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“No two religions”: Non-Muslims in the early Islamic Ḥijāz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2014

Harry Munt
Harry Munt*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
harry.munt@york.ac.uk
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Abstract

Many classical Islamic sources argue that it is not permissible for non-Muslims to reside in the Ḥijāz, especially Mecca and Medina. Such arguments are usually based on a famous Prophetic saying, “Two religions should not join/remain in the peninsula/land of the Arabs”, and on the reported action taken by the second caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb to remove non-Muslims from settlements in western Arabia. In this article, it is argued that the contradictory nature of the evidence for this expulsion casts serious doubt on whether such a widespread action actually took place, certainly not in the decades immediately following Muḥammad's death. It concludes that the widely attested classical prohibition on non-Muslims residing in the Ḥijāz rather had much more to do with the gradually evolving need to draw up firmer communal boundaries, which could help distinguish Muslims from others, and the role played by sacred spaces in doing so.

Keywords

ḤijāzMeccaNon-MuslimsḤadithIslamic lawCommunal boundaries

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Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of SOAS , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 249 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2014 

In the middle decades of the seventh century ce, armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered most of the Roman Near East and all of the Sasanian empire. Whatever the precise role of a new religion in this rapid expansion, there is little doubt that many of the Arabians involved in it were adherents of a new religio-political movement recently founded by Muḥammad in the Ḥijāz. It is also now widely accepted that the vast majority of the newly conquered populations did not convert to this movement's new faith, Islam, for centuries, and so for an extremely long time Muslims remained a small ruling minority throughout most of the Middle East.Footnote 1 The interactions between this ruling minority and the ruled non-Muslim majority have thus justifiably been the subject of a great deal of modern scholarly research and debate.Footnote 2 Here, however, the focus will be on the interactions which concern the one area of the new “Islamic” world where already in the first century ah, so we are led to understand by our sources, Muslims were actually in the majority.

The Ḥijāz (a region of west Arabia which includes Mecca and Medina) was the focus of Muḥammad's mission, and so it is not surprising that earlier religions were thought to have disappeared there most rapidly. After Muḥammad's death the new caliph in Medina, Abū Bakr, had to wage war to compel the rest of Arabia to accept his and the new community's authority, but after these relatively brief ridda wars the Peninsula had largely been won over, at least to the political hegemony of the Muslims of Medina and Mecca.Footnote 3 Many later Muslim scholars argued that in the time of the second caliph, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–44), the Ḥijāz (or, more radically, the whole Arabian Peninsula) was freed from the presence of non-Muslims through a programme of expulsion. This action is justified by reference to a handful of apparently Prophetic statements, perhaps most famously, “Two religions should not join/remain in the peninsula/land of the Arabs”.Footnote 4

As is clear, however, from an investigation of the earliest extant discussions of this question, matters were not this simple. The statements attributed to the Prophet, his Companions, and other early authorities on this question vary considerably concerning who was expelled, by whom, and from where. The later schools of Islamic law also differed in their discussions of the application of this ruling. Furthermore, historians, geographers and travellers to Arabia continued to refer to the existence of non-Muslim communities, even in areas widely considered to be within the Ḥijāz, throughout the early Islamic centuries. Such evidence should caution us against simplistic assumptions that, very early in the Islamic period, all non-Muslim communities were effectively and comprehensively expelled from the Ḥijāz, never to appear there again. In light of much recent research, it is unlikely that the early Muslim community would have taken such serious action against non-Muslims at such an early stage in its development, before many of the symbols and rituals that came to define “Islam” and “Muslims” and differentiate them from “non-Muslims” were fully in place.Footnote 5

This invites us to wonder why such importance came to be placed by so many scholars on the prohibition of non-Muslims from residing in the Ḥijāz. Although such an investigation must focus in part upon the somewhat unfashionable issue of the historical reliability of reports about the expulsion, that is by no means the culmination of the present article. Since it will be demonstrated in what follows that either there was no such comprehensive attempt at expelling non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz, or if there was that it had manifestly failed, we must then account for the reasons why so many scholars over the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries and beyond maintained that non-Muslims had in the past been banned from residing in the Ḥijāz and that they should still be in the present. I wish to suggest here that this can be explained by turning to recent scholarship demonstrating the significance of the gradual emergence of Mecca as Islam's single most sacred centre, and with it of the Ḥijāz more broadly, together with the importance of sacred spaces in conflicts over the drawing up of boundaries between communities that perceive each other as fundamentally different. It was only as Mecca and the surrounding Ḥijāz gained stature as Islam's principal sanctuary and holy land that access to the region became one defining feature of what it meant to be a Muslim in a world still dominated by adherents of other faiths.

Religions of pre-Islamic Arabia

In order to begin investigating some of these questions, it may be helpful to provide a very brief overview of the religious map of pre-Islamic Arabia.Footnote 6 It is well known, of course, that many of the inhabitants of Arabia, and especially of the Ḥijāz, are said to have been polytheists and idolaters (Ar. mushrikūn) before the revelations to Muḥammad, although what precisely that meant in practice may be in some doubt.Footnote 7 Muslim scholars such as Ibn al-Kalbī (d. c. 204/819–20), Ibn Hishām (d. c. 218/833–4), and Muḥammad b. Ḥabīb (d. 245/859–60) certainly present a picture of a Ḥijāz (and a wider Arabia) filled with idols' shrines, attendants and worshippers, but some modern scholars have justifiably expressed some scepticism concerning their accounts.Footnote 8

Whatever the state of local Arabian religions, however, it is becoming ever clearer that Christianity and Judaism were making important inroads into the Peninsula in pre-Islamic late antiquity. Christianity found a home along the eastern Arabian shore of the Gulf; there seems to have been a bishopric in the Bahrain archipelago by 410 ce, and a number of Syriac writers are known from the area.Footnote 9 It is also well attested in parts of south Arabia, particularly at Najrān from the mid-fifth century ce,Footnote 10 and at the northern edge of the Peninsula in the border regions of Syria, Palestine and Iraq.Footnote 11 Considerable effort in modern scholarship has been devoted to trying to establish the existence of Christians in the Ḥijāz around Mecca and Medina, but it has to be said that the evidence usually offered for their presence in that area remains poor. Irfan Shahîd, one of the more recent proponents of the existence of Christianity in the pre-Islamic Ḥijāz, has suggested that there were some monasteries as far south as Wādī al-Qurā – about 170 miles north-west of Medina – based mostly on enigmatic references in a few lines of Arabic poetry, and also argued that Theodore, consecrated in 542–43 ce as the bishop of “ḥirtā d-ṭayāyē”, undertook a mission, albeit it unsuccessfully, to spread Christianity in western Arabia.Footnote 12 This is all rather speculative, however, and the presence of anything more than a few individual Christians in pre-Islamic Mecca and Medina is yet to be securely demonstrated. Late antique sources for episcopal geography are totally silent on the Ḥijāz (north of Najrān), and one later, perhaps fifth-/eleventh-century Christian Arabic author, ʿAmr b. Mattā, explicitly states that Christianity never penetrated the Ḥijāz because the missionaries were too preoccupied with the kings of Kinda and Yemen.Footnote 13 That said, as speculative as the evidence is, it is worth noting that Waraqa b. Nawfal, cousin of Muḥammad's first wife Khadīja, was apparently a convert to Christianity, and that the pre-Islamic Kaʿba is reported to have contained an image of Jesus and Mary.Footnote 14

