The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (28 page)

This militant hardliner had argued vehemently against the idea of offering the Ghatafan Beduin a single date to abandon the siege of Medina. “Give them our property?” he’d exclaimed. “No, the sword!” His eagerness for blood had been rewarded in kind. Severely wounded by an arrow while defending the trench, he was now dying, and he knew it. Since he was too weak to walk, he was carried to Muhammad on a leather litter, where he took what he presented as the high road of the mortally wounded: “The time has come for me, in the cause of God, not to care for any man’s censure.” Precisely because he was dying, that is, his decision was assumed to be without prejudice. But his prejudice had always been for the sword, and it was no different now as he passed judgment on the Qureyz: “The men shall be killed, the property divided, the women and children made captives.”

Some scholars suspect that the early Islamic historians created this role for Saad in order to absolve Muhammad from responsibility for the massacre. It establishes plausible deniability, since it could then be argued that this was not Muhammad’s decision but Saad’s, and that Muhammad had no choice but to honor the word of the dying man. But the argument itself reveals a painful awareness that this was something that needed justifying, and so was implicitly not justifiable. It certainly seems unlikely that Muhammad would leave such a drastic decision to someone else, let alone to a man who was not even one of his senior advisers. And even if the decision was not made directly by him, it was clearly made at the very least with his consent. Indeed, far from overruling it, Muhammad personally oversaw the executions. Trenches were dug alongside Medina’s main marketplace, and when that was done, all the Qureyz men—“all those on whose chins a razor had passed,” as ibn-Ishaq puts it—were led out in small groups, made to kneel by the trenches, and beheaded.

This was not easy work. Beheading someone is far harder than conventional battle tales of the time might lead a reader to think. Whole teams of believers went to work in separate morning and afternoon shifts, resting from their labors in the heat of midday. It took three days until they could declare their job done and the trenches were filled in.

Some eyewitness accounts had it that four hundred bodies were buried in these trenches, others as many as nine hundred. Either way, the numbers alone were shocking. The total casualties at Badr and Uhud had come to no more than a few dozen, and that had been in the heat of battle; here, in the center of Medina, hundreds had been methodically executed. It was a demonstratively brutal act that would send shock waves around Arabia. And it had exactly the intended effect. It was now crystal clear to all that there would be no further tolerance of any form of dissent.

Everything the Qureyz had owned—houses, date orchards, personal property—was divided among the believers, with the usual fifth held back for the communal treasury. Most of the women and children were distributed as slaves, with some taken to the Najd and sold in return for horses and arms. But one woman, Rayhana, received very different treatment. Born into the Nadir tribe, she had married into the Qureyz, and this double affiliation may have been why Muhammad now singled her out, but not for punishment. Instead, he made Rayhana his seventh wife.

Since her husband and all her male relatives had been massacred before her eyes, one hardly imagines this was the most loving of unions, but that was not the point. The marriage made a statement: however ruthless Muhammad had proved himself capable of being with those who refused to acknowledge his authority, he would take pains to create new alliances any way he could. Once ruthlessness had been displayed, it was time to rebuild.

here is sometimes a very fine line, if not an invisible one, between reason and rationalization. Innumerable reasons have been given over the centuries for the massacre of the Qureyz. It has been argued that they collaborated with the Meccans, though there is no convincing evidence that they did. That this was standard operating procedure for the time and place, though it was not. That Muhammad did not order it himself, which is only technically true. That the Qureyz themselves expected nothing less, though most of them clearly did. That Muhammad was left with no choice, which ignores the established alternative of expulsion. That the high number of executions is exaggerated, which while quite possible is also impossible to demonstrate. Even that the massacre was justified by the Quran, despite the fact that the Quran demands an absolute end to hostilities the moment an enemy submits.

In fact some Muslim theologians argue that the massacre simply couldn’t have happened the way ibn-Ishaq tells it, since it’s inconsistent with Quranic values. A few have even gone so far as to argue that it’s a deliberate distortion specifically intended to defame Islam and to make the Qureyz look like martyrs. Indeed some Jewish scholars have likened the Qureyz to the rebels of Masada choosing mass suicide over submission to the Romans, even though they specifically rejected that option. Meanwhile, well-meaning Christian scholars have explained the fate of the Qureyz by saying that modern Western standards of warfare cannot be applied to seventh-century Arabia, thus betraying not only the enduring power of Orientalist condescension but also a strangely blind eye to the horrors of both medieval and twentieth-centuryEuropeanhistory.

