Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

82 t CHAPTER FOUR
We can be certain that not all the later specifications were present
in the dhimma dictated by the Prophet to the Jews of Khaibar—
there were far more complicated, sophisticated, and aggressive People
of the Book ahead for the Muslims—but it sets down the principles
and conditions of all that follow. The Banu Israil of the Quran
were monotheistic paradigms from a remote, unthreatening, but still
educational past; the Yahud of Medina were treacherous allies who
defaulted on a political contract. A third cohort was now added, the
Jews who would come tumbling under the sovereignty of Islam,
along with countless Christians. Many of them converted to Islam,
as did many, many Christians, but others lived for well over a millennium
under the universal and perpetual dhimma.
In the midst of this military activity, Muhammad in 629 did
what he failed to do the previous year. He led a delegation of Muslims
to Mecca to perform the umra there. It was his first visit to his
birthplace since his dangerous escape seven years earlier, but he
received a cold reception. After three days he was told his time was
up and that he should leave. It must have been an unpleasant episode,
though Muhammad’s influential uncle Abbas appears to
have embraced Islam on this occasion.
The Wives and Children of the Prophet
While briefly in Mecca for the umra, Muhammad married Maymuna,
the widowed sister-in-law of Abbas. She was, by one count,
his eleventh wife, and possibly his last, though early in 627 he
received as a gift-concubine the Egyptian Christian Miryam. As
might be imagined, Christian polemicists, who shared the assumption
that prophets should be ascetic, if not celibate, had merry
sport with the Prophet’s many wives, and modern Muslim biographers
of Muhammad have had to address the issue at every turn.
His marriages did, however, cause some problems for his contemporaries
as well, not because they suggested unbridled sexuality,
which could be comfortably parsed as virility, but for other reasons.
Arabian society was, no less than the biblical to which it was