Judaism was perhaps even more successful than Christianity in the Arabian Peninsula, at least in the Ḥijāz.Footnote 15 An increasingly vivid picture of Judaism in south Arabia is growing, mainly thanks to epigraphic and archaeological discoveries; the Himyarite rulers, who publicly promulgated a form of monotheism from the late fourth century ce, are now widely assumed to have favoured Judaism.Footnote 16 The existence of pre-Islamic Jewish communities in the Ḥijāz is not so well attested in contemporary literary sources, although it may be important that two third-century ce rabbis are said to have considered it worth their while to travel to al-Ḥijr (Hegra)/Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ to improve their Aramaic.Footnote 17 The sixth-century ce historian Procopius also noted that on the island of Iotabe, perhaps at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, “Hebrews had lived from of old in autonomy, but in the reign of this Justinian they have become subject to the Romans”.Footnote 18 More importantly, inscriptions from some sites in the northern Ḥijāz (especially al-ʿUlā and al-Ḥijr/Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) covering a period at least between the first century bce and the fourth century ce may attest to the presence of Jewish communities.Footnote 19 Jews in several settlements in north-west Arabia – especially in Khaybar, Fadak, Taymāʾ, and Wādī al-Qurā – and in Medina are well attested in Islamic sources, particularly in the context of the Prophet's campaigns but also elsewhere.Footnote 20 Fred Astren has suggested that Muslim historians' assumptions about the existence of Judaism in pre-Islamic Arabia may in fact have been based on where Jews were still to be found in their own times;Footnote 21 Adhruḥ in southern Jordan, about nine miles east of Petra, offers a good example of a town whose inhabitants were said by one Muslim scholar – Ibn Saʿd (d. 230/845) – to have been Jews in 9/630, but for which archaeology has only uncovered evidence of Christianity.Footnote 22 The epigraphic evidence does, however, suggest that Jews did live in some of these settlements in pre-Islamic times, and so it seems likely that if an early Muslim ruler had wanted to remove Christians and Jews from the Arabian Peninsula, or even just from the Ḥijāz, there would have been some to expel.

How were the expulsions presented?

There is not space here to discuss all the reports and narratives about the expulsions found across the sources, but some attempt to show the kinds of material to be dealt with is important.Footnote 23 To start with what is probably our earliest source, the Quran testifies to a limited attempt at expulsion. Q 9:28 states:Footnote 24

O believers, the idolaters (al-mushrikūn) are indeed unclean (najas); so let them not come near the Holy Mosque (al-masjid al-ḥarām) after this year of theirs. If you fear poverty, God shall surely enrich you of His bounty, if He will; God is All-knowing, All-wise.

Unfortunately, the sense of this verse depends upon interpretation: who exactly are the “idolaters” (mushrikūn) involved, and what is “the Holy Mosque” (al-masjid al-ḥarām) which they can no longer approach? It is possible that mushrikūn used here refers only to non-monotheists, although a verse slightly later (Q 9:30) may lend some support to including Jews and Christians among those criticized in this verse. Classically, al-masjid al-ḥarām would apply only to the area surrounding the Kaʿba in the centre of Mecca, but some early exegetes and jurists interpreted it as meaning the whole Meccan ḥaram, an area considerably larger which extended several miles in each direction.Footnote 25 This is an interpretation of the Quran's use of al-masjid al-ḥarām for which some modern scholars have expressed support.Footnote 26 Even so, however, it still leaves us only with “idolaters” (mushrikūn) being expelled from a very small part of the Ḥijāz. Another verse in this sūra (Q 9:17) criticizes non-believers for attending to God's “mosques” (mā kāna li-l-mushrikīn an yaʿmurū masājid Allāh shāhidīn ʿalā anfusihim bi-al-kufr), but what this meant in particular at the time is difficult to say now.Footnote 27

Later scholars did refer to Q 9:28 in their discussions of the presence of non-Muslims in Arabia and the Ḥijāz,Footnote 28 but they also went far beyond its seemingly limited objectives. The Yemeni ḥadīth collector and jurist, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 211/827), provides a sizeable and relatively early collection of relevant traditions, and for these reasons the following summary will be drawn principally from his collection.Footnote 29 (This is by no means to suggest that ʿAbd al-Razzāq's collection of traditions was exhaustive or that they are necessarily earlier or in any way more “reliable” than those transmitted by other scholars.Footnote 30) Within ʿAbd al-Razzāq's collection, as well as the “no two religions” report mentioned earlier, there are traditions which refer to bans on Jews and/or Christians, and sometimes all non-Muslims, from residing in the peninsula/land of the Arabs (jazīrat/arḍ al-ʿarab), or just from the Ḥijāz, or sometimes even just from one or more of Medina, Khaybar and Najrān. It is most usually ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb who is deemed responsible for the expulsion, but often Prophetic statements are invoked to support his actions. To give one example:Footnote 31

ʿAbd al-Razzāq — Maʿmar [b. Rāshid] — al-Zuhrī — [Saʿīd] b. al-Musayyab: The Messenger of God (ṣ) said, “No two religions should come together in the land of the Arabs (arḍ al-ʿarab)”, or “the land of the Ḥijāz”. So ʿUmar inquired after that until he had found conclusive proof (al-thabt) for it. Al-Zuhrī said, “So because of that ʿUmar expelled them”.

Some traditions allow concessions – ʿUmar is said, for example, to have permitted Jews and Christians to enter Medina for business for up to three days – but at least one actually extends the prohibition to every “miṣr” (which can be understood loosely here as a major Muslim settlement). At least two traditions, the first included within ʿAbd al-Razzāq's collection but the second to be found in Ibn Abī Shayba's (d. 235/849) Muṣannaf, both of which have similar isnāds (predominantly Meccan) and report the opinions of the Medinan Companion Jābir b. ʿAbd Allāh, have very interesting exceptions to the rule.Footnote 32 In the first, commenting on the mushrikūn banned from al-masjid al-ḥarām in Q 9:28, Jābir said, “Except those who are slaves or one of the ahl al-jizya”;Footnote 33 in the second, when asked if Zoroastrians (al-majūs) could enter the ḥaram, Jābir replied, “If they are people under our protection, then yes (ammā ahl dhimmatinā fa-naʿam)”.Footnote 34

It is clear enough then that there were a relatively wide variety of options to be found within the traditions transmitted in discussions of this issue. How were the conflicting options resolved? To a great extent they were not, and it should be noted from the start that conflicting opinions on this question have remained present throughout the centuries. Some scholars could select certain traditions upon which to base their interpretation, others could choose others; even where the same traditions were selected interpretations could vary considerably, particularly concerning the precise area covered by the expulsion. To start with, we can compare the treatment of this question in two ḥadīth collectors' works which are not particularly comprehensive (on this particular question). The first, the Sunan of al-Dārimī (d. 255/868) includes only the following tradition:Footnote 35

ʿAffān — Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān — Ibrāhīm b. Maymūn, a Kufan — Saʿīd b. Samura b. Jundab — his father, Samura — Abū ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ: One of the last things the Messenger of God (ṣ) said was, “Expel the Jews from the Ḥijāz and the inhabitants of Najrān from the Arabian Peninsula”.

