The slaughter of the Quraithah Jews was not the last encounter that the Prophet had with the Jews. Five days' travel from Medina by camel, about 100 miles away, the large oasis of Khaibar became the main center of Jewish concentration in Arabia, after the destruction of Medina Jewry. The land there was very fertile, with farms and orchards stretching over a very large area. After concluding the famous Al-Hudaibiyah agreement with the Quraish "the Prophet felt that the Muslims were now in position to neutralize the threat posed by the Jews in Khaibar. He therefore called on his companions to mobilize again and start the march towards Khaibar."(2)
Salahi explains, "This was the reason which prompted the Prophet to march on Khaibar. Had he not done so, the Jews of Khaibar would have continued to urge others to attack the Muslims. The pattern of raising Arab tribes against the Muslims would be repeated again and again. There was no other way of stopping the Jewish aggression except by attacking the Jews in their own castles."
The Jews were besieged. In one of the attacks the Muslims forced the gates of one of the forts to open "and started to kill anyone who resisted them, or to take him prisoner." When majority of their strongholds failed, the Jews offered to surrender in return for their safety. "The surrender agreement stipulated that none of the fighters would be put to death. They would be allowed to leave Khaibar and its vicinity, taking with them their women and children. They would abandon all claims over their land, money, horses and arms. To these conditions? the Prophet added: 'But all guaranties given you would be abrogated if you withhold anything from me'. Thus all Khaibar fell to Muslims who were now in possessions of all its wealth and land."
However, when the agreement was made, the Jews changed their minds. They asked the Prophet to allow them to remain and work in the farms and orchards, saying, "We are better in this sort of job than you, and the land would yield much better crops if we work on it." They offered to give Muslims half of the crops of all the land in Khaibar in return. "The Prophet accepted these offers and amended the peace agreement accordingly, but added the proviso that the Muslims would evacuate the Jews from Khaibar whenever they chose." After conquering Khaibar, the Muslims "smashed the political and economic power of the Jews in Arabia. As the power of Islam continued to increase, the Jewish influence paled into insignificance."
There is no reason to question the validity of any episodes in Muhammad's relations with the Jews. It does not matter how much truth is in them. What matters is that they persist from one biography of Muhammad to another. They have been repeated for fourteen centuries by Muslims all over the world. The Muslims learn from them that the Jews are a treacherous and extremely dangerous people that must be either expelled, killed or enslaved. The mass destruction of the Quraithah Jews is the only episode in Muhammad's life where his enemies were slaughtered in such terrible numbers.
The Jews were the only people treated by the Prophet this mercilessly. A good comparison would be the fate of the Quraish people after Muhammad conquered Mecca. Before the attack "All commanders were under strict orders not to start fighting unless they were attacked. The Prophet was very keen not to shed blood in Makkah [Mecca]." It was reported to the Prophet that one of his commanders Sa'ad "might be so carried away by the occasion that he would start killing the Quraish people. The Prophet was keen not to shed a drop of blood, if that was at all possible, so he replaced Sa'ad at the command of that division."
When Mecca was conquered, Muhammad addressed the Quraish and asked them: "'What sort of judgement do you think I am going to pass against you? ?You may go free. You are all pardoned.'" Salahi explained that "the pardon granted by the Prophet to the people of Makkah was a general pardon which included all those who fought against him in the battles which had taken place between the Quraish and Muslims." What is even more important is that these people whose lives the Prophet spared were "indeed the very people who turned him out of their city after repeatedly plotting to destroy his life." (Just recall that for an imagined plot against his life, Muhammad expelled all the Jews of the An-Nadheer tribe and confiscated their possessions).
Salahi writes that when Muhammad called on the Quraish to accept Allah they rejected his appeal. "They stopped at nothing in their hostility to him personally and to his cause. They accused him of being a liar, a sorcerer and a madman. They schemed against him and urged others to be hostile to him and to his companions. They forged alliances to meet his peaceful calls with force of arms." If one compares the deeds of the Quraish with the deeds of the Jews, the injustice of the punishment brought on the Jews becomes extremely obvious. Especially, taking into account that not in a single episode did the Jews actually inflict any harm on the Prophet. All accusations against them were based on the assumptions that the Jews "might do something." While the Quraish marched all the way from Mecca, without hiding their intentions to destroy Muhammad, the Jews were only "thinking" of inflicting harm on the Prophet and the cause of Islam, based on unproven accusations. This was, however, enough for their merciless treatment.
