Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
A final detail in Ibn Ishaq’s discussion of Muhammad’s policies vis-à-vis the Jews has to do with the famous jizya verse in the Koran, 9:29:
Fight those who do not believe in God and the last day and forbid not that which God and His apostle have forbidden and follow not the religion of truth from among those who have been given the scripture until they pay the poll tax out of hand being humbled… (p. 620).
Here Ibn Ishaq stresses two things. The first is that the revenue to be raised from the poll tax imposed on the people of the book is to compensate the Muslims for the funds lost by the exclusion of the polytheists from the pilgrimage to the Kaba in Mecca (as per Koran 9:28: “The polytheists are nothing but unclean, so let them not approach the sacred mosque after this year […] If you fear poverty God will enrich you from His bounty”). As Ibn Ishaq puts it: “God gave them compensation for what He cut off from them in their former polytheism by way of what He gave them by way of poll tax from the people of scripture” (p. 620). The second point is that the imposition of the jizya is directly linked by Ibn Ishaq to the allegedly evil ways of the people of the scripture and their lies against God, as made plain by the Koran in the verses immediately following the jizya verse (9:30-3: “The Jews say Ezra is the son of God, while the Christians say the Messiah is the son of God. Such are their assertions, by which they imitate the infidels of old. God confound them! How perverse they are! […]”). It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional Arab culture, honor is of central importance, and being forced “to buy protection from a more powerful tribe […] seriously diminished one’s honor.”[1] Ibn Ishaq thus suggests that the imposition of the jizya has both a practical purpose – the raising of revenue for the Muslims – and an ideological purpose, punishing and dishonoring the people of the book for their alleged religious perversity.
Ibn Ishaq later quotes Muhammad as setting the jizya at “one full dinar” and directing that Jews and Christians who paid the tax were “not to be turned” from their religion, and that those who paid the jizya were to have “the guarantee of God and His apostle,” while those who withheld it were the enemies of God and His apostle (p. 643).
- ↑ Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 90. See also Philip Carl Salzman, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Humanity Books/Prometheus Books: Amherst NY: 2008), p. 106.
Prophet is mentioned in their sacred scriptures, he replied that their scriptures were corrupted.” Tor Andrae, Mohammed: The Man and His Faith, p. 192. If Ibn Ishaq is to be believed, Muhammad made no such claim: instead, he accused the Jews of lying about what they knew to be in their (presumably reliable) scriptures. Andrae anachronistically reads the classical doctrine of tahrif back into the sirah, where it cannot be found.
