MEDINA

Batoota — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 08:48:37 +0000

MEDINA. In pre-Islamic times called Yathrib, Medina (Madinah) became Muhammad’s home after the Hijrah. An oasis 275 miles north of Mecca, it was originally an agricultural settlement, with widely scattered palm groves and armed farmsteads; among its inhabitants were both Arabs and Jews. The two groups lived in a complex political association, which began to unravel late in the sixth century CE, resulting in a grave civil war throughout the oasis. This condition led to Muhammad’s invitation to leave his native Mecca and migrate to Yathrib, where it was thought by some that this charismatic holy man might successfully arbitrate the woes of the oasis. The migration (Hijrah) took place in 622 CE and marks the beginning of the Muslim era.

Once settled in Yathrib, thereafter called “the City of the Prophet” (Madinat al-Nabi), or simply Medina, Muhammad began to set the subsequent course of Islam as a religious and political society. The courtyard of his residence served as the first mosque for the Muslims. Early on, he had a falling out with the Jews and, consequently, changed his direction of prayer from Jerusalem to the Ka`bah in Mecca and modified his fasting practice, which had been based on a Jewish model.
Muhammad first regulated the political problems of Medina by gaining assent to a document (the “Constitution of Medina”) knitting all the inhabitants into a single polity. Soon, however, a more peremptory solution presented itself. In 624 Muhammad and his Muslims successfully attacked a Meccan trade caravan at nearby Badr Wells. The results disheartened the Meccans and emboldened the rest of the Medinans to declare openly for their new leader and his prophetic claims. Other successes followed that of Badr Wells, and it became increasingly clear to the Medinans, and eventually to the Meccans as well, that Muhammad and his message was a force to be reckoned with in western Arabia. By the time of Muhammad’s death in 632, the movement called Islam had not only won Arabia but stood poised to conquer the great but enfeebled superpowers of Byzantium and Iran.
Muhammad’s first four successors chose to remain in Medina, and so the oasis settlement became the capital of the new Islamic empire. The city remained, for all that, a simple place not much changed from the Prophet’s own days there. During the next hundred-odd years the Muslim armies were on the march across North Africa and Iran; when they finally came to rest, and the booty of empire began to be invested in the adornment of its capital, that capital had moved elsewhere. Medina was not to be the seat of sovereignty, its rulers decided. Nor did sovereignty ever return to Medina, though eventually, under the Ottomans, it gained the ascendancy over its political rival Mecca.
The two cities also became rivals in sanctity. Muhammad himself had constituted Medina a “sacred area” (haram) like Mecca, though probably for commercial purposes since it had no shrine. But, with the Prophet’s death, Medina possessed its shrine. Muhammad was buried in the apartment of one of his wives in Medina, right off the courtyard that served as the first mosque in Islam. Later rulers began to invest in the expansion and beautification not only of the mosque but of the Prophet’s own tomb. Other celebrated Muslims were buried nearby: his daughter Fatimah, Abfi Bakr and `Umar (who lay next to the Prophet), and `Uthman as well. Their tombs also received secondary embellishment, but it was the Prophet’s own sarcophagus, invisible inside a draped, grilled enclosure within the enlarged mosque, that began to attract Muslims to Medina. The hajj might be made only to Mecca, but a ziyarah or pious visit to the Prophet’s tomb at Medina was on the itinerary of every Muslim pilgrim to the Hejaz (Hijaz).
Thus, Medina and Mecca became known as the Haraman, the “Twin Sanctuaries,” and the distant caliphs and sultans who ruled the Holy Cities of Arabia rejoiced in the title “Servant of the Haraman.” It was an expensive honor. The ruler was responsible for the caravans that set forth from within his domains on their long and dangerous journey to the Hejaz. They carried with them the annual allocations from the imperial budget and from private sources for the support of the personnel of the Haraman, everyone from the grand sharif who ruled them to the lowliest sweeper at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina.
In medieval times Medina enjoyed little political importance. The sharif lived in Mecca by preference, and the Egyptian or Ottoman governor usually chose to live in Jeddah on the coast. What indirectly changed the political fortunes of the city was the British establishment of themselves in Egypt, thus channeling the direct communication from Istanbul to the Hejaz overland through Syria, thence south through Medina to Mecca. The Turks, to strengthen the link, constructed a telegraph line to Medina and, in 1908, completed the Hejaz Railway, which was for political reasons extended no further than Medina. Medina thus became the chief communication center of Ottoman Arabia, and so its chief garrison town as well.
When Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali announced his revolt against the Turks in 1916, Mecca fell quickly; but Medina, with its garrison of regular Ottoman troops under the command of the redoubtable Fakhri Pasha, held out against the Sharif` s forces until January 1919. With the end of the war, Medina formed part of Sharif Husayn’s short-lived Kingdom of the Hejaz. Husayn’s bitter rival Ibn Sa’ud took the city without much difficulty in December 1925; it was absorbed with the rest of the Hejaz into the newly enlarged Saudi kingdom. There were misgivings at the time that the Wahhabi Saudis might extend their severe disapproval of the cult of the dead to the Prophet’s own tomb in Medina, but the fears were groundless. The Saudis destroyed some minor shrines, but the Prophet’s mosque and tomb they eventually made larger and more ornate than before. Medina today is a large modern city with few physical traces of its preIslamic or even medieval past.
[See also Mecca and the biographies of Husayn and Sa`ud]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burckhardt, John L. Travels in Arabia (1829). Reprint, New York, 1968. A sharp-eyed and judicious anglicized Swiss visitor to the holy cities early in the nineteenth century.
Burton, Richard F. A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madina and Meccah (1855). 3d. ed. Reprint, New York, 1964. Celebrated British soldier-adventurer makes the pilgrimage in disguise in the mid-nineteenth century.
Farahani, Muhammad Husayn Husayni. A Shiite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886: The Safarndmeh of Mirzd Mohammad Hosayn Fardhdni. Edited, translated, and annotated by Hafez Farmayan and Elton L. Daniel. Austin, 1990. Mecca and the Medina through Shi`i eyes in the late nineteenth century.
Ochsenwald, William. Religion, Society and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840-1908, Columbus, Ohio, 1984. Detailed analysis of nineteenth-century Ottoman rule of the Holy Cities and the Hejaz.
Peters, F. E. Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton, 1994. Collection and analysis of the narrative sources on visits to Mecca and Medina from the earliest times to 1925.
Peters, F. E. Mecca and the Hijaz: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land. Princeton, 1994. Collection and analysis of the narrative sources dealing Mecca and Medina from the earliest times to World War
Rutter, Eldon. The Holy Cities of Arabia, 2 vols. London and New York, 1928. Eyewitness account of Mecca and Medina during the first years of Saudi sovereignty.
F. E. PETERS

MEDINA – Hybrid Learning

MEDINA