that ended at Hudaybiyah were allowed to go. He was sure of victory and great wealth, and wanted only those of true faith to be rewarded. It probably took a few weeks to get supplies; word eventually got around to Mecca and Khaybar. The Jews of Khaybar offered their Ghatafan neighbors half of their date harvest to come join them in defense.

Khaybar’s fortresses were separated by clan, as they had been in Medina, though they may have been within sight of each other. In order to defend themselves, they would need to join the defense of each fortress with all of their men, whose number is given as 10,000 in Muslim sources. Muhammad’s army had fewer than 1500. But the Jewish clans had quarreled at times, and when the Muslims singled out the weakest fortress to besiege, the others stayed in their own fortresses. The defenders used bows and arrows to wound many of the besiegers, but otherwise it was a stalemate for about a week.

Everything changed when a spy was caught inside the Muslim camp. Soon the Muslim leadership knew which fortresses would be easiest to take, and which ones had siege engines stored inside, from times when they had besieged each other. After that, the Muslims took each fortress one by one, taking its weapons and catapults for the next assault. The best fortress was high on a rock, with sheer cliffs and walls on all sides, and it had an underground stream inside the walls. But here, too, someone informed the Muslims where they could dig down and divert the stream so that the fortress would be thirsted out. I’m skipping past the battles occasioned by each fortress; this particular battle was deadly.

The Bedouin Ghatafan tribes had indeed set out to relieve the sieges, but they heard a voice crying out, warning them to look after their people, so they returned home. Khaybar’s leaders were left to wonder if allies would ever arrive. The last fortress held out for two weeks, but finally gave up. This last fortress had many of the Bani Nadir Jews from Medina, so Muhammad felt he had a special right to their wealth. He negotiated a truce in which all of the property went to the Muslims, but anyone who tried to hide some of his property would also be executed. As the treasure was rounded up, it turned out that the leader of the fortress was hiding some, telling Muhammad that they had sold it to buy weapons. When the treasure was discovered, he and his kin were executed.

In the final surrender, the Jews of Khaybar offered a tribute deal. They would stay on farming their oasis, but they would send half their produce to Medina. A Jewish settlement farther to the north heard of this treaty and sent word to Muhammad, offering half their produce if he would not attack them at all. Another Jewish settlement to the west also surrendered on those terms. Effectively, all of this area became part of the Medinan Islamic state.

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Letters of Foreign Policy

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Ruth

Medina under Muhammad had become a nascent Islamic city-state, with growing outside territories and alliances around coastal and central Arabia. But Muhammad felt that he had been given a vision of an even larger Islamic state that included Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Persia. Now, with formal peace with Mecca, he had time to think about his next steps.

He ended up writing several letters to nearby rulers. The letters were written by Muslim scribes within his community on parchment in Arabic, with an assumption that someone could translate them on the other end. And, we might note, the assumption that the ruler at the other end would take it seriously. Muhammad could assume that he’d be taken seriously because he knew how many caravans his Muslim raiders had disrupted, and that’s news that gets back to places like Persia and Egypt. All of the current rulers kept an eye out for new rising powers. Receiving a letter from one of them? Definitely a thing to notice.

His first letter was written as one ruler to another in a friendly way. There were still a few Muslims in Abyssinia, and it was time for them to come home. His letter to the king, the Negus, asked him to officiate a proxy marriage between Muhammad and a Muslim widow known as Umm Habibah. Umm Habibah’s father was one of their greatest enemies in Mecca, but she had been an early convert. The Negus did as Muhammad asked, so that when Umm Habibah traveled back with the others, she was legally the Prophet’s wife. (I wonder if this changed her travel conditions, since men related to Muhammad were now related to her and could escort her more easily.)

The other letters were formal challenges to rulers with whom Muhammad had no previous dealing. He sent them to:

  • Emperor Heraclius in Constantinople
  • Emperor Khosroes II in Ctesiphon (Persia)
  • the Roman-appointed governor of Egypt, Mukawkis
  • the Arabic king/governor of Syria, Harith Ghassani (of the Ghassani tribe that had moved north after the Ma’rib Dam failed)
  • the kings/governors of Oman and Bahrain, both under the dominion of Persia

The letters declared their duty to submit to Allah by entering Islam. If they would do so, he would reward them by appointing each of them to keep ruling in that place. If they refused, Islam would conquer their lands at some point.

Egypt’s ruler sent back an evasive reply, but he included a gift as from one ruler to another. It included a slave girl, and I’ll touch back on her later. Emperor Heraclius, according to Muslim sources, was so impressed with Muhammad that he privately believed in Islam. But he had won an important battle against Persia in 627, so he had no reason to think he needed to take an outside threat seriously.

Persia’s experience was interesting, because first the Emperor Khosrau II tore up his letter. Then he sent his Viceroy in Yemen a request to find out who Muhammad was and arrest him. An embassy party set off for Medina, arriving several weeks after the original letters had gone out. Muhammad told the envoys that during the night, the angel Gabriel/Jibril had informed him that the Emperor’s son had seized power in a palace coup. The old Emperor, who had torn up the letter, was dead. They were to understand this a sign that soon Islam would overthrow the Persians in general. The envoys returned and told the Viceroy. The following day, a ship arrived from Persia with the news that yes, they had a new emperor: Kavad II. (more about him later) Badhan, the Viceroy, was shocked that the message proved to be true. He immediately entered Islam, as did the men around him and the envoys themselves. When this message came back to Muhammad, he re-appointed Badhan to be the Muslim ruler of Yemen.

