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Emigration to Madinah could never be attributable to
attempts to escape from jeers and oppression only, but it also constituted a sort of
cooperation with the aim of erecting the pillars of a new society in a secure place. Hence
it was incumbent upon every capable Muslim to contribute to building this new homeland,
immunizing it and holding up its prop. As a leader and spiritual guide, there was no doubt
the Noble Messenger [pbuh], in whose hands exclusively all affairs would be resolved.
In Madinah, the Prophet [pbuh] had to deal with
three distinctively different categories of people with different respective problems:
- His Companions, the noble and Allâh fearing elite [R]
- Polytheists still detached from the Islam and were purely Madinese
tribes.
- The Jews.
As for his Companions, the conditions of life in
Madinah were totally different from those they experienced in Makkah. There, in
Makkah,
they used to strive for one corporate target, but physically, they were scattered,
overpowered and forsaken. They were helpless in terms of pursuing their new course of
orientation. Their means, socially and materially, fell short of establishing a new Muslim
community. In parallel lines, the Makkan Chapters of the Noble Qur’ân were confined
to delineating the Islamic precepts, enacting legislations pertaining to the believers
individually and enjoining good and piety and forbidding evils and vices.
In Madinah , things were otherwise; here all the
affairs of their life rested in their hands. Now, they were at ease and could quite
confidently handle the challenges of civilization, construction, means of living,
economics, politics, government administration, war and peace, codification of the
questions of the allowed and prohibited, worship, ethics and all the relevant issues. In a
nutshell, they were in Madinah at full liberty to erect the pillars of a new Muslim
community not only utterly different from that pre-Islamic code of life, but also
distinctive in its features in the world at large. It was a society that could stand for
the Islamic Call for whose sake the Muslims had been put to unspeakable tortures for 10
years. No doubt, the construction of a society that runs in line with this type of ethics
cannot be accomplished overnight, within a month or a year. It requires a long time to
build during which legislation and legalization will run gradually in a complementary
process with mind cultivation, training and education. Allâh, the All-Knowing, of course
undertook legislation and His Prophet Muhammad [pbuh], implementation and orientation:
"He it is Who
sent among the unlettered ones a Messenger (Muhammad [pbuh]) from among themselves,
reciting to them His Verses, purifying them (from the filth of disbelief and polytheism),
and teaching them the Book (this Qur’ân, Islamic laws and Islamic Jurisprudence) and
Al-Hikmah (As-Sunna: legal ways, orders, acts of worship, etc. of the
Prophet Muhammad [pbuh].)." [Al-Qur'an 62:2]
The Prophet’s Companions [R] , rushed
enthusiastically to assimilate these Qur’ânic rules and fill their hearts joyfully
with them:
"And when His
Verses (this Qur’ân) are recited unto them, they (i.e. the Verses) increase their
Faith." [Al-Qur'an 8:2]
With respect to the Muslims, this task constituted
the greatest challenge for the Messenger of Allâh [pbuh]. In fact, this very purpose lay
at the heart of the Islamic Call and the Muhammadan mission; it was never an incidental
issue though there were the matters that required urgent addressing.
The Muslims in Madinah consisted virtually of two
parties: The first one already settled down in their abode, land and wealth, fully at
ease, but seeds of discord amongst them were deeply seated and chronic enmity continually
evoked; they were Al-Ansar (the Helpers). The second party were Al-Muhajirun
(the Emigrants), homeless, jobless and penniless. Their number was not small, on the
contrary, it was increasing day by day after the Prophet [pbuh] had given them the green
light to leave for Madinah whose economic structure, originally not that prosperous one,
began to show signs of imbalance aggravated by the economic boycott that the anti-Islamic
groups imposed and consequently imports diminished and living conditions worsened.
- The purely Madinese polytheists constituted the second sector with
whom the Prophet [pbuh] had to deal. Those people had no control at all over the Muslim.
