SACRED SPACES IN ISLAMIC MEDINA: A FIRST LOOK

THE HARAM DECLARATION AND THE   MECCAN CONSTITUTION 

 

In the previous posts, I discussed the presence and meaning of harams in pre-Islamic Hijaz, Madinah (or Medina) was the site of one of them, as we already know; now it seems interesting to see what happened after the advent of Islam.

In this article, and eventually in the next ones, we’ll try to answer this question, in order to understand what happened and how the sacred spaces were configured in Islamic Madinah. As a matter of fact, Prophet Muhammad made use of the former haram after he fled to Madinah; the case of Medina is different from the others, as we have many information about this event. For Makkah (or Mecca) we cannot know how the site became an haram, since the Holy Quran does not provide any historical account, in the case of Medina we are luckier. The same goes for the site of Waji, as already noted in the previous article; in the case of Medina, on the contrary, the situation is different.

 

I am not denying that there is a legendary (not verifiable by historians) account for Medina haram too; nonetheless, there is a very important document, which has been preserved and which can give some precious hints about historical facts. This very famous document is known as the ‘Meccan Constitution’.

Before analyzing this document, though, it seems interesting to understand the history of Medina, which will be discussed in this post., 

 

Medina, an unknown past

 

The city of Medina, known worldwide as the ‘Prophet’s city’ and site of the first mosque ever built, is very ancient; Ibn-Zabala, a Muslim scholar who lived in the IX century CE, reports that the city was inhabited at the time of Prophet Moses by the Amalekites. This reference is not historical, but it signals the presence of early settlements; in fact, the site must have been already in place around VI century CE, according to an inscription discovered in 1956. There, Yatribu (which could be the original name of the city) is mentioned as the place where Nabonidus, the Babylonian King, stayed for about ten years. Another witness of the past is a second inscription, found in Mina, and dating back to the I Millennium CE.

 

Again, another reference to Medina can be traced in the II century CE, and Madinah here is referred by Ptolemy in his ‘Geography’, as a part of the ‘Arabia Eudaimon’, the ‘Happy Arabia’. Madinah is then mentioned again, twice, in the VI century CE, the first time as ‘Iatrippa’, by Stephanus Byzantinus, while the second occurred around 550 CE in a Sabaic inscription, mentioning the name of ‘Yathrib’.

 

However, there may be some confusion, since it is far from clear if the mentions discussed above refer to the entire oasis or to the settlement in the north, whose name was Yatrib as well.

 

At any rate, we can be sure that Medina is quite old, and when the Prophet arrived there, its history was already well established; finally, some Persian sources, then attribute the foundation of both Mecca and Medina to a Roman or Sasanian Emperor.

 

As the reliability of these sources is questionable at the very least, it is not surprising that historians relied on later sources, of Arabic origin; these documents describe Medina before the migration of the Prophet, known as ‘hijra’. Despite the eterogeneity of positions, there is some agreement on the ancient inhabitants of the city. Thus, we are told that two separate groups settled in Medina, the first being the Jews, and the second formed by two tribes, the Khazraj and the Aws, which, in turn, traced back their descent from the Banu Qyala. These two tribal group were very important, as they helped the Prophet, and became known as the ‘ansar’, literally, ‘the helpers’.

 

The historians tell us that the Jewish inhabitant were probably already there at the time of the Aws and Khazraj tribes; in this case, they refer a division among them as well. Some of these clans became later notorious, as they appeared in the biographic account of the life of Prophet Muhammad; three, in particular, deserve a special mention. I am talking about the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu-al-Nadir, and the Banu Quraiza; their origin, as emigrants from the near Palestine, or as local converts, is debated though.

 

At any rate, when Prophet Muhammad came to Medina, the Jewish already lost the control of the city, and its rules were the two tribes mentioned above; this does not mean, of course, that the Jewish lost all the relevant position after the hijra. Some of them, in fact, kept some power for some years after the Prophet arrived in Medina.

 

It is highly probable, then, that fights erupted among these groups for the control of the town; this hypothesis, then, is supported by the topography of Medina in pre-Islamic times. The city, in fact, was full of fortified building and ‘tower houses’, which, according the Muslim historian Ibn Zabala, were destroyed during the rule of Caliph Uthman bin Affan, leaving only some ruins.

 

External powers exerted some influence on Medina as well, at least during until the eve of the Vulgar Era; among them, we can mention the rulers of Ethiopia; furthermore, inscription found in the South of Arabian Peninsula seems to confirm an intervention by the Ethiopians in the region of Hijaz in the III century CE.

 

Conclusion

 

We are used to think at Medina as a thriving center of Islam, but its history is much longer and tells us of a somewhat different world, the same that Prophet Muhammad must have found at the time of his hijra there. This story determined and explains the spaces in this city; in the next post, we will take a closer look at what Medina looked like back then.