And in that way, without any fighting, the Islamic state at Medina added Yemen to its territory. I could not find specific details, but apparently Oman’s king also chose to enter Islam at this time. It’s not immediately obvious to us, but it was to them: submission to Islam included a duty to send tribute to Medina instead of Persia. Entering Islam was a blend of personal conversion—often accompanied by a gift to the person or church who was the instrument of conversion—-and political surrender, which came with a stipulation for taxes/tribute.

This combination of faith and political duty was later to cause some problems in Arabia, but at this early point, it seems to have been accepted. They believed that Muhammad was a real Prophet who knew the future and the distant present, so there was no way to defend against him. Surrender and tribute were cheaper in the long run. Paying tribute to Medina instead of Persia would mean rebellion against Persia, so they were also trusting that Muhammad would indeed handle that as promised.

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Peace Treaty with Mecca

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Ruth

In 628, a year after the Battle of the Trench, Muhammad dreamed that he entered the Ka’abah with a pilgrim’s shaved head. Based on this dream, he and a group of companions decided to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, although it was not the official Hajj time to do so. They called a religious trip to Mecca at any other time the lesser pilgrimage or in Arabic, umrah. They would take along a large herd of 70 camels to be sacrificed, and at the start of the trip, the camels would be dedicated and decorated with garlands. Within Mecca, the camels would be sacrificed, and they would shave their heads (or cut some of their hair) and walk around the Ka’abah seven times.

The problem was that although Mecca hosted pilgrim groups like this often, they were specifically at war with Muhammad. What would they do when the pilgrim group arrived? Muhammad insisted on not going armed, apart from basic daily-wear swords, but no real war gear. They were to wear the simple robe of a pilgrim and just act as if it were all normal. The pilgrim’s robe was made of two pieces of cloth, without any stitching, I suppose just tucked around the body with folds or a belt. When the Muslims heard that Mecca had sent a body of cavalry to stop them, they chose a different road. And so they came near to Mecca.

They stopped at a place just outside Mecca called Hudaybiyah, because there Muhammad’s camel stopped walking and knelt for him to dismount. He had used this method to choose his house in Medina, too. The Bedouin tribes in the area were friendly; they provided animals to eat, and they took a message into the city for him. The Prophet told the men of Quraysh that while he was prepared to fight them, he was also prepared to wait outside the city as long as they liked. This was a serious concession and reassured them that it was not an invasion.

The Quraysh leaders in the city deliberated what to do. They couldn’t attack a pilgrim party without the whole region being scandalized, but neither could they stand for everyone to see their enemy walking around the Ka’abah. At last, they invited a Muslim to come in as an envoy, to talk. Muhammad chose to send Uthman, the early convert from Mecca’s powerful Umayyad clan. Both sides were very uneasy. The pilgrims felt that at any time, a surprise attack might come from the city, and days went by with no word from Uthman. Had even his status been insufficient to protect him?

One day Muhammad called them to where he sat under an acacia tree. He asked them to swear personal allegiance to him, one by one. Most of them felt that it was the prelude to a battle, and as they were unarmed, they knew it wouldn’t go well. Muslim records say that about 1400 people, all men except for three women, were present to make this oath. It is known as the Pledge of Ridwan, or the Pledge of the Tree. The solemn drama of it may have impressed the Quraysh leaders with their seriousness.

In the end, a small party of Quraysh negotiated a treaty with Muhammad, and he signed it on behalf of all. He was unusually compliant with Mecca’s demands, for example, he referred to himself as the Messenger of God, but when they objected, he told the scribe to rewrite it as “son of Abd Allah.” The treaty obliged the Muslims to return to Medina without entering the city or seeing the Ka’abah, which was maddening to the men who had just walked 100 desert miles. Some of them were angry, and they let Muhammad know. Other terms made them madder, because the treaty provided that if any sons of Mecca ran off to Medina to become Muslims without their father’s permission, and Mecca sent a messenger to bring them home, Muhammad would see to it that they went. But on the other hand, disaffected Medinans who took refugee at Mecca would not be sent home!

But the meat of the treaty was a ten year truce. That itself was worth a great deal, and time showed its value. Both Medina and Mecca would be free to keep on making alliances, so Muhammad could use the truce period to reach out into any part of Arabia. And the following year, Muslims could come to Mecca on pilgrimage, just not right now. Of course, the treaty also provided that any deceit or treachery would void the agreement. Could it last ten years?

While the Muslims were still camped at Hudaybiyah, their first Meccan runaway showed up in chains. His father was the lead negotiator of the truce on the Meccan side, but his older brother was already a Muslim and was among the pilgrims! Son and father faced each other, each wanting to claim the younger brother. Suhayl, the father, demanded Muhammad fulfill the truce’s terms since it had just been signed, and Muhammad agreed. He told the younger brother to be patient and trust God that it wouldn’t be long until he would have permission to join them.

