The City of the Prophet 57Kahin, whose connection to the Divine was indispensable in espe-
cially difficult disputes like the one between the Aws and Khazraj.
Yet while the other inhabitants of Yathrib may have viewed
Muhammad as little more than a Hakam and a Shaykh, that was not at
all how the Emigrants saw him. To his small band of followers,
Muhammad was the Prophet /Lawgiver who spoke with the authority
of the one God. As such, he had come to Yathrib to establish a new
kind of socioreligious community, though how that community was to
be organized, and who could be considered a member of it, had yet to
be defined.
It may be tempting to call the members of this new community
Muslims (literally, “those who submit” to God). But there is no reason
to believe that this term was used to designate a distinct religious
movement until many years later, perhaps not until the end of
Muhammad’s life. It would perhaps be more accurate to refer to
Muhammad’s followers by the same term the Quran uses: the Ummah.
The problem with this term, however, is that no one is certain what it
meant or where it came from. It may be derived from Arabic, Hebrew,
or Aramaic; it may have meant “a community,” “a nation,” or “a peo-
ple.” A few scholars have suggested that Ummah may be derived from
the Arabic word for “mother” (umm), and while this idea may be aes-
thetically pleasing, there is no linguistic evidence for it. To make mat-
ters more complicated, the word Ummah inexplicably ceases to be
used in the Quran after 625 C.E., when, as Montgomery Watt has
noted, it is replaced with the word qawm—Arabic for “tribe.”
But there may be something to this change in terms. Despite its
ingenuity, Muhammad’s community was still an Arab institution based
on Arab notions of tribal society. There was simply no alternative
model of social organization in seventh-century Arabia, save for
monarchy. Indeed, there are so many parallels between the early Mus-
lim community and traditional tribal societies that one is left with the
distinct impression that, at least in Muhammad’s mind, the Ummah
was indeed a tribe, though a new and radically innovative one.
For one thing, the reference in the Constitution of Medina to
Muhammad’s role as Shaykh of his clan of Emigrants indicates that
despite the Prophet’s elevated status, his secular authority would
have fallen well within the traditional paradigm of pre-Islamic tribal