by Reza Aslan
What the Aws and the Khazraj desperately needed was a Hakam, or arbiter. Not just any Hakam, but an authoritative, trustworthy, and neutral party who was totally unconnected with anyone in Yathrib, someone who had the power—better yet, the divine authority—to arbitrate between the two tribes. How fortunate, then, that the perfect man for the job was himself in desperate need of a place to live.
That Muhammad came to Yathrib as little more than the Hakam in the quarrel between the Aws and the Khazraj is certain. And yet the traditions seem to present Muhammad arriving in the oasis as the mighty prophet of a new and firmly established religion: the unchallenged leader of the whole of Yathrib. That view is partly the result of a famous document called the Constitution of Medina, which Muhammad may have drafted sometime after settling in the oasis. The document—often celebrated as the world’s first written constitution—was a series of formal agreements of nonaggression among Muhammad, the newly arrived Emigrants, the Ansar in Medina who had converted to Muhammad’s movement, and the rest of Yathrib’s clans, both Jewish and pagan.
The Constitution is controversial, however, because it seems to assign to Muhammad unparalleled religious and political authority over the entire population of the oasis, including the Jews. It indicates that Muhammad had sole authority to arbitrate all disputes in Yathrib, not just that between the Aws and Khazraj. It declares him to be Yathrib’s sole war leader (Qa‘id) and unequivocally recognizes him as the Messenger of God. And while it implies that Muhammad’s primary role was as “Shaykh” of his “clan” of Emigrants, it also clearly endows him with a privileged position over all other tribal and clan Shaykhs in Yathrib.
The problem lies in determining exactly when the Constitution of Medina was written. The traditional sources, including al-Tabari and Ibn Hisham, place its composition among the Prophet’s first acts upon entering the oasis: that is, in 622 C.E. But that is highly unlikely, given Muhammad’s weak position during those first few years in Yathrib. He was, after all, forced to flee Mecca and hunted throughout the Hijaz like a criminal. And, as Michael Lecker has shown, it was not until after the Battle of Badr in 624 (an event that will be discussed in the following chapter), and perhaps not even until 627—five years after the emigration (Hijra) to Yathrib—that the majority of the Aws tribe converted to Islam. Before then, few people outside the Ansar (which at that point consisted of only a handful of members of the Khazraj) would have known who Muhammad was, let alone have submitted to his authority. His movement represented the tiniest fraction of Yathrib’s population; the Jews alone may have totaled in the thousands. When Muhammad arrived in the oasis, he had brought fewer than a hundred men, women, and children with him.
The Constitution of Medina may reflect several early pacts of nonaggression among Muhammad, the Arab clans, and their Jewish clients. It may even reproduce certain elements of Muhammad’s arbitration between the Aws and the Khazraj. But there is simply no way it could have been completed as it has been preserved before 624 C.E. Only after the Battle of Badr could Muhammad have dreamed of the powers attributed to him by the Constitution of Medina; indeed, only after Badr could Yathrib even be thought of as Medina.
Muhammad’s role during those first couple of years in Yathrib was very likely that of a Hakam—albeit a powerful and divinely inspired one—whose arbitration was restricted to the Aws and Khazraj, and whose authority as a Shaykh was confined to his own “clan” of Emigrants: one clan out of many; one Shaykh out of many. Muhammad’s claim to be the Messenger of God would not have had to be either accepted or rejected for him to function properly in either of these two roles. Both the pagan Arabs and the Jews of Yathrib would have considered his prophetic character to be proof of his supernatural wisdom, especially since the ideal Hakam was almost always also the Kahin, or soothsayer, whose connection to the Divine was indispensable in especially difficult disputes like the one between the Aws and Khazraj.
Yet while the other inhabitants of Yathrib may have viewed Muhammad as little more than a Hakam and a Shaykh, that was not at all how his small band of followers saw him. To them, Muhammad was the Prophet/Lawgiver who spoke with the authority of the one God. As such, he had come to Yathrib to establish a new kind of socioreligious community, though how that community was to be organized, and who could be considered a member of it, had yet to be defined.