The Muslims couldn’t believe it when they saw Suhayl’s son sent back. Umar, the Companion who always advocated for violence, grew very angry. He shouted at Muhammad that he was wrong to agree to all of their enemies’ demands. He had no intention of going home without the pilgrimage! Nothing came of his outburst and later he was ashamed. It’s worth noting because it’s part of Umar’s behavior pattern, and as a later Caliph he shaped Muslim history.

When the Meccan men went back into the city, the Prophet told his band to sacrifice the camels and shave their heads as if they had actually made it to the Ka’abah. They threw their cut hair onto a tree, and a wind came to carry it toward Mecca. As they returned, Muhammad received a new surah that told him the trip had been completely successful and should be counted as a victory.

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A’isha on Trial

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Ruth

Pagan Mecca and Muslim Medina continued to put on shows of strength and seek out alliances that would hurt the other. One of the most significant events in Muhammad’s family happened when he had led a contingent to the coast of the Red Sea to make a new treaty. He usually took a wife along on trips, sometimes two; A’isha traveled along on this trip. By Sunni calculations, she was 14 by now (though by Shi’ite estimates, she was more like 21). And most famously, she chose to bring along a necklace that she prized.

On the return trip, A’isha lost her necklace and got the whole caravan to pause while she looked. It turned out that her camel had lain down on it. Her father scolded her for making such a fuss, so the next day, when they were getting ready to move on and again she could not find her necklace, she said nothing. On this second occasion, she had walked off to use a bush as a toilet, and she thought perhaps the string had broken there. Slipping from her curtained howdah, she ran back to find the exact bush and pick up the scattered beads. Her maid didn’t see her go, so when the signal came for the camels to start, there was nobody to tell them to wait. They assumed that silence in her howdah meant she napped the whole way.

But A’isha had returned with her beads to find the caravan gone. Her behavior seems strange: instead of walking after them, she chose to lie down under a tree and wait. Lesley Hazelton, in After the Prophet, chalks it up to teenage “entitled” behavior. A Bedouin girl would have walked quickly to catch up, but A’isha was a city girl who looked down on those ways. She assumed that her maid would notice her absence, but the hours passed with no messenger to come back for her. A young man on a camel did arrive at the oasis, though. He was of their party, but he had been delayed starting out. Although A’isha put on her hijab as soon as she woke up, he had seen her face in the non-veiling past and recognized her. He put her on his camel while he walked, and they caught up with the caravan some time after dark.

Back in Medina, A’isha went to stay with her parents for a while, because she was sick. During those weeks, gossip went around the city to the effect that A’isha had committed adultery with the young man. This accusation threw the whole family into crisis. The long and the short of it was that after about four weeks, Muhammad had a revelation that spoke to the point, saying A’isha was innocent and the gossipers who spread libel should be punished.

But during those weeks, at least one thing of lasting significance happened. When Muhammad asked Ali, his cousin/adopted son, what to do, Ali advised him to divorce A’isha and find another wife. He pointed out that it wasn’t hard to find other women like her. A’isha heard of Ali’s harsh, unforgiving advice, and she never forgave him. In later years, this came to matter a great deal.

The revelation that said A’isha was innocent made the point that her accusers did not present four witnesses, which would have established their point. This verse, part of Surah an-Noor, set up the standard of four witnesses to establish an allegation of sexual impropriety. The new standard made it very difficult, almost impossible, to convict someone of adultery, unless they confessed. This protected women from hostile gossip attacks. But many years later, in our time, sometimes when girls claim they were raped, they are challenged to produce four witnesses. Since they can’t, the rapist goes free. Worse, the revelation that declared A’isha innocent also said that the people who spread the evil gossip should receive the punishment that the accused might have gotten. In A’isha’s case, three people were flogged. But in our current times, some girls who say they were raped also end up flogged for gossip. So it’s maybe not the best evidentiary standard, at least not as the only rule.

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The Third Jewish Tribe of Medina

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Ruth

The first order of business when it was clear that the besieging army had left was to confront the large Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah, whose leader had torn up their treaty with Muhammad. I came to this story with the idea that the (spoiler alert) execution of its men was about refusing to give up their faith. It was, and it wasn’t. There are several details of the story that show a mindset that Americans can’t empathize with; it’s a story from another place and time.

As soon as the Muslims withdrew from the trench, Muhammad called them to start a siege of the Jewish fortress. I wish we knew how large these fortresses were, but I think there are no archeological remains. It was large enough that over a thousand people could live inside, withdrawing from the village houses many of them normally lived in. The siege lasted for about three weeks, and then the fortress ran out of food.

The Jewish leaders inside asked one of their former Arab allies to come in for a consultation. His name was Abu Lubabah. They asked him if Muhammad would probably lay on them the same doom as on the other Jewish tribes: banishment with what they could carry. Abu Lubabah knew that this time it was different, since their betrayal had made defending the trench much harder and might have resulted in deaths. Muhammad was probably going to declare the death penalty for treachery. But Abu Lubabah also knew that Muhammad would prefer that he tell them to surrender immediately. So he split the difference: he advised them to surrender, while making a gesture of throats being cut, to show the danger.

