Religion of Peace

Islam Files, No. 1 — The Constitution of Medina Named Three Jewish Clans as Allies. The Pact of Umar Later Priced the Rest of the Region’s Christians as a Tax Line.

In 622 the oasis of Yathrib took in a preacher the Meccans had run out of town. The document later called the Constitution of Medina listed the Jewish clans of Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza among the parties to a common defense. They kept their religion and their property. The arrangement is the exhibit every modern sermon uses when the subject is pluralism.

Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, the earliest surviving biography, is also the exhibit for what happened next. Banu Qaynuqa were expelled after a market quarrel. Banu Nadir were expelled after an alleged plot; their date palms went with them. After the Battle of the Trench in 627, Banu Qurayza were besieged for about twenty-five days. The arbitrator Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh ruled that the fighting men be killed and the women and children enslaved. Ibn Ishaq puts the dead between six and nine hundred. A report preserved by Ibn Hibban puts them at four hundred. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim record the judgment without a headcount: the men killed, the rest taken. Rayhana bint Amr, one of the captured women, is listed in the same sira as taken by the Prophet. Five years after the welcome, the last Jewish clan in the city was gone. The tradition did not suppress the sequence. It taught it.

The same corpus then scaled the model. Qur’an 9:29 instructs fighting those who do not believe “until they pay the jizya readily, while they are humbled.” The terms later associated with the Pact of Umar set the price of remaining Christian or Jewish under the new order: a poll tax, distinctive dress, no new churches, no public bells, no saddled horse, no testimony a qadi had to accept against a Muslim. The third option after convert or die was not equality. It was a revenue category called dhimmi.

Egypt had been Christian for six centuries when Amr ibn al-As crossed the border. Coptic survived as a spoken language until the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, in the early eleventh century, punished public use of it; the language retreated into the liturgy. North Africa had a dense Catholic map — Augustine’s Hippo was one node among hundreds of bishoprics. The Umayyad armies crossed it in about a decade. Spain’s Visigothic kingdoms fell on the same pattern the Medina clans had already demonstrated: one city isolated, the neighboring city watching, then the neighboring city. Gibraltar is still named for the commander who landed there. Jabal Tariq.

The museum label calls the centuries that followed coexistence. The tax register called them a line item. The sira called the Medina chapter victory. All three documents are still in print.

Filed from the primary texts and the public record:

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Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.