Some of them nursed no grudge against the Muslims, but were rather skeptical of their
ancestors’ religious practices, and developed tentative inclination towards Islam and
before long they embraced the new faith and were truly devoted to Allâh. However, some
others harboured evil intentions against the Prophet [pbuh] and his followers but were too
cowardly to resist them publicly, they were rather, under those Islamically favourable
conditions, obliged to fake amicability and friendliness. ‘Abdullah bin
Ubai, who had
almost been given presidency over Al-Khazraj and Al-Aws tribes in the wake of Bu‘ath
War between the two tribes, came at the head of that group of hypocrites. The
Prophet’s advent and the vigorous rise of the new spirit of Islam foiled that
orientation and the idea soon went into oblivion. He, seeing another one, Muhammad
[pbuh],
coming to deprive him and his agents of the prospective temporal privileges, could not be
pleased, and for overriding reasons he showed pretension to Islam but with horrible
disbelief deeply-rooted in his heart. He also used to exploit some events and weak-hearted
new converts in scheming malevolently against the true believers.
- The Jews (the Hebrews), who had migrated to Al-Hijaz from Syria
following the Byzantine and Assyrian persecution campaigns, were the third category
existent on the demographic scene in Madinah. In their new abode they assumed the Arabian
stamp in dress, language and manner of life and there were instances of intermarriage with
the local Arabs, however they retained their ethnic particularism and detached themselves
from amalgamation with the immediate environment. They even used to pride in their
Jewish-Israeli origin, and spurn the Arabs around designating them as illiterate meaning
brutal, naïve and backward. They desired the wealth of their neighbours to be made lawful
to them and they could thus appropriate it the way they liked.
"… because
they say: "There is no blame on us to betray and take the properties of the
illiterates (Arabs)" [Al-Qur'an 3:75]
Religiously, they showed no zeal; their most obvious
religious commodity was fortunetelling, witchcraft and the secret arts (blowing on knots),
for which they used to attach to themselves advantages of science and spiritual
precedence.
They excelled at the arts of earning money and
trading. They in fact monopolized trading in cereals, dates, wine, clothes, export and
import. For the services they offered to the Arabs, the latter paid heavily. Usury was a
common practice amongst them, lending the Arab notables great sums to be squandered on
mercenary poets, and in vanity avenues, and in return seizing their fertile land given as
surety.
They were very good at corrupting and scheming. They
used to sow seeds of discord between adjacent tribes and entice each one to hatch plots
against the other with the natural corollary of continual exhaustive bloody fighting.
Whenever they felt that fire of hatred was about to subside, they would nourish it with
new means of perpetuity so that they could always have the upper hand, and at the same
time gain heavy interest rates on loans spent on inter-tribal warfare.
Three famous tribes of Jews constituted the
demographic presence in Yathrib (now Madinah): Banu Qainuqua‘, allies of
Al-Khazraj
tribe, Banu An-Nadir and Banu Quraizah who allied Al-Aws and inhabited the suburbs of
Madinah.
Naturally they held the new changes with abhorrence
and were terribly hateful to them, simply because the Messenger of Allâh was of a
different race, and this point was in itself too repugnant for them to reconcile with.
Second, Islam came to bring about a spirit of rapport, to terminate the state of enmity
and hatred, and to establish a social regime based on denunciation of the prohibited and
promotion of the allowed. Adherence to these canons of life implied paving the way for an
Arab unity that could work to the prejudice of the Jews and their interests at both the
social and economic levels; the Arab tribes would then try to restore their wealth and
land misappropriated by the Jews through usurious practices.
The Jews of course deeply considered all these
things ever since they had known that the Islamic Call would try to settle in
Yathrib, and
it was no surprise to discover that they harboured the most enmity and hatred to Islam and
the Messenger [pbuh] even though they did not have the courage to uncover their feelings
in the beginning.
