The Battle of Uhud at Medina

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Ruth

After the Battle of Badr, the Muslims at Medina continued to attack Meccan shipping. When a caravan took a northeastern route to Iraq, Muhammad’s adopted son Zayd led 100 men to stop it and bring its trade goods back to Medina. Their business in overland hauling was effectively blocked. And so Mecca mobilized for war.

Abu Sufyan ibn Harb led 3000 men from all of the Quraysh clans, and he also let his wife come along. Some of the other fighters brought their wives, too. In their customs, this meant they were getting serious. The women would be a vulnerability that would force them to fight harder, and the women also beat drums and screamed at them to fight harder. Abu Sufyan’s wife, Hind, promised an Abyssinian slave that if he would kill Hamzah, Muhammad’s same-age uncle, she would free him. She intended to eat Hamzah’s liver.

The Meccan army settled in around the mountain of Uhud, north of Medina. It had enough agriculture for their men and horses to live off the unharvested crops, and it allowed them to wait for the Muslims to come out to fight on the plain.

The Muslims made the decision to summon their best numbers and go meet the battle. Muhammad set out with 1000 men, but along the road, one of the Arab leaders took his clan and turned back, leaving only 700 to go on. They camped on the opposite side of the same mountain, facing Medina.

Muhammad knew that the key to managing their grossly unequal numbers was going to be an archery squad perched on the hilltop above the camp, watching for cavalry coming round to encircle them. Determined archers could pick off horses and riders, maintaining a defensive wall from a distance. He put 50 archers there, and he told them sternly that they were not to leave the hilltop no matter what. No. Matter. What. The mountain itself was also a key, since the Meccan cavalry could not ride on or over it. A surprise attack could come from around it (which the archers would stop), but its bulk acted as a wall to their backs, otherwise.

The battle began with some single-combat duels, as before, then it broke into full-scale battle. By numbers, the Meccans should have won, and then they would have gone on to occupy Medina. But although the Muslims were a smaller force, they had more spirit and determination, and for a while it looked like they would prevail. Using Muhammad’s sword, a fighter called Abu Dujunah cut down many Meccans. He was remembered for wearing a red turban, while Ali had a white plume, and two other champions had green and yellow turbans. But in the middle of these Muslim victories, the Prophet’s kinsman Hamzah was killed by the Abyssinian who had been sent in for this task.

When the archers looked down the hill and thought they saw some of their army heading out to plunder the Meccan camp, they ignored Muhammad’s orders and most of them ran down the mountain to join in. With the archery post so greatly weakened, a Meccan force was able to overwhelm the rest of them, and then their cavalry could come around to the rear of the Muslim army. Many of the Muslims who were stationed there grew frightened and ran up the mountain, where horses could not follow.

In this hour, the greatest danger came closest. Muhammad was wounded on the head and fainted, so that some were afraid he had died. A rumor spread that he was dead, and one man called out “Let us die with him,” plunging into the battle recklessly. But the rumor of Muhammad’s death also worked for the Muslims, because the Meccans got the idea that it was over, too. One of the men with Muhammad gave him some very simple first aid, and he was again able to stand.

At the end of the Battle of Badr, one Meccan had promised Muhammad that he would be back on his horse to kill him. Now this man closed in, charging the small group around the Prophet. But borrowing a spear, Muhammad stepped out and speared him through the neck as he rode forward. The man rode back to his camp and died.

If that wasn’t literally the end of the battle, it was nearly so. Both sides were falling back, exhausted, unsure who had won, to count and tend their dead. The mountain was large enough that they were soon out of each other’s sight, and once the event of the battle was over, neither side sent anyone to seek out further fights or assassinations. It was just over. The Meccans were pretty sure Muhammad had been killed, so they searched for his body. The losses they counted on their side had been only 22 out of their 3000, while the 700 Muslims had lost 65. Modern battle customs would not have armies breaking off and going home with so few dead and so many alive, but this was not a time of “total war.”

But it was a time when they practiced something we take pains to stop our men from doing: mutilating the dead. Abu Sufyan’s wife Hind did indeed take a bite out of Hamzah’s liver, then she went onto the field and cut more bits of him off (but not to eat). Some of the women strung pieces of mutilated warrior onto string, as jewelry. Then the Meccans packed up to leave. They did think about assaulting Medina, but they had heard that a force of men stayed there (true, but outnumbered 10 to 1 by the Meccans, so it’s a bit odd that they were scared off by 300).

The Muslims’ first act was to have their noon prayer, and they only returned to the battle plain when the mutilation was over and the Meccans had pulled back. The Muslims encouraged the Meccans to beat a fast retreat home by setting many campfires as though one of their allied tribes had come in after dark. They buried their dead on the field, and even some who died later in Medina were carried back to the new memorial cemetery. One of the surprises among the dead was a rabbi from one of the Jewish tribes that had decided not to honor its defense pact with Muhammad. He had believed them to be in the wrong, so he went on his own. We’ll come back to the Jewish tribes of Medina.

