Source: Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the
Minaret (NY: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 86-87
Before the Muslims faced the inevitable Meccan reaction to this reverse, the opportunity was taken to bring increasing
pressure upon the Jews, several of whom were put to death or dispossessed. Within a month after the return from Badr there were
individual acts of intimidation, culminating in the expulsion of the Banu Qainuqa'a. Almost a year after Badr, came the Meccan advance to revenge. On this second occasion the issue was less
favorable. Apparently in overconfidence the Muslims lost discipline and were in danger of being routed. They were only rallied
in a desperate effort by the Prophet himself. The Quranic passage relating to the Battle (Surah iii. 120 seq.) rebuked the Muslim presumption and interpreted the reverse as a test of faith and
a deserved chastisement. Over seventy Muslims were slain to some twenty of the Quraish. Muhammad had need of all his
resourcefulness to survive the serious loss of prestige, though the Meccans on their side do not seem to have realized or utilized
the full extent of their victory. They withdrew after mutilating the dead and Muhammad, after a delayed show of pursuit,
returned to Medina.
Perhaps enheartened by this set-back, perhaps fearful of
further Muslim acts of hostility, the Jews of the Medinan region began to make closer cause with the Quraish. Their economically superior position exposed them to dangers of expulsion
such as had already been indicated. The increasing menace from
the Muslims suggested common action with Mecca, with which, however, there were few other ties. It was the familiar story of
the common enemy bringing together unwilling allies. While it seems clear that Jewish elements were implicated in Meccan
enmity to Muhammad, it is also clear that both elements in the
uneasy alliance were blundering and vacillating. Any situation like that confronting them, and relating to an adversary of Muhammad's resolve and resource, calls for comparable resolution
and tenacity. These the Jews and Meccans lacked-as is only too evident from the ill-starred and inept "siege" of Medina known
in Muslim history as "the Battle of the Ditch." Like people acting inadvisably out of fear and bewilderment, they only succeeded in fulfilling their worst dread.
The siege was raised after the besiegers found the weather too
cold for them and the irresolute Quraish, lacking energetic leadership, withdrew, leaving their Jewish partners to face the
accumulated wrath of Muhammad. There followed the massacre of the Banu Quraizah which marks the darkest depth of Muslim
policy, a depth which the palliatives suggested by some modern Muslim historians quite fail to measure. The whole tribe was
dispossessed and after suing for clemency, the women and children were enslaved, while the men, traditionally numbered at
seven hundred, were executed beside long trench graves in a day
of signal terror. The fearful fate of the Banu Quraizah far outweighed their deserts and contrasted darkly with the magnanimity of Muhammad when subsequently he faced their Meccan
allies in the "siege" after his reconquest of the Holy City.
But the circumstances were different. Muhammad, by canons
of soldierly wisdom, could hardly yet afford to be magnanimous. Not all the Muhajirun Muslims were yet re-propertied, nor was
the situation at all secure in the region. In approving, and later eulogizing in a funeral speech, the judge who had decided the
sentence on the Banu Quraizah, Muhammad was no doubt following the behests of a stern policy. Certainly the step succeeded.
Disaffection, both religious and political, was cowed into paralysis, if not
submission, throughout Medina. The next main confiscatory enterprise took the Muslims some hundred miles north
of the city to the Jews of rich Khaibar, who could have been only remotely related to Medinan affairs but who none the less
were made to forfeit all their possessions.
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