This is one of the puzzling, foreign-at-least-to-my-mind details. Abu Lubabah felt that he, too, had now betrayed the Prophet. He was overwhelmed with guilt and went to the mosque, where he tied himself to a pillar. He stayed there all day for two weeks, until Muhammad came to speak revelatory verses over him, assuring him of pardon and suggesting a large charitable donation to complete his repentance.

I don’t get it. All he had done was to tell the doomed men the truth. But this brings up another story: back when the Bani Nadir Jews had not yet been evicted, there was a man living in their fortress who had been writing poetry of sarcasm and satire against the Muslims and also passing military information to the Quraysh. Muhammad appointed an assassin to take him out. The assassin said, “I cannot get into the fortress to kill him. The only way is to lure him out, and I’ll need to deceive him. I know that Allah hates lies.” But Muhammad assured him that “war is deceit.” Once you are in a state of war, lying doesn’t count. And so the poet was assassinated.

Abu Lubabah was sent to do essentially the same thing, but he could not lie to his former friends. He chose his old friends over the Prophet. The Quran had often addressed loyalty problems very clearly: the only right way was to love both Allah and his Messenger more than any friend or family. It’s a very feudal way of defining loyalty, and now very foreign to our minds in a time when we have nation-states and loyalty to ideals, not to leaders.

In any case, the Banu Qurayzah Jews surrendered. As in past cases, there was a negotiation about their fate. The Arab tribe that had previously been their allies begged for mercy. Muhammad suggested that their own chief should make the decision, and they agreed. But their chief decreed execution for the Banu Qurayzah traitors, so that’s what happened. The men were divided from the women and children, who were sold or just appropriated into slavery. (One widow became Muhammad’s servant.) Their property was divided up among the Muslims from Mecca (including their excavating equipment). The execution was carried out by digging mass-grave trenches, then having groups of men sit on the edge, waiting for Ali and others to behead them.

But there was one more twist. About three Jews who chose to convert to Islam were spared. The rest had been aware of this option before their surrender and all during the process, and some of them believed Muhammad was truly a prophet. But all of them said they would not forsake the Torah. One old man who was not executed with them that day asked to be taken to the trenches, the next day, and was beheaded, because he did not want to be separated from his people.

Our modern minds want to separate religion, enemy status, and actual wrongdoing, but they did not separate them. Everyone knew that many of those executed or sold had not taken any hostile action, but they were part of a group who had. The reason conversion would alter things was that Islam’s doctrine stated submission to Allah was more important than any group membership, just as loyalty to the Prophet mattered more than caring about friends. Also, by choosing to identify with the group and die, they accepted collective guilt for the decision made by their chief. It’s all very strange to us.

But were ALL the men executed? The story says they were, but some scholars question that point. The Quran notes the incident in Surah 33, and its wording is equivocal:

And Allah drove back the disbelievers in their rage, totally empty-handed. And Allah spared the believers from fighting. For Allah is All-Powerful, Almighty.

And He brought down those from the People of the Book who supported the enemy alliance from their own strongholds, and cast horror into their hearts. You believers killed some and took others captive.

He has also caused you to take over their lands, homes, and wealth, as well as lands you have not yet set foot on. And Allah is Most Capable of everything. (33: 25-7)

Adil Salahi (Muhammad: Man and Prophet) reasons that some of the details given in the early biography by Ibn Ishaq actually contradict the idea of a mass execution. For example, he says the men were kept in a single house overnight before execution, which is not credible if hundreds of men were involved. Another early historian, Al-Waqidi, says that two of the Jews were sent to each of the tribes of Medina for them to execute, and that doesn’t add up to hundreds either.

Salahi’s conclusion for these and other clues is that the Jews believed to be at fault were executed, and the rest were sent away. Further, the Jews outside Medina were permitted to ransom some of their relatives. The smaller Jewish villages in the Yathrib oasis may have absorbed other Banu Qurayzah Jews. Medina and its farms were not “Jew-free” zones after this event, but the political and military power of the large clans had ended.

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Mecca Attacks: Battle of the Trench

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Ruth

In 627, the eighteenth year since Muhammad’s move to Medina, the Quraysh of Mecca gathered allies to make a full assault on the city of Medina. The first ally to volunteer was the banished Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir. They were now living about 100 miles north of Medina in the walled town of Khaybar. The Banu Nadir actively sought out more confederates for the army, paying a nomadic tribe called the Banu Ghatafan half their harvest to come and join. Some other nomadic tribes joined, including the Kinanah who had emigrated from Yemen at the time of the Marib Dam’s failure. The area around Medina from Khaybar in the north, and along the east where the nomads were, to Mecca in the south, was allied against the Muslims.

As many as 10,000 men with 600 horses marched from several directions to converge on Medina. Friendly nomads warned Muhammad just in time, so that he knew the army was coming with only a week to spare. The Muslims had to decide: given a week, what could they do? Choose a field, and meet them there? Send for their own allied nomads, but could they come in time? Stay in the city, to defend it?

One of the men now living in Medina was an unusual foreigner: Salman al-Farisi was a Persian (which is what al-Farisi means), a former Zoroastrian fire priest. He had traveled widely and lived a number of years as a slave in Medina. He had practiced Islam by himself, as a slave, with only sporadic contact with the other Muslims. At last, Salman had asked Muhammad to help him buy his freedom. He was now fully part of the Muslim community, and they must have recognized that he had linguistic and scientific knowledge from outside their scope.