Who won the Battle of Uhud? If you add up the dead, the Meccans won. But the goal of the Meccans had been to stop the Muslims from raiding their caravans. They had set out with an overwhelming force but went home without anything being settled. In a defensive situation, the defender who is left standing has won. As things played out, Medina’s power to raid caravans and cause problems for Mecca was far from diminished.

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After the Battle of Badr: Muhammad’s Social Revolution

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Ruth

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.

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Medina’s Foreign Policy (Battle of Badr)

Posted on December 25, 2020 by Ruth

Most of the Emigrants from Mecca had left their wealth (or their poverty) behind. Their clans would have re-absorbed the houses they were occupying, passing them to families that stayed. Some of their possessions were seized by others. I wasn’t able to get a firm sense of just how much wealth the city of Mecca received from the exit of the Muslim families. But in any case, Muhammad and his new government in Medina considered Mecca, and the Quraysh clan in particular, an enemy state that had appropriated their wealth. It may be that the attempt on Muhammad’s life had been taken as a declaration of war. What was Muhammad’s new city going to do about it? Not sit there.

It wasn’t long before some of the Muslims — all ones from Mecca — rode out in a war party to see if they could capture some Meccan caravans. They were city-dwelling merchants, but they were also part of the nomad culture that poetically praised the daring courage of raiders. At first the raiding parties were small, but gradually they grew to as many as 70 men, and Muhammad accompanied one of them. They seized whatever the caravan was carrying, and they captured the men to hold them for ransom, a typical feature of raiding. But in one caravan raid, a Meccan man died, and after that, Mecca’s leaders decided to fight back.

In past revelations at Mecca, Allah had told Muhammad to be patient with the unbelievers. Now, in Medina, the revelations went the other way. The second Surah of the Quran is called al-Baqarah, “The Cow,” because it talks about the golden calf of Exodus. Although it appears early in the Quran, it was actually a later revelation from this period at Medina. The Surah describes Allah as the “enemy of unbelievers.” (2:98) Muslims are directed to fight to the death against anyone who wages war and does not surrender. (2:191) They must retaliate even during sacred months, and they must persist until there is no more persecution. (2:194) Fighting would now be obligatory even if they didn’t like it. (2:216) Context suggests that Mecca was the main target of this new aggressive policy, since other verses talk about making pilgrimage to Mecca.

About two years after the Muslims had left Mecca, they decided to target a very rich caravan led by one of Mecca’s rulers. Almost all of the Emigrants from Mecca joined the war party, and additionally many of the Helpers, the Medinan natives, came too. They numbered about 300 men with 70 camels. However, the Meccans got wind of it, re-routed the caravan, and turned out in force to meet the Muslims. Most of the clans participated, adding up to around 1000 men. As the armies faced each other and waited for a decisive moment to either attack or go home, some of the Quraysh clans went home. But among the remaining Meccan war party were many relatives of the Muslims, including Muhammad’s uncle Abbas and Ali’s older brother.

What to do? The Muslims could have just gone home, since they were not prepared for a real battle. After deliberating, they chose to fight; Muhammad spent a night awake in prayer over the decision. One of the Medinans suggested that they occupy or destroy all of the wells in the Badr Valley, and they did. Arabian battles apparently began with duels between champions; the Meccans sent out three champions who declared they would drink water from a Muslim-held well or die. Muhammad sent out Ali and two others. One of them was seriously wounded, but Ali won his duel. Soon after these duels, there was a charge and general melée.

Even outnumbered, the Muslims still won the battle. In human terms, we know that the group that has more conviction often wins, since an army is only as strong as the discipline of its individual members. The Muslims believed angels fought with them, while the Meccans probably had mixed feelings about what they were doing. Some of the chief enemies of Muhammad were killed in the battle, but at the end, the Muslims also held a number of living captives.

Based on their success in this battle, Muhammad’s team was able to start forming more alliances to isolate and box in Mecca. Mecca’s wealth depended on running caravans between Yemen and Syria, and there were only so many roads the caravans could take. Some Arab tribes that lived along the Red Sea coast allied with Medina, making it unsafe for Meccans to pass through their territory. Mecca countered these moves by forming or reinforcing alliances with tribes near Medina. The region began to polarize, with some allied tribes also adopting Islam.

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The Prophet’s Third Wife, A’isha

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Ruth

One of the diciest parts of Muhammad’s story is that as soon as his new house was completed, he and Abu Bakr decided it was time for A’isha to move into her wife-apartment in the house. Until this time, she had been living in her father’s house, although technically married. For her wedding, they dressed her nicely and had a private family dinner, and that was that. Nobody would find much to say about it, except that the official narrative is that she was nine years old. And that raises a lot of questions. If she was only nine, was the marriage a form of abuse or neglect of a child? It’s a point that generates a lot of negative press for Muhammad, sometimes amounting to accusations of pedophilia. The more I’ve read about the situation, though, the less I can see it that way.

Most of what we know about A’isha came from her own recollections, told to others and eventually collected as hadiths. By the time A’isha was narrating her memories, she was a widow who was barred from remarrying, due to an oath that all of the Prophet’s wives took. Without children, she struggled to find her place in the rapidly-growing community after both her husband and her father had died.

