- Professor Watt of Edinburgh University said:
From shortly after its establishment at Medina the Islamic state was
expanding, and this expansion continued... for at least a hundred years
after Muhammad’s death. Because of this certain political concepts
presuppose expansion, and indeed expansion that in the end will be
world-wide. This is expressed by the distinction between ‘the sphere of
Islam’ and the ‘sphere of war’ (dar al-islam, dar al-harb). W.
Montgomery Watt, Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh, 1968, p.91.
Before writing the above book, Professor Watt wrote a two-volume
biography (Muhammad at Mecca in 1953 and Muhammad at Medina in
1956). In 1961 he compiled a shorter version of these books, uniting
material from both: Muhammed: Prophet and Statesman, where it is at
Medina that Mohammed moves from being a religious leader to being a
political leader. Watt is counted among Britain’s foremost writers on
Islam in the twentieth century. Bearing in mind that his works come so
close after the Holocaust in National Socialist Germany, Watt is
extraordinarily glib about Mohammed’s solution to “the Jewish question”
(his phrase).
The lack of fundamental unity among the Jews was a weakness which
meant that it was easy for Muhammad to find Jews who were ready to
help him. The Arab allies of the Jews, too, being attached to them chiefly
by bribes, were easily detached, partly by fear of Muslim reprisals and
partly by Muhammad’s diplomatic skill. The fall of Khaybar and the
surrender of the other Jewish colonies marked the end of the Jewish
question during Muhammad’s lifetime [...] they had been utterly crushed.
( p.191)
The Jews of Medina had taken Mohammed in when, after putting up
with Mohammed’s new religion for fifteen years, the multicultural Pagans
of Mecca had had enough of him and the problems he was causing. In
Medina, Mohammed as the head of the new Islamic State, ultimately
repaid the Jews by exterminating them. Just a few years before Watt
wrote these books, in Europe the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish
Question” had just been “solved” by the mass-extermination of Jews.
dana p.
(Dana P.)
#1