Muhammad

by Karen Armstrong

  After the euphoria of victory had faded, Muhammad found that even though his prestige had increased in Arabia as a whole, the fear of an imminent Meccan attack was swelling the opposition party in Medina. Ibn Ubayy and his supporters were backed by three of the largest Jewish tribes—Nadir, Qurayzah and Qaynuqa‘—who depended upon their commercial links with the Quraysh and wanted no part in any war against Mecca. A third column was opening up in the oasis. About ten weeks after Badr, Abu Sufyan led a token ghazu of two hundred men to the fields outside Medina, and under cover of night slipped into the territory of Nadir, where he was entertained by its chief, Sallam ibn Mishkan, who, according to Ibn Ishaq, “gave him secret information about the Muslims.”25

  Muhammad’s scouts kept him informed of these developments. These three Jewish tribes were clearly a security risk. They had large armies and were experienced soldiers. If a Meccan army were to camp south of Medina, where Nadir and Qurayzah had their territories, it would be easy for them to join forces with the Quraysh and breach the city’s defences. If the Quraysh decided to attack from the north, which would be their best option, Nadir and Qurayzah could attack the Muslims from the south. But a more urgent concern was Qaynuqa‘, the wealthiest of the Jewish tribes and former allies of Ibn Ubayy, who controlled the market in the center of Medina.26 The Muslims had established a little market of their own, and for religious reasons did not charge interest. Taking this as a direct challenge, the Qaynuqa‘ decided to break their agreement with the Prophet and join the opposition. Muhammad visited their district and asked them, in the name of their common religion, to keep the peace. They listened in mutinous silence and then replied:

  O Muhammad, you seem to think that we are your people. Do not deceive yourself, because you have encountered a tribe [at Badr] with no knowledge of war and got the better of them; for by Allah, if we fight you, you will find that we are real men!27

  Muhammad withdrew and grimly awaited developments.

  A few days later fighting broke out in the market of Qaynuqa‘, when one of the Jewish goldsmiths insulted a Muslim woman. As the hakam, Muhammad was called in to arbitrate, but the chiefs of Qaynuqa‘ refused to accept his judgment, barricaded themselves into their fortress and called upon their Arab allies for aid. Qaynuqa‘ had an army of seven hundred men, and had their allies responded, they would certainly have defeated and probably eliminated the ummah. But the Arabs remained staunchly behind the Prophet, and Ibn Ubayy found that he was powerless to help his old confederates. After a siege of two weeks, the Qaynuqa‘ were forced to surrender unconditionally. Muhammad would have been expected to massacre the men and sell the women and children into slavery—the traditional punishment meted out to traitors—but he acceded to Ibn Ubayy’s plea for clemency and spared them, provided that the whole tribe left Medina immediately. Qaynuqa‘ were ready to go. They had taken a gamble, but had underestimated Muhammad’s new popularity. Neither their Arab allies nor the other Jews protested. Tribes had often been driven out of the oasis during the internecine wars before the hijrah, so this expulsion was part of a process that had started long before Muhammad’s arrival.28 Bloodshed was avoided, but Muhammad was caught in a tragic moral dilemma: the justification for the jihad against the Quraysh had been the Muslims’ exclusion from their native city, which was condemned by the Qur’an as a great evil. Now, trapped in the aggressive conventions of Arabia, he was compelled to eject another people from their homeland.

  The people of Medina anxiously waited for the inevitable Meccan attack. Since Abu Jahl had been killed at Badr and Abu Lahab had died shortly afterwards, Abu Sufyan was now the leading chieftain of the Quraysh and a far more formidable opponent. In the late summer, a contingent of Muslim ghazis captured a large Meccan caravan. Abu Jahl would have retaliated immediately, but Abu Sufyan did not allow this defeat to interfere with his long-term objectives. He simply intensified his preparations, building up a large confederacy of Bedouin allies. Once the winter rains were over, three thousand men with three thousand camels and two hundred horses left Mecca on March 11, 625 and began their journey northward. After a journey of a little over a week, they camped to the northwest of Medina on the plain in front of Mount Uhud.29