It was very much in her interests to emphasize just how close she and Muhammad had been, since she was the source of many hadiths that steered doctrine. The story of her wedding was part of this emphasis; it was A’isha herself who represented her age as nine. That might mean it’s plainly true, but it also might mean it was an exaggeration. Clearly, it never entered her or anyone else’s minds that “wife age nine” might later be seen as gravely wrong.

In medieval times, it was not uncommon to set up child marriages when property inheritance was at stake, so that a father’s early death might not leave his orphaned children at the mercy of fate’s whims. It was also common to see a twelve-year-old girl as prime marriage material, at least to start setting up an important match. By the time everyone finished negotiating and traveling, the girl would be fourteen, which was considered fully grown. Such early marriage makes sense in a world where life expectancy was very uncertain and inheritance was only through birth. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that an age like fifteen was considered too young.

A’isha saw her early marriage age as a sign of how early in life she had been influenced by the Prophet. It was a mark of distinction and gave her memories more authority. It justified her continuing importance in the early Caliphs’ courts. Living there meant that she shared the common living space with Muhammad, Saudah, Ali, and the remaining unmarried daughters, while sleeping in her own room. She could be present at many discussions and recitations. The women in early Muslim stories were not sequestered: they went into the town, they approached men to speak or to argue, they made their own decisions. If Saudah had the housework under control, A’isha might have been free to sit with Muhammad’s students as much as she wanted. This was a great honor to Abu Bakr’s family.

But what if she hadn’t really been nine? In a time when few things were being written down, a little girl’s age was not important enough to memorialize. It’s possible that she was, say, twelve but remembered it as nine, trying to show how she had been at the Prophet’s side practically all her life. On the side of believing her age claim, she provided details about playing with toys while living in the Prophet’s house: her friends could still come over to play dolls, and Muhammad might sit with them for a while. That seems realistic for a child’s recollection, though it could also be a case of conflating memories from different times. But on the side of thinking she was actually older when all this happened, there are counter-anecdotes that suggest another picture.

Ibn Ishaq, born in Medina 85 years after the Prophet’s migration, was an early collector of hadiths about Muhammad’s life. He made a list of early believers, and among them he included A’isha, who should have been only a baby. (Mohiuddin, 162) What if she were at least six years old already at the time preserved by his list, old enough to repeat the confession of faith? If so, it would suggest that at the time of her informal wedding, she might have been fourteen, not nine. Further, there is a story that her first childhood betrothal was to a non-Muslim, and since Abu Bakr was one of the first converts, it suggests that perhaps she had already been born when he was still comfortable with idol-worship.

Another contrary bit of evidence is a hadith that says A’isha helped carry water-skins onto a battlefield, two years after her marriage. These skins were heavy, and a battlefield was dangerous. How much help could an eleven-year-old be? Muhammad is on record as not permitting boys to fight at such ages. But if she were sixteen by then, it makes more sense. Some accounts place her even older, walking the battlefield at nineteen, which is more like the ages Muhammad considered appropriate for a boy to be on the battlefield.

There is a deep rift between Sunni and Shi’ite accounts of A’isha. In Sunni memory, A’isha is the mother of all Muslims, a revered saint. It feels deeply sacrilegious to them to say she might have been wrong about her age. Older Islamic reasoning tended to see truth issues as starkly about deliberate lies, and how could A’isha have lived with the Prophet so long, and yet be a liar? So Sunnis tend to take A’isha’s word for it, that she was nine, and they are stuck with defending her very early marriage. By contrast, Shi’ites have no fondness for A’isha. They see her as the rival of Ali, the adopted son and intended heir. While her name is a popular choice among Sunni families, few to no little Shi’ite girls are named A’isha. So they don’t accept the hadith about her young age and are open to her having been a more normal age, like sixteen.

I have another idea to offer, which came to me as I read about the process of setting up the city-state of Medina. Let’s say A’isha was nine, but an outgoing, confident, rather mature nine-year-old, the type that doesn’t get homesick at cheerleader summer camp. Her father, Abu Bakr, is building a house in Medina also. He bought a building plot or house along the wall of Muhammad’s courtyard, which is now the mosque. He is having it modified to open into the mosque, like the Prophet’s house. The Prophet is now a man of great importance, settling disputes and teaching a growing number of students in the mosque area just outside his back door. Abu Bakr already settled his younger daughter’s fate a few years ago; she will someday be the Prophet’s wife, and nobody cares about the age difference (remember that Muhammad’s grandfather and father married a pair of cousins on the same day).

