Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 77
was successful. What later came to be called the Battle of the Ditch
was in fact no battle at all: the Quraysh could not enter the town
and the Muslims did not come out to confront them. Predictably—
with our hindsight—the besiegers soon lost interest in a war of
attrition far from home and began to drift off. This was pure fiasco.
It was also the last serious attempt by the Quraysh to rid
themselves of their homegrown prophet or, as it turned out, even
seriously to oppose him.
These engagements brought most of the Medinese to the
Prophet’s side. They had little choice perhaps. They had offered
Muhammad protection. But his aggressive actions toward the
Quraysh moved the hostilities of one tribe against some of its own
troublesome clansmen into a war between two settlements with no
prior history of enmity between them. We hear of no mass conversions
among the Medinese; there is merely the gradual disappearance
of the issue of polytheism. Muhammad had indeed settled
the civil unrest in the oasis but only by creating a common
enemy for all parties, his own, the Quraysh. If Islam now began to
seem inevitable to the Medinese, shortly it would appear profitable
as well.
Muhammad and the Jews (continued)
Not merely modern political sensibilities make the Jews of Medina
loom large in Muhammad’s later career. The issue sprawls across
the oldest biographies of the Prophet and runs, sometimes explicitly,
sometimes implicitly, throughout the Medina suras. References
to the Jews grow darker and more truculent as the Quran
progresses, and the judgments are indeed more in anger than in
sorrow. The Arab historians and biographers profess to explain
why. Their explanations are not all of a piece, however. Some treat
the theme theologically: the punishment of the Medina Jews, who
were invited to convert and refused, perfectly exemplify the Quran’s
tales of what happened to those who rejected the prophets of
old. Other early historians prefer a more political explanation, to
which we now turn.