  The Medinese had only a week’s notice of the Meccan advance. There was no time to get the crops from the field, but Muhammad and the other chiefs managed to bring in the people from the outlying areas and barricade them into the “city.” The experienced warriors urged caution. It was very difficult to sustain a siege in Arabia; and they suggested that everybody should stay behind the barricades and refuse to engage with the Quraysh, who would eventually be forced to retire. But after the victory at Badr, the younger generation wanted action and managed to carry the day. Muhammad, who was not the supreme commander, had to bow to this disastrous decision. The main Jewish tribes refused to fight and Ibn Ubayy withdrew his men from the army, so on the following morning, Muhammad faced the Quraysh outnumbered three to one. As the two armies began their advance, Abu Sufyan’s wife Hind marched behind the Meccans with the other women, singing war songs and beating their tambourines. The Muslims were routed almost immediately with a brilliant charge by the Meccan cavalry. Muhammad was knocked senseless and word spread that he had been killed.

  In fact, he had only been stunned, but the Quraysh did not bother to check the rumor and failed to follow up their advantage. The Muslim survivors were thus able to retreat in fairly good order. Twenty-two Meccans and sixty-five Muslims had been killed, including Muhammad’s uncle Hamzah, a renowned fighter. The Quraysh ran onto the battlefield and mutilated the corpses; one of them cut out Hamzah’s liver and carried the gruesome trophy to Hind, who ate a morsel of it to avenge her brother, who had died by Hamzah’s hand at Badr. She then cut off his nose, ears, and genitals, urging the other women to follow her example, and to the disgust of some of their Bedouin allies, they left the field sporting grisly bracelets, pendants, and collars. Before his army moved off, Abu Sufyan heard the disappointing news that Muhammad had not after all been among the casualties. “Next year at Badr!” he cried, as a parting challenge. “Yes!” one of the Muslims shouted on Muhammad’s behalf, “It is an appointment between us!”30

  The Muslim defeat could have been worse. Had the Quraysh followed up their charge, they could have destroyed the ummah. But the psychological impact of Uhud was catastrophic. When Muhammad returned home after the battle, sick and shaken, he heard loud lamentation outside the mosque: it was the wives of the Helpers mourning their dead. The Muslims fiercely resented Ibn Ubayy’s refusal to fight. When he rose to speak in the mosque on the following Friday, one of the Helpers grabbed him and told him to keep his mouth shut. He strode from the mosque in fury and refused to ask for Muhammad’s forgiveness. Hitherto the Hypocrites, as the Qur’an calls Ibn Ubayy’s supporters, had been wavering, waiting to see how things would turn out; they now became openly hostile. Muhammad’s victory at Badr, they claimed, had been a flash in the pan. He had brought death and destruction to Medina.

  Each of the Muslim dead had left wives and daughters without protectors. After the defeat, a revelation came to Muhammad giving Muslims permission to take four wives. Muslims must remember that God had created men and women from a single living entity, so that both sexes were equally precious in his sight.

  Hence render unto the orphans their possessions and do not substitute bad things [of your own] for the good things [that belong to them] and do not consume their possessions together with your own; this, verily, is a great crime.

  And if you have reason to fear that you might not act equitably towards orphans, then marry from among [other] women such as are lawful to you—[even] two or three or four: but if you have reason to fear that you might not be able to treat them with equal fairness, then [only] one—or from among those whom you rightfully possess. This will make it more likely that you will not deviate from the right course.31

  The institution of polygamy has been much criticized as the source of considerable
suffering for Muslim women, but at the time of this revelation it constituted a social advance.32 In the pre-Islamic period, both men and women were allowed several spouses. After marriage, a woman remained at the home of her family, and was visited by all her “husbands.” It was, in effect, a form of licensed prostitution. Paternity was, therefore, uncertain, so children were usually identified as the descendants of their mothers. Men did not need to provide for their wives and took no responsibility for their offspring. But Arabia was in transition. The new spirit of individualism in the peninsula meant that men were becoming more interested in their own children, were more assertive about personal property, and wanted their sons to inherit their wealth. The Qur’an encouraged this trend toward a more patriarchal society. Muhammad endorsed it by taking his wives into his own household and providing for them, and the verses instituting polygamy take it for granted that Muslim men will do the same. But the Qur’an was also aware of a social problem that this new revelation sought to redress.

