Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

4Islam i n World Cult u r e sbic, is such an important event in the history of the Muslim community thatthe Islamic lunar calendar starts its year one from this point.From his new position in Medina, Muhammad began to spread his messageof belief in one God and the moral obligations it implied to a religious communitythat by the time of his death in 632 included almost all of the Arabianpeninsula. The initial community that Muhammad formed at Medina compriseda confederation of Arab tribes, new Muslim converts, and Jewishgroups, all of whom had agreed to accept Muhammad’s leadership in the arbitrationof disputes among themselves and with any outside parties. This agreementwas formalized with the signing of the Constitution of Medina. This remarkabletext from the lifetime of the Prophet includes such provisions as thisone: “The Jews of the clan of Awf are one community with the Believers (theJews have their religion and the Muslims have theirs)” (Ibn Ishaq 1997,231–233). Similar stipulations were also made for the Jews affiliated with otherlocal Arab clans.These statements are preserved in the oldest surviving biography ofMuhammad, that of Ibn Hisham (d. 833). As will become clear from the chaptersof this volume, discussions of such formative texts continue to play importantroles in the religious lives of contemporary Muslims. For example, in a recentbook published in Jakarta, the Indonesian Muslim scholar J. SuyuthiPulungan argued that examining the relationship between the various Jewishtribes of Medina and the Muslim community requires a renewed investigationof the meaning of u m m a , “ c o m m u n i t y.” To reconcile this statement with laterIslamic tradition’s generally accepted definition of the u m m a as a communitybounded by religious affiliation, Pulungan makes it clear that the term u m m acan be used on two different levels simultaneously, one general and one specific,and then shows that both these understandings of the term have a solidfoundation in the Qur’an itself (Pulungan 1994).Since the late twentieth century, the Constitution of Medina has becomethe subject of other studies around the world, including one by the contempora ry Turkish intellectual Ali Bulaç. He has argued that this first treaty negotiatedby the Prophet sets forth a model of intercommunal relations based on aprinciple of participation rather than domination, “because a totalitarian orunitarian political structure cannot allow for diversities” (Quoted in Kurzman1998, 174). As the chapters that follow show, diversity is a vital issue for Muslimsnot only in their interactions with other religious traditions but also intheir management of differences within the community of believers. Forthroughout the fourteen centuries of Islamic history, the multiformity of interpretationsof the Prophet’s legacy has been the central dynamic for the growthand development of the tradition. Nevertheless, most Muslims have agreedthat to a certain extent, in Islam, the politics of communal identity are notcompletely separated from religious concerns. Muhammad combined the