Where initially Muhammad concluded that he was possessed with an evil spirit, presenting himself as the angel Gabriel, it next told Muhammad that he was the Messenger of God and ordered him to recite. "What shall I recite?" asked Muhammad. The angel did not reply. Instead he caught the terrified Meccan in a vice-like embrace until Muhammad heard God's words squeezed out of his mouth: "Recite: in the Name of thy Lord who created, created Man of a blood-clot. Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous who taught by the Pen, taught Man that he knew not." (The Koran, trans. with an introduction by Arthur J. Arberry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), sura 96.1-5. While Muslim tradition regards these verses as the Qur'an's first revelation, some believe that sura 74.1-7 was the first. )The traumatized Muhammad returned to his wife and told her what had transpired. "I never hated anything more than idols and soothsayers;' he said, "and I am afraid that I am becoming a soothsayer myself." Khadija was duly impressed. A strong-willed woman of independent financial means, she had exerted a profound influence on Muhammad, her third husband, fifteen years her junior. Once told of Muhammad's extraordinary ordeal, she quickly expressed her belief in the revelation's authenticity and took him to see a monotheistic cousin of hers who was well versed in the Jewish and Christian Holy Scriptures. "He asked me, and I told him what had happened;' Muhammad recalled. "He said, 'This is the Namus which was sent down to Moses, son of Imran. I wish I were young now. I wish I could be alive when your people drive you out!' I said: 'Will they drive me out?' He said, 'Yes. No man has ever brought something akin to what you have brought without arousing antagonism:" (Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa-l-Muluk (Cairo: Dar al-Ma'arifbiMisr, 1966), Vol. 2, pp. 298-99; Muhammad ibn Sa'd, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir.)
Emboldened by these prophetic words, yet reluctant to risk a premature public backlash, Muhammad went on to receive additional revelations but kept them secret from his townsmen for three full years. The first converts to the new faith were his most intimate circle: his wife Khadija, his freedman and adopted son Zaid ibn Haritha, his ten-year-old cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, and his close friend Abu Bakr, later to become his direct successor. Ordered by Allah to make the nascent religion public, Muhammad then quickly acquired a local following, mainly from the town's marginal elements but also from a number of leading families and clans. The Meccans initially viewed Muhammad's burst of prophetic energy with bemused indifference. As pagans worshiping a variety of gods, they were not averse to people choosing religions as they saw fit. As members of a merchant community, with trade relations with Syria, Egypt, and Yemen, they had been well aware of the existence of the monotheistic faiths. Nor was there anything special in Muhammad's claim to divine guidance: the peninsula was rife with poets and ecstatic soothsayers claiming divine inspiration for their preaching. It was only after he launched a frontal assault on their most cherished beliefs and values, deriding their gods, emphasizing the perdition of their ancestors who had died in disbelief, and demanding an unequivocal profession of belief in Allah and total submission (the meaning of "Islam" in Arabic) to His will, that Muhammad incurred the intense enmity of the city's leadership. Even then, however, the authorities seem to have been motivated as much by practical considerations as by religious outrage. Not only was the deity known as Allah, "the god;' already being widely worshiped in southern Syria and northern Arabia, but by the time of Muhammad's early activity it had become primus inter pares in the Meccan pantheon of gods. Allah's elevation to a position of exclusivity was certainly a revolutionary move, yet it might not have been wholly traumatic for the Meccans. He already had attributes not shared by any other gods and was perceived, owing to Jewish and Christian influences, in more abstract terms, being the only god that was not represented by an idol. At the same time, certain aspects of Muhammad's preaching, especially his emphasis on the equality of all believers, challenged long-standing social and genealogical structures of Mecca's tribal society. Besides, Arabian tradition tended to equate leadership with superior wisdom and judgment. Acceptance of Muhammad's claim to religious authority, let alone endorsement of his incipient faith, would have amounted to acknowledgment of his political leadership, something that Mecca's elite was loath to do.
