It was in this social context that a prophet emerged. At around the age of forty, Muhammad began to have visions and received revelations that he eventually identified as coming from the Angel Gabriel. These revelations, which formed the beginning of what would come to be the Quran, the holy book of Muslims, were in the form of aphorisms exhorting people to recognize a new monotheistic religion with Allah as the one true God. They proposed not just a new religion, but a new community and new norms that would transcend the clans, such as the Hashim. They also criticized many of the new individualistic behaviors and the focus on making money.
Muhammad began to preach this new religion and exhort others to swear fealty to this new God. His first converts were his wife Khadija and his close relatives and friends. By 613 he was preaching more broadly in the town. But this wasn’t welcomed by everybody. Other trading clans resented the attacks on their behavior and religious beliefs, and they worried that Muhammad was making a bid for political power in Mecca, which at the time did not have a centralized government. Muhammad’s following gradually grew and the situation became more and more tense. In 622 he fled, along with a group of his followers, to Medina; this was the famous Hegira (“emigration”).
This emigration was precipitated not just by the mounting hostility to Muhammad in Mecca, but by a petition from citizens of Medina to come and help them solve their problems. Like Mecca, Medina was suffering the birth pangs of settled life. Unlike Mecca, however, it was not a trading hub but an oasis specializing in highly productive agriculture. Different parts of the oasis had been settled by different clans from two tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj. There were also three Jewish clans. The clans had built small forts as their strongholds, and engaged in incessant conflict that had culminated in 618 in the battle of Bu’ath. Life was starting to resemble Warre.
Some of the Medinans came up with the idea that Muhammad, as a neutral outsider and with the authority of his new religion, could be the arbiter for disputes and would bring peace and order to the town. In June 622, seventy-five of them went to Mecca to request that he move to Medina; they pledged themselves to protect him and the new religion. Muhammad agreed. The agreement between him and the Medinans is recorded in a document known as the Constitution of Medina. This declares that “wherever there is anything about which you differ, it is to be referred to God and to Muhammad.” In effect Muhammad was to take on the role of judge in disputes between individuals and clans. But how could he do that if he did not have the power to enforce his laws and make others do what he commanded? Yet the reference to God in the Constitution of Medina made it clear that Muhammad didn’t come just as an individual; he came as a prophet, and part of the package was that the Medinans had to accept his teachings and revelations. Indeed, the Constitution of Medina started thus:
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
This is a writing of Muhammad the prophet between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib and those who follow them and are attached to them and who crusade along with them. They are a single community distinct from other people.
This ought to have signaled to the Medinans (the people from Yathrib) that they were perhaps getting more than they bargained for with the new constitution. The constitution didn’t just make Muhammad a judge. It recognized a new sort of society, based not on kin and clan, but on religion and the nascent centralized authority of a prophet. This was the end of statelessness.
Muhammad didn’t at first have any official position or executive power, but from this modest platform he soon got moving. His approach ought to have been evident from the opening paragraph above, which says “who crusade along with them.” Crusade? By 623, the year after the Hegira, Muhammad started to organize raids on Meccan trade caravans with the people he had brought with him from Mecca, known as the Emigrants. Engaging in such raids was not unusual among the tribes of Arabia, but they began to take on a new connotation. Instead of just being raids of one tribe on another, they were raids by Muslims against unbelievers. By 624 the raids began to include not just the Emigrants, but also the Helpers, the name for Medinans who had converted to Islam. By March of that year the Emigrants and Helpers together defeated a large Meccan force sent out against them at the battle of Badr.
Badr and the subsequent battle of Uhud increased Muhammad’s prestige and control over Medina. He proceeded to remove clans that had proved disloyal, particularly the Jews, and he started to use his religious authority to reform local society, changing both marriage and inheritance practices.
Muhammad might have been brought in with a limited mandate to resolve disputes, but he was building a new state over which the preexisting clans would have little control. Over time his power grew. One reason for this was that nomadic tribes in the desert heard of his success and came to Medina to swear their loyalty to him. Another reason stemmed from the fact that part of the benefit of the raids which the Emigrants carried out was booty. Muhammad himself received one-fifth of this. He also stipulated that they make contributions (actually taxes), which had to be paid to the “community of God,” and in addition imposed taxes for protection on Jews and Christians. Growing power and wealth are evident in the number of horses that Muhammad was able to field as cavalry in different raids. At the battle of Badr in 624 he had two horses. By the year 630 he could put 10,000 horses into the field.
Muhammad capitalized on his growing authority in 628 when he led a large mission of Emigrants and Helpers to Mecca purportedly to engage in pilgrimage. Understandably anxious, the Meccans forced them to stop short of the town and negotiated a deal whereby the Meccans would vacate the town the following year so that Muhammad and his followers could come on pilgrimage. While they waited for the deal to be struck, Muhammad gathered all his people under a tree and made them pledge themselves to him. This pledge, known as the Pledge of Good Pleasure, was one more step in the establishment of the state in Medina. As Hobbes imagined, the Leviathan needs people to submit to its will. This is what the people of Medina did, agreeing to do whatever Muhammad commanded. Though he still had no formal legislative or executive office, he was in effect the ruler of a new state.
His great authority is illustrated by an event that occurred in 630, just two years before he died. Muhammad was set on expanding the scope of his state and converting more people to the new religion. To achieve this objective, he decided to send a military force against the town of Tabuk in the north, and he insisted that all Muslims from Medina take part in this raid as a religious duty. He was now commander in chief.
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The story of Muhammad’s creation of the new Islamic state encapsulates some of the key ideas of this chapter. Prior to his emergence as a prophet, there were no real states in Arabia, just tribes. Even more urbanized areas, like Mecca and Medina, didn’t really have centralized government. This created a lot of problems, not least violence and insecurity. When they lived in the vast wilderness of the Arabian Desert, there was plenty of room for all the tribes, but in the cramped oasis of Medina or around the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, they had to figure out how to live with one another. The creation of more centralized authority was one obvious way out. But how to do that without ceding control to another clan or tribe?
Then came Muhammad and his revelations from the Angel Gabriel, and the Medinans saw in his teachings a solution to their predicament. They brought him in to resolve conflicts between the clans and tribes. He succeeded in bringing peace, clearly a great service to the people living in Medina. But it didn’t stop there. Though Muhammad and the Emigrants might have been a small minority to start with, they grew in number and became more powerful and wealthier as people joined them and agreed to contribute to their finances. This was the birth of political hierarchy in Arabia. By 628, with the Pledge of Good Pleasure, Muhammad’s authority in Medina was unassailable. Two years later in the attack on Tabuk, he ordered the entire oasis to march north.