This seems a relatively minimalist position, especially when compared to al-Tirmidhī's (d. 279/892) two traditions on the subject in his chapter specifically on the expulsions, which both have the Prophet state that he would have expelled Jews and Christians (the implication in one being all of them; in the other it is explicitly spelled out that only Muslims would remain) from the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 36

Other jurists, whose works focused more on deriving and explaining rules from a range of sources, rather than simply transmitting traditions, also came up with a variety of opinions and took their discussions beyond the confines of the traditions.Footnote 37 Al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), eponymous founder of the classical Shāfiʿī school (madhhab) of Islamic law, held that non-Muslims could not enter the Meccan ḥaram at all, and they could not move to the Ḥijāz permanently although they could temporarily visit Ḥijāzī settlements (except, of course, Mecca) for up to three days. Other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, however, including Yemen, were open to them.Footnote 38 The Ḥanafī madhhab, however, which traced its origins back to the Kufan jurist Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), is said by several non-Ḥanafīs to have allowed non-Muslims into the entire Arabian Peninsula, including Mecca, although they could not settle in that town.Footnote 39 The Mālikīs, named after their Medinan eponym Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), held that the total ban on settlement of all non-Muslims applied to the entire Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 40 The actual legal positions held within the schools of law were rather more various than these generalizations suggest, and it should be noted that several Ḥanafī sources express very clearly the wish that non-Muslims should not settle in Arabia, but could only enter for trade.Footnote 41

Some scholars took traditions proscribing non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz and/or the Arabian Peninsula much further, and applied them in legal discussions of other issues. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) was asked why he denied the legal right of pre-emption (shufʿa) to Jews and Christians and replied, “Because the Prophet (ṣ) said, ‘Two religions should not join in the Arabian Peninsula’”.Footnote 42 A handful took such traditions to great lengths and used them to suggest that non-Muslims should not, in fact, be allowed to reside in any town in which Muslims were the majority population. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 187/803 or 189/805), for example, is held to have said: “Nor should Dhimmīs be permitted to reside in cities inhabited by Muslims, for [as stated in a Tradition] the Apostle expelled them from Madīna, and it is related concerning [the caliph] ʿAlī [b. Abī Ṭālib] that he expelled them from Kūfa”.Footnote 43 The famous jurist, Quranic exegete and historian, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), may have been one of the scholars who interpreted these non-Muslims in Arabia traditions in the broadest possible way; if a fairly extensive citation of his opinion on this matter in a treatise by Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355) can be treated as reliable, he too used these traditions to argue in detail for non-Muslims to be forced out of anywhere where the Muslims were the majority population.Footnote 44

Non-Muslims in Arabia and the Ḥijāz after the Rāshidūn period

This brief survey has demonstrated that in spite of the existence of traditions which unanimously banned non-Muslims from entering the Ḥijāz and, sometimes, the entire Arabian Peninsula, the range of opinions on this topic held by Muslim scholars over the first four centuries ah varied considerably. In this light it should come as no surprise, as noted by several modern scholars, that other sources (historical, biographical, geographical) continued to mention or allude to the existence of non-Muslim communities within Arabia, and even within the Ḥijāz, throughout the pre-modern period.Footnote 45 The Christian community of east Arabia seems to have flourished well into the Islamic era.Footnote 46 Christianity is still attested in south Arabia in the third/ninth century, and in Najrān – one of the towns specifically singled out in many accounts for the expulsion of its non-Muslim inhabitants – as late as the fourth/tenth century.Footnote 47 Jewish communities, of course, remained in Yemen throughout the centuries until the foundation of the modern state of Israel, although their presence in that region was not always without controversy.Footnote 48

The evidence for the Ḥijāz is patchier, but there is still plenty to go on. A few examples here will suffice. When the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (re-)constructed the Prophet's Mosque in Medina in the late first/early eighth century, several sources, including Medina's local historian Ibn Zabāla (d. after 199/814), mention that he had non-Muslim artisans brought to that town from Byzantium to undertake the work; Ibn Zabāla made several scandalous allegations about what these artisans got up to in Medina, including attempting to urinate on the Prophet's tomb and putting up the image of a pig above some of the arches in the qibla wall.Footnote 49 In a perhaps far-fetched anecdote, Muṣʿab b. al-Zubayr (brother of the late first-/seventh-century caliphal claimant ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr) apparently toured Medina with a son of the Jewish Exilarch (ibn raʾs al-jālūt).Footnote 50

These are only examples of non-Muslims visiting the Ḥijāz, but there is also further evidence that they resided there too throughout the pre-modern period; again I will provide just a few examples.Footnote 51 Although the Meccan Ibn Jurayj (d. c. 149–51/766–69) had claimed that by his time there were only Muslims in Khaybar, during a discussion of the outbreak of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad's rebellion with the Zanj in the year 255/868–69, al-Ṭabarī notes that a Jew from Khaybar (rajul yahūdī khaybarī) called Māndawayh came to ʿAlī and claimed to have found his description in the Torah.Footnote 52 Khaybar is one of the Ḥijāzī towns that is specifically mentioned in many reports about ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb's expulsion of non-Muslims. The famous Radhanite Jewish merchants were, according to Ibn Khurradādhbih (wr. late third/ninth century), still using the west Arabian ports of al-Jār and Jedda on their route from Clysma/al-Qulzum down the Red Sea.Footnote 53 In the mid–late fourth/tenth century the geographer al-Muqaddasī described the settlement of Wādī al-Qurā, known in his day as Qurḥ. He started his discussion of this then important settlement by saying, “There is not in the Ḥijāz today a town (balad) more splendid, flourishing or populated, nor with more merchants, properties (amwāl) and crops (khayrāt) after Mecca than this”. He ended his account of the Ḥijāz's second largest (albeit only briefly) town noting, “It is dominated by Jews”.Footnote 54

It is not only Muslim sources that preserve evidence for these non-Islamic Arabian communities. Some Gaonic responsa indicate that Jews still resided in Wādī al-Qurā and Taymāʾ at least, and the undated Arabic-language inscriptions in Hebrew script from northwest Arabia (the area around al-ʿUlā) are probably best regarded as having been engraved well into the Islamic period.Footnote 55 If one very strange source is to be believed (and it is an enormous “if”), there was even a metropolitan bishop of the Church of the East based in Medina (Yathrib) in the early seventh/thirteenth century.Footnote 56

Muslim scholars were considerably confused in their attempts to match definitions of the Ḥijāz or the peninsula/land of the Arabs both by the fact that there was no precise agreement on the exact towns for which specific historical expulsions of non-Muslims were reported, and by the realities of continued non-Muslim habitation in many towns which could easily be included within many definitions of those areas.Footnote 57 One nice example among many concerns the following three reports, the first taken from al-Balādhurī's (d. 279/892) Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān, the second from al-Wāqidī's (d. 207/822) Kitāb al-Maghāzī, and the third from Abū Dāwūd's (d. 275/889) Sunan:Footnote 58

  1. [1] ʿAbd al-Aʿlā b. Ḥammād al-Narsī — Ḥammād b. Salama — Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd — Ismāʿīl b. Ḥakīm — ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz: ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb expelled the inhabitants of Fadak, Taymāʾ and Khaybar.

  2. [2] When it came to the time of ʿUmar – may God be pleased with him – he expelled the Jews from Khaybar and Fadak. However, he did not expel the inhabitants of Taymāʾ and Wādī al-Qurā because they are within Syria. What is beyond Wādī al-Qurā towards Medina is considered the Ḥijāz, and what is behind that within Syria.

  3. [3] Abū Dāwūd — al-Ḥārith b. Miskīn was read to (quriʾa ʿalā al-Ḥārith …) while I was witnessing — Ashhab b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz — Mālik: ʿUmar expelled the population of Najrān, but that of Taymāʾ was not expelled because it is not part of the lands of the Arabs (bilād al-ʿarab). As for the wādī [i.e. Wādī al-Qurā], I think that those Jews there were not expelled because they were not thought to be part of the land of the Arabs (arḍ al-ʿarab).

