Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

4. The Prince of Medina
MECCA was a parched and shadowless settlement collected
around a single well—the Zamzam of Muslim
lore—and a shrine. Yathrib, or, as the Muslims soon
started calling it, Madinat al-Nabi, the “City of the
Prophet,” and now in English simply Medina, was a
quite different place. It was an oasis whose underground
water supply supported plantations of date
palms and a comfortable population of agriculturalists.
Those agriculturalists were, for a couple of generations
before Muhammad’s arrival, Arabs, chiefly the
tribe called Khazraj, who had first approached Muhammad
at Mecca, and another, the Aws. But there
were other people in Medina as well, various tribes of
Jews who had once controlled the oasis and were in
622 in a dependent alliance with either the Aws or the
Khazraj. We do not know when or how the Jews arrived
in that remote outpost of the Diaspora, but a
Jewish population is attested in many of the oases that
stretched northward from Medina toward what is now
the Jordanian frontier, and there was a large and powerful
Jewish presence in the southwestern tip of Arabia,
in the Yemen. Yet, we do not know in what precisely
the religious beliefs and practices of those Medina Jews
consisted.
Life was easier in Medina than in Mecca, or it
should have been, given its natural advantages. But
while the Quraysh held their fragile settlement in a
shifting but nonetheless tight political grip, the Arabs