In this case, Salman proposed that they stay in the city but create a barrier to prevent an effective cavalry charge. Persians, he said, would dig a trench. Since Medina was surrounded by rocky hills and the old lava beds, there were well-defined spaces that would need to be trenched. It was just possible that, given a week and all hands to work, they could get it done.

Salman had worked for the remaining large Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah, and he knew that they owned some excavating equipment. The Muslims borrowed these tools and set everyone to work. The planned trench would seal off the open end of the combination of hills, trees, and lava that surrounded them. It would be over five kilometers long, stretching from hill to hill. It had to be wide enough and deep enough to slow down horses, putting them at a disadvantage to archers and spearmen as they struggled up the other side. One estimate is that it was about 30 feet wide, and 10 to 15 feet deep. Muhammad came out to help dig, and he led the men in singing songs of faith as they worked. Boys helped carry away the dirt in baskets.

There is one story of the digging that is not believable to non-Muslims, but it’s worth telling because it shows the beginning of the idea to unite the Arabian peninsula (and beyond). Down in the ditch, there was a huge boulder that could not be moved or split. Muhammad struck it with three blows, and it split into movable pieces with flashes of light. In these flashes of light, he saw visions that Allah would soon give the Muslims control over the south (Yemen), the north (Syria), and even the east (Persia).

When the Meccan armies arrived, the trench was nearly finished; one place was still only a meter or two wide. The outlying villages had evacuated, taking their supplies into the city, and women and children had been sent into upper rooms of the fortresses. Muhammad and the 3000 fighting men—a few lucky teenage boys had been granted permission to join them—camped across from the trench, ready to defend its length. They pitched tents and built fires.

The Meccans had not expected anything like the trench. They moved up and down it, inspecting it and thinking. One of the Jews from Banu Nadir (i.e. he was an ex-Medina resident) offered to slip inside the city and speak to the Jewish tribe that had lent the Muslims their digging tools. He thought he could persuade them to turn on the Muslims. So he did it, and after some resistance, the leader of the Banu Qurayzah Jews agreed. He ripped up the parchment treaty with Muhammad. What seems to have persuaded him was the sheer size of the Meccan force. They wanted to be on the surviving side, obviously, and it didn’t look like it would be Muhammad’s side. He promised that the Banu Qurayzah would attack Medina from within the defenses. This way the Muslims would need to guard and fight on two fronts, so the trench defense would be weakened.

Then the war just fizzled. The trench was such an effective deterrent that no more than an occasional single horse could get through. The Banu Qurayzah knew that enough men had come back to Medina to patrol the streets that any attack would be a bloodbath, so they never got around to actually making their internal attack. It’s notable in these battles that Arabians seemed averse to bloodbaths, cf. the Meccans after Uhud being deterred by a force one-tenth their size. Arabians liked surprise attacks, quick raids, and overwhelming numbers.

As time went by, Muhammad negotiated with one of the nomadic tribes, offering dates for them to leave, and there were showers of arrows now and then. Then one of the nomad chiefs suddenly quit; he quietly went into Medina’s camp to declare that he was a Muslim now. Muhammad asked him to return just as quietly, as though nothing had happened, and see if he could get the confederation to break apart. So the Bedouin chief went first to the Jews of Medina (the Banu Qurayzah) and suggested to them that the Quraysh planned to sell them out with a separate peace. Then he told something similar about the Jews to the Quraysh.

Additionally, time was passing. The nomads had come to make a quick assault, not to sit around campfires for two weeks. Finally, a fierce storm fell on the valley, with torrents of rain and hurricane-strength wind. Toward dawn, the Meccan leader Abu Sufyan called for an end to the expedition and retreat to their homes.

After the dawn prayer, the Muslims could see the abandoned camp, and they too returned home. There really had been no battle at the Battle of the Trench, and it was over.

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Four Wives and Three Grandchildren

Posted on January 12, 2021 by Ruth

We focus a lot on the most sensational aspects of Muhammad’s marriages: A’isha’s age and the sheer number (8 or 9) of the widows he left at his death. He spent most of his life as an ordinary man with one wife, and even after her death, with A’isha betrothed, he was actually married to the widow Saudah. But during the years of the move to Medina and these battles, he married four more women, two named Zaynab (which was also the name of his oldest daughter, so it gets confusing).

We know that A’isha came to live in his household a short time after the move to Medina. Each time he added a wife, a new room was built onto the house whose courtyard was the mosque. The first addition to Saudah and A’isha was the daughter of his close friend, Umar. Hafsah’s husband was killed in the Battle of Badr, leaving her widowed at 18. Her father offered her hand to his friend Uthman, whose wife Ruqayyah (the Prophet’s daughter) had just died. But Uthman declined and Umar felt snubbed. Muhammad offered a different solution: the next daughter for Uthman, and Hafsah for himself. Hafsah became A’isha’s best friend (and recall that some believe A’isha was about the same age, not actually a child).

The Battle of Uhud left even more widows–and orphans–who needed provision. At this time, Muhammad recited the Quranic verses suggesting marriage up to four wives. Widows and unmarried daughters, now orphans, were sent back to their fathers or brothers, where they were extras in the household. The Muslims were now encouraged to marry as many of them as they could afford. The Prophet set an example by marrying his cousin’s widow, Zaynab. His cousin had been killed in a single combat at Badr. And it was this marriage to Zaynab that opened the opportunity to send missionaries to her tribe (although that turned out badly due to massacres).

This brought the Prophet up to the limit of four wives, but two things changed (I’m not sure which one happened first). Zaynab #1 died less than a year after she married into the family, so that the Prophet now had only three wives. And a further revelation freed Muhammad, individually and specifically, from the rule of four. Because of his unique burdens, he was freed to marry as many as he wanted to.

His next marriage was to another cousin’s widow. We know her as Umm Salamah, which implies she had at least one child already. She was the first widow to raise objections to marrying into Muhammad’s family. Her monogamous marriage had been very close and warm, so she did not think she could handle being a plural wife. But Muhammad persuaded her to trust to Allah to remove the sin of jealousy, and she then agreed. We don’t know how she handled jealousy, but we do know that A’isha got upset. Many of the hadiths come through A’isha, so we have more stories about her than about the others. A’isha felt that this was the first wife to come along who might get Muhammad spending more evenings with her.

There was another new wife during this period, and she was the most controversial. You’ll remember that Muhammad had adopted his teenage slave, Zayd, who was only ten years younger than him. Zayd had married a much older woman at first—this seems to have been a typical “starter marriage” solution for young men without money. He had a son with this first wife, who was by now a teenager. Zayd may have married several more women; in this last case, perhaps just before the Battle of Badr he had married Muhammad’s cousin Zaynab bint Jahsh. We have on record that she did not want to accept this marriage. Part of her objection may have been that Zayd was merely the adopted son, a former slave, and not of the Quraysh. Muhammad may have used the marriage as an object lesson in going against social class customs, since he viewed Zayd as having high standing in Islam. But Zayd and Zaynab were never happy together. The marriage didn’t last more than two years and produced no children.

I’ll cut to the headline: after a divorce, Zaynab married Muhammad himself. And this was a problem, because for 20 years, Zayd had been known as Zayd ibn Muhammad. Marrying across an age gap meant nothing to the Arab culture, since a young woman was honored by being placed in an important older man’s house. But marrying your son’s ex-wife was not cool.

There’s a hadith that seems to report a rumor such that Muhammad came to see Zayd but found Zaynab in a revealing underdress; in his confused attraction, he left without waiting, so that Zayd remarked on it, asking if he wanted her. It doesn’t seem likely; this is an example of a hadith that can’t be trusted. But it does give us a sense of the types of rumors and scandal that rose when he married her. Whoever reported that hadith to al-Bukhari may have been correctly reporting the gossip passed down through five generations.

The Quran directly speaks to Muhammad about this situation. Surah al-Ahzab, number 33, is addressed to Muhammad and tells him (translation is by Dr. Mustafa Khattab, “The Clear Quran”):

Allah does not place two hearts in any person’s chest. Nor does He regard your wives as ˹unlawful for you like˺ your real mothers, ˹even˺ if you say they are.1 Nor does He regard your adopted children as your real children.2 These are only your baseless assertions. But Allah declares the truth, and He ˹alone˺ guides to the ˹Right˺ Way.

Let your adopted children keep their family names. That is more just in the sight of Allah. But if you do not know their fathers, then they are ˹simply˺ your fellow believers and close associates. There is no blame on you for what you do by mistake, but ˹only˺ for what you do intentionally. And Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

The Prophet has a stronger affinity to the believers than they do themselves. And his wives are their mothers. As ordained by Allah, blood relatives are more entitled ˹to inheritance˺ than ˹other˺ believers and immigrants, unless you ˹want to˺ show kindness to your ˹close˺ associates ˹through bequest˺.1 This is decreed in the Record.2 

From that time, Zayd reverted to “ibn Harithah,” his biological father. At this point, he probably didn’t expect to inherit from Muhammad, as he would have done in much earlier years, but now he was specifically excluded.

And Surah 33 had more thoughts addressed to the Prophet’s growing tribe of wives:

O wives of the Prophet! If any of you were to commit a blatant misconduct, the punishment would be doubled for her. And that is easy for Allah.

And whoever of you devoutly obeys Allah and His Messenger and does good, We will grant her double the reward, and We have prepared for her an honourable provision.

O wives of the Prophet! You are not like any other women: if you are mindful ˹of Allah˺, then do not be overly effeminate in speech ˹with men˺ or those with sickness in their hearts may be tempted, but speak in a moderate tone.

