The charge runs like this: Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) silenced his critics by having them killed at night. The list usually carries four names: Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, Abu Rafi’ ibn Abi al-Huqayq, and the poets Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak.
Two of those killings are in Sahih al-Bukhari, and this page concedes them and reads them in their setting, which was a war for the survival of Medina. The other two rest on reports the hadith critics reject. The difference matters, because the case is usually pressed hardest on the weakest pair.
Number 1: Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf was killed, and Bukhari says how
The report is sound and it is blunt. Jabir ibn Abd Allah relates that the Prophet asked, “Who is willing to kill Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, who has hurt Allah and His Apostle?” Muhammad ibn Maslama offered, asked leave to “say a thing” to Ka’b, meaning words that would draw him out, and was told he might. He and his companions went to Ka’b at night, talked him out of his house and killed him (Bukhari 4037; Muslim 1801).[1]
So it was a planned killing, and it used a ruse. Any honest answer starts there. The question is what Ka’b had done. Ka’b was a leader among the Jews of Medina through his mother’s tribe, the Banu Nadir. After the battle of Badr, Ibn Ishaq reports, he rode to Mecca, mourned the Quraysh dead in verse and urged them to take revenge on Medina, then came home and wrote verses about Muslim women.[2] The Medina agreement that bound the city’s tribes forbade giving protection to Quraysh or to anyone who helped them.[2] By the terms he had agreed to, a man who went to the enemy and called for war on his own city had gone over to the enemy.
I will not soften what the jurists did with the case, though. Ibn Taymiyya made the killing of Ka’b a central proof, in al-Sarim al-maslul, for his ruling that a non-Muslim under covenant who reviles the Prophet has broken the covenant.[3] That is a ruling of law, argued from this report, and a reader is entitled to weigh it. What the report itself records is a man who was helping an army that had just fought Medina and would fight it again.
Al-Bukhari also records the report a second time, in the Book of Jihad, in a chapter on deceiving the enemy in war, beside the Prophet’s saying that “war is deception”.[4] The placing shows how the early scholars read the episode. They treated it as an operation against an enemy in a war already under way, governed by the rules of war, and they did not treat it as a punishment for speech carried out in peacetime.
The sources also record what followed. Abu Dawud preserves a report that the Jews of Medina came to the Prophet the next morning to complain that one of their leaders had been killed at night. He reminded them of what Ka’b had done, and then invited them to write an agreement between him and them, and they wrote one.[5] The tribes of Medina, in other words, were not driven out or punished for Ka’b. They were offered a fresh written guarantee, which is the conduct of a ruler restoring a broken treaty.
Number 2: Abu Rafi' was an enemy commander in time of war
Al-Bara’ ibn Azib relates that the Prophet sent a party of the Ansar under Abd Allah ibn Atik to Abu Rafi’, “who used to hurt Allah’s Apostle and help his enemies”, and that Abd Allah entered his fortress at night and killed him (Bukhari 4039).[6]
Abu Rafi’ ibn Abi al-Huqayq was a leader of the Banu Nadir, who had been sent out of Medina and settled at Khaybar. Ibn Ishaq names him among the men who went round the tribes and raised the confederate army that besieged Medina at the Trench in 627.[7] Killing the organiser of an army that has already marched on your city is an act of war. A reader may still dislike how it was done. The report does not show a critic killed for his words.
The party also went out under limits. Malik’s Muwatta records that the Prophet forbade the men he sent against Ibn Abi al-Huqayq to kill women or children, and that when Abu Rafi’s wife cried out, one of them raised his sword against her and then held it back, remembering the command.[8] A raid on a commander inside his fortress was still bound by the rules that protect those who are not fighting.
Number 3: The story of Asma bint Marwan has no sound chain
This is the story most often quoted: a woman who mocked the Prophet in verse, killed at night by Umayr ibn Adi while her child lay at her breast. It is told in Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat, from al-Waqidi, and in a version with a chain back to Ibn Abbas.[9]
Both chains fail. The Ibn Abbas version runs through Muhammad ibn al-Hajjaj al-Lakhmi. Al-Bukhari said his hadith is to be rejected, Ibn Ma’in called him a liar, and Ibn Adi said that this is the man who fabricated the hadith of the woman who used to lampoon the Messenger of God. Ibn al-Jawzi placed the report in his collection of fabrications, and al-Albani graded it fabricated in al-Silsila al-da’ifa, number 6013.[9] The other version comes from al-Waqidi, whom Ahmad ibn Hanbal called a liar and al-Bukhari and Abu Hatim listed as abandoned.[9]
So the story fails the test the Muslim scholars themselves apply to every report about the Prophet. A critic who cites it is citing a report those scholars threw out.
Some Western historians took a different approach. W. Montgomery Watt, among others, accepted the stories of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak from the early biographies, reading them as part of the Prophet’s consolidation of power in Medina.[10] Their method weighs the biographies as historical narratives and does not apply the hadith critics’ tests of narrators, which is a fair difference of method to state. A reader who adopts it should still note that the stories reach us through al-Waqidi and a narrator the early critics named as a forger, and weigh them accordingly.
