The Jew is Not My Enemy (22 page)

The chill of the night air surprised me. Notwithstanding my bald head – shaved as part of the rites of hajj – I had expected Saudi Arabia to be a hot place and was unprepared for the bone-chilling cold of the Medina night. Centuries earlier, it was this same bone-chilling cold that had forced the Meccans to end their siege, saving the nascent Muslim community of the Prophet from being annihilated.

Oil wealth had started pouring into Saudi Arabia in 1978, but had not made its way to the shack-like roadside food stalls, restaurants, and gas stations that dotted the route of the hajj caravans, traversed by thousands of white Iranian-made automobiles heading back to the Shah’s Iran. Hulks of burnt-out cars, involved in sure-death head-on collisions, littered both sides of the road. The dead hajjis had perished in the Holy Land, the ultimate dream of many a Muslim.

We refuelled at one of the “benzene stations” before the last leg to Medina. As we sat and sipped translucent shai from what looked like miniature beer mugs, a couplet from a devotional song of my childhood came to my lips.

Pasha rolled his eyes. “One week in the kingdom and now I have to put up with your religious side,” he quipped. He had known me since our university days as a hard-nosed leftist secularist with little respect for mullahs, and had warned me on the day I arrived at Jeddah airport: “You want to survive here, you better keep your big mouth shut, or you’ll end up being deported or, worse, jailed.”

As a child, I had grown up listening to devotional songs written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. An entire genre of poetry, the Na’at, is dedicated to praising the Prophet. As a little boy I had memorized many
of the verses and can still sing a few. Mom had inculcated in us a devotion to the apostle that was much more than religious; he was a family member. Prophet Muhammad was our uncle, the one we could turn to when help was needed and the one who, we were told, would intercede on our behalf on the Day of Judgment. Every month Mom would invite her friends over, and they would read the Quran and later stand up together and sing the praises of the Prophet. I usually waited until the last of the guests had gone to grab at the leftover sweetmeats and the succulent dates that were holy simply because our beloved Prophet liked them.

Whereas I had approached Mecca in 1978 with some trepidation, uncertain what to expect, my trip to Medina was very different. I was going to see the man who had dominated my life as a child, a man I had talked to as if he were right there standing next to me when I played cricket with a tennis ball or lost my marbles to the street bullies. While Mecca was the city of God, the divine power we were all conditioned to fear and submit to, Medina was the city of Muhammad, the man we had grown to love and adore.

We arrived in Medina just before the crack of dawn and headed straight to the Masjid-e-Nabawi, the Mosque of the Prophet. After the Fajr prayers, we stayed inside the mosque until the noon Zuhr congregation, amidst the cacophony of a polyglot crowd: Turks jostling with Nigerians; the overzealous Pakistanis elbowing out Yemenis; groups of tearful Shia Persians huddling together matched in their devotion only by the Indonesians; loud Egyptians in tent-like attire walking around with a sense of entitlement that was in stark contrast to the prim and proper North Americans, who politely found their right-of-way. A hundred different guttural Arabic accents rained down like flower petals in the mosque of the man these men revered so much.

Later that day, having offered my supplications, I visited the many battle sites where Muhammad had fought against his enemies. I came
back rather disappointed. There was so much more that I wanted to know, but so little that I could find. Above all, I wanted to see the
khandak
, the trench or the moat; the Tôrres Vedras of Islamic history. Had the Prophet, I wanted to know, really authorized the slaughter of hundreds of apparently neutral Jews – the same Prophet who forgave his sworn enemies, the Meccan pagans, on their surrender – or was this an exaggerated myth? Something didn’t sound right about this story, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it. My search would begin at the trench.

By my reading of the history and geography of the city, every historic site in Medina should have been within an eight-kilometre radius. I saw the mountain of Ohud, the site of the first Muslim defeat in history. Later, Pasha took me to what was supposed to be the site of the Battle of the Trench, but the trench itself had disappeared. The moat that saved the Prophet and Islam had been filled in by time. “Where is it?” I asked.

“Gone, my friend,” Pasha said with a shrug. “It was just a trench, not a mosque, so why save it?”

“And where,” I asked with some trepidation, “were the Jews of Banu Qurayza slaughtered and buried?”

He reacted as if I had struck him. “Are you crazy? What Jews are you talking about?” He looked over his shoulder to ensure no one had heard my blasphemous question.

“Never mind,” I replied, recognizing that asking questions about Jews was likely to land us in trouble.

I returned to Medina the following year, in the spring, this time alone. I had history on my mind, not religion or piety. Notwithstanding the obligatory visit to the Prophet’s Mosque to pay respects to the apostle and say my early-morning prayers, I was focused on evidence-based truth, not blind faith.

I joined a group of pilgrims headed for Mount Ohud, and when
the group moved on, I hung back to reflect on all I had read about the ferocity of the fight that day fourteen hundred years ago; the Prophet had been wounded in the battle and almost lost his life. I loitered on the rocky surface, trying to visualize the scene, until I was rudely interrupted by a Saudi security guard in jungle greens with his bootlaces untied. “Keep moving,” he yelled, adding a racist slur, “ya Rafeek,” a derisive term for Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis.

(This wasn’t the first time I had heard such a slur in the city of my Prophet. The same people who take ownership of the Prophet as their birthright, and act as if his legacy is a franchise they have inherited, appear to find it completely acceptable to insult blacks, Indo-Pakistanis, East Asians, and, of course, the hated Persians – not seeming to realize that had it not been for a Persian, who suggested to the Prophet that he dig a defensive trench to stop the enemy, Islamic history would have been very different. I would like to think that the racist attitude of the Saudi towards the poor and the darker-skinned stems from Arabia’s recently acquired oil wealth. However, in his classic account of his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in 1852, the English adventurer Richard Burton wrote: “Whenever an Ajemi [non-Arab] stood in the way of an Arab or a Turk, he was rudely thrust aside, with abuse muttered loud enough to be heard by all around.” More than a century later, I was cautioned by friends to swallow such abuse, lest I run afoul of the law and disappear in the kingdom’s prison system.)

The historical texts suggested the trench would have been dug to the north of the city, running east–west, beginning at Mount Sala and ending in the area known as Hara Sharqia (Eastern Lava Field), a distance of some two to four kilometres. However, try as I might, I could not find any trace of the trench, nor anyone willing to help me locate it. Could the trench have been a fiction, the figment of some scribe’s imagination? This did not seem possible, since, unlike some other historical events in early Islam, the Battle of the Trench is specifically
mentioned in the Quran. On asking around, I aroused more suspicion than I should have. “Why do you want to know?” a Saudi asked me. “Do you have a permit?” he enquired before starting an inquisition that I escaped thanks to the muezzin’s call to prayer.

This lack of interest in the trench is also reflected in Burton’s
A Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina
, in which it receives only one passing mention: “The principal places of pious visitation in the vicinity of El-Madinah are the Mosques of Kuba, the Cemetery of El-Bakia.… Shortly after leaving the suburb [outside Medina], an Indian, who joined our party upon the road, pointed out on the left of the way what he declared was the place of the celebrated Khandak, or Moat.”
²

After the death of Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs, the early Muslims abandoned Medina as the seat of their growing domain and moved to the luxurious abodes of captured Byzantine palaces in Damascus. The two holiest cities of Islam were literally cast away by the Arabs, who were tantalized by the advanced civilizations of Persia and Byzantium. Over the centuries, while Islamic civilization would blossom in the newly conquered territories of Persia, Egypt, Syria, Spain, and India, little attention would be paid to the birthplace of Islam – Arabia. The seventh-century Umayyads of Damascus, the ninth-century Abbasids of Baghdad, the tenth-century Fatimids of Cairo, the sixteenth-century Ottomans of Turkey, the seventeenth-century Mughals of India – all of them built monuments, libraries, tombs, and mosques, but little in the city where their Prophet lies buried.

It seems that once Medina had been abandoned, preserving the trench that saved Islam and the Prophet was the last thing on any caliph’s mind. The Saudi scholar Ali Hafiz, in his book
Chapters from the History of Madina
, states, “There are no remains or ruins left at the trench to help define its exact location.” In 2005, the renowned Saudi architect Sami Angawi lamented the destruction of historic sites in Arabia. He told
The Independent
, “The house where the Prophet received the word
of God is gone and nobody cares.… This is the end of the history of Mecca and Medina and the end of their future.” A people who could not care less for the house of the Prophet would certainly not bother to save the trench that saved his life.

In the absence of any physical evidence of the trench, I had to rely on the map used by the Indian diplomat and scholar Barakat Ahmad in his book
Muhammad and the Jews
. (The map matches the detailed description provided by Ali Hafiz in his book.) Ahmad, who earned a doctorate in Arab history from the American University of Beirut and another doctorate in literature from the University of Tehran, has challenged the Muslim understanding of the events of that time as they have been passed on to us through the biography of Ibn Ishaq.

The earliest detailed reference to the massacre of Medina’s Jews is in Ibn Ishaq’s
Sira
, part of which I have reproduced in the previous chapter. Given that Ibn Ishaq’s account was written more than a hundred years after the event in question, it is surprising that hardly anyone has questioned the authenticity of his narrative. Later Muslim historians simply take his version of the story, at times creatively embellish it with their own fantasies, and almost always overlook Ibn Ishaq’s uncertain list of authorities.

However, Ibn Hajar, the fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar, denounces this story and related ones as “odd tales,” while another contemporary of Ibn Ishaq, the jurist Malik ibn Anas, referred to him as an outright “liar” and “an impostor” who belonged to the charlatans.
³
But these were exceptions. Most historians from medieval times onward have blindly swallowed the legend of the slaughter of the Jews of Banu Qurayza. Even the great Muslim historian Tabari, who always drew on multiple sources in his rendering of history, does not rely on versions of the legend other than Ibn Ishaq’s.

Ibn Ishaq himself relied on the stories that were told by Jewish children taken from their parents and raised as Muslims, or sons of Jewish
women who were concubines of Muslim warriors. Converts to a religion are usually hostile to the faith they have left behind, and it is quite possible that the stories these former Jews told were the basis of the tales about the alleged Jewish conspiracies. Indeed, Ibn Hajar rejects the stories in question in the strongest terms, referring to them as “such odd tales.”

While the Quran makes many references to the siege and the actual Battle of the Trench, the only reference to the supposed massacre is to a clash between the combatants of the Banu Qurayza and the Muslim army. In Sura 33:26 the Quran says: “He [God] caused those of the People of the Book [Jews] who helped them [the Meccan pagans] to come out of their forts. Some you killed, some you took prisoner.”

But here God talks about a battle, not a mass killing. It concerns those who he says fought and, as in any battle, some of those were killed while others were taken prisoner. There is no mention whatsoever in the Quran of the massacre of Jews.

Is it possible Ibn Ishaq got it all wrong? And why is it that when making a choice between the words of Ibn Ishaq and the words of the Quran, Islamic scholars opt for the words of a man instead of Allah?

Over the course of many visits to Medina, searching for the truth, and many years reading Jewish and Muslim authors who have written about this epic event that frames the Muslim view of the Jew, I have come to believe that the massacre of the Jews never took place. My conclusion is based on my analysis of physical factors as well as the historical and religious incongruities in how we Muslims are told the story, but above all, on the absence of any mention of this monumental massacre in Jewish texts.

Jews have been persecuted all through history, expelled from dozens of countries, hated by people who have never been exposed to them
or their faith, but what makes them unique is that they have survived centuries of pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust, and have had the ability to document their suffering faithfully and in great detail.

The account of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans, which ended in the destruction of the Second Temple in
AD
70, has a close similarity to the Medina massacre. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, some of the radical Jews known as the Sicarii took over the nearby rock fortress of Masada for their last stand – an event that ended in the mass suicide of the besieged Jews. With the crushing of the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Jews were enslaved while others fled to the Mediterranean and some to Arabia. Alfred Guillaume, who translated Ibn Ishaq, suggests that some of the Jews fleeing the Romans were the ones who settled in the oasis of Medina.