For a while Muhammad managed to hold his ground, largely due to the protection of his influential uncle Abu Talib. Though an unreconstructed pagan, Abu Talib had raised the young Muhammad following the early death of his parents and rallied his clan, the Banu Hashem, or Hashemites as they are commonly known, behind his protégé. Yet with Abu Talib's death in 619, the headship of the Hashemite clan passed to his brother, Abu Lahab, whose enmity to Muhammad was so virulent as to buy him a special Qur' anic sura (No. 111), detailing the torment he and his wife would endure in hell. Having initially promised to protect Muhammad, Abu Lahab quickly reneged on his word on the pretext that the Prophet had besmirched his own pagan grandfather by alleging him to be in hell. In these circumstances, Muhammad concluded that his position in Mecca had become untenable and that he had better look for an alternative venue from which to spread his divine message.
As early as 615 Muhammad sent a group of his followers to Ethiopia to escape persecution and to explore the possibility of cooperation with its Christian king. But Ethiopia was too remote and isolated to serve as a permanent base of operations, so Muhammad began to look closer to home. After a humiliating rebuff by the notables of Taif, a hilly town some sixty miles southeast of Mecca, and a string of abortive overtures to neighboring Bedouin tribes, Muhammad eventually reached an agreement with a group of Muslim converts from the town of Yathrib, some 275 miles north of Mecca, whereby they gave him their oath of allegiance and undertook to fight with him against his enemies.
A well-watered desert oasis on the merchant route to Syria, Yathrib had originally been settled by Jewish refugees fleeing Roman persecution and their local Arab proselytes. They were organized in three tribes-Nadir, Quraiza, and Qainuqa-and their thriving farming and commercial enterprises attracted a substantial number of pagan Arabs to the site, notably the Aws and Khazraj tribes, who dominated the Jews yet remained torn by internal strife. The invitation to come to Yathrib as a peacemaker, made by representatives of the feuding tribes, thus provided Muhammad with a golden opportunity for spiritual and political pre-eminence, which he did not fail to seize. In the early summer of 622 about seventy of his followers quietly left Mecca in small groups for Yathrib. A few months later, on September 24, Muhammad himself arrived in the town, accompanied by his close associate Abu Bakr.
The Hijra, as the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib has come to be known, was a watershed in Islamic history, aptly designated after the Prophet's death as the official starting point of the Muslim era. At one fell swoop Muhammad was transformed from a private preacher into a political and military leader and head of a rapidly expanding community, and Islam from a persecuted cult into a major religious and political force in the Arabian Peninsula. "Hitherto it had been a religion within a state;' wrote the historian Philip Hitti, "in Medina ['the city; as Yathrib came to be called after the Hijra] it passed into something more than a state religion-it became the state. Then and there Islam came to be what the world has ever since recognized it to be-a militant policy.”
Muhammad created this inextricable link between religious authority and political power shortly after the Hijra in the form of the "Constitution of Medina;' which organized his local followers (Ansar) and those who had migrated with him from Mecca (Muhajirun) into "one community (umma) to the exclusion of all man;' designed to act as a unified whole against external enemies and internal dissenters. The document wisely refrained from specifically abolishing existing tribal structures and practices, yet it broke with tradition by substituting religion for blood as the source of social and political organization and by making Allah, through the aegis of His chosen apostle, the supreme and exclusive sovereign: "If any dispute or controversy likely to cause trouble should arise it must be referred to God and to Muhammad, the apostle of God. God accepts what is nearest to piety and goodness in this document."