  In the pre-Islamic period, a woman could not own property. Any wealth that came her way belonged to her family and was administered by her male relatives. But in Mecca, where individualism was more pronounced than elsewhere in Arabia, some of the more aristocratic women had been able to inherit and administer their own fortunes. Khadijah was a case in point, but this was still rare in Mecca and almost unheard of in Medina. Most men found the idea that women could inherit and manage their property quite ludicrous. Women had no individual rights. How could they? Apart from a few notable exceptions, they did nothing to contribute to the economy; and because they took no part in the ghazu, they brought no wealth to the community. Traditionally women were considered part of a man’s estate. After his death, his wives and daughters passed to his male heirs, who often kept them unmarried and impoverished in order to control their inheritance.

  The Qur’anic institution of polygamy was a piece of social legislation. It was designed not to gratify the male sexual appetite, but to correct the injustices done to widows, orphans, and other female dependants, who were especially vulnerable. All too often, unscrupulous people seized everything and left the weaker members of the family with nothing.33 They were often sexually abused by their male guardians or converted into a financial asset by being sold into slavery. Ibn Ubayy, for example, forced his women slaves into prostitution and pocketed the proceeds. The Qur’an bluntly refutes this behavior and takes it for granted that a woman has an inalienable right to her inheritance. Polygamy was designed to ensure that unprotected women would be decently married, and to abolish the old loose, irresponsible liaisons; men could have only four wives and must treat them equitably; it was an unjustifiably wicked act to devour their property.

  The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart, but it was resolutely opposed by many men in the ummah, including some of his closest companions. In a society of scarcity, it took courage and compassion to take financial responsibility for four women and their children. Muslims must have confidence that God would provide:

  Marry the spouseless among you, and your

  slaves and handmaidens that are righteous;

  if they are poor, God will enrich them

  of his bounty, God is all-embracing

  All knowing. 34

  Muhammad led the way. After Uhud, he took another wife, providing a home for Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, a widow whose husband had died at Badr. She was also the daughter of the Bedouin chief of ‘Amir, and so the match forged a new political alliance. An apartment was built for her beside the mosque and she joined her “sisters”—Sawdah, ‘A’isha and Hafsah—there.

  The Prophet did not regard his women as chattel. They were his “companions”—just like the men. He usually took one of his wives along on a military expedition and disappointed his commanders by spending the whole of every evening in their tent, instead of bonding with his men. In the camp, the women did not remain meekly secluded, but walked around freely, taking an interest in everything that was going on. This type of freedom had been common for elite women in pre-Islamic Arabia, but it infuriated ‘Umar. “Your boldness borders on insolence!” he yelled when he came one day upon ‘A’isha strolling along the front lines. “What if disaster overtakes us? What if there is a defeat and people are taken captive?”35 Muhammad’s domestic arrangements gave his wives a new access to politics, and they seemed quite at home in this sphere. It would not be long before other women began to feel similarly empowered, and his enemies would use this women’s movement to discredit the Prophet.

  Muhammad had to recover the prestige he had lost at Uhud. He could not risk another open confrontation with the Quraysh, but nor could he afford to show his weakness. Two incidents in the summer of 625 showed how vulnerable he was. Two of the Bedouin tribes of Najd, a region to the west of Medina, had asked for instruction in Islam, so Muhammad sent six of his ablest men. During their journey they were attacked by one of the chiefs of Qudayd, the city of the goddess Manat, one of the three gharaniq. Three of the Muslims were killed; the others taken prisoner. One was stoned to death when he tried to escape and the other two were sold as slaves in Mecca, and afterwards taken outside the sanctuary and crucified.

  At about the same time, Muhammad’s new father-in-law, Abu Bara’, chief of ‘Amir, asked for help against warring factions in his own tribe. Forty Muslims were dispatched, and nearly all of them were massacred just outside ‘Amir’s territory, by members of the tribe of Sulaym. When one of the Muslim survivors came across two ‘Amiris lying peacefully asleep under a tree, he killed them, assuming that their tribe had been responsible for the killing and taking revenge in the traditional fashion. When he returned to Medina, Muhammad told him that he had done wrong, but the tradition of retaliation was so deeply engrained in Arabia that it was nearly impossible to eradicate. Muhammad insisted on paying the usual compensation to Abu Bara’. His willingness to do so in spite of the fact that the crime had technically been committed by tribesmen of Sulaym made some of the Bedouin more kindly disposed towards the ummah. Some of the Sulaymites had been so impressed by the courage of their Muslim victims that they entered Islam themselves.