The following incident could attest clearly to that
abominable antipathy that the Jews harboured towards the new political and religious
changes that came to stamp the life of Madinah. Ibn Ishaq, on the authority of the Mother
of believers Safiyah [R]Ç narrated: Safiyah, daughter of Huyayi bin Akhtab said: I was
the closest child to my father and my uncle Abi Yasir’s heart. Whenever they saw me
with a child of theirs, they should pamper me so tenderly to the exclusion of anyone else.
However, with the advent of the Messenger of Allâh [pbuh] and setting in Quba’ with
Bani ‘Amr bin ‘Awf, my father, Huyayi bin Akhtab and my uncle Abu Yasir bin
Akhtab went to see him and did not return until sunset when they came back walking lazily
and fully dejected. I, as usually, hurried to meet them smiling, but they would not turn
to me for the grief that caught them. I heard my uncle Abu Yasir say to Ubai and
Huyayi:
"Is it really he (i.e. Muhammad [pbuh])?" The former said: "It is he, I
swear by Allâh!" "Did you really recognize him?" they asked. He answered:
"Yes, and my heart is burning with enmity towards him"[Ibn Hisham 1/518, 519]
An interesting story that took place on the first
day, the Prophet [pbuh] stepped in Madinah, could be quoted to illustrate the mental
disturbance and deep anxiety that beset the Jews. ‘Abdullah bin Salam, the most
learned rabbi among the Jews came to see the Prophet [pbuh] when he arrived, and asked him
certain questions to ascertain his real Prophethood. No sooner did he hear the
Prophet’s answers than he embraced Islam, but added that if his people knew of his
Islamization they would advance false arguments against me. The Prophet [pbuh] sent for
some Jews and asked them about ‘Abdullah bin Salam, they testified to his scholarly
aptitude and virtuous standing. Here it was divulged to them that he had embraced Islam
and on the spot, they imparted categorically opposite testimonies and described him as the
most evil of all evils. In another narration ‘Abdullah bin Salam said, "O Jews!
Be Allâh fearing. By Allâh, the only One, you know that he is the Messenger of Allâh
sent to people with the Truth." They replied, "You are lying." ... That was
the Prophet’s first experience with the Jews.[Bukhari 1/459]
That was the demo-political picture within
Madinah.
Five hundred kilometres away in Makkah, there still lay another source of detrimental
threat, the archenemy of Islam, Quraish. For ten years, while at the mercy of
Quraish, the
Muslims were subjected to all sorts of terrorism, boycott, harassment and starvation
coupled by a large scale painstaking psychological war and aggressive organized
propaganda. When they had emigrated to Madinah, their land, wealth and property were
seized, wives detained and the socially humble in rank brutally tortured. Quraish also
schemed and made attempts on the life of the first figure of the Call, Muhammad
[pbuh] .
Due to their acknowledged temporal leadership and religious supremacy among the pagan
Arabs, given the custodianship of the Sacred Sanctuary, the Quraishites spared no effort
in enticing the Arabians against Madinah and boycotting the Madinese socially and
economically. To quote Muhammad Al-Ghazali: "A state of war virtually existed between
the Makkan tyrants and the Muslims in their abode. It is foolish to blame the Muslims for
the horrible consequences that were bound to ensue in the light of that long-standing
feud."[Fiqh As-Seerah p.162]
The Muslims in Madinah were completely eligible then
to confiscate the wealth of those tyrants, mete out for them exemplary punishment and
bring twofold retaliation on them in order to deter them from committing any folly against
the Muslims and their sanctities.
That was a resume of the major problems that the
Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] had to face, and the complicated issues he was supposed to
resolve.
In full acknowledgment, we could safely say that he
quite honestly shouldered the responsibilities of Messengership, and cleverly discharged
the liabilities of both temporal and religious leadership in Madinah. He accorded to
everyone his due portion whether of mercy or punishment, with the former usually seasoning
the latter in the overall process of establishing Islam on firm grounds among its faithful
adherents.
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