Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
is also worth noting that Sura 109 is addressed only to polytheists, not to people of the book.
A key theme in Ibn Ishaq’s depiction of the Jews is that they are chronic violators of their covenant with God. In one of the passages quoted above, Muhammad specifically links recognition of him as a prophet with fidelity to the Jewish covenant: “You know that I am a prophet who has been sent – you will find that in your scriptures and in God’s covenant with you” (p. 363). The Koran 2:65 (and 5:60 and 7:166) alleges that God has punished past generations of Jews for their infidelity to the covenant (specifically, for violating the Sabbath) by transforming them into “detested apes,” a claim echoed by Ibn Ishaq, who describes this bestial transformation as divine vengeance (pp. 250-1, 462). In his account of Muhammad’s attack on the last of the Jewish tribes of Medina, the Banu Qurayza, Ibn Ishaq portrays Muhammad as addressing them as follows: “When the apostle approached their forts he said, ‘You brothers of monkeys, has God disgraced you and brought His vengeance upon you?’” (p. 461).[1] This was not a piece of gratuitous verbal abuse on Muhammad’s part. In rejecting Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet, the Jews of the Banu Qurayza were violating their own covenant as Jews, since (Muhammad thought) the Torah clearly named and foretold Muhammad as a prophet the Jews must accept. Like the Jews of the past who had broken their covenant and whom God had punished by transforming them into apes, the Jews of the Banu Qurayza were violating the covenant and thus were, figuratively speaking, “brothers of monkeys.”
An important detail in Ibn Ishaq’s treatment of the Jews has to do with the stoning of adulterers. According to Ibn Ishaq, the Jews of Muhammad’s day had abandoned stoning for adultery. Their failure to stone adulterers is presented as yet another example of how they deny, ignore, and distort the contents of their own scriptures and violate their covenant. In one of the several versions of this story recounted by Ibn Ishaq, when presented with a man and woman caught in adultery, Muhammad asked for a Torah (to determine the divinely prescribed penalty for adultery). A rabbi held out a Torah, but with his hand covering over the verse of stoning. Abdullah bin Sallam, the rabbi who had converted to Islam, struck away the rabbi’s hand, exclaiming “This, O prophet of God, is the verse of stoning which he refuses to read to you.” Muhammad then says, “’Woe to you Jews! What has induced you to abandon the judgment of God which you hold in your hands?’ [...]
- ↑ Ibn Ishaq’s treatment of the Banu Qurayza episode has itself become the topic of scholarly controversy: see W.N. Arafat, “New Light on the Story of the Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (new series) 108 (1976), pp. 100-107, and (rebutting Arafat) M.J. Kister, “The Massacre of the Banu Qurayza: A Re-examination of a Tradition,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986), pp. 61-96. See also Gordon Darnell Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 92-93.
