Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

128 t CHAPTER SIX
state and its place in the scheme of both Sacred History and their
own lives. Islam’s experience was profoundly different. From its
inception, the Muslim community, the umma, was both a religious
and a political association, a “church” as well as a “state”; Muhammad
was his own Constantine.
The Creation of the Umma
In 622 Muhammad accepted an invitation to leave his native
Mecca, where he was the charismatic leader of a small conventicle
of believers, and to emigrate to Medina as the arbitrator-ruler of a
faction-ridden community of Arabs and Jews. This was a crucial
period in Muhammad’s life, and the years following his migration
were spent trying to forge some kind of community in accordance
with his religious principles and the political realities of the situation.
As described in the Medina Accords, Muhammad’s original
“community” (umma) at Medina included not only his fellow Migrants
from Mecca and the newly converted Helpers at Medina,
but Jews and Medinese pagans as well. The Jews were soon purged
from both the umma and the town, and the pagans were dragged
willy-nilly into it; the umma finally became exclusively a community
of believers who accepted the dominion of the One True God
and both the prophethood and the leadership of Muhammad.
These were not artificial associations. Muhammad’s role as a
prophet within a community that he himself had summoned into
being necessarily included the functions of legislator, executive,
and military commander. God’s revelations continued to spill from
his lips. Now, however, they were not only threats and warnings to
nonbelievers, but more often legislative enactments regulating
community life, and particularly the relations of one Muslim with
another. Thus was constituted an exclusively Muslim umma, and
its institutionalization can be charted in the Medina suras of the
Quran, which are devoted not merely to shaping the Muslim sensibilities
of the believers but to laying out some of the basic ritual
requirements, notably daily liturgical prayer and the annual payment
of zakat, the alms-tithe incumbent on all Muslims.