been called into question, particularly in light of three episodes in the history
of Jews in the Islamic world that contradict this view: eighth- and ninth-century
Baghdad, tenth- and eleventh-century Spain, and the early-sixteenth- through
late-seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. Each of these three episodes
reflects a significant gap between the theological and the sociopolitical atti-
tudes toward Jews.
The status of Jews under Islam, and the ways that it differed from the sta-
tus of Jews under Christendom, reflected a combination of theological and
political factors that stemmed partly from the initial Islamic and Christian
encounters with Jews and Judaism. Early Christianity was one of several
Jewish sects competing for hegemony in a land where Judaism was the dom-
inant and majority religion. By contrast, Muhammad encountered Jews as a
minority, and thus did not see Judaism as a rival religion. Moreover, by
Muhammad’s time, Judaism itself had developed beyond the laws of the Bible
and the moral teachings of the prophets; Muhammad drew on a much larger
corpus of rabbinic teachings in conceptualizing Judaism as a precursor to
Islam. For example, the Midrashic story of Abraham’s path to monotheism
was retold in the Qur’an as Abraham’s path to Allah. While the theological
image and view of Jews in Muslim theology were ambiguous, at best, at no
point did the Qur’an or Hadith villainize Jews the way Christian doctrine
had. Simply put, there was no Islamic belief that Jews had murdered Allah or
his son, or that Allah had singled out the Jews to be persecuted for all eter-
nity. The notion that Islam had supplanted Judaism (and Christianity) was far
less antagonistic toward Jews than the Christian notion of divine rejection
and condemnation.
There was also a crucial difference between the Muslim ulamand caliph
on the one hand and the Catholic priest and king on the other – a differ-
ence that stems from the disparate roles that Jesus and Muhammad played
as founders of their respective religions. Jesus’ leadership was exclusively
religious. He never ruled an empire in the temporal sense, envisioning
Christendom exclusively as a theological realm. As a result, Christian sov-
ereigns, while periodically acting independently of, or contrary to,
Christian theology, on the whole regarded their domain as a Regnum
Marianum, limiting the theological and political space for Jews in the
world of Christendom.
By contrast, Muhammad was a political leader in addition to founding a
religious faith. Hard-wired into the fabric of Islamic civilization, therefore,
was a dimension of politics and statecraft that was independent of theology.
Hanafi, one of the schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, allowed political
leaders to make decisions based on reason and the demands of circumstance.
All in all, Islamic leaders had greater freedom to act pragmatically, indepen-
dent of religious doctrine; their decisions that determined the privileges,
obligations, and restrictions imposed on their subjects were based in no
62 The Jews of Islam