Number 4: The story of Abu Afak is not established
Abu Afak is said to have been an old man of the Banu Amr ibn Awf who wrote verses against the Prophet and was killed in his sleep by Salim ibn Umayr. Ibn Ishaq tells the story with no chain of transmission at all. Al-Waqidi tells it with chains, and Ibn Sa’d takes it from him, so every chain runs through al-Waqidi.[11]
A report with no chain cannot be checked, and a report that rests on al-Waqidi alone does not meet the standard for a claim about what the Prophet ordered. The honest verdict is that the story is not established. That is a weaker claim than proving it false, and I will not dress it up as more. It means a case against the Prophet cannot rest on it.
The sound reports point to how the Prophet usually answered hostile verse: with verse. Quraysh had poets who lampooned him for years, and he asked Hassan ibn Thabit to answer them, telling him, “Lampoon them, and Gabriel عليه السلام is with you.”[12] The contest of poetry was a contest of words, and it was fought with words on both sides.
Poets who had attacked him were also pardoned when they came to him. Ka’b ibn Zuhayr, who had satirised the Prophet and whose blood had been declared forfeit, came to Medina in disguise, asked for protection, and recited the ode that begins “Su’ad has departed”; the Prophet accepted his repentance, and later tradition says he gave him his own mantle. Abd Allah ibn al-Ziba’ra, the leading Meccan poet against Islam, fled at the conquest of Mecca and was pardoned when he returned.[13] A ruler who killed his critics for their words would not have left these men alive.
The bottom line
Two men were killed on the Prophet’s order, and the sound reports say so plainly: Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, who went to Mecca after Badr to call Quraysh to war, and Abu Rafi’, who helped raise the army that besieged Medina. Both acts belong to a war that was being fought, against men who were fighting it.
The two poets are another matter. The story of Asma bint Marwan comes through a narrator named as its forger, and the story of Abu Afak has no chain that holds. Judge the Prophet on the first two if you must. The second two are not evidence.
The cases that are established carry a further limit, which the jurists drew themselves. Wherever the classical schools allowed a penalty, they placed it with the ruler and the courts, after proof, and never with a private person acting on his own judgement. Modern scholars have applied that limit plainly. When gunmen attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, al-Azhar condemned the attack the same day and said that Islam denounces any violence of that kind.[14] The site’s article on blasphemy and insults to the Prophet sets out the law in more detail.
A fair reader can therefore hold three things at once. Two killings in time of war are recorded and should be judged as acts of war. Two killings of poets are not established, and should be set aside. And the record of the Prophet’s dealings with his critics is fuller than the four names on the list: it includes the poets who were answered with poetry, the poets who were pardoned, and a treaty renewed on the morning after the hardest of these episodes.
Notes
- Sahih al-Bukhari 4037 (Book of Military Expeditions), the report of Jabir ibn Abd Allah; Sahih Muslim 1801 (Book of Jihad and Expeditions).
- Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya (the recension of Ibn Ishaq), the killing of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, and the text of the agreement between the Muslims and the Jews of Medina, with its clause that Quraysh and those who help them are given no protection.
- Ibn Taymiyya, al-Sarim al-maslul ala shatim al-rasul, the discussion of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 3030 and 3031, Book of Jihad, chapter on lying and deceit in war, checked on sunnah.com.
- Sunan Abi Dawud 3000, Book of Tribute, Spoils and Rulership, report of Ka’b ibn Malik through his son, on the agreement written after the killing of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf; graded sound in its chain by al-Albani.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 4039 (Book of Military Expeditions), the report of al-Bara’ ibn Azib.
- Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya, the battle of the Trench, on the men of the Banu Nadir who raised the confederates.
- Malik ibn Anas, al-Muwatta, Book of Jihad, chapter on the prohibition of killing women and children in raids, the report of the son of Ka’b ibn Malik, checked on sunnah.com.
- Ibn Sa’d, al-Tabaqat al-kubra, the expedition of Umayr ibn Adi; Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Mawdu’at, vol. 3, p. 18, quoting Ibn Adi on Muhammad ibn al-Hajjaj; al-Dhahabi, Mizan al-i’tidal, vol. 3, p. 509 (Muhammad ibn al-Hajjaj) and vol. 3, p. 663 (al-Waqidi); Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib al-tahdhib, vol. 9, p. 163 (al-Waqidi); al-Albani, Silsilat al-ahadith al-da’ifa wa-l-mawdu’a, no. 6013.
- W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), chapter on the consolidation of the Muslim community.
- Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya, the killing of Abu Afak, given without a chain; Ibn Sa’d, al-Tabaqat al-kubra, the expedition of Salim ibn Umayr, from al-Waqidi.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 4123 and 4124, Book of Military Expeditions, report of al-Bara’ ibn Azib; Sahih Muslim 2486, checked on sunnah.com.
- Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya (the recension of Ibn Ishaq), the coming of Ka’b ibn Zuhayr and his ode “Banat Su’ad”, and the conquest of Mecca, on Abd Allah ibn al-Ziba’ra; the account of the mantle is in later sources.
- Al-Azhar, statement of 7 January 2015 on the attack on Charlie Hebdo, as reported by Reuters and Al-Ahram the same day.
Leave a Reply