It may be tempting to call the members of this new community Muslims (literally, “those who submit” to God). But there is no reason to believe that this term was used to designate a distinct religious movement until many years later, perhaps not until the end of Muhammad’s life. It would perhaps be more accurate to refer to Muhammad’s followers by the same term the Quran uses: the Ummah. The problem with this term, however, is that no one is certain what it meant or where it came from. It may be derived from Arabic, Hebrew, or Aramaic; it may have meant “a community,” “a nation,” or “a people.” A few scholars have suggested that Ummah may be derived from the Arabic word for “mother” (umm), and while this idea may be aesthetically pleasing, there is no linguistic evidence for it. To make matters more complicated, the word Ummah inexplicably ceases to be used in the Quran after 625 C.E., when it is replaced with the word qawm—Arabic for “tribe.”
But there may be something to this change in terms. Despite its ingenuity, Muhammad’s community was still an Arab institution based on Arab notions of tribal society. There was simply no alternative model of social organization in seventh-century Arabia, save for monarchy. Indeed, there are so many parallels between the early Muslim community and traditional tribal society that one is left with the distinct impression that, at least in Muhammad’s mind, the Ummah was indeed a tribe, though a new and radically innovative one.
For one thing, the reference in the Constitution of Medina to Muhammad’s role as Shaykh of his clan of Emigrants indicates that despite the Prophet’s elevated status, his secular authority would have fallen well within the traditional paradigm of pre-Islamic tribal society. What is more, just as membership in the tribe obliged participation in the rituals and activities of the tribal cult, so did membership in Muhammad’s community require ritual involvement in what could be termed its “tribal cult”: in this case, the nascent religion of Islam. Public rituals like communal prayer, almsgiving, and collective fasting—the first three activities mandated by Islam—when combined with shared dietary regulations and purity requirements, functioned in the Ummah in much the same way that the activities of the tribal cult did in pagan societies: by providing a common social and religious identity that allowed one group to distinguish itself from another.
What made the Ummah a unique experiment in social organization was that in Yathrib, far away from the social and religious hegemony of the Quraysh, Muhammad finally had the opportunity to implement the reforms he had been preaching to no avail in Mecca. By enacting a series of radical religious, social, and economic reforms, he was able to establish a new kind of society, the likes of which had never before been seen in Arabia.
For instance, whereas power in the tribe was allocated to a number of figures, none of whom had any real executive authority, Muhammad instead united all the pre-Islamic positions of authority unto himself. He was not only the Shaykh of his community, but also its Hakam, its Qa‘id, and, as the only legitimate connection to the Divine, its Kahin. His authority as Prophet/Lawgiver was absolute.
Also, while the only way to become a member of a tribe was to be born into it, anyone could join Muhammad’s community simply by declaring, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” The shahadah, or profession of faith, was thus transformed in Yathrib from a theological statement with explicit social and political implications into a new version of the oath of allegiance, the bay’ah, which the tribe gave to its Shaykh. And because neither ethnicity nor culture nor race nor kinship had any significance to Muhammad, the Ummah, unlike a traditional tribe, had an almost unlimited capacity for growth through conversion.
The poin
t is that one can refer to Muhammad’s community in Yathrib as the Ummah, but only insofar as that term is understood to designate what the Orientalist explorer Bertram Thomas has called a “super-tribe,” or what the historian Marshall Hodgson more accurately describes as a “neo-tribe”: that is, a radically new kind of social organization, but one that was nonetheless based on the traditional Arab tribal paradigm.
