Fields of Blood (34 page)

The Emigrants were a drain on the community’s resources. They were merchants and bankers, but there was little opportunity for trade in Medina; they had no experience of farming, and in any case there was no available land. It was essential to find an independent source of income, and the ghazu, the accepted way of making ends meet in times of scarcity, was the obvious solution. In 624, therefore, Muhammad began to dispatch raiding parties to attack the Meccan caravans, a step that was controversial only in that the Muslims attacked their own tribe. But because the Quraysh had abjured warfare long ago, the Emigrants were inexperienced
ghazis,
and their first raids failed. When they finally got the hang of it, the raiders broke two Arabian cardinal rules by accidentally killing a Meccan merchant and fighting during one of the Sacred Months, when violence was prohibited throughout the peninsula.
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Muslims could now expect reprisals from Mecca. Three months later Muhammad himself led a ghazu to attack the most important Meccan caravan of the year. When they heard about it, the Quraysh immediately sent their army to defend it, but in a pitched
battle at the well of
Badr, the Muslims achieved
a stunning victory. The Quraysh responded the following year by attacking Medina and defeating the Muslims at the
Battle of Uhud, but in 627, when they attacked Medina again, the Muslims trounced the Quraysh at the
Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad dug a defensive ditch around the settlement.

The ummah also had internal troubles. Three of Medina’s
Jewish tribes—the
Qaynuqa,
Nadir, and
Qurayzah—were determined to destroy Muhammad, because he had undermined their political ascendency in the oasis. They had sizable armies and preexisting alliances with Mecca so they were a security risk. When the Qaynuqa and Nadir staged revolts and threatened to assassinate him, Muhammad expelled them from Medina. But the Nadir had joined the nearby Jewish settlement of
Khaybar and drummed up support for Mecca among the local
Bedouin. So after the Battle of the Trench, when the Qurayzah had put the entire settlement at risk by plotting with Mecca during the siege, Muhammad showed no mercy. In accordance with
Arab custom, the seven hundred men of the tribe were slaughtered and the women and children sold as slaves. The other seventeen Jewish tribes remained in Medina, and the Quran continued to instruct Muslims to behave respectfully to “the people of the book” (
ahl al-kitab
) and stress what they all held in common.
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Even though the Muslims sentenced the tribesmen of Qurayzah for political rather than religious reasons, this
atrocity marked the lowest point in the
Prophet’s career. From then on, he intensified his diplomatic efforts to build relationships with the Bedouin, who had been impressed by his military success, and established a powerful confederacy. Bedouin allies did not have to convert to Islam but swore merely to fight the ummah’s enemies: Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation.
¹⁹

In March 628, during the month of the
hajj, Muhammad announced, to everybody’s astonishment, that he intended to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, since pilgrims were forbidden to carry weapons, meant riding unarmed into enemy territory.
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About a thousand Muslims volunteered to accompany him. The Quraysh dispatched their cavalry to attack the pilgrims, but their Bedouin allies guided them by a back route into the sanctuary of Mecca, where all violence was forbidden. Muhammad then ordered the pilgrims to sit beside the Well of
Hudaybiyyah and wait for the Quraysh to negotiate. He knew that he had put them in an extremely difficult position: if the guardians of the
Kabah killed pilgrims
on sacred ground, they would lose all credibility in the region. Yet when the Qurayshi envoy arrived, Muhammad agreed to conditions that seemed to throw away every advantage the ummah had gained during the war. His fellow pilgrims were so horrified that they almost mutinied, yet the
Quran would praise the truce of Hudaybiyyah as a “manifest victory.” While the Meccans had behaved with typical jahili belligerence when they tried to slaughter the unarmed pilgrims, God had sent down the “spirit of peace” (
sakina
) upon the Muslims.
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Muhammad’s first biographer declared that this nonviolent victory was the turning point for the young movement: during the next two years “double or more than double as many entered
Islam as ever before,”
²²
and in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army.

