Muhammad in Medina
In the sixth century after Christ, in a hot stone city in the Hijaz called Mecca, a merchant named Muhammad ibn Abdallah began to recite verses he said had been given to him by the angel of God. He was a man of…
Biblical Narrative
In the sixth century after Christ, in a hot stone city in the Hijaz called Mecca, a merchant named Muhammad ibn Abdallah began to recite verses he said had been given to him by the angel of God. He was a man of forty, married to a wealthy widow named Khadija, known among his neighbors as al-Amin, the trustworthy. The verses he recited were unlike anything in Arabic before: rhythmic, threatening, full of the splendor of one God who would not share His worship with the idols of the Kaaba. The merchants of Mecca, whose pilgrim trade depended on those idols, did not approve.
For thirteen years he preached and was persecuted; for thirteen years his small community of believers was beaten and starved and driven into exile. In the summer of the year now called 622, the city of Yathrib — three hundred miles to the north, an oasis of date palms and Jewish tribes — sent a delegation begging him to come and arbitrate their endless feuds. He went; his followers went; the date of his arrival, the Hijra, became year one of a new calendar. Yathrib was renamed: Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet.
In Medina he was both prophet and judge. The Constitution of Medina — preserved in Ibn Ishaq's biography of him — listed the believers and the Jewish tribes as one community, an umma, with mutual obligations of defense and arbitration. The Jewish tribes of Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza signed it. For a season Medina knew something rare in seventh-century Arabia: an order in which Jew and Muslim shared a town and a covenant.
But the season passed. As Muhammad's struggle with the Quraysh of Mecca intensified, his relations with the Jewish tribes broke down one by one. The Banu Qaynuqa were expelled in 624 after a market quarrel; the Banu Nadir in 625, accused of plotting against him; the Banu Qurayza in 627, after the Battle of the Trench, were judged guilty of treason and the men were executed. The early Muslim community emerged from these years with a sharpened identity and a memory of broken trust — a memory that would shape, for centuries, the Muslim attitude toward Jews.
This is a writing of Muhammad the Prophet between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib, and those who follow them and join them and labor with them. They are one community to the exclusion of all men.Constitution of Medina, opening clause (Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The earliest narrative biography of Muhammad (c. 570 — 8 June 632 CE) is the Sirat Rasul Allah of Ibn Ishaq (d. 767 CE), preserved in the recension of Ibn Hisham (d. 833 CE). It is supplemented by the maghazi (campaign) literature of al-Waqidi (d. 823 CE) and the early sections of al-Tabari's universal history (d. 923 CE). Modern scholars distinguish between the historical core of these sources and the layers of theological elaboration accreted in the first two Islamic centuries. The classic critical study is W. Montgomery Watt's two-volume Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956); a more skeptical reassessment is Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses (1980).
The Hijra to Yathrib in September 622 CE is one of the firmest dates in early Islamic history. The city Yathrib was an agricultural oasis dominated by date palms and divided among Arab tribes (Aws, Khazraj) and three Jewish tribes (Qaynuqa, Nadir, Qurayza), which had quarreled themselves nearly to ruin. The decisive Pledge of Aqaba (622), in which Yathribi delegates accepted Muhammad as arbiter, is independently attested across multiple early sources.
The Constitution of Medina (Sahifat al-Madina) is preserved as a single document in Ibn Ishaq with what appears to be archaic Arabic and pre-Islamic legal terminology. Michael Lecker's The Constitution of Medina: Muhammad's First Legal Document (Darwin Press, 2004) reconstructs forty-seven articles and argues for substantial authenticity, dating the original to the first year after the Hijra. The text grants the Jewish tribes — named explicitly — equal status as members of the umma, with religious freedom ("the Jews have their religion, and the Muslims have theirs") and mutual obligations of defense.
The fates of the three Jewish tribes are recorded in the maghazi literature with considerable detail. Qaynuqa, primarily goldsmiths, were besieged after a market incident in 624 and expelled toward Syria. Nadir, agriculturalists, were expelled to Khaybar in 625 after accusations of plotting Muhammad's assassination. Qurayza, after the failed Confederate siege of Medina in 627, were executed (the men) or enslaved (the women and children) following arbitration by Sa'd ibn Mu'adh — an episode whose historicity has been challenged by W. N. Arafat (1976) but defended by most scholars. M. J. Kister's Studies in Jahiliyyah and Early Islam (Variorum 1980) remains the most rigorous source-critical treatment.
The Constitution of Medina is the foundational charter of the Islamic community as a political body — and its inclusion of the Jewish tribes as members of the umma is one of the most striking documents of seventh-century Near Eastern history.Adapted from Michael Lecker, The Constitution of Medina