As was the case with all tribal Shaykhs, Muhammad’s primary function as head of the Ummah was to ensure the protection of every member in his community. This he did through the chief means at his disposal: the Law of Retribution. But while retribution was maintained as a legitimate response to injury, Muhammad urged believers toward forgiveness: “The retribution for an injury is an equal injury,” the Quran states, “but those who forgive the injury and make reconciliation will be rewarded by God” (42:40). Likewise, the Constitution of Medina sanctions retribution as the principal deterrent for crime, but with the unprecedented stipulation that the entire community may be “solidly against [the criminal], and may do nothing except oppose him,” a stark reversal of tribal tradition and a clear indication that Muhammad was already beginning to lay the foundations of a society built on moral rather than utilitarian principles. But this was only the beginning.
To further his egalitarian ideals, Muhammad equalized the blood-worth of every member of his community, so that no longer could one life be considered more or less valuable (pecuniarily speaking) than another. This was yet another innovation in the Arabian legal system, for while an injury to a victim’s eye in pre-Islamic Arabia would have required an equal injury to the criminal’s eye, no one would have considered a Shaykh’s eye to be worth the same amount as an orphan’s. But Muhammad changed all that, and not without seriously disrupting the social order. The traditions recount a particularly amusing story about an aristocratic tribesman named Jabalah ibn al-Ayham, an early follower of Muhammad, who was struck in the face by a humble man from the Muzaynah, a modest tribe in Arabia. Expecting that a stern penalty would be imposed on the lowly offender—one that would signify his inferior status in society—al-Ayham was shocked to learn that all he could expect as retribution was the opportunity to strike the humble man back. So outraged was he by this “injustice” that al-Ayham immediately abandoned Islam and became a Christian.
Nor did Muhammad’s move toward egalitarianism end with reforming the Law of Retribution. In Yathrib, he categorically outlawed usury, the abuse of which was one of his chief complaints against the Meccan religio-economic system. To facilitate the new economy, he established his own market, which, unlike the one controlled by the Banu Qaynuqa, charged no tax on transactions and no interest on loans. While this tax-free market eventually became a point of conflict between Muhammad and the Banu Qaynuqa, the Prophet’s move was not a means of antagonizing the wealthy and powerful Jewish tribe, but a further step toward alleviating the divide between the ridiculously wealthy and the absurdly poor.
Using his unquestioned religious authority, Muhammad instituted a mandatory tithe called zakat, which every member of the Ummah had to pay according to his or her means. Once collected, the money was then redistributed as alms to the community’s neediest members. Zakat literally means “purification,” and was not an act of charity but of religious devotion: benevolence and care for the poor were the first and most enduring virtues preached by Muhammad in Mecca. Piety, the Quran reminds believers, lies “not in turning your face East or West in prayer … but in distributing your wealth out of love for God to your needy kin; to the orphans, to the vagrants, and to the mendicants; it lies in freeing the slaves, in observing your devotions, and in giving alms to the poor” (2:177).
Perhaps nowhere was Muhammad’s struggle for economic redistribution and social egalitarianism more evident than in the rights and privileges he bestowed upon the women in his community. Beginning with the unbiblical conviction that men and women were created together and simultaneously from a single cell (4:1; 7:189), the Quran goes to great lengths to emphasize the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God:
God offers forgiveness and a great reward,
For men who surrender to Him, and women who surrender to Him,
For men who believe, and women who believe,
For men who obey, and women who obey,
For men who speak truth, and women who speak truth, For men who persevere, and women who persevere,
For men who are humble, and women who are humble,
For men who give alms, and women who give alms,
For men who fast, and women who fast,
For men who are modest, and women who are modest,
For men who remember God, and women who remember God. (33:35)
At the same time, the Quran acknowledges that men and women have distinct and separate roles in society; it would have been preposterous to claim otherwise in seventh-century Arabia. Thus, “men are to take care of women, because God has given them greater strength, and because men use their wealth to provide for them” (4:34).