Having established himself as the absolute religious and political leader of his community of believers, Muhammad spent most of his Medina years fighting external enemies and domestic opponents. During the first eighteen months after the Hijra he carried out seven raids on merchant caravans as they were making their way to Mecca. This was an attempt to build up the wealth and prestige of his followers, who had lost their livelihood as a result of their move to Medina, and to weaken Mecca's economic lifeline. It was also the logical thing to do. The caravans from Syria to Mecca passed between Medina and the Red Sea coast and were militarily unprotected, which made them easy prey for potential raiders who could intercept them at a substantial distance from their base and then disappear before the arrival of a rescue party. Yet as the Muslims lacked military experience, having themselves been merchants rather than fighters in their Meccan years, they normally returned home empty-handed. It was only in January 624 that Muhammad scored his first real success. A small raiding party of eight to ten Muslims, disguised as pilgrims, ambushed a convoy at Nakhla, southeast of Mecca, killed one of its attendants, captured another two (the fourth attendant managed to escape), and led the caravan to Medina. Yet as the raid occurred during the holy month of Rajab, when bloodshed was forbidden according to pagan convention, it was met with a wave of indignation in Medina. The embarrassed Muhammad claimed that his orders had been misunderstood and waited for a while before distributing the booty.
Eventually a new Qur'anic revelation appeared to justify the raid, and two months later the incident was all but forgotten as a Muslim contingent headed by Muhammad himself routed a numerically superior Meccan force near the oasis of Badr, southwest of Medina, carrying home substantial booty and a few dozen prisoners. The battle of Badr boosted Muhammad's position in Medina, which seemed to have been deteriorating during the previous months, and allowed him to move against his local opponents. The first to find themselves in the line of fire were the Jews, who had refused to acknowledge the validity of Muhammad's revelations, and whose affluence made them a natural target for plunder. Using a trivial incident as a pretext, he expelled the weakest of the three tribes, the Qainuqa, from the city and divided their properties among the Muhajirun. (Muhammad had originally meant to kill the Qainuqa men but was dissuaded from doing so by the Khazraj sheikh.) One year later, in March 625, after a Muslim defeat in the battle of Mount Uhud, near Medina, had dented Muhammad's prestige in the eyes of the neighboring Bedouin tribes, it was the turn of the Nadir to pay the price of the Prophet's setback: after a few weeks' siege they were driven from the city and their lands were taken over by the Muslims. The last and most powerful Jewish tribe-the Quraiza-suffered more profusely following the abortive Meccan siege of Medina in the spring of 627. Charged with collaboration with the enemy, the tribe's six to eight hundred men were brought in small groups to trenches dug the previous day, made to sit on the edge, then beheaded one by one and their bodies thrown in. The women and children were sold into slavery and the money they fetched, together with the proceeds from the tribe's possessions, was divided among the Muslims.
The physical elimination of the Medina Jews was accompanied by Islam's growing break with its Jewish (and to a lesser extent Christian) origins. Upon moving to the town, Muhammad had sought to woo the local Jewish population by emphasizing the similarity between his incipient religion and Judaism, and by adopting a number of religious Jewish practices and rituals. These included the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, turning toward Jerusalem in prayer, raising the number of daily prayers from two to three, and accepting a number of dietary restrictions such as eating no pork or blood. These gestures failed to impress the Medina Jews. Rather than endorse Islam or unite with Muhammad against the local idolaters, they became his staunchest critics, highlighting the gaps and inconsistencies in the Qur'an and its misrepresentation of the Old Testament stories. The embittered Muhammad began to cast the Jews in his revelations as a devious and treacherous people, who had persecuted past prophets and falsified the Holy Scriptures. The direction of prayer was changed from Jerusalem to Mecca, Friday was substituted for Sabbath as the holy day of rest, the muezzin and minaret replaced the Jewish trumpets (and Christian bells) as the means of summoning to prayer, and Ramadan was designated as a month of fasting. This disengagement was completed on Muhammad's deathbed in the form of an injunction ordering the expulsion of Jews (and Christians) from the peninsula: "Two faiths will not live together in the land of the Arabs."
