��92 No god but God
For more than a month, he kept the Qurayza inside their fortress
while he deliberated with his advisers about what to do. In the end, he
turned to Arab tradition. This was a dispute; it could be settled only
through the arbitration of a Hakam. But because this dispute involved
Muhammad—who was obviously not a neutral party—the role of
arbiter fell to Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, the Shaykh of the Aws.
On the surface, it seemed Sa‘d was anything but a neutral party.
After all, the Banu Qurayza were clients of the Aws and so, technically,
fell under Sa‘d’s direct protection. This may have been why the Qurayza
were so eager to accept him as Hakam. But when Sa‘d came out of his
tent, where he had been recovering from his battle wounds, his decision
was the clearest sign yet that the old social order no longer applied.
“I pass judgment on them,” Sa‘d declared, “that their fighters shall
be killed and their children [and wives] made captives and that their
property shall be divided.”
UNDERSTANDABLY, THE EXECUTION of the Banu Qurayza
has received a great deal of scrutiny from scholars of all disciplines.
Heinrich Graetz, writing in the nineteenth century, painted the event
as a barbarous act of genocide reflecting Islam’s inherently anti-Jewish
sentiments. S. W. Baron’s Social and Religious History of the Jews some-
what fantastically likened the Banu Qurayza to the rebels of Masada—
the legendary Jews who heroically chose mass suicide over submission
to the Romans in 72 C.E. Early in the twentieth century, a number of
Orientalist scholars pointed to this episode in Islamic history as proof
that Islam was a violent and backward religion. In his masterwork,
Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, Francesco Gabrieli claimed that
Muhammad’s execution of the Qurayza reaffirms “our consciousness
as Christian and civilized men, that this God, or at least this aspect of
Him, is not ours.”
In response to these accusations, some Muslim scholars have done
considerable research to prove that the execution of the Banu
Qurayza never happened, at least not in the way it has been recorded.
Both Barakat Ahmad and W. N. Arafat, for example, have noted that
the story of the Qurayza is not only inconsistent with Quranic values
and Islamic precedent, but is based upon highly dubious and contra-