The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (23 page)

Indeed it seemed at first that Medina’s Jews were quite open to him. The clans of the three main Jewish tribes had willingly signed on to the arbitration agreement and were part of the umma, though only as secondary members—as confederates, that is, of the dominant Aws and Khazraj tribes. The Quranic voice had appealed directly to the original “People of the Book,” instructing Muhammad to say: “We believe in that which has been revealed to us and that which was revealed to you. Our God and your God is one.” The believers were not to argue with Jews “except fairly and politely,” the Quran instructed. They should say, “People of the Book, let us come to an agreement that we will worship none but God, that we will associate no partners with him, and that none of us shall set up mortals as deities alongside God.” And then, since that formulation might be understood to exclude Christians, further verses expanded on it: “Believers, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, whoever believes in God and the day of judgment and does what is right, all shall be rewarded by God . . . We believe in God and in what was revealed to us, in that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael, to Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and in that which God gave to Moses and Jesus and the prophets. We discriminate against none of them.”

The problem was that Medina’s Jews saw no more reason to accept Muhammad as a prophet than they had Jesus. They believed that the days of prophecy had ended twelve centuries before, with the Babylonian exile. There could be no more prophets. So just as the Quraysh had declared that they could not abandon the traditions of their fathers, so the Jews were determined to stand firm in the traditions of theirs. In almost two years, hardly any had accepted islam, and this appeared to confound Muhammad.

In Mecca, the Quranic voice had been quite accepting of challenges to its teaching. “We have sent down this scripture to you, messenger, with the truth for the people,” it had said. “Whoever follows its guidance does so to his own benefit. Whoever strays away from it does so at his own peril; you are not in charge of them.” Yet now Muhammad seemed to feel a special responsibility for the Jews. Their lack of interest seemed impossible, the result surely of sheer stubbornness; but the more he tried to convince them, the more they resisted, and in response the tone of the Quranic voice began to change, reflecting his exasperation.

“People of the Book, why do you deny God’s revelations when you know they are true?” it said. “Why do you confound the true with the false, and knowingly conceal the truth?” Soon the Jews were no longer addressed directly but referred to only in the third person: no longer “we” but “they.” Some of them were “upright and honorable,” the voice conceded, but others had “made of their religion a sport and a pastime,” as had the Meccans. Couldn’t they see that they were betraying their own faith? That the Quran was not a denial of the Judaic message but a renewal of it?

But the Jewish tribes saw no need for renewal, let alone for an outsider telling them that they weren’t good enough Jews. Their rabbis rejected the Quranic appeal, leading ibn-Ishaq to devote several pages to scenes in which they argued vehemently with Muhammad, “stirring up trouble” by insisting that his versions of the biblical tales were wrong. It’s unlikely that these arguments ever took place, however. While details of the biblical stories as told in the Quran certainly differ from those now accepted in the West as canonical, they were current throughout the Middle East of the time. In fact radically different versions of many of the biblical tales can still be heard today throughout the region, where what seems “wrong” to Western ears is accepted as part of the lore of the Eastern churches.

The real issue was not religious but political. Medina’s three Jewish tribes had already been outnumbered by the arrival of the Aws and Khazraj in the fifth century, and now, with the rapid expansion of Muhammad’s influence, they feared being marginalized further. Perhaps if they had presented a united front, they could have been a political force to be reckoned with. But they had taken different sides in the inter-tribal conflict that had brought Muhammad to the city as an arbiter, and were thus often as hostile to each other as to anyone else. As the former majority reduced to a divided minority, they saw Muhammad’s increasing power as a threat not so much to their religion as to their future in Medina. And in this he would prove them correct.

f it was clear that Muhammad was deeply disappointed by Jewish resistance to his message, it was equally clear that he needed to establish himself as no longer a man to disappoint. Without antagonizing the majority of Medina, he needed to make an example of those who openly challenged him. The smallest of the three Jewish tribes, the Qaynuqa, would now provide that example.

One story has it that “the affair of the Qaynuqa,” as ibn-Ishaq calls it, was sparked by a marketplace incident just a month after the Battle of Badr. A young Qaynuqa man was said to have harassed a Beduin girl, trying to get her to lift her veil as she sat selling her produce. The girl swore at him, and a friend of his decided to retaliate by playing a crude practical joke, quietly tying the hem of her dress to a post so that when she stood up, her skirt was ripped off and she was left exposed. A Muslim believer who was passing by saw what had happened and leaped on the laughing men, killing one of them only to be killed himself by others drawn to the fight.