The one thing all such explanations have in common is an almost desperate attempt to make the unpalatable somehow less so. That vaunted hard-headed realist Machiavelli would define it as “the question of cruelty used well or badly.” But even the master of realpolitik found himself dogged by the terms of his own question: “We can say that cruelty is used well, if it is permissible to talk in this way of what is evil, when it is employed once and for all, and one’s safety depends on it, and then it is not persisted in but is as far as possible turned to the good of one’s subjects.” That’s four conditional phrases in one sentence—Machiavelli astutely hedging his bets. Clearly aware that this resolved nothing, he kept returning to the question. “A ruler must want to have a reputation for compassion rather than for cruelty,” he wrote, “but he must nonetheless be careful not to make bad use of compassion.” Eventually his own logic led him to earn lasting disrepute by arguing that cruelty can actually be more compassionate than compassion, coming up with a line that has served as the rationale of repressive dictators worldwide: “By making an example or two, the ruler will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine.”

Seen in the light of today’s ongoing Middle East conflict, the massacre of the Qureyz in the year 627 seems to set a terrible precedent. Since faith and politics are as inextricably intertwined in today’s Middle East as they were in the seventh century, the arguments given for the massacre in the early Islamic histories are still invoked, alongside the Quran’s evident anger at Medinan Jewish rejection of Muhammad’s prophethood, to justify the ugly twin offspring of theopolitical extremism: Muslim anti-Semitism and Jewish Islamophobia. In the light of Muhammad’s political situation at the time, however, a less emotional analysis may be more to the point. The massacre of the Qureyz was indeed a demonstration of ruthlessness, but they were, in a sense, collateral damage. The real audience for this demonstration was not them but anyone else in Medina who still harbored reservations about Muhammad’s leadership. If there had been any doubt that he was dealing from a position of strength, he had now dispelled it.

The principle is both as familiar and as arguable today as it was in Muhammad’s time: only by demonstrating a hard line, the reasoning goes, can a leader establish the authority to make the concessions necessary for the long term. It’s a solipsistic argument at best, since there’s no knowing what would have happened if a softer approach had been taken. But for Muhammad, it seems to have worked. Having established his willingness to use extreme force, he had gained the leeway to pursue a more peaceful alternative as he looked to the future, and specifically to Mecca.

erhaps no return in all of history has been as richly symbolic as Muhammad’s to the city of his birth. Every exile dreams of return. Not merely going back, but being welcomed back. Being begged to come back, in fact, in a public righting of a great

wrong. The place you return to will be the same—the landscape, the people, everything that constitutes the feeling of home—and yet transformed, and your return will itself be a sign of that transformation, a signal of hope for a new start, a better future. This is the vision that sustains you through the years of exile.

Yet for Muhammad there was no single triumphal moment such as the dream might seem to demand. No banners flying, no cheering throngs, no flowers being thrown at his feet and former enemies embracing him in tears of repentance and joy. Instead, his return was an incremental process, so skillfully managed that by the third and final stage it seemed more a matter of completion than of victory.

It began with an actual dream early in the year 628. In it, Muhammad stood in front of the Kaaba with its key in his right hand. His head was shaved pilgrim-style, and he was in ihram, the traditional pilgrim’s garb consisting of nothing but two seamless pieces of homespun linen, one tied around his waist, the other draped over his shoulders. The moment he woke, he knew what he had to do. He had proven his strength by matching the Meccans three times in battle; now he would approach them in the vulnerability of near-nakedness. Where force of arms could not win the day, the dream said, disarming would.

There were two forms of pilgrimage, both of which would continue into Islam. The greater one, the hajj, took place in the twelfth and final month of the year, Dhu al-Hijja, “that of the pilgrimage.” But there was also the lesser pilgrimage, the umra, or “homage,” which could be made at any time of the year. To the dismay of the Meccans, this was what Muhammad now announced he would make.

