Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 81
chose, which they rarely if ever did. Those who refused the terms
and resisted forfeited all prospects if they were defeated, as they
invariably were. The lesson was not lost on the next settlement up
the trail.
These arrangements were part of Muhammad’s political and
military strategy and their consequences eventually disappeared
within the larger political reality of the rapidly expanding “Abode
of Islam.” What persisted far longer—down to the present day
since they became part of an unchanging religious law—were the
religious demands and concessions made of and to the inhabitants
of these same conquered oases. Khaibar, the first of them, was
largely inhabited by Jews, whose numbers were swollen by Nadir
refugees from Medina. But the Jews of these oases settlements
were no longer treasonous members of the Medina umma. Politically,
they were surrendered foes, and their submission won them
concessions; religiously, they were People of the Book, Scriptuaries
like the Muslims, and that theological status won them tolerance.
The tolerance granted the Jews of Khaibur was formalized in the
dhimma, the contract between the Muslim community and their
subjects from among the People of the Book. This concordat guaranteed
the latter the privilege—it is not a question of rights here;
the victors are dictating terms to the vanquished—to continue to
practice their religious rituals, a privilege not granted to the polytheists
among the conquered peoples; they had to submit or face
death, convert or perish. “Fight against those who do not believe
in God or in the Last Day,” the Quran forthrightly says (9:29). But
the dhimma also imposed certain obligations on the vanquished
Scriptuaries. The full list of privileges and restrictions later appears
in a document called the Covenant of Umar. It was supposedly
granted by the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634–644),
to the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem on the occasion of the
city’s surrender in 635. Although the document itself is a later
forgery and often brandished by Eastern Christians in their disputes
with their Muslim sovereign—in that sense it is the Muslim
counterpart of the forged Donation of Constantine—the Covenant
of Umar does embody some of the basic conditions that bind
the dhimmis from that day to the present.