52 No god but God
drying dates, then stops and kneels, lowering its neck for the Prophet
to dismount. Of the owners of the land, Muhammad asks a price.
“We do not want money for it,” the owners reply. “Only the
reward we shall receive from God.”
Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be
leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to
build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves,
with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this
will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and ceme-
tery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of commu-
nity, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim
scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin
not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation,
but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this
small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E.,
will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that
for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as
Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina.
There exists an enduring mythology about Muhammad’s time in the
city that came to bear his name, a mythology that has defined the reli-
gion and politics of Islam for fifteen hundred years. For it is in Medina
that the Muslim community was born, and where Muhammad’s Arab
social reform movement transformed into a universal religious ideology.
“Muhammad in Medina” became the paradigm for the Muslim
empires that expanded throughout the Middle East after the Prophet’s
death, and the standard that every Arab kingdom struggled to meet
during the Middle Ages. The Medinan ideal inspired the various
Islamic revivalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, all of which strove to return to the original values of Muham-
mad’s unadulterated community as a means to wrest control of Muslim
lands from colonial rule (though they had radically different ideas
about how to define those original values). And with the demise of
colonialism in the twentieth century, it was the memory of Medina
that launched the Islamic state.
Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democ-
racy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the