The story places the blame squarely on the Qaynuqa for having instigated the whole affair, and for having taken matters into their own hands after one of them was killed instead of turning to Muhammad for arbitration. With its vivid image of a victimized half-naked girl, it was perfectly calculated to inflame the imagination. Nobody could honorably stand by and allow that to happen. Yet at least part of the story is clearly apocryphal, since no Medinan women, let alone hard-working Beduin, wore veils at that time. The idea of the veil would be introduced only three years later, and then only for Muhammad’s wives. Nevertheless, this purported marketplace brawl would serve as the apparent reason to single out the Qaynuqa.

But there were other, more political reasons. One centered on the possibility of collusion with the enemy. After all, somebody had warned abu-Sufyan of the three hundred men planning to raid his caravan at Badr, and though there was no solid evidence against the Qaynuqa, they were suspect by virtue of their close business ties with Mecca. More likely, however, they were never the primary target, but merely pawns in a larger political game in which the real quarry was their chief ally among the Khazraj: Abdullah ibn-Ubayy.

Ibn-Ubayy was a veteran clan leader who was said to have nursed the ambition of becoming “prince of Medina” until Muhammad’s arrival. As one rumor had it, he had been “stringing the beads of his crown.” It’s unclear how he hoped to achieve this given the ongoing rift between his Khazraj tribe and the Aws; perhaps he saw himself as the peacemaker and had accepted islam under the illusion that Muhammad would help him. If so, he was soon disillusioned: the distinction between emigrants and helpers made it clear whose role it was to be helped and whose to do the helping. But ibn-Ubayy was far from alone in feeling that Muhammad’s spiritual authority did not translate so well into political authority.

It had escaped none of the helpers’ notice that Muhammad’s closest advisers—abu-Bakr, Ali, and Omar among them—were all emi- grants. Though the helpers had welcomed them, many did not quite fully accept them. The emigrants still had the whiff of outsiders, bigcity foreigners who had come from another place and were not just taking over, but endangering the whole of Medina by rashly pursuing a policy of confrontation with the city they’d left behind. Along with those who had not yet accepted islam, many of the helpers thus had reservations about Muhammad’s increasingly political role, and ibnUbayy was the most vocal of them.

His voice counted. As a leading figure in Medinan politics, he was used to being listened to, and had been openly displeased when his criticism of raids against Meccan caravans was ignored. He had refused to join the expedition to Badr, but now the victory there had placed his judgment in question, leaving him politically vulnerable. For Muhammad to directly attack him was out of the question; that would only antagonize the Khazraj. Far wiser, then, to undermine ibn-Ubayy by challenging his ability to protect his allies. Charging his Qaynuqa confederates with breaking Medina’s arbitration agreement would be an excellent way to subvert his authority, effectively defanging a respected critic and possible rival for leadership.

The last thing the Qaynuqa wanted was to be caught in the middle of a power struggle like this, but caught they were. It made no difference whether what happened was due to a marketplace scrap turned fatal, or payback for suspected collusion with the enemy, or a ploy to disempower a leading critic. Muhammad charged them with disloyalty, and ordered his followers to surround their village, forcing them to retreat into their stronghold.

This was an over-reaction on his part, but that was precisely the point: it was a demonstration of his power and authority, and of ibnUbayy’s lack of the same. The Qaynuqa held out under siege for fifteen days until they ran out of water, surrendered, and threw themselves on Muhammad’s mercy. Like everyone else, they expected him to make the usual demands in such a situation: that they surrender their arms, that their income for the next several years be garnished, even that their leaders be imprisoned for a term. Instead, Muhammad stunned everyone by ordering them all placed in fetters. The punishment, he declared, would be execution for the men, slavery for the women and children, and confiscation of all their property.

Ibn-Ubayy rushed to intercede. The Qaynuqa had been loyal to him, and now his loyalty to them was on the line—his reputation, that is, as a leader of integrity with the power to protect his allies. But the only weapon he had was outrage. “Treat my confederates well!” he shouted at Muhammad. “Seven hundred men who defended me from all comers, and you would now mow them down in a single morning? By God, I do not feel safe with such a decision. It makes me afraid of what the future may hold in store.”