It seems obvious that Abu Bakr and his wife would say to themselves, “What are we waiting for? She’s legally married to him already, by contract, why not move her into that establishment to finish growing up?” She was going to become one of the First Ladies of Medina, and she would be more of an ornament to the household than Sawdah. So why not just do it? She’d be 100 feet away, they’d see her every day, and it’s not like she’d be sorry to become more important. If that’s the way it seemed, then sex had little or nothing to do with it. Wives who were too young were just moved in, and then they finished growing up, and assumed a sexual role when they felt like it. It probably became clear to A’isha that if she decided she was up for sex, it would increase her prestige in the new household, establishing her socially as a full adult. She may have been old enough without questions, or she may have been as young as she said. In either case, it doesn’t seem to have been about sexual attraction to children.

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The First Islamic State at Medina

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Ruth

It’s important to understand how society was organized in Muhammad’s Medina, because it set the pattern for Muslims as what a perfect society would look like. One of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Maliki) takes customs and memoirs from Medinans to be a valid source of law, since that time and place represented the ideal. Everyone assumes that with Muhammad right there, guiding the community through continuing revelations, society was set up in a perfectly just way.

Muhammad quickly ordered mosques to be built in Medina and other parts of the oasis. The absolute centrality of religion in Medina’s government was shown in a concrete way: the city’s new mosque was made from the courtyard of Muhammad’s new house. The mosque was mostly open, as the masjid had been around the Ka’aba, but the palm trees growing in the space were cut down. Their trunks were used as pillars for a palm-leaf roof to create a covered area. The house had a common area with separate rooms for Saudah and A’isha to live in. With this provision made, A’isha arrived in Medina and very soon went to her long-betrothed husband’s household. (See next article about A’isha.) Muhammad’s family members, such as Ali and Zayd, and his closest companions, also built houses that opened into this mosque. It was not possible to bring a case for judgment without coming to the mosque.

In Medina, too, they first began the public call to prayer: a man was appointed to stand at the top of the tallest house and call out at dawn, then four times more during the day. Not every person in the city was yet following Islam, but the agreement had been that the city would be organized on Muhammad’s principles, so mosques and prayer were part of civic life. Giving for the poor was mandated. That probably meant it was mandated for believers and resident non-believers alike, though administered through the mosque.

In the first year at Medina, the mosque was oriented toward Jerusalem. The qibla, the direction of prayer, was mandated to be the same as the Jews used. The idea of unity with the Jews went further, too, as Muhammad formed a treaty of cooperation with the Jewish clans in Medina.

The treaty stated that Jews and Muslims were to consider that they had the same religion, both honoring the God of Abraham. Each could continue its own customs for worship, without pressure from the other. The fact that both groups faced toward Jerusalem helped to reinforce the sameness. A few of the Jewish leaders crossed over to Islam, and Muhammad hoped that there would be more.

The treaty outlined a plan of mutual cooperation: consulting on decisions, settling offenses, and defending each other. God and the Prophet would settle disagreements, and the Jews would comply with the new mandatory boycott of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. Further, they would help pay the costs of war as long as they were on the same side as the Muslims. The phrasing of this stipulation makes me wonder if the costs were to be heavier on the Jews, as established businessmen, than on the Muslims, who were refugees, because it’s not phrased in terms of equality.

With this treaty, the entire civil-war-torn oasis was at peace, with Muhammad responsible to keep it that way as a secular ruler or judge would (but always in the name of Allah). Medina had already been a city-state in that it was independent of the empires, but now it had a ruler who would view relationships with other cities as foreign policy decisions.

Mecca itself was now a foreign city. It was not typical for Arabs to move away from their birthplace; they felt it as a hardship. Muhammad had been devoted to the Ka’aba, which he taught them had been built by Abraham to Allah, not for idols. At the end of a year in Medina, he received a revelation that from now on, their qibla (direction to face during prayer) would now be toward Mecca, not Jerusalem. Only a few simple mosques had been built by then; they were altered to show the new direction, and all others followed suit. This was a step away from unity with the Jews, though not a step in itself that would have caused a rift.

As Islam went from the status of persecuted minority in Mecca to rulers of a city-state in Medina, being a believer suddenly became an appealing choice. In Mecca, believers had often been the poor and lowly, who wanted a change from the old system. Wealthy men who became Muslims were very devout and sure in their own minds, and the decision cost them a lot, as in Abu Bakr’s case. But now, in Medina, it was an advantage to confess the Shahada and begin praying publicly. When religion and state are fused this way, people begin pretending religion for the sake of power. The religion has sovereign power, but it begins to lose purity. The same thing had happened when Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion, ruled from Constantinople. Where before all believers had been tested with hardship, now belief opened doors to privilege. From this time on, Muslims could never be sure how genuine a conversion was.

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The Move to Medina

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Ruth

Ten years had passed since the Prophet’s first revelations, and it was increasingly clear that Mecca was not going to have a change of heart regarding the new beliefs.

Toward the end of this time, six men from the oasis of Yathrib, to the north of Mecca, met with Muhammad secretly during their pilgrimage. These six adopted the new beliefs and returned home. The following year, a much larger group came to Muhammad, and this time, they made a formal (though verbal) contract with him. In this agreement, they gave military and other protection to Muhammad and his followers, as if he were of their own kin. In turn, he promised that he would become the judge, effectively an uncrowned king, and that he would not later abandon them if the Meccans grew friendlier.