Our main source for Muhammad’s life is the Quran, the collection of revelations that came to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission. The official text was standardized under
Uthman, the third caliph, some twenty years after Muhammad’s
death. But it had originally been transmitted orally, recited aloud, and learned by heart; as a result, during and after the Prophet’s life, the text remained fluid, and people would have remembered and dwelled on different parts they had heard. The Quran is not a coherent revelation: it came to Muhammad piecemeal in response to particular events, so as in any scripture, there were inconsistencies—not least about warfare.
Jihad
(“struggle”) is not one of the Quran’s main themes: in fact, the word and its derivatives occur only forty-one times, and only ten of these refer unambiguously to warfare. The “surrender” of islam requires a constant jihad against our inherent selfishness; this sometimes involves fighting (
qital
), but bearing trials courageously and giving to the poor in times of personal hardship was also described as jihad.
²³

There is no univocal or systematic Quranic teaching about military violence.
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Sometimes God demands patience and restraint rather than fighting;
²⁵
sometimes he gives permission for defensive warfare and condemns aggression; but at other times he calls for offensive warfare within certain limits;
²⁶
and occasionally these restrictions are lifted.
²⁷
In some passages, Muslims are told to live at peace with the people of the book;
²⁸
in others, they are required to subdue them.
²⁹
These contradictory instructions occur throughout the Quran, and Muslims developed two
exegetical strategies to rationalize them. The first linked each verse of the Quran with a historical event in Muhammad’s life and used this context to establish a general principle. Yet because the extant text does not place the revelations in chronological order, the early scholars found it difficult to determine these
asbab al-nuzal
(“occasions of revelations”). The second strategy was to abrogate verses: scholars argued that while the ummah was still struggling for survival, God could only give Muslims temporary solutions to their difficulties, but once Islam was victorious, he could issue permanent commands. Thus the later revelations—some of which call for unrestrained warfare—were God’s definitive words and rescinded the earlier, more lenient directives.
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Scholars who favored abrogation argued that when Muslims were still a vulnerable minority in Mecca, God told them to avoid fighting and confrontation.
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However, after the hijrah, when they had achieved a degree of power, God gave them permission to fight—but only in self-defense.
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As they grew stronger, some of these restrictions were lifted,
³³
and finally, when the Prophet returned in triumph to Mecca, Muslims were told to wage war against non-Muslims wherever and whenever they could.
³⁴
God had therefore been preparing Muslims gradually for their global conquests, tempering his instructions to their circumstances. Modern researchers have noted, though, that the early exegetes did not always agree about which revelation should be attached to which particular “occasion” or which verse abrogated which. The American scholar
Reuven Firestone has suggested that the conflicting verses instead expressed the views of different groups within the ummah during the Prophet’s life and after.
³⁵

It would not be surprising if there were disagreements and factions in the early ummah. Like the Christians, Muslims would interpret their revelation in radically
divergent ways and, like any other faith, Islam developed in response to changing circumstances. The Quran seems aware that some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.”
³⁶
Once the ummah had started to engage in warfare, it seems that one group, which was strong enough to warrant extensive rebuttal, consistently refused to take part:

The Quran calls these people “laggers” and “liars,” and Muhammad was reproved for allowing them to “stay at home” during campaigns.
³⁸
They are accused of apathy and cowardice and are equated with the
kufar,
the enemies of Islam.
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Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,” responding to aggression with mercy, patience, and courtesy.
⁴⁰
At other times, the Quran looks forward confidently to a final reconciliation: “Let there be no argument between us and you—God will gather us together and to Him we shall return.”
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The impressive consistency of this irenic theme throughout the Quran, Firestone believes, must reflect a strong tendency that survived in the ummah for some time—perhaps until the ninth century.
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Ultimately, however, the more militant groups prevailed, possibly because by the ninth century, long after the Prophet’s death, the more aggressive verses reflected reality, since by this time Muslims had established an empire that could be maintained only by military force. A favorite text of those involved in the wars of conquest was the “Sword Verse,” which they regarded as God’s last word on the subject—though even here the endorsement of total warfare segues immediately into a demand for peace and leniency:

There is thus a constant juxtaposition of ruthlessness and mercy in the Quran: believers are repeatedly commanded to fight “until there is no more sedition and religion becomes God’s,” but they are at once told that the moment the enemy sues for peace, there must be no further hostilities.
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