The Emigration (Hijra) ••• 35Yathrib's two pagan tribes had grown so bad that they could no longer pro¬
tect themselves against the three Jewish tribes with which they shared the
oasis. They asked Muhammad to come and, because of his reputation as an
honest man, arbitrate their quarrels. The next year more pilgrims came
from Yathrib and some embraced Islam. In return for Muhammad's ser¬
vices as an arbiter, they agreed to give sanctuary to the Meccan Muslims.
This was a great opportunity for Muhammad. He quickly grasped that
his mission as God's spokesman would be enhanced once he became the
chief judge of a city (even if it was only a motley collection of settled tribes)
rather than the spiritual leader of a persecuted band of rebels split between
pagan Mecca and Christian Ethiopia. Besides, the Jewish presence in
Yathrib made him hope that he might be accepted as a prophet by people
who were already worshiping the one God—his God—revealed to the Jews
by earlier scriptures. In the following months, he arranged a gradual trans¬
fer of his Muslim followers from Mecca to Yathrib. At last, he and Abu-Bakr
departed in September 622.
This emigration, called the hijra in Arabic, was a major event in Islamic
history. Rather than a "flight," as some call it, the hijra was a carefully
planned maneuver by Muhammad in response to his invitation by the cit¬
izens of Yathrib. It enabled him to unite his followers as a community, as a
nation, or (to use an Arabic word that is so hard to translate) as an umma.
From then on, Muhammad was both a prophet and a lawgiver, both a reli¬
gious and a political leader. Islam was both a faith in one God as revealed
to Muhammad (and the earlier prophets) and a sociopolitical system.
Muhammad and his followers drew up the Constitution of Medina as a
concrete expression of their umma. No wonder the Muslims, when they
later set up their own calendar, made the first year the one in which the
hijra had occurred.
The Struggle for Survival
Once the umma was set up in Yathrib, renamed Medina (or madinat al-
nabi, "the city of the Prophet"), Muhammad faced new challenges. Medina's
Arabs did not become Muslims at once; their quarrels proved hard to settle,
and it was harder still for him to win the allegiance of the city as a whole. If
the Jews of Medina had ever harbored any belief in Muhammad as the Mes¬
siah or the messenger of God, they were soon disillusioned. His revelations
differed from what they knew from the Bible, and they rejected his religious
authority. Muhammad, for his part, saw Islam as the first and most natural
monotheism, not as a pale imitation of Judaism or Christianity. His divine