There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muhammad had to
contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who resented
the power of the Muslim newcomers and were determined to expel them from
the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where Abu Sufyan now directed the campaign against him, and had launched two major offensives
against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not simply to defeat the
ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the Muslims. The harsh ethic of
the desert meant that there were no half-measures in warfare: if
possible, a victorious chief was expected to exterminate the enemy, so
the ummah faced the threat of total extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a
severe defeat on the ummah at the Battle of Uhud, but two years later
the Muslims trounced the Meccans at the Battle of the Trench, so called
because Muhammad protected the settlement by digging a ditch around
Medina, which threw the Quraysh, who still regarded war rather as a
chivalric game and had never heard of such an unsporting trick, into
confusion, and rendered their cavalry useless. Muhammad's second victory
over the numerically superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand
Meccans to three thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the
nomadic tribes that Muhammad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh
look decidedly passe. The gods in whose name they fought were clearly
not working on their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to become the
allies of the ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal
confederacy, whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight
each other's enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made
the hijrah to Medina; at last, after five years of deadly peril,
Muhammad could be confident that the ummah would survive.
In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three
Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to
destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with Mecca.
They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims,
since their territory was so situated that they could easily join a
besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When the
Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Muhammad in 625, they
were expelled from Medina, in accordance with Arab custom. Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with
them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assassinate
him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the nearby Jewish
settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up support for Abu Sufyan among the
northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even more of a danger
outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah sided with Mecca
during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it seemed that the
Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no mercy.
The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their women and
children sold as slaves.
The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible
incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our
own time. This was a very primitive society: the Muslims themselves had
just narrowly escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the
Qurayzah they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and
brought another war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an
Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah.
The executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the
pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the allies
of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and everybody had
always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did not indicate
any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel
tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge
Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish groups
continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed
full religious liberty in the Islamic empires. Anti-semitism is a
Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world
only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the
subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were
compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into
Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own. Because of
this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims now quote the
passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle with the three
rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the
message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt
no such hatred of Judaism.
Muhammad's intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to bring
hostilities to an end as soon as possible. The Quran teaches that war is
such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in their power to
restore peace and normality in the shortest possible time.18 Arabia was
a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to fight its way to
peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad was attempting in
the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed. But after the Battle
of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca and quashed the
opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to abandon the jihad and
begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in train a daring and
imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to a close. He
announced that he was going to make the hajj. to Mecca, and asked for
volunteers to accompany him. Since pilgrims were forbidden to carry
arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into the lions' den and
putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and resentful Quraysh.
Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to join the Prophet and
set out for Mecca, dressed in the traditional white robes of the hajji.
If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the Kabah or attacked bona fide
pilgrims they would betray their sacred duty as the guardians of the
shrine.
The Quraysh did, however, dispatch troops to attack the pilgrims before
they reached the area outside the city where violence was forbidden, but
the Prophet evaded them and, with the help of some of his
Bedouin allies, managed to reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at
Hudaybiyyah and awaited developments. Eventually the Quraysh were
pressured by this peaceful demonstration to sign a treaty with the ummah.
It was an unpopular move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager
for action, and felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was
determined to achieve victory by peaceful means.
Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the
Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible
trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by
attacking one of the Prophet's tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon
Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming
force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh
conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca without
shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the Kabah,
rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan rites of
the hajj, an Islamic significance by linking them to the story of
Abraham, Hagar and Ismail.
None of the Quraysh was forced to become Muslim, but Muhammad's victory
convinced some of his most principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan,
that the old religion had failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms
of his beloved wife Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined
the ummah as Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the
ummah could not, of course, attack one another, the ghastly cycle of
tribal warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended.
Single-handedly, Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
Courtesy: Karen Armstrong, Islam
(New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 19-23)
