Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 87
Problems before and after Tabuk
The raiding continued. Earlier in 629, between his umra of that
year and his conquest of Mecca, Muhammad had launched his
most ambitious and perhaps most ill conceived expedition deep
into distant Roman-Byzantine Syria. The alleged reason was the
murder of one of the Prophet’s emissaries to someone said to be the
Arab governor of Bostra (today Busra). The truth of that does not
concern us here, but the raid, which was met by government troops
at a village called Muta east of what is now the city of Kerak in
Jordan, is well attested—indeed, it is the first event of Muslim
history mentioned by a non-Muslim source, in this case the Byzantine
historian Theophanes (d. 818)—as is the fact that it was a
disastrous defeat for the Muslims. Muhammad did not accompany
the raiders, but he was there to console them on their return. In his
weekly sermon he assured his fellow Muslims that he had had a
vision of the “martyrs of Muta” at their ease in Paradise.
In March 630, after his triumph at Hunayn, Muhammad made
the umra to Mecca, though not the hajj, which, according to the
standard Life, “The people made . . . that year in the way the (pagan)
Arabs used to do.” Then he planned yet another raid far into
the north, not as foolhardy as the expedition to Muta perhaps, but
dangerous enough for some Muslims to balk at it. The situation
was sufficiently critical that a revelation addressed it, lashing out
at those who preferred to “sit at home” and “preferred to be with
the women who remain behind” (Quran 9:81–86). God’s advice is
strong and straightforward:
It was not fitting for the people of Medina and for the Bedouin in the
vicinity to refuse to follow God’s Apostle, nor to prefer their own
lives to his, because everything that they would suffer or do would
be accounted to their credit as a deed of righteousness—whether
they suffered thirst or fatigue or hunger in the cause of God or trod
paths to anger the unbelievers or received any injury. (9:120)
We are not well informed on either the motives for this expedition
or the motives of the disinclined. The Helpers may have been