  Muhammad’s position in Medina remained precarious, and he could not afford to drop his guard. When he called upon the Jewish tribe of Nadir to collect the blood money for ‘Amir, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt: some members of Nadir had planned to drop a boulder on the Prophet from a nearby roof top. Ibn Ubayy had promised to support them and they probably assumed that Muhammad had been so discredited by Uhud that the Medinese would rally behind them. So they were astonished to receive a grim message from their former ally, the tribe of Aws: they had broken their treaty with the Prophet and could no longer remain in the city.

  Like Qaynuqa‘ before them, the Nadiris withdrew to their fortress and waited for their allies to relieve them, but again no help was forthcoming. Even the powerful Jewish tribe of Qurayzah, which was also hostile to Muhammad, told them that they were on their own. After two weeks, Nadir knew that they could no longer sustain the siege, and when Muhammad gave the order to cut down their palm trees—an unmistakable sign of war in Arabia—they surrendered, begging only that their lives be spared. Muhammad agreed, on condition that they left the oasis immediately, taking with them only those goods that they could carry on their camels. So Nadir packed up their possessions, even taking down the lintels of their doors rather than leave them to Muhammad, and left Medina in a proud procession, as though they were going in triumph. The women dressed in all their jewels and finery, beating tambourines and singing to the accompaniment of pipes and drums. Weaving their way through the orchards and hamlets of the oasis, they finally took the road to Syria, though some stayed in the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, where they helped Abu Sufyan build his confederacy against the Muslims by drumming up support among the northern tribes.36 />
  In the space of two short years, Muhammad had expelled two powerful tribes from Medina, and the Muslims now managed the market vacated by Qaynuqa‘. As we have seen, this was not Muhammad’s intention. He had wanted to cut the cycle of violence and dispossession, not continue it. Muhammad had shown that he was still a man to be reckoned with, but he must also have reflected on the moral and political sterility of this type of success, because Nadir remained just as much of a threat in nearby Khaybar.

  It was nearly time to make good on Abu Sufyan’s parting shot after Uhud: “Next year at Badr!” but Muhammad was playing a very dangerous game. He had to make a show of strength, but his troops were so dispirited that he could not risk another pitched battle. Nevertheless, during the week of Badr’s annual suq, he rode there with 1,500 men. Fortunately for the Prophet, Abu Sufyan did not appear. He had not expected the Muslims to keep the appointment and had set out with his army as a mere show, planning to turn back as soon as he heard that Muhammad had failed to leave Medina. It was a year of severe drought and there was not a blade of grass to feed the camels during the journey, so with only a few days’ supplies packed, Abu Sufyan had to lead his men home. He was bitterly reproached by the Meccans, because the Bedouin were full of admiration for the Muslims’ courage.37

  In Medina, Muhammad’s position was still weak.38 But in the peninsula as a whole, the tide was beginning to turn in his favor. Whenever he heard that a Bedouin tribe had joined the Meccan confederacy, he would lead a ghazu to capture its flocks and herds—even if it meant a trek of five hundred miles to the Syrian border. In June 626, he learned that some clans of the Bedouin tribe of Ghatafan were planning a raid against Medina, so he set out to repel the expedition. When the Muslims came face to face with the enemy at Dhat al-Riqa, he once again avoided a direct confrontation, but for three days the Muslims remained face to face with the enemy. Both Tabari and Ibn Ishaq make it clear that the Muslim troops were terrified. But so, it seems, were the Ghatafan. In this atmosphere of terror, the Prophet received a revelation that instituted the Prayer of Fear, an abridged form of the usual prostrations adapted for a military emergency.39 Instead of making themselves vulnerable to the enemy by praying en masse at the appointed times, Muslims should pray in relays, with their arms at the ready. In the end, the battle simply fizzled out before it began; Ghatafan withdrew and Muhammad could return to Medina, having achieved a symbolic victory.