Some further traditions specify that the Jews of Khaybar were removed from that settlement to Taymāʾ.Footnote 59 Faced with this confusion, it seems that some legal scholars hedged their bets a little and offered conflicting definitions themselves. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal was apparently one such jurist:Footnote 60

ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥanbal — his father — his uncle: The Arabian Peninsula (jazīrat al-ʿarab) means Medina and what is next to it, because the Prophet (ṣ) expelled the Jews [from there] and they are not allowed to reside there.

ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad: I heard my father tell the Prophet's (ṣ) ḥadīth, “No two religions should remain in the Arabian Peninsula (jazīrat al-ʿarab)”, and his explanation was, “What was not controlled by the Persians or Romans” (mā lam yakun fī yad fārs wa-al-rūm). Al-Aṣmaʿī said, “Everything that is below the limits (aṭrāf) of Syria”.

It seems that as far as many legal and legally-minded scholars were concerned, the limits of the Ḥijāz/Arabian Peninsula were often defined by the limits of contemporary non-Muslim residence, and not vice versa. That is to say, many (although by no means all) scholars seemed to have assumed that all the non-Muslims had been expelled from the Ḥijāz/Arabia during the early decades of the Muslim community, and therefore anywhere they still resided could not be within the Ḥijāz/Arabia. This rather pragmatic and circular understanding also, of course, ensured that no further expulsions were necessary. The large and prosperous Jewish community of al-Muqaddasī's day could be left in place because Qurḥ/Wādī al-Qurā was outside the Ḥijāz, and this was in turn proven by that community's existence.

That early Islamic legal scholars seem to have constructed a definition of the Ḥijāz/Arabian Peninsula to fit in with the geography of the expulsions – as opposed to suggesting expulsions that fitted with an already conceived definition of the Ḥijāz/Arabian Peninsula – can be demonstrated by comparing it to definitions of the Ḥijāz created by specialists in other branches of knowledge. The Ḥijāz could be defined in many different ways according to taste. For the famous early theologian, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728), the Ḥijāz was almost a non-terrestrial entity, which “guards over (ḥajaza ʿalā) the rivers and trees, and will be [the location of] the gardens on the Day of Resurrection”.Footnote 61 This is, of course, in part a lexicographical definition based around one meaning derived from the root ḥ-j-z, and other lexicographers also offered definitions based around the root meaning.Footnote 62

Perhaps the clearest evidence that jurists were constructing geographical definitions on the back of legal traditions is that geographers offered further definitions which, since many may have been less inclined to care as much about the apparent expulsion of non-Muslims, were often far more extensive than those of the legal scholars. Al-Muqaddasī included his majority Jewish town Qurḥ within the Ḥijāz as well as settlements further north, such as al-Ḥijr/Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ; he actually placed Adhruḥ, about 300 miles north-west of Qurḥ, on the border between Syria and the Ḥijāz. (Another source also has Ayla, at the north-east corner of the Red Sea, as part of the Ḥijāz.Footnote 63) To the south, he included Najrān – whose Christian inhabitants many sources have as expelled in the early Islamic decades – within Yemen and not in the Ḥijāz at all.Footnote 64 The conflict between traditions on the expulsion of non-Muslims and many definitions of the Arabian Peninsula and the Ḥijāz led a large number of legal scholars to alter their definitions of the Ḥijāz. Not only does this make it hard to justify using sources which discuss these apparent expulsions in working out early Islamic definitions of Arabia and the Ḥijāz; it also suggests that a group of later scholars were loath to accept that what had by their day become a clear Prophetic command was not being obeyed, and/or keen to remove the possibility of further impractical attempts at removing non-Muslims from those parts of the Arabian Peninsula in which they were firmly established.

Was there actually an expulsion?

This is far from the only case where the theoretical regulations outlined by Muslim jurists were not fully adhered to in practice. Goitein noted another example that applies to Islamic law on dealing with non-Muslims:Footnote 65

According to a proviso in one of the oldest sources of Muslim law, no churches or synagogues were to be established in the new towns founded by the conquerors, an injunction that soon was understood to mean that no new non-Islamic houses of worship were to be erected anywhere in Islamic territory. In fact, however, numerous churches and synagogues existed in Fustat and Baghdad at a time when the power of Islam was at its height, and even Cairo, which was founded in 969, soon had its own churches and synagogues.Footnote 66

Nonetheless the contradictions discussed so far in the evidence for non-Muslim residency in the Ḥijāz into the Islamic period should make modern scholars question whether there was ever an historical attempt (or attempts) to remove non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz, at least by anyone with the authority and power to do so. There are certainly serious problems with the claims that Muḥammad and/or ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb were responsible for any attempted expulsions. Muḥammad may well have expelled the three famous Jewish tribes – the Banū Qaynuqāʿ, Banū al-Naḍīr and Banū Qurayẓa – from Medina, but it is hard to accept that, if he were personally responsible for more widespread expulsions, later reports would so widely attribute that action to someone else. That somebody else is, in the extant material, most commonly ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, but there are some indications that his later, Umayyad, namesake, ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–20), may have been considered a more important candidate at an earlier stage.

If ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz had been the caliph first associated with measures taken against Arabia's non-Muslims, then it is simple enough to see how later sources could easily have attributed his action – deliberately or accidentally – to ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb. This suggestion is partially supported by the fact that on occasion ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz appears as the last link before ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb in the isnāds of the traditions discussed above.Footnote 67 It is more firmly supported by the existence of traditions which have ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz the ultimate source for the Prophet's ruling on the expulsion of non-Muslims from Arabia rather than ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb.Footnote 68 Such a confusion of ʿUmars did occur in other circumstances; both are on record as having issued various parts of what later came to be known as the “shurūṭ ʿUmar”.Footnote 69

At least one report, preserved in Ibn Abī Shayba's Muṣannaf, offers very strong support for the suggestion that the ʿUmar originally associated with expulsions of non-Muslims from Arabia was the Umayyad caliph:Footnote 70

Yazīd b. Hārūn — Ibn Abī Dhiʾb: He witnessed ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz expel the ahl al-dhimma from Medina during his caliphate, and sold their slaves to the Muslims (wa-bāʿa ariqqāʾahum min al-muslimīn).

Ibn Abī Shayba's next tradition has an otherwise unidentified ʿUmar expel the mushrikūn from the Arabian Peninsula because of a Prophetic statement on this;Footnote 71 given the preceding tradition, this ʿUmar could be the Umayyad caliph.

There are still problems with the actions ascribed to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. One is that several of the traditions where he appears in the isnād also emphasize that Muḥammad took against the Jews and/or Christians because they made religious buildings out of the tombs of their Prophets.Footnote 72 Since ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was, before he became caliph, famously the governor of Medina who oversaw the incorporation of Muḥammad's tomb within the Prophet's Mosque during the caliphate of al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik, it is hard to imagine him ordering the expulsion of non-Muslims from Arabia for this reason. It should also be made clear that, even if any caliph had issued an order for the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz, the current state of modern scholarship on the extent of the power and authority of the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates would suggest that he would not have had the means to enforce the measure in practice, and so it is no surprise that non-Muslim communities in the Arabian Peninsula continue to be attested for the fourth/tenth century and beyond.Footnote 73 That the size of those communities waned slowly but surely presumably has much to do with the same processes of gradual conversion to Islam, perhaps helped along by intermarriage, that we see in other conquered regions.