With a few notable exceptions (like Khadija), women in pre-Islamic Arabia could neither own property nor inherit it from their husbands. Actually, a wife was herself considered property, and both she and her dowry would be inherited by the male heir of her deceased husband. If the male heir was uninterested in the widow, he could hand her over to his kin—a brother or a nephew—who could then marry her and take control of her dead husband’s property. But if she was too old to marry again, or if no one was interested in her, she and her dowry would revert to the clan. The same was true for all female orphans, as well as those male orphans who, like Muhammad when his parents died, were considered too young to inherit property from their fathers.
However, Muhammad—who had benefited greatly from the wealth and stability provided by Khadija—strove to give women the opportunity to attain some level of equality and independence in society by amending Arabia’s traditional marriage and inheritance laws in order to remove the obstacles that prohibited women from inheriting and maintaining their own wealth. While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage. Muhammad also forbade a husband to touch his wife’s dowry, forcing him instead to provide for his family from his own wealth. If the husband died, his wife would inherit a portion of his property; if he divorced her, the entire dowry was hers to take back to her family.
As one would expect, Muhammad’s innovations did not sit well with the male members of his community. If women could no longer be considered property, men complained, not only would their wealth be drastically reduced, but their own meager inheritances would now have to be split with their sisters and daughters—members of the community who, they argued, did not share an equal burden with the men. Al-Tabari recounts how some of these men brought their grievances to Muhammad, asking, “How can one give the right of inheritance to women and children, who do not work and do not earn their living? Are they now going to inherit just like men who have worked to earn that money?”
Muhammad’s response to these complaints was both unsympathetic and shockingly unyielding. “Those who disobey God and His Messenger, and who try to overstep the boundaries of this [inheritance] law will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering the most shameful punishment” (4:14).
If Muhammad’s male followers were disgruntled about the new inheritance laws, they must have been furious when, in a single revolutionary move, he both limited how many wives a man could marry and granted women the right to divorce their husbands.
In some ways, pre-Islamic Arabian custom was extraordinarily lax when it came to both marriage and divorce. In Bedouin societies, both men and women practiced polygamy and both had recourse to divorce: men simply by making a statement such as “I divorce you!” a
nd women—who remained with their father’s family during marriage—by turning their tent around so that its entrance would no longer be available to the husband when he came for a “visit.” Because paternity was unimportant in Bedouin societies (lineage was passed primarily through the mother), it made no difference how many husbands a woman had or who fathered her children. However, in sedentary societies like Mecca, where the accumulation of wealth made inheritance and, therefore, paternity much more important, matrilineal society had gradually given way to a patrilineal one. As a result of this trend toward patriliny, women in sedentary societies were gradually stripped of both their right to divorce and their access to polyandry (the practice of having more than one husband).
Although Muhammad’s views on marriage seem far more influenced by Jewish tradition than by the traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia, he was still a product of Meccan society. So while he limited the rights of men to divorce their wives—forcing upon them a three-month reconciliation period before the statement of divorce could take effect—and while he provided women with the right to divorce their husbands if they feared “cruelty or ill-treatment” (4:128), he nonetheless consolidated the move toward a patrilineal society by putting a definitive end to all polyandrous unions. Never again could a Muslim woman have more than one husband. Whether a Muslim man may have more than one wife (polygyny), however, remains a contested issue to this day.
On the one hand, Muhammad clearly accepted polygyny (within limits) as necessary for the survival of the Ummah, especially after war with the Quraysh resulted in hundreds of widows and orphans who had to be provided for and protected by the community. “Marry those women who are lawful for you, up to two, three, or four,” the Quran states, “but only if you can treat them all equally” (4:3; emphasis added). On the other hand, the Quran makes it clear just a few verses later that monogamy is the preferred model of marriage when it asserts that “no matter how you try, you will never be able to treat your wives equally” (4:129; again, emphasis added). This seeming contradiction offers some insight into a dilemma that plagued the community during its early development. Essentially, while the individual believer was to strive for monogamy, the community that Muhammad was trying to build in Yathrib would have been doomed without polygyny.