The substitution of Mecca for Jerusalem as Islam's holiest site was also a shrewd piece of political expediency that allowed Muhammad to tie his nascent religion to pagan reverence of the city. He further reinforced this link by endorsing the annual pilgrimage to the Ka’ba, Mecca's central shrine containing the images of the local gods, and by sanctifying the fetish of kissing the shrine's Black Stone, the source of Mecca's holiness. By way of giving this pragmatic move an ideological grounding, he claimed that the Ka’ba had been built by the biblical figure of Abraham, together with his son Ishmael, to whom many Arabians traced their descent. In doing so, Muhammad tapped into prevailing Arabian practices and beliefs by conferring a monotheistic status on ancestral practices. He moreover dissociated Abraham, whom he presented as the first monotheist (or hanij), from Judaism and Christianity, and linked him to Islam and more specifically to himself by creating a direct line of succession in the development of monotheism.
By now Muhammad had consolidated his power to a considerable extent. The Uhud defeat, where over seventy Muslims were killed, including some of Muhammad's oldest and most trusted followers and his formidable uncle Hamza, was a humbling experience for the Prophet. Yet the Meccans failed to achieve their strategic goal of destroying the umma and were increasingly forced to rely on a network of alliances with Bedouin tribes in their fight against the Muslims. Muhammad, however, was not to be easily upstaged. He managed to maintain the loyalty of the tribes around Medina, conducted a string of successful raids throughout the peninsula, and even resorted to the assassination of political rivals. These efforts did not prevent the Meccans from forming a grand alliance against Muhammad, nevertheless they did keep many potential participants out of this grouping, thus ensuring a more equal balance of forces in the final encounter. This came at the end of March 627, when a ten-thousand-strong Meccan Bedouin force advanced northward and laid siege to Medina, only to be confronted with a number of tactical surprises. To begin with, the Muslims had dug a trench around the city wherever it lay open to cavalry attack, a hitherto unknown defense method in Arabia. This caused considerable operational confusion among the Meccans, whose hopes of victory largely rested on their superior cavalry, which was further compounded by Muhammad's negotiations with the main Bedouin group in the coalition, the Ghatafan, aimed at bribing them out of the war. While the talks came to naught since the Medinese considered such a deal as being beneath their dignity, the Ghatafans had been sufficiently compromised in the eyes of their Meccan allies to preclude a cohesive military effort. After two weeks of abortive attempts to break the resistance of the far more committed and disciplined Muslims, the coalition disintegrated and its members went their separate ways.
With the failure of the siege of Medina, Mecca ceased to pose a threat to Muhammad, and in the spring of 628 he felt confident enough to attempt to make the "little pilgrimage" (umra) to his native city. As the Meccans vowed to prevent him from doing so, Muhammad stopped in the small nature spot of Hudaibiya, some ten miles northwest of the city, where the two sides negotiated a ten-year truce. The Muslims were given the right to carry out the pilgrimage the following year and the Meccans would vacate the city for three days to allow them to perform their religious duties unhindered. Muhammad agreed to send back anyone who came to him from Mecca without the explicit permission of his guardian, while the Meccans were not obliged to reciprocate this move.
Many Muslims viewed these conditions as an unnecessary and humiliating surrender. They were particularly resentful of Muhammad waiving any reference to himself in the treaty as Allah's Messenger, and were indignant at the loss of booty attending the stoppage of raids on the caravans to Mecca that was implicit in the agreement. To deflect this simmering discontent, Muhammad found a handy scapegoat that had served him well in the past: the Arabian Jews. Having eliminated the Jewish presence in Medina, he now turned to the affluent Jewish community in the oasis of Khaibar, some ninety miles north of the city. After a month of siege the Jews surrendered and were stripped of their possessions and granted free passage with their women and children. Yet as Muhammad could not find the necessary manpower for tilling the site, he relented and allowed the Jews to stay on their land in return for an annual tribute of half of their produce. IS A number of neighboring Jewish communities surrendered shortly afterward under the same terms, thus laying the ground for what would become the common arrangement between the umma and its non-Muslim subjects.
In the end, Muhammad proved more far-sighted than his critics. Not only did the Hudaibiya agreement not divert him from the ultimate goal of occupying his native city, it actually turned out to be a Trojan Horse facilitating the attainment of this objective. Aside from putting the umma on a par with Mecca, the treaty gave both signatories a free hand in their dealings with the nomadic tribes. On the face of it, this provision was of a reciprocal nature. In fact it worked in Muhammad's favor, as increasing numbers of tribes, including some that had previously been aligned with Mecca, sought to associate themselves with the umma.
When in 629 Muhammad performed the deferred "little pilgrimage;' the event made a great impression. A fresh influx of converts flocked to the Prophet's camp, and Muhammad decided to strike while the iron was still hot. Using the killing of a Muslim by a Meccan in the course of a private dispute as a pretext for reneging on the Hudaibiya agreement, on January 1, 630, he set out from Medina at the head of a formidable force. Ten days later Mecca surrendered without offering any serious resistance.
The capture of Mecca was the jewel in Muhammad's crown. Less than eight years after his undignified departure, the ridiculed and despised preacher had returned as the city's undisputed master and Arabia's most powerful leader. In the course of the following year a steady stream of tribal dignitaries from all corners of the peninsula would flock to the warrior-prophet to profess their subservience. For many of them, this was a pragmatic response to the newly established balance of power rather than a true conversion to Islam. Yet being the astute politician and statesman that he was, Muhammad was prepared to content himself initially with a merely verbal profession of faith and a payment of tribute. He knew full well that paganism, as a social and political phenomenon, was virtually a spent force and that there was no need to bring about an instantaneous transformation of these independent-minded tribes. So long as they gave him their political obeisance and financial tribute, he could afford to wait and allow the socio-economic dynamics, which now favored Islam, to run their natural course.
Even in Mecca Muhammad refrained from following up his victory with mass conversions. He smashed the numerous idols kept in the Ka’ba but left the population very much to its own devices, and incorporated many of the local leaders into his administration. Some of them, including his arch-enemy and the city's grand old man Abu Sufian ibn Harb and his two sons-Yazid and Mu'awiya, the future founder of the Umayyad dynasty-were given handsome rewards. It was only a year later, during the annual pilgrimage festival, that Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, read a decree on the Prophet's behalf forbidding infidels from entering the Kaaba during the annual pilgrimage season.
In March 632 Muhammad performed for the first time the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, or the hajj. This turned out to be his last visit to his native city. Three months later the Prophet suddenly developed a high fever and excruciating headaches, succumbing to his brief illness on June 8, 632. He left behind a new universal religion and a community of believers organized on its basis-an unprecedented phenomenon in Arabian history that made Islam's imperial expansion inevitable.
To be sure, as evidenced by the common Qur'anic phrase "an Arabic Qur' an;' Islam was initially conceived as a distinctly Arab endeavor, designed to set apart the "clear speakers" from other monotheistic groups such as the Christian Ethiopians and Byzantines, the Zoroastrian Iranians, and the Jews. This was particularly the case in the early Meccan period, when Muhammad viewed his mission along similar lines to those of numerous past prophets, namely to warn his Quraish tribe in its own language and to show it the road to salvation. He did not seem particularly interested in establishing an entirely new religion, let alone a universal one, and neither did his early supporters, whose preference for Islam over Christianity or Judaism was as much an act of rejection of foreign influence as religious devotion.
With the growth of his political and military prowess, however, Muhammad increasingly fashioned himself, and by extension his religion, in universal terms. This is vividly illustrated by the concept of the "Seal of the Prophets;' which casts Muhammad as the last, and the definitive, of the great prophets sent by Allah to pass His divine message to humanity: Abraham, the founding father of monotheism; Moses, to whom the Old Testament was revealed; and Jesus, who received the Gospel, confirming the Old Testament. Yet Muhammad is far more than a mere successor to them. According to the Qur'an, his future mission was foretold in the early scriptures and heralded by none other than Abraham and Jesus, which makes Muhammad nothing short of Allah's chosen Messenger to humanity, and Islam the one and only true religion: "Say: a mankind, I am Allah's Messenger to all of you .... There is no god but He .... Believe [then] in Allah and in his Messenger.”
This absolutist claim to universalism was amplified by a series of actions on the ground, beginning with the creation of the borderless and timeless umma. It is true that Muhammad's community was predominantly Arab in composition, but this was merely an historical accident attending Muhammad's Arabian descent and the environment in which he operated. Even before the establishment of the umma, some of the first converts to Islam had been of foreign extraction, notably Byzantine and Ethiopian,19 and in creating his community the Prophet took great care to ensure its universal nature by substituting religion for tribal kinship as the basis of social and political affinity. At a stroke the past was wiped clean. One's ethnic origin and traditional ties and relationships counted for nothing, only one's faith and piety. The umma was not merely a novel form of socio-political communal organization. It was a divinely ordained brotherhood, bound together by something far stronger than blood and far wider than the Arabian Peninsula: the great equalizer between Arabs and non-Arabs, free men and freed men. As Muhammad put it in his farewell address during his pilgrimage to Mecca: "0 people, your Lord is one and your ancestor is [also] one. You are all descended from Adam and Adam was [born] of the earth. The noblest of you all in the sight of Allah is the most devout. Allah is knowing and all wise [Qur' an xlix, 13]. An Arab is superior to a non-Arab in nothing but devotion."
This unique fusion of religious and temporal authority, established by the Constitution of Medina, sowed the seeds of Islam's millenarian imperial experience. Muhammad was, of course, not the first political leader to have associated himself with divine guidance. Numerous rulers of all hues had done this before. Yet in pagan societies the authority of gods was limited to specific territories and/or functions, and it was generally accepted that there could be other deities in different places. The authority of Allah, as embodied in the person of His Messenger, was all-encompassing and left no room whatsoever for other gods. This made the worldwide expansion of the umma, as both the constituency in which Allah's authority had been established and the tool for its further dissemination, only a question of time. For if Allah is one and His Messenger is one and the two are fundamentally indivisible, then all humanity should believe in the one and only true religion-Islam-and be organized in one universal community living by its laws.
Aside from its divinely ordained universalism, the socio-economic structure and political modus operandi of Muhammad's umma, endorsed by successive generations of Middle Eastern rulers to remain the basis of the Islamic perception of international relations to the present day, contained strong imperialist elements. To begin with, notwithstanding its tiny size and the theoretical equality of all believers, this community was organized along classical imperial lines, with Medina acting as the metropolis of Muhammad's rapidly expanding Islamic order and its other constituents serving as the periphery or even colonies. The city was the seat of government, where the Prophet resided and made his decisions and where taxes and other revenues were received and distributed (Mecca took a back seat as a religious center).
Similarly, by substituting absolutist rule for the pluralistic system of traditional tribal organization, based as it was on a series of agreements among equals, the umma created a powerful drive for expansion. Since it was answerable directly to Allah, through the aegis of His Messenger, it could tolerate no dissent. Whoever acted contrary to the rules of the umma, let alone broke ties with it, could not expect the protection of even his nearest relatives, for he would be breaking with both God and man. So long as there were Arabs who defied Muhammad's authority, the ideological foundation of his Islamic order and its political standing were under challenge. This meant that "the umma could not stand still, it had to expand or disintegrate."
More importantly, the formation of the umma created a sharp dichotomy between Muslims and "infidels" and presupposed a permanent state of war between them. This vision was already expressed in the Constitution of Medina, which declared the believers "friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders" and forbade fighting and killing among them, let alone aiding infidels against Muslims or making peace with them as long as "believers are fighting in the way of God:' It was further underscored by Muhammad's farewell address, which bequeathed to all Muslims a mission "to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah;" and by countless sayings and traditions attributed to the Prophet (hadith). "The gates of Paradise are under the shadow of the swords;' runs one famous saying, while another hadith stipulates that: ''A morning or an evening expedition in God's path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years."
The Qur' anic revelations during the Medina years abound with verses extolling the virtues of jihad against idolaters, infidels, and hypocrites (munafiqun), who had ostensibly embraced Islam but effectively remained entrenched in their non-belief. Those who participate in this holy pursuit "with their property and lives" will be generously rewarded, both in this life and in the afterworld, where they will reside in shaded and ever-green gardens, indulged by pure women. The enemies of Islam will burn in hell, having "no protecting helper nor friend in the earth:' Those killed in the course of the jihad should not be mourned as dead as they have made their contract with Allah: ''Allah has bought from the believers their soul and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of Allah; they kill and are killed ... and who fulfils his covenant truer than Allah? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph:'
There was an important material aspect to this militant doctrine. By forbidding fighting and raiding within the umma, Muhammad deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of livelihood and drove them inexorably toward imperial expansion. A well-known Muslim tradition tells of a prominent tribe, which, on the verge of joining the victorious Prophet, had second thoughts owing to its reluctance to give up its previous way of life. "The religion of the grandchild of Abdel Muttalib [i.e., Muhammad] forbids its followers to go to war with each other," they are reported to have said. "It condemns to death a Muslim who kills another (even if he be of a different tribe). Thus we should have to refrain from attacking and robbing tribes who, like us, accept Islam." In the end they devised an ingenious solution: "We will undertake one more expedition ... and then we will become Muslims."
This story mayor may not be true, but it certainly grew out of real conditions and underscored the dilemma confronting Muhammad. For a time he could rely on booty from non-Muslims as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he did not go out of his way to convert all tribes seeking alignment with his Pax Islamica and preferred their attachment as tributaries. Yet given his belief in the supremacy of his religion and his relentless commitment to its widest possible dissemination, Muhammad could not deny conversion to those tribes wishing to undertake it. Were the whole of Arabia to become Muslim, a new source of wealth and an alternative outlet for the bubbling energies of the Arabian tribes would have to be found north of the peninsula, in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant.
The early Arab historian al-Waqidi (d. 823) narrated a tradition that Muhammad was destined to extend his domination over the lands of the Byzantine and Iranian empires, which had dominated the Middle East for centuries. The Prophet certainly acted as if this objective were on his agenda. As early as the summer of 626 he sent a small force to fight some hostile tribes in the area of Dumat al- Jandal, some five hundred miles northeast of Medina. The ease and rapidity of the operation seemed to have whetted Muhammad's appetite, and in the following year he sent his freedman and adopted son Zaid to Syria on a trading mission. This failed to produce concrete results, but another mission in the same year resulted in a treaty of alliance with the Dumat prince.
At this stage, Muhammad was apparently not interested in occupying these territories on a permanent basis or converting their largely Christian populations to Islam. Yet during the last three years of his life he attempted to incorporate the tribes on the road to Syria into his Islamic order and even made overtures to the tribes in the direction of Iraq. Muhammad was also reported to have sent emissaries to a number of prominent Arab and non-Arab rulers, including the Byzantine, Iranian, and Ethiopian emperors, with the demand that they embrace Islam. In October 630 he ventured toward the Byzantine frontier at the head of a thirty thousand-strong army. Advancing as far as the oasis of Tabuq, some five hundred miles north of Medina, Muhammad camped there for twenty days, during which time he negotiated a peace treaty with the Christian prince of Aylah (the biblical Eilat), at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. In return for an oath of allegiance and an annual tribute, the Christians were placed under the protection of the umma and granted freedom of worship. At this point Muhammad decided to return to Medina, having apparently realized the impracticability of his Byzantine ambitions. Yet this did not imply the disappearance of his interest in northern expansion. No sooner had he returned from his pilgrimage than he began preparations for a campaign in Transjordan and southern Palestine, which were only brought to an abrupt end by his sudden death.And while it is unlikely that Muhammad had imagined the full scope of Islam's future expansion, let alone planned it in detail, "his was the far-seeing mind which directed the Arabs' attention to the strategic importance of Syria for the new Islamic state."