Whether or not anyone tried to expel non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz, reports arguing for this did enter circulation at some point, and it is hard to imagine that this would have happened during the first/seventh century, at a time when the nascent Muslim community had not yet had much time to work out what really distinguished them from their non-Muslim neighbours.Footnote 74 It was during the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries that many of the better-known actions against non-Muslims were being taken.Footnote 75 Traditions and narratives – be they preserved, invented or altered – of what had happened, or should have happened, in the Muslim community's earliest decades played a key role in these later interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims, as can be demonstrated by the “discovery” of what was said to be a copy of the Prophet's agreement with the inhabitants of Najrān as late as 265/878–79.Footnote 76 It is within this kind of milieu that ideas about the expulsion of non-Muslims from parts of Arabia can more comfortably be understood to have taken hold. Not only would this fit better with the history of the development of Muslim/non-Muslim relations; research over the last few decades has shown how it was only by the late first/seventh century that the Ḥijāz, with Mecca at its centre, was starting to gain its absolute primacy as the premier Islamic holy land.Footnote 77

The Ḥijāz as Islamic holy land and communal boundaries

Perhaps the most important question remains: why did the idea that the Prophet and his caliphal successors had expressed and eventually acted upon a wish to expel non-Muslims from the Ḥijāz enter the discourse on Muslim/non-Muslim interactions and, more importantly, continue to play a relatively important part in many scholars' contributions to that discourse? No doubt there are several ways of approaching such a problem. Here I would like to propose one possible solution that builds on a growing trend in recent research in late antique history to emphasize the significance that was placed upon the establishment of boundaries – both theoretical and sometimes physical – between different religious communities. Sacred spaces played a demonstrably meaningful role in such communal delineations and against this background it makes a certain sense that the discomfort of Muslim scholars with the presence of non-Muslims in the Ḥijāz would increase over time together with the ever more firmly perceived sanctity of that region and its two principal towns, Mecca and Medina.

Much recent research has considered how the various religious communities of the late antique Near East shaped their group identities and worked out what connected them with or distinguished them from other religious groups.Footnote 78 An attempt to work out what distinguished one's own group from others was one of the most important parts of what has been called “identity formation” and the drawing up of “communal boundaries”, and in particular working out what distinguished one's own group from those that were in other respects quite similar. As Jonathan Z. Smith has nicely put it:Footnote 79

The “otherness” of the common housefly can be taken for granted, but it is also impenetrable. For this reason, its “otherness” is of no theoretical interest. While the “other” may be perceived as being either LIKE-US or NOT-LIKE-US, he is, in fact, most problematic when he is TOO-MUCH-LIKE-US, or when he claims to BE-US. It is here that the real urgency is called forth not by the requirement to place the “other,” but rather to situate ourselves. It is here, to invoke the language of a theory of ritual, that we are not so much concerned with the drama of “expulsion,” but with the more mundane and persistent process of “micro-adjustment.” This is not a matter of the “far,” but, preeminently, of the “near.” The problem is not alterity, but similarity – at times, even identity. A “theory of the other” is but another way of phrasing a “theory of the self.”

Sacred spaces, and access to those spaces, have throughout history played an important role, not only in such efforts at drawing up boundaries between religious communities, but also in demonstrating one community's superiority over another. There are plenty of examples of this from pre-Islamic late antiquity and only a few can be given here. Hagith Sivan has noted that Mt Gerizim “was the territory that stood at the heart of the controversy which marked and marred relations between Samaritans and Christians”, and the emperor Zeno (r. 474–91 ce) famously built a church on its summit and banished Samaritans from approaching it in retaliation for one of their revolts.Footnote 80 Jews are repeatedly said to have been banned from Jerusalem, at least by the emperors Hadrian (r. 117–38 ce), Constantine (r. 306–37 ce),Footnote 81 and Heraclius (r. 610–41 ce),Footnote 82 and Jerome in his late fourth-century ce commentary on Zephaniah demonstrated how Christians could use this to emphasize victory over their Jewish rivals.Footnote 83 Over the fifth and sixth centuries ce, a succession of increasingly hostile Christian imperial edicts were passed concerning the maintenance of synagogues, culminating in an isolated law of the emperor Justinian i (r. 527–65) addressed to the Praetorian Prefect of Africa in 535 ce which stated that “we do not grant that their synagogues shall stand, but want them to be converted in form to churches”.Footnote 84 From the late fourth century ce as Christian attitudes towards the so-called pagans became more hardened, their shrines and sanctuaries were a principal target. Temples all across the Roman Near East were closed, demolished and converted to churches: there is an apparent example of the latter already from the reign of Constantine at Mamre, to the north of Hebron, and two other famous instances that can stand for many others involved the Marneion in Gaza in the early fifth century ce and the Serapeum in Alexandria in 391 ce.Footnote 85 An edict of 391 ce issued to the Prefect and Count of Egypt in the aftermath of the closure of the Serapeum banned all entrance into the temples.Footnote 86

Early Muslims recognized that they shared a great deal in common with Jews and Christians, and therefore, of course, also strove hard to identify what distinguished them from Jews and Christians, especially as they established contacts on an ever-increasing number of levels with the non-Muslim inhabitants of the conquered territories. Holy places played a very important part in this. ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb is said to have reiterated the ban on Jews from Jerusalem in his treaty with the Christian inhabitants of that city.Footnote 87 ʿAbd al-Malik's well-known appropriation of the site of Temple Mount for his new Dome of the Rock and his son al-Walīd's equally well-known appropriation of the Church of St John for his new mosque in Damascus both also speak to the importance of sacred spaces in relations between communities.

It is in this context that we should place the continuing discussions over whether or not non-Muslims could enter the Ḥijāz. As the Ḥijāz increased in stature as Islam's premier holy land, access to it became an important part of the emerging definitions of what it meant to be a Muslim; likewise, keeping non-Muslims away from it – even if only theoretically – became one important boundary between Muslims and others. In part this may have been an attempt to ensure the permanent purity of Islam's central sacred site at Mecca; the Quran stresses the impurity of the mushrikūn as reason for keeping them away from al-masjid al-ḥarām. Al-Shāfiʿī's division between Mecca's ḥaram, which no non-Muslim should enter, and the rest of the Ḥijāz, which they could enter temporarily, also supports this idea. That the idea of the Ḥijāz or Arabia as an Islamic holy land was an important communal boundary is highlighted specifically by some traditions. Several place some emphasis on the point that after the expulsions only Muslims would remain.Footnote 88 Others insist that the reason behind the Prophet's order of the expulsion of non-Muslims was that “the land belongs to God and His Messenger (ṣ)”.Footnote 89 By the fifth/eleventh century, al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058) was particularly explicit about the Ḥijāz's sanctity being the reason why no non-Muslim could reside there, and Mecca's extreme sanctity being why they could not even enter.Footnote 90 A slightly younger contemporary of his, al-Sarakhsī (d. c. 483/1090–91), suggested that the measures aimed at preventing non-Muslims from residing in Arabia were justified by respect for the Prophet, whose birthplace was Arabia.Footnote 91 This would also explain how reports which earlier seem to have focused at least equally on expulsions from Najrān and the northern Ḥijāzī oases came increasingly to be used to make the case for prohibiting non-Muslim access to Mecca and Medina, an injunction which remains in place today.

Whether or not any significant groups of non-Muslims had ever been forcibly expelled from any Ḥijāzī or Arabian settlements is important, but becomes less so for our understanding of the continuing attention paid to traditions and opinions discussing the expulsion(s). It was the Ḥijāz's progressively central role as Islam's holy land which meant that, in theory at least, it should be off-limits to non-Muslims. How those non-Muslims who did travel there, or even resided there, dealt with this theoretical communal boundary – whether indeed it impacted upon their lives in any way at all – would be fascinating to know, but unfortunately, since they have left so little literature of their own, we are unlikely ever to do so.