From Muhammad's relations with the Jews the Muslims can learn only one thing: that they must constantly fight the Jews, since this is what Muhammad was tirelessly doing. Muslims learned from Muhammad's encounters with the Jews that the Jews are the biggest enemies of Islam, that they will never stop battling Muslims, that they are an extremely dangerous people because of their treacheries nature, that they constantly caused wars, and that they attempted to kill the Prophet many times and only Allah saved him.
Muhammad died in 632, but the Muslim hatred towards Jews never abated.
On June 14, Fox News published the transcript of an interview with a 3-year-old girl conducted by Muslim Woman Magazine with the host Doaa 'Amer on Iqraa [Saudi Arabia/Egypt TV channel] television. It deserves to be presented almost in its entirety:
'Amer: Our guest is a girl, a Muslim girl, but a true Muslim. Allah willing, may our God give us the strength to educate our children the same way, so that the next generation will turn out to be true Muslims who understand that they are Muslims and know who their enemies are.
Toddler: Allah's mercy and blessing upon you.
'Amer: What's your name?
Toddler: Basmallah.
'Amer: Basmallah, how old are you?
Toddler: Three and a half.
'Amer: Are you a Muslim?
Toddler: Yes.
'Amer: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?
Toddler: Yes.
Amer: Do you like them?
Toddler: No.
'Amer: Why don't you like them?
Toddler: Because . . .
'Amer: Because they are what?
Toddler: They're apes and pigs.
'Amer: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Toddler: Our God.
'Amer: Where did he say this?
Toddler: In the Koran.
'Amer: Right, he said that about them in the Koran. Okay, Basmallah, what are the Jews doing? ?Did they love our master, Muhammad?
Toddler: No.
'Amer: No. What did the Jews do to him?
Toddler: [Pauses, struggling for the right answer.] The Prophet Muhammad killed someone?
'Amer: Obviously, our master Muhammad was strong and could have killed them. All right, you know the traditions about the Jews and what they did to the Prophet Muhammad?? Is there a story you know?
Toddler: Yes, the story about the Jewish woman. ?There was a Jewish woman who invited the Prophet and his friends. When he asked her, "Did you put poison (in my food)?" she said to him, "Yes." he asked her, "Why did you do this?" and she replied, "If you are a liar you will die and Allah will not protect you; if you speak the truth Allah will protect you."
'Amer: And our God protected the Prophet Muhammad, of course.
Toddler: And he said to his friends, "I will kill this lady."
'Amer: Of course, because she put poison in his food, this Jewess. ?Basmallah, Allah be praised. May our God bless her. No one could wish Allah could give him a more believing girl than she. May Allah bless her and her father and mother. The next generation of children must be true Muslims. We must educate them now while they are still children so that they will be true Muslims.
According to Amer, to be a true Muslim means to hate the Jews. Millions of little Basmallahs all over the world study the life of the Prophet learning how they need to deal with the Jews. They learn that the Prophet expelled the Jews and therefore, almost all the Jews today have been expelled from Arab countries. They learn that the Prophet robbed the Jews of their possessions, so they rob the Jews of their possessions, as well. They learn that the Prophet orchestrated killings of Jews and they are only glad to follow his example. All stories of Muhammad's life present Jews as dangerous enemies of the Prophet and Islam. This is the axiom that Muslim Arabs obtain with their mother's milk.
Muhammad was ruthless to the Jews, seeing them as his mortal enemies. As the Qur'an says: "the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews." He had said in his last sermon: "I leave behind me two things, the Qur'an and my example the sunnah, and if you follow these you will never go astray." Only those who do not understand Islam may believe that the Muslims will ever dare to question his last will.
1. Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World. I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2001. p.28.
2. Adil Salahi. Muhammad: Man and Prophet. A Complete Study of the Life of the Prophet of Islam. Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1995.
[End Part 3 of 3]
--------------------------------------------
Boris Shusteff is an engineer. He is also a research associate with the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies.
Salahi explains, "This was the reason which prompted the Prophet to march on Khaibar. Had he not done so, the Jews of Khaibar would have continued to urge others to attack the Muslims. The pattern of raising Arab tribes against the Muslims would be repeated again and again. There was no other way of stopping the Jewish aggression except by attacking the Jews in their own castles."
The Jews were besieged. In one of the attacks the Muslims forced the gates of one of the forts to open "and started to kill anyone who resisted them, or to take him prisoner." When majority of their strongholds failed, the Jews offered to surrender in return for their safety. "The surrender agreement stipulated that none of the fighters would be put to death. They would be allowed to leave Khaibar and its vicinity, taking with them their women and children. They would abandon all claims over their land, money, horses and arms. To these conditions? the Prophet added: 'But all guaranties given you would be abrogated if you withhold anything from me'. Thus all Khaibar fell to Muslims who were now in possessions of all its wealth and land."
However, when the agreement was made, the Jews changed their minds. They asked the Prophet to allow them to remain and work in the farms and orchards, saying, "We are better in this sort of job than you, and the land would yield much better crops if we work on it." They offered to give Muslims half of the crops of all the land in Khaibar in return. "The Prophet accepted these offers and amended the peace agreement accordingly, but added the proviso that the Muslims would evacuate the Jews from Khaibar whenever they chose." After conquering Khaibar, the Muslims "smashed the political and economic power of the Jews in Arabia. As the power of Islam continued to increase, the Jewish influence paled into insignificance."
There is no reason to question the validity of any episodes in Muhammad's relations with the Jews. It does not matter how much truth is in them. What matters is that they persist from one biography of Muhammad to another. They have been repeated for fourteen centuries by Muslims all over the world. The Muslims learn from them that the Jews are a treacherous and extremely dangerous people that must be either expelled, killed or enslaved. The mass destruction of the Quraithah Jews is the only episode in Muhammad's life where his enemies were slaughtered in such terrible numbers.
The Jews were the only people treated by the Prophet this mercilessly. A good comparison would be the fate of the Quraish people after Muhammad conquered Mecca. Before the attack "All commanders were under strict orders not to start fighting unless they were attacked. The Prophet was very keen not to shed blood in Makkah [Mecca]." It was reported to the Prophet that one of his commanders Sa'ad "might be so carried away by the occasion that he would start killing the Quraish people. The Prophet was keen not to shed a drop of blood, if that was at all possible, so he replaced Sa'ad at the command of that division."
When Mecca was conquered, Muhammad addressed the Quraish and asked them: "'What sort of judgement do you think I am going to pass against you? ?You may go free. You are all pardoned.'" Salahi explained that "the pardon granted by the Prophet to the people of Makkah was a general pardon which included all those who fought against him in the battles which had taken place between the Quraish and Muslims." What is even more important is that these people whose lives the Prophet spared were "indeed the very people who turned him out of their city after repeatedly plotting to destroy his life." (Just recall that for an imagined plot against his life, Muhammad expelled all the Jews of the An-Nadheer tribe and confiscated their possessions).
Salahi writes that when Muhammad called on the Quraish to accept Allah they rejected his appeal. "They stopped at nothing in their hostility to him personally and to his cause. They accused him of being a liar, a sorcerer and a madman. They schemed against him and urged others to be hostile to him and to his companions. They forged alliances to meet his peaceful calls with force of arms." If one compares the deeds of the Quraish with the deeds of the Jews, the injustice of the punishment brought on the Jews becomes extremely obvious. Especially, taking into account that not in a single episode did the Jews actually inflict any harm on the Prophet. All accusations against them were based on the assumptions that the Jews "might do something." While the Quraish marched all the way from Mecca, without hiding their intentions to destroy Muhammad, the Jews were only "thinking" of inflicting harm on the Prophet and the cause of Islam, based on unproven accusations. This was, however, enough for their merciless treatment.