The oasis of Yathrib lay between some hills and two ancient lava beds. It had one central town, called al-Madina, “the city,” and some smaller villages at the edges of the oasis. The oasis was covered with date palms and other agriculture. In the city, the important clan leaders had built houses that were like personal fortresses. (more pictures of Medina)

There were five main clans, two of Arabs and three of Arabicized Jews (or Jewish Arabs). The two Arab clans (Aws and Khazraj) had been carrying on a feud that rose to the level of pitched battles. The battles were growing larger and bloodier, so that the city’s population would be at risk soon if they weren’t stopped. The oasis was isolated, and apart from travelers, it functioned as its own complete marketplace. A population drop would risk the whole economy collapsing.

That is why some of the men had reached out to Muhammad. The clan system had become a dead end, so they were open to something new. They needed a ruler who could be impartial among the clans. Moving from Mecca to Medina would bring an entirely new lifestyle to Muhammad’s followers, too. In Medina, the set of beliefs that they may have referred to as something like “the Abrahamic Way” came into final form as the religion we know as Islam. In Medina, the Prophet had the opportunity to make laws that supported Islam.

The process of moving to Yathrib oasis and Medina is known as the hejira. It’s often spelled Hegira in English, and it’s often capitalized. It is the founding year of the Muslim calendar, abbreviated in English “AH,” Anno Hegirae.

At first, only some of the Muslims quietly moved to Medina. We have to remember that in Mecca, they lived in their paternal-line clan quarters where they were constantly around everyone they knew. If a clan realized that ten of its families were selling their houses and moving away, it would stop them. The Arab way of life was not individualistic or isolated; moving away would be viewed as an aggression against the family. As it turned out, some families did notice what was happening. They sent armed men to stop the travelers, and they brought back their relatives under close guard. Others were able to travel light, perhaps under pretense of visiting relatives, and just not return.

Muhammad himself stayed put with his second wife and younger children, and Abu Bakr and family also stayed. Muhammad’s daughter Zaynab’s husband decided to stay, but neither had he yet embraced Islam. Uthman, who had married Muhammad’s second daughter Ruqayya, went to Medina with her. Umar, another leader, and Muhammad’s cousin Hamza and adopted son Zayd also went, though at first without their families. The plan was that as many men would get out as could, before the top leaders made a move. They tried to move as many households as possible within two months.

One day, Muhammad heard that some Quraysh men were planning to kill him at his house that night. He and Abu Bakr quickly left town, leaving Ali and the women to keep up the appearance of normality. Expected to go north, they went south, staying a few days in a cave near Mecca. Search parties fanned out for them, since a bounty of a hundred camels was on their heads. When the coast was clear, they went to Medina by taking a very long way around. At the oasis, an armed honor guard escorted Muhammad into the city as its new ruler.

The move was not complete until the last of Muhammad’s and Abu Bakr’s households had paid off debts and moved as well. Meanwhile, the Meccans tried to fit into Medina. They were from different tribes themselves, and now they had to fit in with Medina’s clans and tribes. Cross-tribal bonding became a hallmark of Islam, beginning here. Muhammad termed the native Medinans who were volunteering “the Helpers” (al-Ansar), and the Meccans, “the Emigrants.” He set up a buddy system in which one Helper was paired with one Emigrant as new-made brothers, with responsibilities to each other as though they were actually related. The buddy system didn’t work well in the long run, but it set a good tone in this first year.

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Two Deaths: “The Year of Sorrow”

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Ruth

In the year 619, Muhammad’s wife Khadijah died. Most Sunni accounts say that she was significantly older than her husband, 65 years old to his 50. Her great age seems less likely when you consider that she left a daughter who was perhaps as young as ten, but really nobody knows. Of course, this was a great grief to their family, as the couple had been very close friends.

Muhammad’s uncle, Abu Talib, who had raised him and whose son he was in turn raising, was growing old and sick. He had been the official clan elder protector of Muhammad for the last five or six years. Before he passed away, the Quraysh elders made another attempt to get him on their side. They asked him to get his nephew to leave Mecca or stop attacking their city’s religion. On his deathbed, he made this request of Muhammad, but of course the Prophet instead asked them all to admit that God was one. The Quraysh elders left, disgusted. But what about Abu Talib?

Abu Talib died soon after the confrontation. He had never publicly embraced Islam, so did he finally repeat that there is no God but Allah? Shi’ite sources believe he did, that in fact he had privately professed faith even before this. They don’t believe that he had ever been an idolater. Sunni sources are in doubt, saying that Uncle Abbas told Muhammad he heard Abu Talib whispering the Shahada as he died, but Muhammad said only, “I did not hear it.” In this narrative, it was a lesson to remember that we cannot determine who God saves, just because we love them. It’s possible that Shi’ites exalt Abu Talib beyond what he deserved because he was the father of Ali; it’s also possible that Sunnis put down Abu Talib more than he deserved, because later political strife made them want to de-emphasize the genetic kin of Muhammad.