References

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24 The translation is Arberry's (slightly adapted).

25 For example, al-Shāfiʿī, Kitāb al-Umm, ed. al-Muṭṭalib, R.F. ʿAbd, 11 vols (al-Manṣūra: Dār al-Wafāʾ, 1422/2001)Google Scholar, V, 418; ʿAbd al-Razzāq, al-Muṣannaf, ed. Ḥ.-R. al-Aʿẓamī, 11 vols (Beirut: al-Majlis al-ʿIlmī, n.d.), X, 356 (no. 19356), where the opinion is ascribed to ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Rabāḥ (d. 115/733–34); al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, ed. Qamḥāwī, M.Ṣ., 5 vols (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1412/1992), IV, 278–81Google Scholar.

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28 And also occasionally to Q 5:2, on which see Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 330–3.

29 ʿAbd al-Razzāq's traditions can be found within his Muṣannaf, VI, 51–8 (nos 9977–95); X, 356–62 (nos 19356–74). On the circumstances of transmission which led to the doubling up of many traditions dealing with non-Muslims in volumes VI and X of the edited text of ʿAbd al-Razzāq's Muṣannaf, and for a persuasive argument that most of its traditions on the topic of non-Muslims at least probably were circulated by ʿAbd al-Razzāq, see Motzki, H., “The author and his work in the Islamic literature of the first centuries: the case of ʿAbd al-Razzāq's Muṣannaf”, JSAI 28, 2003, 171–201.Google Scholar

30 Relevant traditions can also be found in, for example, al-Shaybānī, Muwaṭṭaʾ al-imām Mālik: riwāyat Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī, ed. al-Laṭīf, ʿA.-W. ʿAbd, 3rd ed. (Cairo: Wizārat al-Awqāf, 1407/1987), 284–5Google Scholar (nos 873–4); al-Laythī, Yaḥyā, al-Muwaṭṭaʾ li-imām dār al-hijra Mālik b. Anas: riwāyat Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī al-Andalusī, ed. Maʿrūf, B.ʿA., 2nd ed., 2 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1417/1997)Google Scholar, II, 470–1 (Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ, nos 17–19); al-Ṭayālisī, Musnad (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-Niẓāmiyya, 1321/1903–04)Google Scholar, 31 (no. 229); Shayba, Ibn Abī, Muṣannaf, ed. al-Jumʿa, Ḥ. and al-Luḥaydān, M., 16 vols (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1425/2004)Google Scholar, XI, 346–7 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 71; nos 33534–41); Abū ʿUbayd, Kitāb al-Amwāl, ed. M.Kh. Harrās, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1406/1986 [reprint]), esp. 106–10; Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt, II/ii, 44; Aḥmad, Musnad, 6 vols (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maymāniyya, n.d.), I, 29, 32, 87, 195–6, 222; III, 345; VI, 274–5; al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmiʿal-ṣaḥīḥ, ed. A.M. Shākir, M.F. ʿAbd al-Bāqī and K.Y. al-Ḥūt, 5 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d. [reprint]), IV, 133–4 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 43); al-Dārimī, al-Sunan, ed. al-ʿAlamī, Kh.S. and Zamarlī, F.A., 2 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1407/1987)Google Scholar, II, 305–6 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 55); Dāwūd, Abū, Sunan, ed. al-Daʿʿās, ʿI.ʿU. and al-Sayyid, ʿĀ., 5 vols (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1418/1997)Google Scholar, III, 266–75, 279–81 (Kitāb al-Kharāj wa-al-imāra wa-al-fayʾ, abwāb 22–4, 28); al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-Jāmiʿal-ṣaḥīḥ, ed. Krehl, M.L. and Juynboll, T.W., 4 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1862–1908)Google Scholar, II, 72 (Kitāb al-Ḥarth wa-al-muzāraʿa, bāb 17); 294–5 (Kitāb al-Jizya, bāb 6); III, 185 (Kitāb al-Maghāzī, bāb 83).

31 ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Muṣannaf, VI, 53 (no. 9984); X, 359 (no. 19367).

32 On Jābir b. ʿAbd Allāh (d. between 68/687–88 and 79/698–99), see al-Mizzī, Tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. Maʿrūf, B.ʿA., 35 vols (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1402–13/1982–92)Google Scholar, IV, 443–54. The other shared links in the isnād are the Meccans Abū al-Zubayr (d. before 128/745–46) and Ibn Jurayj (d. c. 149–51/766–69), on whom see respectively al-Mizzī, Tahdhīb, XXVI, 402–11; XVIII, 338–54.

33 ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Muṣannaf, VI, 53 (no. 9982).

34 Ibn Abī Shayba, Muṣannaf, XI, 347 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 71; no. 33540).

35 Al-Dārimī, Sunan, II, 305–6 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 55).

36 Al-Tirmidhī, Jāmiʿ, IV, 133–4 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 43).

37 On this, see esp. Fattal, Statut légal, 86–8; Ferré, “Muhammad a-t-il exclu”, esp. 59–65, where he translates a discussion on the topic from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's (d. 751/1350) Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma. For a relatively early survey of varying jurists' opinions on this question, see al-Ṭabarī, Ikhtilāf al-fuqahāʾ, ed. Schacht, J., Das konstantinopler Fragment des Kitāb Iḫtilāf al-fuqahāʾ des Abū Ğaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Ğarīr aṭ-Ṭabarī (Leiden: Brill, 1933), 233–6Google Scholar.

38 Al-Shāfiʿī, Umm, V, 418–23. For a later Shāfiʿī discussion, see al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. Muʿawwaḍ, ʿA.M. and al-Mawjūd, ʿĀ.A. ʿAbd, 20 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1414–16/1994–96), XIV, 334–9Google Scholar; al-Māwardī, al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya wa-al-wilāyāt al-dīniyya, ed. al-Sirjānī, M.F. (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tawfīqiyya, 1978), 188–9Google Scholar. Some doubt has been expressed concerning the date of composition of the Kitāb al-Umm usually attributed to al-Shāfiʿī, and Norman Calder has suggested that a great deal of material may have continued to enter the text at the very least through the third/ninth century; see his Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 67–85Google Scholar.

39 Al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr, XIV, 334, 336; al-Māwardī, al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya, 188–9; Fattal, Statut légal, 87–8; Ferré, “Muhammad a-t-il exclu”, 62.

40 Fattal, Statut légal, 87; Ferré, “Muhammad a-t-il exclu”, 60. For an example of a broad Mālikī definition of the exclusion zone, see al-Jadd, Ibn Rushd, al-Bayān wa-al-taḥṣīl wa-al-sharḥ wa-al-tawjīh wa-al-taʿlīl fī masāʾil al-mustakhraja, ed. Ḥajjī, M. et al. , 20 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1404–7/1984–87)Google Scholar, XVII, 50.

41 For example, al-Sarakhsī, Sharḥ al-siyar al-kabīr, 4 vols (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-Niẓāmiyya, 1335–36/1916–18), III, 257–8Google Scholar; al-Kāsānī, Badāʾiʿ al-ṣanāʾiʿ fī tartīb al-sharāʾiʿ, 7 vols, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1406/1986)Google Scholar, VII, 114. That reports attributed to Mālik himself sometimes contradict the claims that all non-Muslims were expelled from all settlements of the Ḥijāz, see Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 321.