Settle in your homes, and do not display yourselves as women did in the days of ˹pre-Islamic˺ ignorance. Establish prayer, pay alms-tax, and obey Allah and His Messenger. Allah only intends to keep ˹the causes of˺ evil away from you and purify you completely, O  members of the ˹Prophet’s˺ family! (33:30-33)

Last, the Surah explicitly tells the believers that Muhammad’s marriage to Zaynab was entirely God’s will:

And ˹remember, O  Prophet,˺ when you said to the one1 for whom Allah has done a favour and you ˹too˺ have done a favour,2 “Keep your wife and fear Allah,” while concealing within yourself what Allah was going to reveal. And ˹so˺ you were considering the people, whereas Allah was more worthy of your consideration. So when Zaid totally lost interest in ˹keeping˺ his wife, We gave her to you in marriage, so that there would be no blame on the believers for marrying the ex-wives of their adopted sons after their divorce. And Allah’s command is totally binding. (33:37)

The social revolution was ongoing: it aimed to take the old sunnah and replace it with a completely new one. The new Muslim sunnah would include remarriage of widows, typically as plural wives, and would cross both age gaps and some previously-important taboo relationships, such as adopted children. Adoption in the sunnah would mean raising a child with love, but not putting the child in line for inheritance.

Another point in the new sunnah arose from this same set of revelations:

O believers! Do not enter the homes of the Prophet without permission ˹and if invited˺ for a meal, do not ˹come too early and˺ linger until the meal is ready. But if you are invited, then enter ˹on time˺. Once you have eaten, then go on your way, and do not stay for casual talk. Such behaviour is truly annoying to the Prophet, yet he is too shy to ask you to leave. But Allah is never shy of the truth. And when you ˹believers˺ ask his wives for something, ask them from behind a barrier. This is purer for your hearts and theirs. And it is not right for you to annoy the Messenger of Allah, nor ever marry his wives after him. This would certainly be a major offence in the sight of Allah. (33:53)

There’s a lot to unpack in this one ayah. But notice the part in which believers must ask the wives from something only from behind a barrier. The verse is talking about coming into someone’s home, so its initial reference is to a curtain in the house, beyond which outsiders were not to pass, which gave the wives more privacy in a house that functioned as a seat of government. However, once the rule was given, it had to be followed out in the street, too. And so Muhammad’s wives began wearing the veil, the hijab (curtain).

When Muhammad had four wives, three of whom were clearly of child-bearing age, at least one of these (Umm Salamah) having proven her ability to bear, the community expected that babies would soon follow. Surely one of these women would bear a son, an “ibn Muhammad” by blood who would not die in infancy. But meanwhile, his daughters by Khadijah were producing some children. The oldest (another Zaynab) had a 3 year old daughter who came to Medina with her when Muhammad separated her from her husband. The child’s name was Umamah, and Muhammad was very fond of her. Once, teasing his wives, he said he would give a necklace to his best girl: and chose little Umamah, doubtless producing tense laughter among the adults.

Next in age to Umamah was Hassan, Fatimah’s son. He was about a year old when his younger brother, Huseyn, was born. Muhammad was very fond of Hassan and Huseyn. One hadith tells of how he let the boys ride on his back, pretending he was their horse. We know that in the distant future, these boys would be as important to Muslim history as their father, Ali. But for now, they were just cute. And everyone expected them to have some little uncles their own age any day, as Muhammad himself had grown up with his same-age uncle Hamzah.

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The Jewish Tribes of Medina

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Ruth

The Jews of Medina are an important topic because they’re one of the footballs that get kicked around in the current ideological wars. Since anti-Semitism is a problem in many modern Muslim countries, we wonder if it has always been so. The Quran presents a very mixed picture of how to view Jews, coming out of the mixed experiences the Muslims had. The events in Medina were a large part of this.

The town of Medina, perhaps like all towns of its time in Arabia, was not organized like a European town, with a city hall and a main street. Each family group lived in a village clustered around a fortress-house where the tribal chief lived. When trouble came, they could all pull inside the fortress, which was impregnable to typical means and methods of the time. The Yathrib oasis was eight miles wide, with various farms and villages spread out through it. There were three main Jewish extended-family tribes, and their fortress-village were near Medina, enough to be part of the city life, but also separated a bit.

These Jews were very Arabicized, that is, very assimilated to the place where they had lived for a few hundred years. They practiced Judaism, but they spoke Arabic and lived by the same cultural rules as their neighbors. Somewhere I picked up the idea that they were probably Jews who had left Babylon after the Captivity. They may have still made use of a trade network extending back into Persia. The picture we get in the Muslim stories is that some of them were most active as date farmers, some as craftsmen, some as merchants. There was also an even larger Jewish settlement to the north, which they probably passed through on trips to Persia.

When the Arab tribes of Aws and Khazraj invited Muhammad to come be their judge and stop the endless feuding, the Jewish tribes had to work out their place in the new system. Each of the Jewish tribes had pre-existing alliances to one of those Arab tribes, as well as to other outside tribes. They had been caught up in the endless feud, too, through their allies. Muhammad asked them to sign a treaty that stipulated Judaism and Islam would be considered essentially the same (no need to convert) and they would leave each other alone, cooperatively, with Muhammad as chief arbiter of disputes. The treaty also stated that they were bound to mutual defense, and to boycotting the Quraysh of Mecca.

I wonder if the Jews knew how significant defense was going to be. “How often is Medina attacked?” they had to be thinking. They may not have realized to what extent the Muslims would actively go to war against Mecca, when they signed the treaty during the first six months.

The first tribe to have a treaty-breaking issue was the Bani Qaynuqa. They lived in two fortresses near the marketplace; they did not farm, but were craftsmen and goldsmiths. They kept close ties with the Quraysh, in spite of the treaty. They did not help in the Battle of Badr. They made it clear in various ways that they preferred the old order.

