22 DESTINY DISRUPTED
was an agricultural rather than a commercial town and it was torn by con-
flict because its inhabitants belonged to several quarreling tribes. The peo-
ple of Yathrib wanted a fair-minded outsider to come in and oversee
negotiations among the tribes; they hoped that if they ceded judicial au-
thority to such a person, he would be able to bring about a peace. Mo-
hammed had a reputation as a fair-minded and skillful arbitrator, a role he
had played in several crucial disputes, and so the Yathribis thought he
might be the man for the job. Several of them visited Mecca to meet Mo-
hammed and found his charisma overwhelming. They converted to Islam
and invited Mohammed to move to Yathrib as an arbiter and help put an
end to all the quarrelling; the Prophet accepted.
Mohammed's murder was planned for a September night in the year
622 CE. That night, the Prophet and Abu Bakr slipped away into the
desert. Ali crawled into Mohammed's bed to make it look like he was
still there. When the would-be assassins burst in, they were furious to
find Ali, but they spared the kid and sent a search party out to hunt
down the Prophet. Mohammed and Abu Bakr had made it only to a cave
near Mecca, but legend has it that a spider built its web across the mouth
of the cave after they entered. When the posse came by and saw the web,
they assumed no one could be inside, and so passed on. Mohammed and
Abu Bakr made it safely to Yathrib, by which time some of Mohammed's
other followers had moved there too, and the rest soon followed. Most of
these Meccan emigrants had to leave their homes and property behind;
most were making a break with family members and fellow tribesmen
who had not converted. But at least they were coming to a place where
they would be safe, and where their leader Mohammed had been invited
to preside as the city's highest authority, the arbiter among the rival tribal
chieftains.
True to his promise, Mohammed sat down with the city's fractious
tribes to hammer out a covenant {later called the Pact of Medina.) This
covenant made the city a confederacy, guaranteeing each tribe the right to
follow its own religion and customs, imposing on all citizens rules de-
signed to keep the overall peace, establishing a legal process by which the
tribes settled purely internal matters themselves and ceded to Mohammed
the authority to settle intertribal disputes. Most important, all the signato-
ries, Muslim and non-Muslim, pledged to join all the others to defend