With Abu Talib’s death, the floodgates of persecution could open. Abu Bakr, now in poverty and being assaulted, set out for Abyssinia, but instead found a friend along the road who was amazed at the reversal of fortune and helped reinstate him in Mecca, under new protection. The new deal allowed Abu Bakr’s house to be a Muslim prayer refuge, but stories tell that neighbors threw dirt and blood over the wall.

Muhammad began putting out feelers to nearby towns, to see if the growing Muslim community could move there. These towns said no, and that isn’t surprising considering they were economically and socially part of Mecca’s orbit. But to the north and farther inland, there was a growing core of believers in the oasis of Yathrib. Yathrib had several Jewish clans, so it was more adapted to monotheism already. It was a place that Meccans passed through on their caravan journeys, but if anything, it was more firmly on the Spice Road than Mecca, so it was not economically dependent. Muhammad’s Banu Hashim clan had kinship ties in Yathrib, too. Yathrib looked like a good place to move from the troubles of Mecca.

In personal news, after some time had passed since Khadijah’s death, friends urged him to remarry. He married a widow named Saudah, who was about 30 and could step in and take up the household work. But then Muhammad also became betrothed to Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha. We’ll talk more about Aisha later. In mainstream Sunni telling, at her betrothal Aisha was only six, and it made little difference to her life. The tie served to bring Abu Bakr and Muhammad closer, so that they were family, not just friends.

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Coping with Persecution

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Ruth

Two major events define the next, more intense, stage of persecution. They were happening simultaneously, and they represented two different ways of handling what was happening: to leave, or to stay.

Persecution ramped up to include some beatings, torture, and deaths. Because the Prophet himself was protected by his uncle Abu Talib, he was safe, and many of his followers lived in the Banu Hashim quarter with him. But converts in other parts of the city were not safe. Abu Bakr spent some of his fortune on buying slaves to free them; one was an African being tortured with a large stone on his chest for hours. In Arabia, the sun was an available instrument of torture; take away a man’s ability to protect himself, and he might die. Sun exposure was also used to torture a poor family in another clan. Stories about them vary, but it seems that the husband and wife, and their grown son, were being exposed in the sun, and when the wife shouted at their tormenter, he speared her. The husband may have died of exposure.

Muhammad decided to send a core group of Muslims away to Abyssinia. Abyssinia–that is, modern Somalia and Ethiopia–was one of the closest foreign countries, and it had always been socially/politically close to South Arabia. It wasn’t under the control of either the Romans or the Persians (as other nearby areas were), and it was solidly monotheistic. It had a large Jewish population, and its official religion was Coptic Christianity. There was a chance that Abyssinia would be a good home for a new monotheistic faith. At the very least, it would demonstrate to the Quraysh in Mecca that it wasn’t going to be possible to wipe them all out physically, if half of them were in another country.

Some of Muhammad’s close family were included in the mission to Abyssinia. Uthman, the merchant who was an early convert, had married the Prophet’s second daughter, and they went. So did Ali’s older brother Jafar and his wife, and a man named Hisham ibn al-A’as. About 80 people went, though they left in stages, fearful that their clans would realize the plan and stop them. As soon as the Quraysh leaders understood the plan, they sent emissaries to Abyssinia to ask for their renegade clan members to be returned. The leader? Hisham’s brother Amr. He led an official delegation and brought expensive gifts.

Jafar acted as spokesman when they were called before the Negus, which was the title of the Abyssinian king. Asked to recite a portion of the Quran, he chose Surah Maryam, which tells the story of the angel appearing to Mary to tell her she would have a son. Of course, the king recognized the story. He asked Jafar what they said about Jesus, and he answered with a carefully-worded reply: “Jesus is a servant of Allah, His Messenger, His Spirit, and His Word breathed into the Virgin Mary.” He clarified that God should not be said to have a “son.” On the basis of this interview, the Negus announced formal protection of the group, and sent the Quraysh delegation home. Some of the Muslims returned to Mecca after a short time abroad, but some of them stayed for the next few years. Jafar’s family remained in Abyssinia for twelve years.

Back in Mecca, the elders of the Quraysh voted to enforce a complete boycott on the Banu Hashim quarter. Other clans were not to buy from them or sell to them, nor enter into any marriages with them. This would end when the Banu Hashim handed over Muhammad or at least denounced him. One clan, the Banu Muttalib, declined to participate, and they were included in the boycott. The boycott oath was written on parchment and placed in the Ka’aba.

Some individuals tried to break through the boycott as conditions worsened for the Banu Hashim. One man loaded his camel with supplies and turned it loose to wander there. In many other cases, the wives were points of entry to the banned quarter, since they were still technically members of their own clans. “I’m just taking flour to my daughter.” Muslim believers in the outside clans also did what they could to break the boycott. Less wealthy families in the Banu Hashim quickly fell into hardship, while some others had reserves to draw on. Not being allowed to sell, their income dried up.

When the annual pilgrimage time came around, no fighting was allowed, so Muhammad and his followers could safely go into the city, especially to the Ka’aba. But to compensate, the other Quraysh were more aggressive in other ways, like verbal harassment, or throwing dirt and animal entrails.

