The Constitution of Medina

The text survives embedded in the biography of the Prophet transmitted by Ibn Ishaq and edited by Ibn Hisham, and it reads like what it is, a treaty between parties who do not yet trust one another. It opens by declaring the emigrants of Quraysh and the people of Yathrib, and whoever follows them and fights alongside them, to be one community to the exclusion of other people.

Most of the clauses are practical. Each clan continues to pay blood money and to ransom its own captives according to the custom it already follows. A believer may not make an alliance with the client of another believer without his consent. The believers as a body stand against anyone among them who acts oppressively, even if he is a son. No party may make a separate peace while war is being waged. Whatever the parties dispute is referred to God and to Muhammad.

The clauses concerning the Jewish groups are the ones most often quoted. Named clans allied to particular Arab tribes are said to form one community with the believers, with a formula repeated for each: the Jews have their religion and the Muslims theirs, both their clients and themselves. Each side bears its own expenses in war, each must help the other against an attacker of the confederacy, and each owes the other sincere counsel and good faith rather than treachery.

The valley of Yathrib is declared a sanctuary for the people of this document.

Very little from the first Islamic century survives in a form historians treat as documentary, and this text is the striking exception. The reason has to do with what it does not say.

A document forged later to serve a later purpose would be expected to match later doctrine. This one does not. It uses the word umma for a body that includes non-Muslims, a usage that later Islamic law does not support. It gives Muhammad an arbitral role rather than a sovereign one, and calls him the Prophet without the titles that quickly became standard. It names Jewish clans as constituent members of the community at Medina, which sits awkwardly beside the narrative of their later expulsion and destruction that the same biography goes on to tell. It refers to pagan Arabs among the parties. And it contains archaic administrative language that later transmitters evidently did not fully understand, since they preserved it without smoothing it.

Those features are hard to explain as invention and easy to explain as survival. Julius Wellhausen argued for its authenticity in the 1880s and the position has held broadly since, though scholars differ on whether the surviving text is one document or several agreements of different dates run together, and on exactly when it was drawn up.

What remains contested is its afterlife. It is regularly cited in modern argument as a charter of pluralism or as the first written constitution. Those readings are claims about the present, not findings about the text, and the atlas keeps them apart.