In the weeks after Badr, a Muslim woman went into a Jewish goldsmith’s shop, and they got into an argument. The Muslim woman’s legs were exposed in the scuffle, and a passing Muslim man killed the Jew; some Jewish men killed a Muslim. This budding feud (typical for life in this oasis) should have been arbitrated by Muhammad, but the Jewish tribe decided to go back to the old customs. They called for their allies and retreated into their fortress, and Muhammad sent Ali to lead a siege. The problem here is not that they were Jews, but that they refused to use the arbitration process, and small infractions and refusals were taken very seriously in a place with governments that were only as stable as they could enforce that they were. The Bani Qaynuqa fortress held out for two weeks, with as many as 700 fighting men inside, so most of the Muslims must have been involved in the siege. Their allies did not come to help, probably unwilling to break their own agreements with the Prophet and return to old feuding ways.

When the Bani Qaynuqa surrendered, the chief of the Arab Khazraj tribe, which had converted to Islam, pleaded for mercy for them. This Arab chief, known as Ibn Ubayy, was going to cause many worries for Muhammad. He had almost become the king of Medina, and he resented the Muslims but he also converted as a matter of form. (It was Ibn Ubayy who would soon take his 300 men home from the Battle of Uhud.) He negotiated with Muhammad for the tribe to be treated less harshly than full enemies would be. The outcome was an agreement for expulsion: the tribe left with what they could carry, leaving behind their weapons and tools. Along with their houses, these riches were distributed as spoils of war. The Bani Qaynuqa moved north, joining other Jewish communities in Syria.

The next problem came with the Bani Nadir, when Muhammad paid them a formal call to ask them to contribute to pay the blood-wite of a quarrel against their Arab allies. Everyone was on edge, but it should have been a simple matter, since the Jews agreed to help pay it. What happened next surely sounds different, depending on whose side you take.

Muhammad, Abu Bakr, Umar, and other Companions were in the Bani Nadir fortress to discuss the matter, and the chiefs asked them to stay for a meal. While the meal was being cooked, Muhammad received a direct revelation from Gabriel/Jibril that warned him the Jews were about to assassinate him. He got up and left quietly, and he walked out of their fortress and back to his home. It’s not clear that there was any evidence of a plot apart from the angelic message, but Muslim historical sources don’t ask for more evidence. It would be interesting to know how this story was told among the Jews, but we don’t know that. Did they admit to a plot, or did they feel wrongly accused?

The Prophet sent a message telling the Bani Nadir that they had ten days to leave. When the Jews protested to the Arab messenger that this message ran against all of their past history together, he said simply, “Hearts have changed.” I wonder if he told them that they were suspected of a plot, but that’s all we have. Now what? The Jews debated what to do, and here Ibn Ubayy got involved as well. He urged them to make a defiant stand. If all of their past allies came to their aid, both Arab tribes and the other Jews of the oasis, they could win. So when they delivered a message of defiance to Muhammad, he declared war on them.

Their fortress was in a date grove south of the main city. As the Jews withdrew and set archers on the walls, Muhammad walked an ad-hoc Muslim force to the settlement and began a low-level attack. Ali was in command of a force that camped outside the Bani Nadir for ten days, while the Jews learned, slowly, that none of their allies would come. Iby Ubayy had interfered and over-promised, but even his people were not coming. The other Jews of Medina didn’t want to touch it, and other Bedouin allies stayed home. Finally, the Jews in the fortress surrendered when Muhammad told some of his men to start cutting down date palms. If their agriculture was all ruined, what good would it be to try to stay?

The Bani Nadir were given just a few days to leave with whatever their camels could carry, except for armor and weapons. They took the order seriously. Some even removed pieces of their houses, like doors, as long as the camels could carry it all. When they walked out through the town, the Arabs were astonished to see how just much wealth was being carried out.

The Bani Nadir families went north to where many of them already owned land in the other Arabian Jewish settlement, Khaybar; it was stronger than Medina. The Muslims in Medina distributed the Bani Nadir land, houses, and arms, but they knew that a lot of portable property had just left the community. Many wondered if the terms had been too generous. Remaining in the community, there were still some small Jewish tribes, plus one more large one: the Bani Qurayzah. The Bani Qurayzah also had shaky allegiance to Muhammad, maintaining ties with his enemies. For now, they were stable in Medina’s economy, but the next big battle would spell their end.

These bad experiences with the Jews of Medina changed Muhammad’s view of Jews. He had hoped that they would all become Muslims, or that they’d at least assimilate enough that it wouldn’t matter. When he came to Medina, the Muslims had been facing Jerusalem to pray, to emphasize their Abrahamic origin. But after the Bani Qaynuqa siege, there was a revelation that now they should face Mecca, which Abraham had also established. That became the qibla, the prayer direction, from them on. Muhammad hadn’t declared all Jews to be evil, far from it. But he had realized that they did not view his new faith as either the same as theirs or better. They began to stand out among his enemies as the ones that would never give in, and they could work to undermine him. He began to see the Jews as a fifth column, an enemy in their midst.

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When blood flows…

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Ruth

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.

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