After more than two years had passed like this, some of the other clan leaders regretted the oath. The Banu Hashim didn’t appear ready to hand over their kinsman Muhammad, and the hardship was getting worse than the Quraysh had intended. So they announced that they intended to break their oaths. When someone went into the Ka’aba to fetch the oath parchment, they found that insects had eaten all but the words, “In Thy Name, God.” So the boycott ended.

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Mecca and the Revelations

Posted on December 9, 2020 by Ruth

One reason that, at first, Muhammad’s message stayed among his clan is that in Mecca, people tended to live in family and clan blocks. It’s a typical way that older cities grew: each patriarch built additions onto the house, and it eventually became a block. In such cities, people who handled small daily chores and shopping typically stayed within their family quarter. You see it also in the old Italian cities like Genoa and Florence. Shakespeare clearly had in mind this type of layout for Romeo and Juliet: crossing into a hostile clan’s block was a bad idea.

A few of Muhammad’s early followers, like Abu Bakr and Uthman, lived in different quarters of Mecca, so the message began to move into those areas. Abu Bakr made his house available for prayers or other meetings, but the wall around his garden was not so high that others couldn’t see in. Most of the Meccans thought the prayers looked silly. They thought it was just a weird little cult, not connected to some important empire, so there was no reason to look into it.

Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib did not yet profess the new belief publicly, but he formally made it known that Muhammad was under his personal protection. The other clan chiefs had to respect this, since they didn’t want civil war, nor did they want the clan-chief-protection racket to die out. Until Abu Talib died, Muhammad was physically safe, apart from mockery and some dirt thrown on him. A few of the men in the city were very hostile to the new message.

One day, Muhammad went up a rocky hill that was embedded in the city. This was one way to be high enough that everyone could see you. He called out to them, “If I warned you of raiders approaching, you would listen! Now I’m warning you of greater danger, and will you listen?” His most important uncle, Abu Lahab, shouted back with ridicule. The next revelation/surah denounced this uncle by name for his harsh rejection; the Prophet may even have recited it from the top of the hill (I’m not sure). Incensed, the uncle dissolved engagements that had been formed with Muhammad’s older daughters. Ostracization within the city had begun.

It’s a long, complicated story: how individual bullying turned to strategic bullying, as the entire tribe of Quraysh got involved. Each time someone went to speak to Muhammad face to face, he typically came away either converted or no longer willing to be an active persecutor. Remember the power of poetry with these Arabs: the growing body of surahs that became the Quran were in rhymed prose, not strictly poetry, but they struck the Meccans’ ears as poetry. When Muhammad began to recite, they would stand there mesmerized, feeling transports of emotion. Imagine if the Beatles’ “English Invasion” had been a religious one, carried forward by infectious pop beats. The power of poetry was so great in Mecca that it seems to have worked much that way. Some men were converted as soon as they heard a few lines of one surah. But there were always plenty of families who had not heard the poetry, who were still very hostile, and who did things like throwing dung or dirt.

During this time, many of the revelations were tied to events that had just happened, as persecution and attempts at persuasion both grew more intense. For example, one day Muhammad was trying to persuade a clan leader, when a poor convert came and interrupted him. He wanted to hear a recitation, but the Prophet was annoyed, since the flow of speech had stopped and the clan leader got up and left. This annoyance is embedded in a revelation, noting that “he frowned and turned away.” The message rebuked him for not valuing the poor convert enough. It’s certainly possible to read the verses without knowing why he “frowned,” but it probably makes more sense if you do. (Note: Shi’ites do not believe that Muhammad frowned at this man, since that was an ungenerous response that was uncharacteristic of him.) Many of the surahs from this time talk about the persecution, alluding to specific events.

The literate ones among his followers had realized the importance of writing down the surahs on whatever was at hand. Perhaps in a rich man’s house, they were written on fresh parchment, while among the poorer families, they were jotted down on old accounts or even palm fronds (we still have some old Arabic script on palm branches; you can fit about three lines of script going down the stem’s length). Probably they knew which surahs were older, since those were familiar, but they made no concerted effort to keep the records in time order. As tribes from other towns started catching the new belief, some copies of surahs traveled back with them, out of order, of course. Eventually, when the surahs were all collected after the Prophet’s death, they were put into an order that isn’t always chronological. For example, that second revelation that opened with the puzzling letter “N” is Surah 68! One of the types of Islamic study with hadiths is an attempt to connect events with surahs. The biographies I’m working with typically cite surahs that seem related to events as they tell the events.

Persecution grew. The city did not want to lose its lucrative business model, in which the remaining pagans in Arabia all flooded in during the pilgrimage weeks. As in the New Testament apostles’ adventures at Ephesus, the reaction of the craftsmen to this monotheistic threat was violent. They tried various ways to drive Muhammad out of the city. We must remember, too, that Muhammad was constantly talking about what we today would call “social justice.” Give to the poor; share your wealth; limit your lifestyle. His friend Abu Bakr spent quite a bit of his wealth on supporting the converted poor. All of this was entirely unwelcome to the lifestyle influencers of the city.