42 al-Khallāl, Abū Bakr, Ahl al-milal wa-al-ridda wa-al-zanādiqa wa-tārik al-ṣalāt wa-al-farā'iḍ min Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ, ed. Sulṭān, I.Ḥ., 2 vols (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maʿārif, 1416/1996)Google Scholar, I, 195 (no. 330); al-Kawsaj, Kitāb al-Masā'il ʿan imāmay ahl al-ḥadīth Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal wa-Isḥāq b. Rāhwayh, ed. al-Ḥulwānī, Ṭ.F., 3 vols (Cairo: al-Fārūq al-Ḥadītha, 1426/2005)Google Scholar, III, 234 (no. 2832). On Aḥmad's attitude towards non-Muslims more generally, see Sizgorich, T., Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 231–71Google Scholar.

43 Khadduri, M., The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybānī's Siyar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 277–8Google Scholar. As with al-Shāfiʿī's Kitāb al-Umm, Calder has questioned the dating of many works usually attributed to al-Shaybānī to his lifetime; see his Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, 39–66; cf., however, in part Sadeghi, B., “The authenticity of two 2nd/8th century Ḥanafī legal texts: the Kitāb al-Āthār and al-Muwaṭṭaʾ of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī”, Islamic Law and Society (ILS) 17/3–4, 2010, 291–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 See esp. Ward, “Fragment”. For some further discussion of the question of where, outside of the Ḥijāz or Arabia, non-Muslims could legitimately reside, see Levy-Rubin, M., “Shurūṭ ʿUmar and its alternatives: the legal debate on the status of the dhimmīs”, JSAI 30, 2005, 174–80Google Scholar; Bello, M. Fierro, “A Muslim land without Jews or Christians: Almohad policies regarding the ‘protected people’”, in Tischler, M.M. and Fidora, A. (eds), Christlicher Norden – muslimischer Suden: Ansprüche und Wirklichkeiten von Christen, Juden und Muslimen auf der iberischen Halbinsel im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2011), 231–47Google Scholar.

45 For other discussions, see for example Friedlaender, I., “The Jews of Arabia and the Gaonate”, Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) 1, 1910–11, 249–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tritton, Caliphs, 175–6; Fattal, Statut légal, 88–90; Newby, History, 97–108; Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 326–8; Elad, A., “Community of believers of ‘holy men’ and ‘saints’ or community of Muslims? The rise and development of early Muslim historiography”, Journal of Semitic Studies (JSS) 47/2, 2002, 296–7Google Scholar, n. 200.

46 As well as those studies cited above, n. 9, see also Fiey, J.M., “Diocèses syriens orientaux du Golfe Persique”, in Mémorial Mgr Gabriel Khouri-Sarkis (1898–1968) (Leuven: Imprimerie orientaliste, 1968), 209–19Google Scholar; Kennet, D., “The decline of eastern Arabia in the Sasanian period”, AAE 18/1, 2007, 89–94Google Scholar; Carter, R.A., “Christianity in the Gulf during the first centuries of Islam”, AAE 19/1, 2008, 71–108Google Scholar; Payne, R., “Monks, dinars and date palms: hagiographical production and the expansion of monastic institutions in the early Islamic Persian Gulf”, AAE 22/1, 2011, 97–111.Google Scholar

47 Beaucamp and Robin, “Christianisme”, 56–7. On the expulsion of the Najrānīs, see esp. Lecker, “Najrān Inc”.

48 Goitein, S.D., “The Jews of Yemen”, in Arberry, A.J. (ed.), Religion in the Middle East: Three Religions in Concord and Conflict, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), I, 226–35Google Scholar; Tobi, Y., The Jews of Yemen: Studies in Their History and Culture (Leiden: Brill, 1999)Google Scholar. The existence of Jews in Yemen seemed to cause particular problems in the eleventh/seventeenth century; see Ibn Abī Rijāl, al-Nuṣūṣ al-ẓāhira fī ijlāʾ al-yahūd al-fājira, ed. al-Tāzī, ʿA.-H., Majallat al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿirāqī 32/3–4, 1981, 378–400Google Scholar; al-Maghribī, Risāla fī baqāʾ al-yahūd fī arḍ al-Yaman, ed. and trans. M. Fabbro, Islamochristiana 16, 1990, 67–90.

49 Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā, ed. al-Sāmarrāʾī, Q., 5 vols (London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān, 1422/2001), II, 268–70Google Scholar.

50 Gil, M., “The Babylonian encounter and the exilarchic house in the light of Cairo Geniza documents and parallel Arab sources”, in Golb, N. (ed.), Judaeo-Arabic Studies: Proceedings of the Founding Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997)Google Scholar, 157.

51 For more examples, see the studies cited in n. 45.

52 Shabba, Ibn, Taʾrīkh al-Madīna al-munawwara, ed. Bayān, Y.S.-D. and Dandal, ʿA.M., 2 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1417/1996), I, 113Google Scholar; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk, ed. de Goeje, M.J. et al. , 3 parts in 13 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901)Google Scholar, III, 1760.

53 Khurradādhbih, Ibn, Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-mamālik, ed. de Goeje, M.J. (Leiden: Brill, 1889)Google Scholar, 153; Gil, M., “The Rādhānite merchants and the land of Rādhān”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17/3, 1974, 308–9Google Scholar.

54 Al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. de Goeje, M.J., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1906), 83–4Google Scholar; see also M. Lecker, “Wādī al-Ḳurā”, EI (second edition), XI, 18–19; Elad, “Community”, 297, n. 200. A century or so later, Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094) suggested that Jews had first settled in Wādī al-Qurā after the destruction of Thamūd: al-Bakrī, Muʿjam mā istaʿjam, ed. al-Saqqā, M., 4 vols (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa-al-Tarjama wa-al-Nashr, 1364–71/1945–51)Google Scholar, I, 43.

55 Friedlaender, “Jews”, 251; Mann, J., “The responsa of the Babylonian Geonim as a source of Jewish history”, JQR 7/4, 1916–17, 489Google Scholar; Hoyland, “Jews”, 102–3, 112–4.

56 This source is the so-called Statistique inédite de l'ancienne église chaldéo-nestorienne [= Taqwīm al-kanāʾis al-nusṭūriyya], ed. and trans. P. Aziz (Beirut: Imprimerie catholique, 1909), 8 for Medina. (I am very grateful to Muriel Debié for providing me with a copy of this text.) Modern scholars seem somewhat divided over the usefulness of the information provided in this source, which was written after the turn of the seventeenth century ce. J.M. Fiey, for example, noted that, “Cet ouvrage est d'ailleurs un factum tardif sans aucune valeur historique”; see his “Comment l'occident en vint à parler de ‘Chaldéens’”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78/3, 1996, 167Google Scholar, n. 29. Others, however, have given more weight to it, including Aigrain, R., “Arabie”, in Baudrillart, A. et al. (eds), Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1924)Google Scholar, col. 1333; Robin, C.J., “Arabia, Christians and Jews in”, in Vauchez, A. et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2 vols (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2000), I, 89–90Google Scholar. If this Statistique inédite were shown to contain generally reliable information, it would certainly shed remarkable new light on an otherwise totally hidden Christian community; as well as the metropolitan bishop at Medina and one at Ṣanʿāʾ, it also mentions a number of other Arabian bishops (including at Najrān and ʿUkāẓ), and a host of more minor officials and sizeable Christian communities. I have not spent much time working with this source, but my current feeling is that its information on the Ḥijāz at least seems most likely to be spurious, although if this is the case it is just as interesting that someone thought it worth inventing.

