6 facts about Medina’s Jewish tribes and Banu Qurayza

The objection runs that Qaynuqa were expelled and robbed after Badr, Nadir plundered after Uhud, Qurayza massacred, and Khaybar attacked to pay the army after Hudaybiyah. The order of events is right: the sources place Qaynuqa in 2 AH, Nadir in 4 AH, Qurayza in 5 AH after the Trench, and Khaybar in 7 AH.^[1]

The outcomes differ. Qaynuqa were besieged and then allowed to leave Medina alive, after Abdullah ibn Ubayy, a Medinan leader allied to them, pleaded for them. Nadir were also exiled; Quran 59:2-4 speaks of their expulsion, and 59:6-7 sets the rule for property gained without a fight. The reports differ on what each tribe took with it, so the word “robbed” needs more than the sources give.^[1]

At Khaybar the people were left on their land to work it for a share of the produce.^[2] The critics are right that spoils were a stated motive: Quran 48:15-20 promises them to those present at Hudaybiyah. The sources also record that Nadir leaders had settled at Khaybar and had worked to raise the tribes against Medina.^[3] Only Qurayza ended in executions.

Critics call the Constitution of Medina implausible: the Jewish clans had no army, they say, and the document simply made Muhammad ruler. The text is preserved by Ibn Ishaq (in the edition of Ibn Hisham) and in a different transmission by Abu Ubayd in his book on revenues. It treats the Jews of named clans as a community alongside the believers, lets each keep its religion, and binds all parties to defend Medina against attack.^[4]

Western scholars such as Wellhausen, Watt and Serjeant generally treated it as an early text, and some think it joins several agreements made over time.^[4] The charge of having no army sits badly with the sources themselves, which describe the Jewish clans as holding fortified strongholds and fighting men; the sieges of Qaynuqa, Nadir and Qurayza only make sense if they did.

The critics are right about one thing. The text sends disputes to God and to Muhammad and forbids going out to war without his leave, so authority did gather around him. Whether that made him a dictator depends on whether the parties accepted it, and the document presents it as agreed. The one great judgment on a Jewish tribe, in the case of Qurayza, was handed to a Medinan chief and not kept by Muhammad.

Ismail al Faruqi reads the covenant as the founding charter of every later Islamic state. On his account it made the Muslims of different tribes one community (ummah, “people under one law”) and recognised the Jews as another, with their own religion, laws and courts.^[5] The later conflicts with the Jewish tribes have to be read against that original arrangement. In Essential Writings he adds that, on arrival in Medina, “the Jews were recognized as an autonomous ummah within the Islamic state”, so that “Jewish law, religion and institutions became a sacrosanct trust” for the Muslims to protect, and that those who rejected the Prophet’s call “were constituted by him into a community constitutive of the Islamic state”.^[6] He presents the covenant as a settled ideal and does not discuss Qaynuqa, Nadir or Qurayza, so his account supplies the arrangement and leaves the breakdown to the sources cited here.

The sources say that after the Trench, Qurayza was besieged for some weeks, surrendered, and accepted the judgment of Sa’d ibn Mu’adh, chief of the Aws, their old allies. His verdict was that the fighting men be killed, the women and children taken captive and the property divided. Bukhari reports Muhammad saying that he had judged by the judgment of God.^[7] Quran 33:26 refers to the event: “some you killed, some you took captive.” Fighting men of Qurayza were executed, and the sources say so plainly. This article does not minimise it.

The argument concerns process and ground. The stated ground was treason in wartime: while Medina was under siege, leaders of Qurayza reportedly negotiated with the besiegers, the situation the Quran describes in 33:9-11 as attack from above and from below.^[8] As the sources tell it, the charge rests on their dealings with the enemy. The tribe surrendered and the arbitrator was the one its own allies preferred. A critic may answer that the sentence was still severe. Many readers will agree, and the next entry shows how much about its size is uncertain.

The usual figure is 600 to 900 men, and the critique treats it as settled. The reports do give numbers in that range. But the question is how early those numbers appear and how far the narrative that carries them can be trusted.

Walid Arafat, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1976, argued that Ibn Ishaq’s account of Qurayza cannot be sustained as it stands and that the earliest items he examined carry no figures at all. Meir Kister later reconsidered the tradition in a long study.^[9] Each side has its readers. Many Western historians accept that men of Qurayza were killed and differ on how many; some Muslim writers question the story as a whole, and others defend the classical account.

The honest position is a narrow one. The sources agree that an execution of fighting men took place. The scale rests on a single narrative line, and the scholars who have studied it disagree about its value.

Defenders of the verdict often cite Deuteronomy 20:13-14, which tells Israel to kill the males of a city that refuses terms and to take the women, children and goods. The match is loose. The verses that follow are harsher, and the Medinan case had a different setting, so a Muslim reader gains little by resting the case there.^[10] The stronger points lie in the process. Arbitration by a chosen judge was an accepted way to end a siege, and the verdict fell on those bearing arms. Quran 6:164 says that no soul bears another’s burden, and 47:4 governs captives of war. Taking women and children captive is the harshest part of the verdict, and the sources record it.

The word “Holocaust” asks for a different category. Qurayza was one tribe, tried on a wartime charge by a judge its own allies had nominated. Qaynuqa and Nadir left Medina alive, and Jews at Khaybar stayed on their land. The Holocaust was the planned murder of a people by descent, whatever any person had done. Saying so takes nothing from the grief of Qurayza, which the sources do not hide.

Critics say Muhammad approved the killing of his critics: Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, Abu Rafi’, and the poets Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak. The reports of Ka’b and Abu Rafi’ are in Bukhari, and they say a party of Muslims killed each man at night, in Ka’b’s case after a ruse that Muhammad ibn Maslama was reported to have been given leave to use. The reports about Asma and Abu Afak sit in later biographical works such as Ibn Sa’d and Ibn Ishaq, and a number of hadith critics grade their chains weak.^[11]

The classical sources give reasons. Ka’b is said to have gone to Mecca after Badr to urge the Quraysh to fight and to have written verse about Muslim women; Abu Rafi’ is said to have helped the enemy confederates. The dispute is whether these were wartime killings of combatants and inciters, as classical writers read them, or something harder to defend, as many modern readers hold. Poetry was a weapon in that world, and Muhammad also told Hassan ibn Thabit to answer in verse.^[12]

As for the Meccan poets, the conquest of Mecca ended in a general amnesty. A short list was excluded, and the sources record that some on it were later forgiven. The poet Ka’b ibn Zuhayr, condemned for his satire, later came to the Prophet, accepted Islam and recited his ode in his presence.^[12]