Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 69
of Medina had fallen to contesting ownership of the limited plantation
land, and by the second decade of the seventh century social
strife was beginning to pit the Aws and their Jewish clients against
the Khazraj and theirs. The clans lived locked within their fortified
farmsteads and awaited the inevitable showdown. These were the
circumstances that brought Muhammad to the place that would
one day bear his name. His audience at Mecca had said that he
sounded like a possessed poet or, alternatively, a “seer” (kahin),
both of which identifications he vehemently denied, but it was
surely as some kind of vates or holy man that he was brought to
Medina. Where today parties in conflict might bring in an impartial
arbitrator with binding powers, the Medinese imported a charismatic
holy man whose wisdom was not stipulated but Godgiven.
The Medina Accords
Several important events took place at Medina between Muhammad’s
arrival in September 622 and the defining military action at
Badr Wells in 624. One of the first, begun while he was still at
Mecca, was Muhammad’s arrangement of fictive “brotherhoods”
whereby his fellow “Migrants” (muhajirun)—whose name was
a badge of honor and who soon became a somewhat privileged
class—were attached, family by family, to counterparts in the still
small group of Medina Muslims called “Helpers” (ansar) to ensure
some degree of economic and social support for the penniless and
resourceless Meccan Muslims. Muhammad himself lodged with
some Medinese supporters until a house was built for him. Its
courtyard soon became the Muslims’ first public prayer house or
mosque.
The biographical sources on the Prophet have preserved what
may be the agreement drawn up between Muhammad and the folk
of Medina. The so-called Medina Accords constitute a complex
document with numerous later additions, but at its heart we can
discern that the Medinese agreed to accept Muhammad as their
leader in the sense that they would refer all disputes to him and