94 No god but God
And while reports of the total number of men who were killed vary
from 400 to 700 (depending on the source), the highest estimates still
represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews
who resided in Medina and its environs. Even if one excludes the
Qaynuqa and Nadir clans, thousands of Jews still remained in the
oasis, living amicably alongside their Muslim neighbors for many
years after the execution of the Qurayza. Only under the leadership of
Umar near the end of the seventh century C.E. were the remaining
Jewish clans in Medina expelled—peacefully—as part of a larger
Islamization process throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Describing
the death of only slightly more than one percent of Medina’s Jewish
population as a “genocidal act” is not only a preposterous exaggera-
tion, it is an affront to the memory of those millions of Jews who truly
have suffered the horrors of genocide.
Second, as scholars almost unanimously agree, the execution of
the Banu Qurayza did not in any way set a precedent for future treat-
ment of Jews in Islamic territories. On the contrary, Jews throve
under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine
lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and
non-Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing
them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In
contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians “protected
peoples” (dhimmi ), neither required nor encouraged their conversion
to Islam. (Pagans and polytheists, however, were given a choice
between conversion and death.)
Muslim persecution of the dhimmi was not only forbidden by
Islamic law, it was in direct defiance of Muhammad’s orders to his
expanding armies never to trouble Jews in their practice of Judaism,
and always to preserve the Christian institutions they encountered.
Thus, when Umar ordered the demolition of a mosque in Damascus
that had been illegally constructed by forcibly expropriating the house
of a Jew, he was merely following the Prophet’s warning that “he who
wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of
Judgment.”
In return for a special “protection tax” called jizyah, Muslim law
allowed Jews and Christians both religious autonomy and the oppor-
tunity to share in the social and economic institutions of the Muslim