Even during this period, some of the persecutors were converted to belief. A young man named Umar was furious when he heard that his sister’s family had converted. He wanted to kill the Prophet, but then he went to his brother-in-law, to attack him instead. He ended up hitting his sister badly enough that she bled, which froze him in his tracks. She showed him a Quranic passage, and he was immediately impressed by the eloquence. He continued his walk to the Prophet’s house, but this time, he wanted to profess faith. Then he publicly told the chief persecutor, his uncle, that he was now one of them.

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Muhammad’s Family and the Revelations

Posted on December 8, 2020 by Ruth

Sometimes there were long silences, while other times, the revelations came in quick succession. Muhammad was able to recite each one to his family and close friends, who also memorized them. Each revelation incident became a surah, a chapter in the eventual Quran, but for now just a discrete portion of the message. Each line was called an ayah. The fact that the ayahs rhymed helped with the memorization, but then Mecca’s culture was one of oral tradition. We’ve lost the faculty for vast memorizations, since now we put our efforts into learning to write. They still memorized things frequently and well, so it was easy and obvious for them to do it.

The first believers were Muhammad’s wife and his immediate family: four daughters still at home, and two adopted sons, Ali and Zayd. Very soon, his merchant friend Abu Bakr also embraced the message and began urging his family and friends to believe in it, too. (Note: the name “Abu Bakr” meant that his son was called Bakr, and it was considered very polite to address a man as “father of son” or his wife as “mother of son. History sometimes records this version of someone’s name, called a kunya, instead of their given name.)

And at first, the message was very simple: tawhid, or belief in the oneness of God. This was to be stated in every prayer as, “There is no God but Allah,” which in Arabic creates a tongue-twister of L’s: La ilahah illa-‘llah. Also very early came the now-familiar phrase “God is great,” Allahu akbar, to be included in prayers. An early revelation added the duty to perform ritual washing before prayer and a set form of bowing, sitting, and standing in repeating prayers. The duty to memorize and recite the known surahs went without saying, for how else could the words be preserved?

After Abu Bakr, the next convert was also an important man. Uthman was related to Muhammad through his mother, but was part of the wealthiest Meccan clan by his father’s line. (His grandfather’s name had been Umayyah; eventually, the dynasty of Caliphs descended from Uthman would be named after Umayyah, the Umayyads.) In 611, Uthman was taking his caravan back from Syria when he heard a dream voice telling him to awake, for “Ahmad” had arisen in Mecca. Puzzled, he shared the dream with another Meccan along the way, Talhah who was a cousin of Abu Bakr. This young man knew that Abu Bakr had been talking about Muhammad (similar to “Ahmad”), so they went to Abu Bakr and the Prophet to hear and profess faith.

A growing number of Muhammad’s cousins, and some of their mothers, were also embracing the new belief. Abu Talib, the uncle who had raised him, was affectionate but not accepting, and other uncles remained hostile to the message. Muhammad hosted a banquet for the clan of Banu Hashim. Some hadiths state that at this banquet, the food was multiplied from an originally small portion prepared by Ali. When his uncles gave him no opportunity to speak, he hosted a second banquet the next day, at which he addressed them. “God has commanded me to call you to Him. Which of you will help me, and be my brother and my successor in this?” A long silence was broken only by adopted son Ali, who was 13 or 15 years old. When Ali spoke up, Muhammad said, “this is my brother and my successor.” The uncles laughed, saying now Abu Talib would have to obey his own youngest son.

It’s interesting that both Sunni and Shi’ite scholars accept the story of Ali’s public stand at the banquet. To Shi’ites, this was the public proclamation of Ali’s formal inheritance of the leader’s mantle. As we’ll see in later entries, Muhammad’s companions did not choose Ali as the successor at the time of the Prophet’s death. But they did not try to suppress this story; apparently they just didn’t credit that what the Prophet said that day meant a legally binding will or even a formal proclamation.

A handful of women were early converts, on the heels of Khadijah. Several of Muhammad’s aunts, both blood-relation aunts and the wives of his uncles, converted. This included his uncle Abbas’s wife, Umm Fadl, although Abbas hesitated (Abbas later became the titular head of another Muslim dynasty, the Abbasids). There was a freed Abyssinian slave in the Prophet’s household, a widow known as Umm Ayman, and she became a prominent Muslim who married Zayd, the adopted son. In these early years, the women in Mecca seemed to have a great deal of freedom of belief and choice.

During these early times, they met where they could to recite the memorized surahs together and pray. There was the most space in the masjid, the wide clearing around the Ka’abah, and that’s where Meccans were supposed to pray. But their style of prayer was unique, strange, and therefore disruptive. They had learned the routine of sitting, standing, and prostrating in a uniform manner. They went through the prayer routines in the drill-like way that today’s Muslims still often pray in public. The Meccans were astonished. That’s when the private, family-based movement started to be noticed and mostly not in a welcoming way.

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