Muhammad’s only reply was to turn away, and at that ibn-Ubayy saw red. How dare Muhammad turn his back on him? He grabbed him by the collar, and the two men struggled briefly. “Confound you, let me go!” Muhammad yelled, the veins in his forehead throbbing dark and livid with anger. But ibn-Ubayy hung fast: “I will not let you go until you treat them well.”

As his followers closed in to help him, Muhammad tore himself free and held up his hand to hold them off. There was no need to go any further. Ibn-Ubayy had just conceded the principle: judgment was Muhammad’s to make, and his alone. Only his word could spare the Qaynuqa, and now that ibn-Ubayy had acknowledged this, it was to Muhammad’s advantage to compromise. Drawing out the moment, he hesitated as if in thought, and then concluded: “They are yours. Let them go elsewhere.” Anywhere but Medina, that is. All two thousand of the Qaynuqa were to be expelled.

The penalty of banishment was not unheard-of, as the poetic meme of the lone outlaw makes clear, but applying it to a whole tribe was. This was collective punishment, and while obviously less extreme than execution and enslavement, it was still inordinately severe. Yet insist as ibn-Ubayy might on more lenient terms, he got nowhere. He had been outmaneuvered, his influence undermined even as it appeared to be bolstered by Muhammad’s change of mind.

Three days later, the sad procession of departing Qaynuqa served as due warning to all that Muhammad was now in charge. They filed out of Medina, the women and children on camels, the men on foot, heading for the Jewish-dominated oasis of Khaybar sixty miles to the north. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. What they left behind—land, palm groves, houses—would be divided among the emigrants, with one fifth kept back for the community treasury. The rest of Medina watched silently. If there was irony in the fact that the exiles had now in turn exiled others, nobody cared to comment on it.

he Qaynuqa were not the only ones to pay in the aftermath of Badr. Being a poet could be equally dangerous. However marginal poets may seem in the twenty-first-century West, they were the rock stars of seventh-century Arabia, and not only because of their famed odes and elegies. The other great form of Arabic poetry was satire: verses laced with vivid and often bawdy puns and double entendres, the more biting the better. But if words could be as sharp-edged as a sword, they could also bring the sharp edge of a sword in return.

The price of satire would now be made abundantly clear. One of the pithiest wordsmiths criticizing Muhammad was Asma, whose lines were all the more insulting for coming from a woman. The wit of her rhyme is lost in translation, but even a literal version conveys her scorn. “Screwed men of Khazraj,” she wrote, “will you be cuckolds / Allowing this stranger to take over your nest? / You put your hopes in him like men greedy for warm barley soup. / Is there no man who will step up and cut off this cuckoo?”

In Mecca, Muhammad had had no choice but to put up with such mockery and taunts. Not any longer. “Will nobody rid me of this woman?” he sighed aloud. His wish was the command of one believer who was a kinsman of Asma’s. That same night, he went to her house, found her asleep with her youngest child in her arms, and drove his sword through her breast. “Shall I have to bear any penalty on her account?” he asked Muhammad the next morning. The answer was curt: “Two goats shall not come to blows for her.”

Another opposition poet, abu-Afak, was mild by comparison: “Here’s a rider who has come among us and divided us, / Saying ‘This is forbidden and that is permitted.’ / But if you believe in power and might, Medinans, / Why not follow a ruler of your own?” But even this was now beyond the pale. All Muhammad had to say was “Who will avenge me on this scoundrel?” and another volunteer obliged. As with Asma, nobody dared demand vengeance.

A third poet, ibn-Ashraf, made good his escape, if only temporarily. A member of the Jewish Nadir tribe, he had headed for Mecca together with some fifty other young men, calling on the Quraysh to take their revenge for Badr. “For such battles, tears and rain flow in torrents,” he wrote. “The flower of the Quraysh perished around the wells of Badr, / Where so many of noble fame were cut down.” This prompted a taunting rebuke from Hassan ibn-Thabit, who was to become in effect Muhammad’s poet laureate: “Weep on like a pup following a little bitch. / God has given satisfaction to our leader / And shamed and cast down those who fought him.” Whether bravely or foolishly, ibn-Ashraf returned to Medina eager to out-insult ibnThabit in person, only to be quickly assassinated.