Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

72 t CHAPTER FOUR
any longer fast the Ashura, the tenth day of the Jews’ month of
Tishri or Yom Kippur. This was the day, Muhammad discovered,
on which the Torah had been sent down to Moses. We cannot be
certain of the chronology, but at some point after this he no longer
required his followers to fast on Yom Kippur but decreed instead
the fast of Ramadan, the month during which the Quran, which
Muhammad explicitly compared to the Torah (11:7, etc.), was sent
down to the new Moses (2:185; 97:1–5).
On the evidence we can only conclude that something went
wrong between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina. It seems
fairly certain that they rejected his claims to prophethood—which
many Jews in Arabia and elsewhere later accepted—but there may
have been a great deal more. There is no indication that the Jews
there had anything to do with the civil strife that brought Muhammad
to Medina in 622, but we may at least suspect that their fall
from proprietors of the oasis to clients within it left some scars on
the local politics, and the political overtones of Muhammad’s subsequent
treatment of them suggests the same. The biographical tradition
is more explicit; the “Jewish rabbis”—whatever that might
mean in that time and place—“showed hostility to the Messenger
in envy, hatred, and malice because God had chosen the Messenger
from among the Arabs.” Some version of that judgment we may
well have surmised on our own, but the Jews of Medina were also
allegedly joining forces with men from the Aws and Khazraj who
had obstinately clung to their heathen practices and beliefs. The
Jews, then, according to this and similar accounts, took religious
exception to Muhammad—how loudly or publicly we cannot
tell—and then made a political alliance with those Medina Arabs
who, for whatever reason, were beginning to oppose the new ruler
from Mecca.
The Religion of Abraham
For the moment there was no political response from Muhammad;
it is unlikely that he, newly arrived in Medina and on uncertain
terrain, had the means or inclination to do so. But he did begin to