Islamic Narrative on the Jews of Muhammad’s Timeĭespite these stories, however, it appears even from Muslim tradition that most Medinan Jews did not join the new community. In order to make sense of the Jewish response, however, we must first consider the general thrust of the Islamic narrative regarding the role of Jews in the prophetic experience of Muhammad. The story that will be examined below represents a Jewish polemical “counter-narrative” to the Islamic narrative that includes within it polemics directed against Jews. 15 Polemics reflect metanarratives-patterns and structures of thinking that reflect worldviews and provide collective meaning. This relationship of contention produced what is commonly referred to as polemics-perspectives, attitudes and positions that attempt to support a position by undermining and delegitimizing the position of the other.
Each religious community established a series of narratives to support its own exclusive view of divine and human history, and each of those narratives undermines the claims of the others. All three failed to convince the others that their understanding of God’s expectations is true. And history has also shown how all three scriptural monotheisms found themselves threatened by new prophets who emerged after they had become established religion. 14 History has shown how Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all revolutionized the status quo ante when they emerged into history with a new prophetic figure and divine dispensation. The prophetic role includes challenging assumptions and testing the viability of the existing state of affairs. Prophets challenge the religious status quo because, as spokespersons of God, they always represent a higher power than that of any human religious establishment.
13 Eventually, however, Muhammad was to prevail with the help of God, so that by the time of his death at the age of sixty-two, most of Arabia had accepted him. These adversaries, who derived mostly from his own tribe of Quraysh, are referred to as mushrikūn in the Qur’an-“idolaters.” 11 He was also soon challenged by some who joined his community but then began to undermine him-the qur’anic munāfiqūn, usually translated as “hypocrites,” but also “doubters” or “waverers.” 12 And Jews and Christians, known as ahlu-lkitāb in the Qur’an (“people of the Book”), challenged him because his status as a new prophet bringing a new divine dispensation threatened their practice and belief.
10 According to the Islamic narrative, his first opponents were the native inhabitants of his Meccan hometown who practiced indigenous, polytheistic Arabian religion. The “official” biography of Muhammad mentions on the one hand that people began to accept Islam in large numbers when he began preaching in Mecca ( dakhala al-nās fī al-Islām … ḥattā fashā dhikr al-Islām bimakka), 9 yet the same work notes how he was challenged as soon as he began preaching against the native polytheism in Mecca, and that his actual followers were quite few. Just as Muhammad was depicted in the sources as having fit the classical model of a reluctant prophet, so did the general opposition to his prophetic message seem to fit a historical pattern of resistance to God’s prophetic voice. It is enough for my purpose of examining polemical literature to establish the basic Muslim narrative and observe how Jews have responded to it with their own counter-narrative. 8 It is not my purpose here to try to reconstruct the actual history or to argue in favor of either a positivist or revisionist position over the historicity of the sources. The critical scholarship cited in the previous footnotes has demonstrated how difficult (or perhaps impossible) it is to reconstruct actual historical events from the canonical sources. 7 Any reasonable historical reconstruction of the emergence of Islam can therefore only be conjectured. 6 And certainly in the case of early Islam, archaeological and paleographical research remain in their infancy. As with the early history of Israel and the early history of Christianity, the only written sources were composed by religious followers of the founders, which no trained historian would take at face value. 5 The actual history of Muhammad’s life and the emergence of the Qur’an, however, remain controversial and uncertain. Together, these sources convey a basic and collective Islamic narrative (or metanarrative) of its own beginnings, a sacred or “salvation history” ( Heilsgeschichte) that serves as a core doctrine and foundation upon which is constructed the authority and significance of Islamic scripture, law and theology.