Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

74 t CHAPTER FOUR
but a later generation of Muslim historians and storytellers put
robust flesh on the bare bones of Abraham’s stay in Mecca and the
subsequent lapse of Muhammad’s town into the heathenism into
which the Prophet himself was born.
Muhammad’s career at Medina falls into two main phases. The
first, as we have just seen, covered the two years immediately following
the Hegira, when Islam underwent a new shaping, first and
chiefly by reason of Muhammad’s contact with the Jews of the
oasis. Previously his preaching had taken place in the form of a
simple antagonistic antiphony: the monotheist trying to convert
the polytheists, whose refusals, denials, and accusations fly out
from between the lines of the Meccan suras. At Medina a third
voice is heard, that of the Jews. It was a voice that Muhammad
had likely expected to harmonize with his own but it proved to be
a grating discord. He did not change his tune; he simply refined
and enriched it. The earliest definition of Islam was figured against
the totally “other” of the polytheists: “Say,” God commands
Muhammad in an early sura, “you disbelievers, I do not worship
what you worship and you do not worship what I worship. ...
You have your religion and I have mine” (109). At Medina it assumed
a more complex identity as Muhammad, somewhat like the
early Christians, had to define his faith and practice against a “parent”
group, which in both instances rejected its putative offspring.
This process of religious identification continued throughout
Muhammad’s stay in Medina, but early in his second year there he
began a course of action that would eventually make him the true
master of a Muslim Medina. In 628, he embarked on a more expansive
thrust that made him, before his death in 632, the lord of
Arabia.
The Master of Medina (624–628)
If Muhammad’s mandate was to bring peace and stability to Medina,
he went about it in a curious but, as it turned out, extremely
effective fashion. He had problems at Medina: there was trouble
with the Jews, and some Medinese resistance to the religious