��The City of the Prophet 53Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 1966)
pointed to Muhammad’s community in Medina as proof that Islam
advocated the separation of religious and temporal power, while Mus-
lim extremists in Afghanistan and Iran have used the same community
to fashion various models of Muslim theocracy. In their struggle for
equal rights, Muslim feminists have consistently drawn inspiration from
the legal reforms Muhammad instituted in Medina, while at the same
time, Muslim traditionalists have construed those same legal reforms
as grounds for maintaining the subjugation of women in Islamic soci-
ety. For some, Muhammad’s actions in Medina serve as the model for
Muslim-Jewish relations; for others, they demonstrate the insurmount-
able conflict that has always existed, and will always exist, between the
two sons of Abraham. Yet regardless of whether one is labeled a Mod-
ernist or a Traditionalist, a reformist or a fundamentalist, a feminist or
a male chauvinist, all Muslims regard Medina as the model of Islamic
perfection. Put simply, Medina is what Islam was meant to be.
As with all mythologies of this magnitude, it is often difficult to
separate factual history from sacred history. Part of the problem is
that the historical traditions dealing with Muhammad’s time in Me-
dina were written hundreds of years after the Prophet’s death by Mus-
lim historians who were keen to emphasize the universal recognition
and immediate success of Muhammad’s divine mission. Remember
that Muhammad’s biographers were living at a time in which the Mus-
lim community had already become an enormously powerful empire.
As a result, their accounts more often reflect the political and religious
ideologies of ninth-century Damascus, or eleventh-century Baghdad,
than of seventh-century Medina.
So to understand what really happened in Medina and why, one
must sift through the sources to uncover not the holy city that would
become the capital of the Muslim community, but rather the remote
desert oasis which nurtured and cultivated that community in its
infancy. After all, long before there was a “City of the Prophet,” there
was only Yathrib.
YATHRIB IN THE seventh century was a thriving agricultural oasis
thick with palm orchards and vast arable fields, most of which were