28 DESTINY DISRUPTED
blew up-no small matter in this landscape-they drifted off, and soon the
Quraysh gave up and went home too.
All this left the Banu Qurayza in a bad spot. Their plot had been dis-
covered and now their allies were gone. Mohammed put the whole tribe
on trial and appointed one of their former associates among the Medina
tribes as judge. When the tribe was found guilty, the judge declared that
the crime was treason, the punishment for which was death. Some on-
lookers protested against this sentence, but Mohammed confirmed the
sentence, whereupon some eight hundred Jewish men were executed in the
public square, and the women and children of the tribe were sent to live
with the two tribes exiled earlier.
This whole drama sent a shock wave through Arabia. The trial and ex-
ecution of the Banu Qurayza announced the grim resolution of the Mus-
lims of Medina. In strictly military terms the Battle of the Moat was a
stalemate, but the Quraysh had mustered a force of ten thousand with
such fanfare that failing to win was as bad as losing, and this loss helped to
stoke a growing myth of Muslim invincibility, communicating a broad im-
pression that this community was not just another powerful tribe feeling
its oats but something strange and new. The Muslims lived a distinctly dif-
ferent way of life, they practiced their own devotional rituals, and they had
a leader who, when problems came up, went into a trance and channeled
advice, he said, from a supernatural helper so powerful that Muslims had
no fear of going into battle outnumbered three to one.
Who was this helper?
At first, many of the unconverted might have thought, It's a really pow-
erful god. But gradually the Muslim message sank in: not a god but the
God, the only one. And what if Mohammed was exactly what he claimed
to be-the one human being on earth directly connected to the creator of
the entire universe?
Recruiting people to kill the man grew ever more difficult. Recruit-
ing warriors to go up against his forces grew difficult too. After the Bat-
tle of the Moat, the trickle of conversions to Islam became a flood. It's
easy to suppose people were converting out of canny self-interest, a de-
sire to join the winning side. Muslims, however, believe there was more
to it. In Mohammed's presence, they believe, people were having a reli-
gious experience.