From Muhammad's relations with the Jews the Muslims can learn only one thing: that they must constantly fight the Jews, since this is what Muhammad was tirelessly doing. Muslims learned from Muhammad's encounters with the Jews that the Jews are the biggest enemies of Islam, that they will never stop battling Muslims, that they are an extremely dangerous people because of their treacheries nature, that they constantly caused wars, and that they attempted to kill the Prophet many times and only Allah saved him.
Muhammad died in 632, but the Muslim hatred towards Jews never abated.
On June 14, Fox News published the transcript of an interview with a 3-year-old girl conducted by Muslim Woman Magazine with the host Doaa 'Amer on Iqraa [Saudi Arabia/Egypt TV channel] television. It deserves to be presented almost in its entirety:
'Amer: Our guest is a girl, a Muslim girl, but a true Muslim. Allah willing, may our God give us the strength to educate our children the same way, so that the next generation will turn out to be true Muslims who understand that they are Muslims and know who their enemies are.
Toddler: Allah's mercy and blessing upon you.
'Amer: What's your name?
Toddler: Basmallah.
'Amer: Basmallah, how old are you?
Toddler: Three and a half.
'Amer: Are you a Muslim?
Toddler: Yes.
'Amer: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?
Toddler: Yes.
Amer: Do you like them?
Toddler: No.
'Amer: Why don't you like them?
Toddler: Because . . .
'Amer: Because they are what?
Toddler: They're apes and pigs.
'Amer: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Toddler: Our God.
'Amer: Where did he say this?
Toddler: In the Koran.
'Amer: Right, he said that about them in the Koran. Okay, Basmallah, what are the Jews doing? ?Did they love our master, Muhammad?
Toddler: No.
'Amer: No. What did the Jews do to him?
Toddler: [Pauses, struggling for the right answer.] The Prophet Muhammad killed someone?
'Amer: Obviously, our master Muhammad was strong and could have killed them. All right, you know the traditions about the Jews and what they did to the Prophet Muhammad?? Is there a story you know?
Toddler: Yes, the story about the Jewish woman. ?There was a Jewish woman who invited the Prophet and his friends. When he asked her, "Did you put poison (in my food)?" she said to him, "Yes." he asked her, "Why did you do this?" and she replied, "If you are a liar you will die and Allah will not protect you; if you speak the truth Allah will protect you."
'Amer: And our God protected the Prophet Muhammad, of course.
Toddler: And he said to his friends, "I will kill this lady."
'Amer: Of course, because she put poison in his food, this Jewess. ?Basmallah, Allah be praised. May our God bless her. No one could wish Allah could give him a more believing girl than she. May Allah bless her and her father and mother. The next generation of children must be true Muslims. We must educate them now while they are still children so that they will be true Muslims.
According to Amer, to be a true Muslim means to hate the Jews. Millions of little Basmallahs all over the world study the life of the Prophet learning how they need to deal with the Jews. They learn that the Prophet expelled the Jews and therefore, almost all the Jews today have been expelled from Arab countries. They learn that the Prophet robbed the Jews of their possessions, so they rob the Jews of their possessions, as well. They learn that the Prophet orchestrated killings of Jews and they are only glad to follow his example. All stories of Muhammad's life present Jews as dangerous enemies of the Prophet and Islam. This is the axiom that Muslim Arabs obtain with their mother's milk.
Muhammad was ruthless to the Jews, seeing them as his mortal enemies. As the Qur'an says: "the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews." He had said in his last sermon: "I leave behind me two things, the Qur'an and my example the sunnah, and if you follow these you will never go astray." Only those who do not understand Islam may believe that the Muslims will ever dare to question his last will.
1. Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World. I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2001. p.28.
2. Adil Salahi. Muhammad: Man and Prophet. A Complete Study of the Life of the Prophet of Islam. Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1995.
[End Part 3 of 3]
--------------------------------------------
Boris Shusteff is an engineer. He is also a research associate with the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies.