THE HIJRA 27Thus, the battle of Badr showed that Allah's will, not material factors, de-
termined victory in battle. But the battle of Uhud raised a thorny theo-
logical question. IfBadr showed the power of Allah, what did Uhud show?
That Allah could also lose battles? That He was not quite as all-powerful
as Mohammed proclaimed?
Mohammed, however, found a different lesson in defeat. Allah, he ex-
plained, let the Muslims lose this time to teach them a lesson. The Mus-
lims were supposed to be fighting for a righteous cause-a just
community on earth. Instead, at Uhud they forgot this mission and went
scrambling for loot in direct disobedience to the Prophet's orders, and so
they forfeited Allah's favor. Divine support was not an entitlement; Mus-
lims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and sub-
mitting to His will. This explanation for defeat provided a stencil that
Muslims invoked repeatedly in later years, after the Mongol holocaust of
the thirteenth century, for example, when nomadic invaders from Central
Asia overwhelmed most of the Islamic world, and again in response to
Western domination, which began in the eighteenth century and contin-
ues to this day.
The Quraysh spent two years planning their next assault. Recruiting allies
from other tribes, they built an army of ten thousand men-inconceivably
gigantic for that time and place. When Mohammed heard about this force
marching on Medina, he had his Muslims dig a moat around their town.
The Quraysh arrived on camels, which would not or could not cross the
moat. The stymied Quraysh decided to starve Medina with a siege.
The siege strategy, however, scuttled a secret plan the Quraysh were
counting on. After the disastrous battle of Uhud, another of Medina's Jew-
ish tribes had been exposed as collaborating with the Meccans. Like the
first Jewish tribe, they had been tried and sent into exile. The third tribe,
the Banu Qurayza, then proclaimed its loyalty to the Pact of Medina.
Now, however, in the run-up to the Battle of the Moat, its leaders had se-
cretly conspired with the Quraysh to fall upon the Muslim forces from be-
hind as soon as the Meccan forces attacked from the front.
When no frontal attack came, the conspirators within Medina lost their
nerve. Meanwhile, the besieging force began to fragment, for it was a con-
federation of tribes, most of whom had come along only as a favor to their
Qurayshi allies. With no battle to fight, they got restless. When a windstorm