Story

The Conquest of Khaybar

628 CE

Biblical Narrative

Ninety miles north of Medina, in a wadi where black volcanic stone gives way to springs and date palms, lay the oasis of Khaybar — the richest Jewish settlement in the Arabian peninsula. Its seven fortresses crowned the cliffs above the gardens; its three districts of Natat, Shiqq, and Katiba held tens of thousands of date palms and the granaries that fed them. The Jews of Khaybar were tribesmen — Banu Nadir, exiled from Medina; Banu Qurayza in scattered remnants; older lineages whose origins ran back to Solomon's caravans, or so they said.

In the spring of the year now called 628, Muhammad's army marched out from Medina toward the oasis. The Jews of Nadir, exiled there three years before, had not forgiven their banishment; they had made common cause with Mecca; they had paid Bedouin chieftains to attack the Muslim community. The Prophet had decided that Khaybar would no longer be a haven from which his enemies could strike. The march was undertaken in secrecy and in haste, and the oasis had no warning when, on a morning that would be remembered, the standards of Medina appeared on the heights above the palms.

The fortresses fell one by one. Naim, then Sa'b ibn Mu'adh, then Qamus — the last and strongest, where Kinana ibn al-Rabi' was tortured to give up the buried treasure of Banu Nadir. The fighting men of Khaybar were killed. The women and children were taken captive. Among the captives was Safiyya, daughter of the chief of Banu Nadir, whom Muhammad freed and married — and through whom the Jewish lineages of Khaybar entered, by a strange channel, into the household of the Prophet himself.

But the survivors of Khaybar were not driven out. Muhammad, who had no Muslim farmers to work the date orchards, accepted their petition: they would remain on the land they no longer owned, and would deliver half the harvest each year to the Muslims of Medina. So began the dhimma — the contract of protection-and-tribute that, for fourteen centuries, would govern the place of non-Muslims under Islamic rule. Khaybar was its first written instance, and its terms — half the harvest, life and worship preserved — would be remembered, simplified, and elaborated long after the oasis itself had passed into the hands of the caliph Umar.

We will leave you on the land as long as God leaves you, on condition that we have half the fruit.Muhammad to the Jews of Khaybar (Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah)

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The Muslim conquest of the oasis of Khaybar took place in Muharram or Safar of year 7 AH (May or June 628 CE), shortly after the Treaty of Hudaybiyya freed Muhammad's hand from the Meccan front. The principal sources are Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah (preserved in Ibn Hisham), al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi, and the campaign-by-campaign reconstruction in al-Tabari. These sources broadly agree on the sequence of events but diverge on numbers and on the most lurid details (the torture of Kinana, the poisoning attempt by Zaynab bint al-Harith).

Khaybar's Jewish population is estimated by modern historians at between 10,000 and 20,000 — making it the largest concentrated Jewish community in seventh-century Arabia, possibly larger than the Medinan Jewish tribes combined before their expulsion. The seven fortresses (al-Watih, al-Sulalim, Naim, al-Sa'b, Qamus, al-Nizar, al-Qamus) are partially identifiable in the modern landscape; Khaybar's date palms remained famous into the early twentieth century. The oasis's Jewish population persisted under the dhimma until Caliph Umar's expulsion of all Jews from the Hijaz around 642 CE.

The Khaybar treaty is the foundational text of dhimmi law. Moshe Gil's Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Brill English ed. 2004), the most authoritative source-critical treatment, shows how the Khaybar precedent — half the produce, retained worship, no military obligation — was generalized through the early conquests and codified in the eighth and ninth centuries as the jizya (poll tax) and kharaj (land tax) regime. Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross (Princeton 1994) places the dhimma in comparative perspective with medieval Christian treatment of Jews and concludes that, on a per-century basis, dhimmis fared better than Jews in Christendom.

The Khaybar episode is also significant in the history of qur'anic exegesis. Several Medinan suras (notably Q. 33, 59, 5) refer to incidents involving the Jewish tribes; the asbab al-nuzul (occasions of revelation) literature ties specific verses to Khaybar and the earlier Medinan expulsions. Modern Islamic-studies scholarship (Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands [JPS 1979] and Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam [Princeton 1984]) has read these verses against the maghazi sources to reconstruct the early-Islamic-Jewish encounter without either apologetic minimization or polemical amplification.

The Khaybar agreement is the matrix of the dhimma — the legal framework that, for fourteen centuries, organized Jewish and Christian life under Muslim rule.Adapted from Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries