The Jew is Not My Enemy (24 page)

Arafat argues that if the story of the slaughter of Banu Qurayza were true and had been accepted as a historical fact, then Imam
al-Awza’i would have had to treat it as a precedent and not intervene to stop the collective deportation of the Christian Lebanese.

Other Jewish-Muslim conflicts took place after the Battle of the Trench during the Prophet’s lifetime. In all these confrontations, the Muslims prevailed; yet the defeated tribes did not meet the fate of the Banu Qurayza. Does this mean the Prophet himself was not following his own precedent and was defying the “command” sent by God through the agency of Gabriel?

What’s more, could God or his Prophet inflict a punishment of mass murder on a people who had committed no crime other than being neutral? This is contrary to the rules of warfare in Islam and in the Quran and has no precedent. If such a punishment was imposed on the Jews of Banu Qurayza, certainly there is no evidence in the Quran that such a thing ever happened again during Muhammad’s lifetime. (Of course, after his death, this episode was invoked as a Sunnah to give religious justification to countless massacres and ethnic cleansings in the name of Islam.)

There are two more examples of the Prophet’s army inflicting comprehensive defeat on groups that, unlike the Banu Qurayza, had openly declared hostility and enmity towards Muhammad. One involved the Jewish town of Khaybar, where many of the Jews expelled from Medina had taken refuge, and the other the Meccan pagans led by the Quraysh tribe.

Despite the fact that the men who surrendered unconditionally at Khaybar had taken up arms against the Prophet and had built the confederacy that had almost wiped out the Muslims a year before, Muhammad did not inflict a collective punishment. Here is the account of the Khaybar surrender in the words of Ibn Ishaq: “The apostle besieged the people of Khaybar in their two forts al-Watih and al-Sulalim until they could hold out no longer. They asked him to let them go, and spare their lives, and he did so.… When the people of Khaybar surrendered on
these conditions, they asked the apostle to employ them on the property with half the share in the produce, saying ‘We know more about it than you and we are better farmers.’ The apostle agreed to this arrangement on the condition that ‘if we wish to expel you, we will expel you.’ ”
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Years later, when Muhammad’s army conquered Mecca, the city he had fled ten years earlier, he “instructed his commanders when they entered Mecca only to fight those who resisted them.”
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These were men who had harassed and chased Muhammad into exile; they had conspired to kill him and had launched many raids in an attempt to wipe out Islam. Yet the Prophet decreed a general amnesty for all of them, barring a few, including the leader of the Meccan pagans, Abu Sufyan. Had the massacre of Jews in Medina been a precedent, Mecca would have turned into a slaughterhouse that would have dwarfed the supposed massacre in Medina.

According to Ibn Ishaq and the Hadith literature of Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the death sentence passed on the Banu Qurayza was handed down by Saad bin Mu’adh after both parties agreed upon him as an arbiter. However, Saad was a Muslim who had recently railed against the Jews in an argument over their treaty with the Prophet, vowing to avenge their supposed treachery. Why would the Jews agree to appoint as judge of their fate a man who had vilified them just a few days earlier? Why would they sign their own death sentence? Yet this is the answer most Muslims give when asked why the Prophet approved such a horrendous punishment. Invariably, a cleric will say, “The Jews chose their own fate … it was their own choice.”

The legend would have us believe that after the judgment, all the Jews were enclosed in the home of a woman named Bint al-Harith. If the massacred men totalled nine hundred, then it is safe to assume that, including women and children, the combined population of the Jews
who surrendered was close to five thousand people. Notwithstanding the impossibility of accommodating so many people in one home, Ibn Ishaq and the Hadith literature would have us believe that no one among the five thousand attempted to flee; no one resisted as they heard the sound of their men succumbing to the sword; and that all this happened while the Muslims dug trenches in the Medina market.

Which raises another question. Why did the Prophet dig trenches for the massacred Jews when the Muslims already had a massive trench north of the city? That trench was deep and wide enough to stop an army of ten thousand Meccan soldiers; surely it would have sufficed as a place to dump the decapitated Jews of the Banu Qurayza. Digging fresh graves in the middle of Medina just does not make sense.

Moreover, if all the graves were dug in the vicinity of the Prophet’s Mosque and the main marketplace, how much space was required to bury nine hundred souls? Ibn Ishaq says it was not one mass grave but that “trenches” were dug. By a conservative estimate, an area of ten thousand square feet would be needed to accommodate nine hundred graves.

During my stay in Medina, I searched endlessly for any evidence of these graves, but found none. While it is conceivable that the moat dug in the Battle of the Trench could have disappeared over time, skeletons do not vanish. If the Prophet of Islam killed nine hundred Jews and buried them near the Medina market, then surely the bones would have emerged during the twentieth-century excavations and expansion of the market. But there is no record of any bone fragments or other human remains being found when the market was expanded or the Prophet’s Mosque was rebuilt to accommodate the millions like me who pray there.

To understand why the legend of the Banu Qurayza massacre was created, we need to consider the geopolitical conditions in which Ibn Ishaq compiled his biography of Prophet Muhammad.

While Ibn Ishaq was still living in Medina in the early 700s, the Umayyad caliphate was firmly in power in Damascus, controlling a realm that spread from the banks of the River Indus in India to the northern border of Spain with France. The challenges to the caliphs’ rule came not from the Hindu east or the Christian north, but from disaffected Muslims, primarily the descendants of the Prophet who considered the caliphs’ regime illegitimate and corrupt. However, amidst the turmoil and bloodshed of the time, there were two Jewish uprisings led by men who claimed they were the Messiah, the first in Isfahan, Persia, and the second in Damascus itself.

During the reign of Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, a Persian Jew, Ishaq ibn Yakub Abu Isa al-Isfahani, maintained that the coming of the Messiah was to be preceded by five messengers, of whom he himself was the last – the Messiah’s herald and the summoner. He claimed he had come to deliver the Jews from the rule of the Muslims and to take them back to Jerusalem and restore Palestine. Abu Isa al-Isfahani asserted that no miracle would rescue the Jews from their plight and urged them to use force. It is said he was able to raise an army of ten thousand Jews in Persia, who hailed him as the Messiah. The caliph’s army met the rebels near the city of Ray (ancient Rhagae), where they crushed the revolt and killed the so-called Messiah.

(Abu Isa al-Isfahani introduced several changes to Judaism. He “regarded Jesus and Muhammad as genuine prophets, who were sent to pagans, and urged his followers to read not only the Old Testament, but also the Gospels and the Koran.”)
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The other Jew who laid claim to prophethood, not just of the Jews but also of Muslims, was a Syrian by the name of Zonarius (or Serenus) during the reign of Caliph Yazid II. Zonarius had escaped the tyranny of Emperor Lev Isavrianin in Byzantine Constantinople and along with many Jews had sought refuge in the Muslim caliphate that was at war with that city. In Damascus, Zonarius declared himself
the Messiah and challenged the existing Jewish order. He established religious observances that were contrary to rabbinical law, abolished prayer and certain incest laws formulated by the scribes, and allowed marriage without a contract. His fame was such that Jews from as far away as Spain and Persia rallied to his call against the caliph and the Jewish authorities.

As Simon Dubonov writes in his
History of the Jews:
“This turmoil went on for several years until the new prophet was taken into custody and brought before Caliph Yazid ii. The Caliph had interrogated Zonarius, became convinced that his teaching harboured no political motives, and therefore turned him over to the Jewish authorities, so they could punish him for his religious heresy.”
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The court ordered him beheaded.

It was in this climate of Jewish rebellion and the subsequent slaughter of the Umayyads by the Abbasids that Ibn Ishaq penned his biography of Prophet Muhammad. Taking this into consideration, Barakat Ahmad concludes that the legend of the Medina massacre was created to warn the Jews of the Abbasid Empire of the consequence of armed uprising as sanctioned by the practice of the Prophet himself. As Ahmad puts it: “One more Ibn Isa [revolt] and you will be exterminated like the B. [Banu] Qurayzah.”
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Montgomery Watt, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Edinburgh, is considered one of the foremost non-Muslim interpreters of Islam in the West. In his book
Muhammad at Medina
, Watt speculates on “what would have happened had the Jews come to terms with Muhammad instead of opposing him.” The thought is enticing to those of us who are deeply troubled by the institutional nature of anti-Semitism that drives twentieth-century Islamists. According to Watt, the Jews of Medina “could have secured very favourable terms from
him [Muhammad], including religious autonomy, and on that basis, the Jews might have become partners in an Arab empire and Islam a sect of Jewry. How different the face of the world would be now, had it happened.”
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Of course, Watt writes about Muslim-Jewish relations as seen through the prism of Ibn Ishaq’s biography that accentuated the frictions between the “nation of Ishamel”– as many medieval Jews referred to Muslims – and Jews. Contemporary Islamist writers too paint a grim picture, as it confirms their view of Jews as a conniving enemy of Islam. If we depended only on the texts of contemporary Islamists, their apologists, and Ibn Ishaq, it may appear that Muslim-Jewish relations in the era following the death of Muhammad were governed by a mutual suspicion, if not hatred or resentment. However, a reading of history demonstrates otherwise.

Jewish-Muslim relations during the time of the eighth-century Umayyad dynasty, and their ninth- and tenth-century Abbasid successors, were fairly amicable. Jews were integrated into Muslim society and had considerable religious autonomy. True, they were accorded a second-class status as dhimmis, but Jewish texts of the time do not reflect an atmosphere of hostility between the two peoples. And true, the Sunni Arab caliphs ruled with a sense of entitlement, but compared to how they treated other Muslim sects and groups who challenged the authenticity of the caliph, they did not see the small Jewish community as a threat. Compared to Medina during the Prophet’s time, when Jews were almost equal in number to Muslims and thus a possible threat to them both militarily and theologically, in Damascus or Baghdad, the Muslim empire was so huge that the Jews had no illusions about overcoming the caliphate and had reconciled themselves to living under the “protection” of the caliph.

The nineteenth-century German scholar Heinrich Graetz – the first historian to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people
from a Jewish perspective – paints a vivid picture of Jewish life in the eighth-century Abbasid caliphate that suggests that the autonomy Jews had under the pre-Islamic Persians was respected by the Arab caliphs. Graetz writes:

“The Jewish community … had the appearance of a state.… The Exilarch (leader of the Jewish Diaspora community) and the Gaon (spiritual leader and scholar who headed Talmudic academies) were of equal rank. The Exilarch’s office was political. He represented Babylonian-Persian Judaism under the Caliphs. He collected the taxes from various communities, and paid them to the treasury. The Exilarchs, both in bearing and mode of life, were princes. They drove about in a state carriage; they had outriders and a kind of a bodyguard, and received princely homage.”
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This would have been around the time Ibn Ishaq moved to Baghdad from Medina and was still compiling material for his biography of the Prophet. While he collected the tales of the Jewish massacre, he could not have missed the amicable environment within which Jews and Muslims lived alongside each other in Baghdad, though he makes no mention of this in his work.

Graetz’s depiction of Jewish life under the Baghdad caliphs corresponds with Shlomo Goitein’s description of Jewish life under Abbasid rule in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his history of Jews and Arabs, Goitein writes that the Exilarch “occupied a very honoured position as the general representative of the Jewish community. According to a Christian source, he had precedence over Christian dignitaries at the caliph’s court, but as a rule, he had no administrative function within the Muslim state. He was addressed as ‘Our Lord, the son of David,’ and as David is described as one of the greatest prophets, naturally his office was surrounded by the halo of sanctity.”
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Goitein does point out that despite the splendour of the Exilarch’s court, he had little executive authority, he had no jurisdiction over
criminal matters, and his income was restricted to the proceeds from his own lands and contributions from the community. Nevertheless, this is far from the picture of death and exile that was painted by Ibn Ishaq.

Before Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography, and before it was incorporated into the Hadith literature, Muslim clerics did not have the texts available to them to depict the killing of Jews as an example of following in the steps of the Prophet. The relative tolerance of Jews under Arab rule in the eighth century, as reflected in the writings of Graetz and Goitein, would have been impossible if Ibn Ishaq’s claim that, barely a century earlier, Muslims had massacred nine hundred Jews in Medina was true.