57 On early Islamic geographical definitions of the Ḥijāz and other constituent parts of the Arabian Peninsula, see also Lammens, H., “L'ancienne frontière entre la Syrie et le Ḥidjâz (notes de géographie historique)”, Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 14, 1918, 69–96Google Scholar; al-Wohaibi, A., The Northern Hijaz in the Writings of the Arab Geographers, 800–1150 (Beirut: al-Risalah, 1973), 17–31Google Scholar; Bashear, S., “Yemen in early Islam: an examination of non-tribal traditions”, Arabica 36/3, 1989, 327–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lecker, M., “Biographical notes on Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī”, JSS 41/1, 1996, 58–61Google Scholar; Retsö, J., The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 48–51Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of the problems faced by Muslim scholars confronting this particular question, see also Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 322–34.

58 Al-Balādhurī, Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān, ed. Goeje, M.J. de (Leiden: Brill, 1866), 34–5Google Scholar; al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-Maghāzī, ed. Jones, J.M.B., 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, II, 711; Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, III, 281 (Kitāb al-Kharāj wa-al-imāra wa-al-fayʾ, bāb 28).

59 For example, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Muṣannaf, VI, 55 (no. 9989); al-Bukhārī, Jāmiʿ, II, 72 (Kitāb al-Ḥarth wa-al-muzāraʿa, bāb, 17).

60 Al-Khallāl, Ahl al-milal, I, 127–8 (nos 143–4).

61 Al-Bakrī, Muʿjam, I, 11 (reading al-jinān, “the gardens”, instead of the published al-ḥinān).

62 For example, Aḥmad, al-Khalīl b. (attrib.), Kitāb al-ʿAyn, ed. al-Makhzūmī, M. and al-Sāmarrāʾī, I., 8 vols (Baghdad: Dār al-Rashīd, 1980–85)Google Scholar, III, 70; al-Iṣfahānī, Bilād al-ʿarab, ed. al-ʿAlī, Ṣ.A. and al-Jāsir, Ḥ. (Riyadh: Dār al-Yamāma, 1388/1968), 14–16Google Scholar; al-Bakrī, Muʿjam, I, 11–12.

63 Ḥazm, Ibn, Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, ed. Hārūn, ʿA.-S.M., 7th ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 2010)Google Scholar, 421.

64 Al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm, 68–70, 178.

65 Goitein, S.D., A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgement in One Volume, rev. and ed. Lassner, J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 146. See further Levy-Rubin, “Shurūṭ ʿUmar”, 174–80; Ward, “Fragment”, 415–7.

66 There is also plenty of archaeological and material evidence for continued church building; see, for example, Schick, R., The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

67 For example, al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ, 34–5.

68 For example, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Muṣannaf, VI, 54 (no. 9987); Yaḥyā al-Laythī, Muwaṭṭaʾ, II, 470 (Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ, no. 17); al-Shaybānī, Muwaṭṭaʾ, 285.

69 Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims, esp. 58–98.

70 Ibn Abī Shayba, Muṣannaf, XI, 347 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 71; no. 33538).

71 Ibn Abī Shayba, Muṣannaf, XI, 347 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 71; no. 33539).

72 For example, Yaḥyā al-Laythī, Muwaṭṭaʾ, II, 470 (Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ, no. 17): ittakhadhū qubūr anbiyāʾihim masājid.

73 For a possibly more successful attempt at expelling non-Muslims from a part of the Islamic world, see Fierro Bello, “Muslim land”.

74 Such was already suggested a century ago by Caetani, L., Annali dell'islam, 10 vols (Milan: Ulrico Heopli, 1905–26)Google Scholar, II/i, 507: “In verità, la esclusione dei non musulmani della penisola arabica fu un prodotto del fanatismo religioso del II e III secolo delle Hiǵrah. Il sentimento era ancora prematuro ai tempi di Maometto, quando forse più di quattro quinti degli Arabi ancora non erano musulmani”.

75 See the references above, n. 2; also the recent study of Yarbrough, L., “Upholding God's rule: early Muslim juristic opposition to the state employment of non-Muslims”, ILS 19/1, 2012, 11–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76 Chronicle of Siʿirt, part 2, fasc. 2, ed. and trans. A. Scher and R. Griveau, Patrologia Orientalis 13, 1919, 601–10.

77 Again the bibliography is too large to cite in full here, but see especially Bashear, “Yemen”, and many articles by Hawting, G.R., including “The Umayyads and the Ḥijāz”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 2, 1972, 39–46;Google Scholar “Origins of the Muslim sanctuary”; “The Ḥajj in the second civil war”, in Netton, I.R. (ed.), Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Mediaeval and Modern Islam (Richmond: Curzon, 1993), 31–42Google Scholar. Also now Shoemaker, S.J., The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. 197–265Google Scholar.

78 For example, Schwartz, S., Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Lieu, J.M., Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sizgorich, Violence and Belief; Sizgorich, “Monks and their daughters: monasteries as Muslim–Christian boundaries”, in Cormack, M. (ed.), Muslims and Others in Sacred Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 193–216.Google Scholar

79 Smith, J.Z., “What a difference a difference makes”, in Neusner, J. and Frerichs, E.S. (eds), “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 47.

80 Sivan, H., Palestine in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quote from 111).

81 Although cf. in part Irshai, O., “Constantine and the Jews: the prohibition against entering Jerusalem – history and hagiography”, Zion 60, 1995, 129–78Google Scholar (Hebrew with English summary at x–xi).

82 Hoyland, R.G., Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 84.

83 Kelly, J.N.D., Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London: Duckworth, 1975), 166–7Google Scholar.

84 Novellae no. 37, discussed and translated in Linder, A., The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 381–9Google Scholar (no. 62); further discussion at 73–4 of the development of legislation concerning synagogues. There is some archaeological evidence for the conversion of synagogues into churches at roughly this time. For example, the synagogue at Jerash in modern Jordan was paved over and converted into a church in 530–31 ce; see Moralee, J., “The stones of St. Theodore: disfiguring the pagan past in Christian Gerasa”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 14/2, 2006, 192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

85 Mamre: Sozomen, Ecc. Hist., II.4. Marneion: Mark the Deacon (attrib.), Vie de Porphyre, évêque de Gaza, trans. Grégoire, H. and Kuegner, M.-A. (Paris: Société d'Édition «Les Belles Lettres», 1930), §§63–84, 92–4Google Scholar. Serapeum: Haas, C., Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 159–69Google Scholar, 207. For an interesting discussion of the symbolic uses of pagan temples by Christians at Jerash, based on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, see Moralee, “Stones of St. Theodore”.

86 Codex Theodosianus XVI.10.11, translated by Pharr, C. in The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952)Google Scholar; also discussed in Haas, Alexandria, 165–6. Book XVI of the Codex Theodosianus is full of legislation regulating the maintenance and use of, as well as the access to, pagan temples, synagogues and the churches of heretics.

87 Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, I, 2405; Levy-Rubin, M., “Were the Jews prohibited from settling in Jerusalem? On the authenticity of al-Ṭabarī's Jerusalem surrender agreement”, JSAI 36, 2009, 63–81Google Scholar.

88 For example, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Muṣannaf, VI, 54 (no. 9985); X, 359 (no. 19365); al-Tirmidhī, Jāmiʿ, IV, 134 (Kitāb al-Siyar, bāb 43); Aḥmad, Musnad, I, 29, 32; III, 345; Abū ʿUbayd, Amwāl, 107 (no. 271).

89 For just a few examples, Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, III, 268 (Kitāb al-Kharāj wa-al-imāra wa-al-fayʾ, bāb 22); al-Bukhārī, Jāmiʿ, II, 72 (Kitāb al-Ḥarth wa-al-muzāraʿa, bāb 17); II, 294–5 (Kitāb al-Jizya, bāb 6).

90 Al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr, XIV, 336–7.

91 Al-Sarakhsī, Sharḥ, III, 257.