Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 71
at Medina, but the Muslim tradition also connects its imposition
with 9:11–12, which seems to reflect the tribes’ capitulations of
the year before Muhammad’s death, and where it has the flavor of
a tribute tax. The fast of Ramadan was likewise a Medina phenomenon
(2:184–185); its specification as a religious obligation
was almost certainly an outgrowth of the Prophet’s early disputes
with the Jews of the oasis between 622 and 624. Finally, we can be
certain that no Muslim made the ritual pilgrimage until the very
end of the Prophet’s life: the sole hajj he himself performed was in
February 632, four months before he died.
Muhammad and the Jews
Before his arrival at Medina Muhammad had often spoken of the
Banu Israil, as the Quran names the Jews. He had used, as we have
seen, the eschatological images and language current in the Jewish
tradition in his attempt to convince the Quraysh of the seriousness
of their predicament and had invoked the example of the biblical
prophets both to explain his own mission and to illustrate what
happened to those who resisted God’s commands. The Bible was a
religious terrain that Muhammad shared with the Jews and the
Christians. He had sent his followers to Christian Abyssinia—in
belief and practice the most “Jewish” of the area’s Christian cultures—with
some expectation that they would be favorably received,
as they apparently were, and now, newly arrived in Medina,
he may have anticipated that his own prophetic claims would
be acknowledged by the Banu Israil whose God he too worshiped.
If this is what Muhammad in fact expected, he was sorely disappointed.
The parts of the Quran revealed at Medina show a notable
hardening of attitudes toward contemporary Jews, now
straightforwardly referred to as Yahud. We know too that certain
religious practices Muhammad had once observed—rituals that
apparently derived from Jewish ones—were altered soon after his
arrival in Medina. He no longer prayed facing Jerusalem, as the
Jews did and as he had previously done; his qibla was now the
Meccan Kaaba, the old Quraysh cult center in Mecca. Nor did he