The Constitution of Medina’s Importance For Jews

The Constitution, Charter or Covenant of Medina pre-dated the English Magna Carta by almost six centuries. It applied to the 10-20,000+ citizens living in Medina at that time. About 50-55% of the total population in Medina consisted of pagan Arabs, 30-40% consisted of Jews, and only about 15% were Muslims, at the start of this treaty.

So Prophet Muhammad’s Charter/Covenant of Medina was designed to govern a multi-religious pluralistic society in a manner allowing religious freedom for all. As the Qur’an states: (49: 13) “O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know (respect) each other. Verily the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things)”.

The Charter’s 47 clauses protect human rights for all citizens, including equality, cooperation, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. Clause 25 specifically states that Jews and pagan Arabs are entitled to practice their own faith without any restrictions: “The Jews of the Banu ‘Auf are one community with the Muslim believers, their freedmen and their persons, except those who behave unjustly and sinfully for they hurt only themselves, and their families.

(26-35) The same applies to the Jews of the Banu al-Najjar, Banu al-Harith, Banu Sai’ida, Banu Jusham, Banu al-Aus, Banu Tha’laba, and the Jafna, a clan of the Tha‘laba and the Banu al-Shutayba. Loyalty is a protection against treachery. The freedmen of Tha‘laba are as themselves. The close friends of the Jews are as themselves. So the Covenant of Medina was the first political document in history to establish religious freedom as a fundamental constitutional right.

The “Charter of Medina” created a new multi-tribal ummah/community soon after the Prophet’s arrival at Medina (Yathrib) in 622 CE. The term “constitution” is a misnomer. The treaty was more like the American Articles of Confederation that proceeded the U.S. Constitution because it mainly dealt with tribal matters such as the organization and leadership of the participating tribal groups, the ransoming of captives, and that Jews and pagan Arabs are entitled to practice their own faith without any restrictions.

As the Qur’an states (2:136) “Say: “We believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and, their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus; and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them. And it is unto Him that we surrender ourselves.”

Two iterations of the document (henceforth, “the treaty”) are found in Ibn Ishaq’s Biography of Muḥammad (sira) and Abu ʿUbayd’s Book of State Finance (Kitāb al-amwāl). Some argue the final document actually comprises several treaties concluded at different times.

According to Arjomand, the treaty is a “proto-Islamic public law.” Some clauses in the second part of the treaty, or the treaty of the Jews section (namely clauses 53–64), form a pact with the Jewish Qurayza tribe that was incorporated in this treaty at a later stage. However, clause 44 (“Incumbent upon the Jews is their expenditure and upon the muslimun theirs”) and, clause 45 (“They will aid each other against whosoever is at war with the people of this treaty”) clearly were part of the original pact.

According to Denny, the ummah of the Constitution is made up of Muslims and Jews; although the Jews also constitute a separate ummah “alongside” the Muslims. The treaty was a political-military document of agreement designed to make Yathrib and its people more secure. The Jewish tribes were a party to it as a special group, a “sub-ummah” with its own din (religion and law). Yathrib was to be “sacred for the people of this document,” which adds a factor of locality and religion. Kinship was not to be the main binding tie of the new ummah; for monotheistic religion was of much greater importance. The ummah is the tribe, a super-tribe, with God and Muhammad as arbiters and authorities.

According to Goto, the three main Jewish tribes—Nadir, Qurayza, and Qaynuqaʿhad agreements with Muhammad that were separate. Muhammad himself made a document or documents for the three major Jewish tribes. The six Jewish groups called “yahud bani so-and-so” mentioned in the treaty were not the three large Jewish tribes, but refer to significant groups of Jewish converts to Judaism within the pagan Arab tribes of Medina (since most Jews married Jews these groups grew into large clans within the larger pagan Arab tribe of which they were a part).

Muhammad Hamidullah divides the document into two parts: (1) The rules affecting the Muhajirun and the Anṣar that go back to the beginning of the first year after the Hijrah, and (2) the code for the Jews concluded after the Battle of Badr. In Hamidullah’s view it was a constitution promulgated for the city-state of Medina. It included the prerogatives and obligations of the ruler and the ruled. As the Qur’an states: “If they charge you with falsehood, say: “My deeds are mine; and yours are yours. You are free from responsibility for what I do; and I for what you do”. (Qur’an 10:41)

According to Rubin, the Jewish participants were not the three main Jewish tribes, but Jewish groups that unlike the three main tribes, had neither a territory of their own nor a separate Jewish tribal affinity, because they were families and clans of converts to Judaism within the various pagan Arab tribes. Muhammad’s ummah was a unity sharing the same religious orientation (monotheism) and included the Jews as “an umma of believers.” They were entitled to complete protection for themselves that also included their din (religion and law).

The Qur’an strongly supports religious pluralism and wasatia, a religious term in Islam for the middle path of temperance and reconciliation. Extremists who deny the value of wasatia should read Prophet Muhammad’s original Covenant of Medina”.

David J Wasserstein, a Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, points out that within a century of the death of Prophet Mohammad in 632 CE, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence.

Their treatment improved in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms – all for the better.

Political change was partnered by change in the legal status of the Jewish population: although it is not always clear what happened during the Muslim conquests, one thing is certain. The result of the conquests was, by and large, to make the Jews second-class citizens.

This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711 CE, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity, and many had themselves been enslaved.

In the developing Islamic societies of the classical and medieval periods, being a Jew meant belonging to a category defined under law, enjoying rights and protections, alongside various obligations. These rights and protections were not as extensive or as generous as those enjoyed by Muslims, and the obligations were greater but, for the first few centuries, the Muslims themselves were a minority, and the practical differences were not all that great.

Along with legal near-equality came social and economic equality. Jews were not confined to ghettos, either literally or in terms of economic activity. The societies of Islam were, in effect, open societies. In religious terms, too, Jews enjoyed virtually full freedom. They might not build many new synagogues – in theory – and they might not make too public their profession of their faith, but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion. Along with internal legal autonomy, they also enjoyed formal representation, through leaders of their own, before the authorities of the state. Imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this might sound, it was at least the broad norm.

The political unity brought by the new Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created a vast Islamic world civilization, similar to the older Christian civilization that it replaced. Within this huge area, Jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere. They could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as Jews. A great new expansion of trade from the ninth century onwards brought the Spanish Jews – like the Muslims – into touch with the Jews and the Muslims even of India.

ll this was encouraged by a further, critical development. Huge numbers of people in the new world of Islam adopted the language of the Muslim Arabs. Arabic gradually became the principal language of this vast area, excluding almost all the rest: Greek and Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic and Latin all died out, replaced by Arabic. Persian, too, went into a long retreat, to reappear later heavily influenced by Arabic.

The Jews moved over to Arabic very rapidly.

By the early 10th century, only 300 years after the conquests, Sa’adya Gaon was translating the Bible into Arabic. Bible translation is a massive task – it is not undertaken unless there is a need for it. By about the year 900, the Jews had largely abandoned other languages and taken on Arabic.
The change of language in its turn brought the Jews into direct contact with broader cultural developments.

The result from the 10th century on was a striking pairing of two cultures. The Jews of the Islamic world developed an entirely new culture, which differed from their culture before Islam in terms of language, cultural forms, influences, and uses. Instead of being concerned primarily with religion, the new Jewish culture of the Islamic world, like that of its neighbors, mixed the religious and the secular to a high degree. The contrast, both with the past and with medieval Christian Europe, was enormous.

Like their neighbors, these Jews wrote in Arabic in part, and in a Jewish form of that language. The use of Arabic brought them close to the Arabs. But the use of a specific Jewish form of that language maintained the barriers between Jew and Muslim. The subjects that Jews wrote about, and the literary forms in which they wrote about them, were largely new ones, borrowed from the Muslims and developed in tandem with developments in Arabic Islam.

Also at this time, Hebrew was revived as a language of high literature, parallel to the use among the Muslims of a high form of Arabic for similar purposes. Along with its use for poetry and artistic prose, secular writing of all forms in Hebrew and in (Judeo-)Arabic came into being, some of it of high quality.

Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period. Sa’adya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra (Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and many more – all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary and cultural endeavor

This did not last forever; the period of culturally successful symbiosis between Jew and Arab Muslim in the middle ages came to a close by about 1300. In reality, it had reached this point even earlier, with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish.

Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews.

In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural capital thus created also served as the seedbed of further growth elsewhere – in Christian Spain and in the Christian world more generally.
The Islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly was a major contributor to that development. Its significance cannot be overestimated.