The whole of the Hijaz buzzed with admiration for the unexpected daring of such a move. Everyone grasped instantly that with this announcement Muhammad was not only calling the Meccans’ bluff, but doing it with an act of absolute sincerity. It seemed inevitable that they would try to stop him entering the city, yet how? As the self- declared guardians of the sanctuary, their whole reputation rested on guaranteeing the right of pilgrimage to all who wished. To turn away pilgrims was unthinkable; it would be a major dereliction of their public responsibility, placing in jeopardy their vaunted right to guardianship. And besides, exactly how could they turn Muhammad away? Any armed attack on half-naked pilgrims would be to shed the blood of those they were sworn to protect, defiling the whole idea of sanctuary. By simply declaring his intention to perform this basic act of piety, Muhammad had placed the Meccans in a double bind of their own making.

Seven hundred men made the ten-day journey with him, traveling in conspicuously peaceful array. They carried no battle weapons like bows or swords, just the daggers that were as much part of a traveler’s equipment as the ubiquitous goatskins full of water. At the head of the procession were seventy specially fatted camels, each one a perfect specimen adorned for sacrifice with the customary woven garlands and necklaces. The most resplendent of them was also the most recognizable: the magnificent silver-nose-ringed male that had once been the pride and joy of Muhammad’s nemesis abu-Jahl, and had been chosen by Muhammad as his share of the booty after the Battle of Badr. The symbolism of his bringing it back to Mecca for sacrifice was unmistakable.

As he must have fully expected, the Meccans sent out a mounted squadron to bar the route into the city. But instead of taking one of the two obvious options—confronting them or turning back— Muhammad diverted. He led his followers overnight on “a rough and rugged path among canyons” where horses couldn’t follow, and then down into lower ground at Hudaibiya, a few miles north of Mecca, where a single large acacia tree shaded a winter pool. They reached it before dawn and lit fires, knowing that the smoke would announce where they were. They had nothing to hide, after all. They were pilgrims, come in peace, not in enmity. At daybreak they hobbled their camels, laid aside their daggers, and began to wash and change into ihram. By the time the Meccan horsemen caught up with them, they were ready to set out for the city as tradition demanded, on foot.

There was nothing the cavalry squadron could do but block the path forward. Instead of battle cries, they’d been met with the pilgrim chant Labbayka allah-umma labbayka, “Here I am, oh God of all people, here I am.” Instead of a declaration of war, it was a declaration of faith by a mass of men who were unarmed, unresisting—and unmoving. They would stay right here, Muhammad declared, for however long they had to until the Meccans allowed them to proceed into the city. All they wanted was to complete the pilgrimage in peace. Yet the peacefulness was itself the challenge.

The squadron commander sent riders back into the city to ask how he should proceed, and abu-Sufyan called an emergency meeting of the Meccan council. But they were effectively stymied: damned if they let Muhammad in and damned if they didn’t. Their dilemma was made all the worse when their own Beduin allies took Muhammad’s side. “Not on these terms did we ally ourselves with you,” one chieftain told them. “That you should turn away those who have come to do honor to the House of God? Either leave Muhammad free to do what he came to do, or we will leave you, taking every last one of our men.”

Depending on your point of view, this had developed into the equivalent of either a sit-in or a lockout. Something had to give, and by now abu-Sufyan must have known that it would not be Muhammad. The only way to break this impasse was through negotiation, so over the next few days high-level envoys rode back and forth between the city and Hudabiya, some openly, others less so as they tried to persuade one faction or another of Muhammad’s followers to turn back.

Muhammad countered by calling for a renewed pledge of allegiance from all those with him. One by one they came up to him as he sat beneath the acacia tree, grasped his hand and held it close, forearm against forearm, and solemnly renewed their oaths of loyalty, swearing to obey Muhammad as the messenger of God. The ceremony made a deep impression on one of the Meccan envoys. “By God,” he reported back, “if Muhammad coughs up a bit of phlegm and a speck of it falls on one of them, he rubs his face with it. If he gives them an order, they vie to be the first to carry out. If he performs ablutions, they almost fight over the water he used. If they speak in his presence, they lower their voices out of respect for him. What he proposes makes sense, and we should accept it.”