On 10/27/05, Susan Maneck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "They agreed on their own judge (who was not the
> prophet) and the judge declared that the men should be killed. The
> women and children were spared. It was certainly harsh. But it wasn't
> genocide."
> Dear Gilberto,
> By 'spared' you mean the women and children were sold into slavery. In
> Bosnia it was mostly the men who were killed as well while they women were
> raped (which is the fate of most female slaves.) And what happened in Bosnia
> is considered genocide. So by modern definitions, what would be the
> difference? Or is it perhaps the case that we can't always judge past events
> by modern standards?
In this particular context, the way you are trying to redefine things
is inappropriate to the larger issue. The issue of genocide came up in
the contex of talking about how moral decisions can be made based on
constant ethical values and principles. And in that context, I said
that the Biblical genocides were clearly wrong. The Israelites
believed they had a divine commandment, a God-given policy, to kill
entire populations without sparing women and children, without sparing
the old or the clergy, without even giving them an opportunity to
surrender peacfully, or even convert. That's the behavior I'm talking
about, and that's what I mean by "genocide" in this discussion.
If you come along later with a weaker more inclusive "modern"
definition of "genocide" in order to try to argue that sometimes
genocide is okay, that would be a distortion. And comparison with the
Bosnian genocide is really inappropriate.
Here is a description from Karen Armstrong of some of the issues
involving Banu Qurayzah:
On Muhammad's treatment
of Banu Qurayzah, a Jewish tribe
Karen Armstrong
There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muhammad had to
contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who
resented the power of the Muslim newcomers and were determined to
expel them from the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where
Abu Sufyan now directed the campaign against him, and had launched two
major offensives against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not
simply to defeat the ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the
Muslims. The harsh ethic of the desert meant that there were no
half-measures in warfare: if possible, a victorious chief was expected
to exterminate the enemy, so the ummah faced the threat of total
extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a severe defeat on the ummah at the
Battle of Uhud, but two years later the Muslims trounced the Meccans
at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad protected the
settlement by digging a ditch around Medina, which threw the Quraysh,
who still regarded war rather as a chivalric game and had never heard
of such an unsporting trick, into confusion, and rendered their
cavalry useless. Muhammad's second victory over the numerically
superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand Meccans to three
thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the nomadic tribes
that Muhammad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh look decidedly
passe. The gods in whose name they fought were clearly not working on
their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to become the allies of the
ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal confederacy,
whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight each
other's enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made the
hijrah to Medina; at last, after five years of deadly peril, Muhammad
could be confident that the ummah would survive.
In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three
Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to
destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with
Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the
Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily
join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When
the Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Muhammad in 625,
they were expelled from Medina, in accordance with Arab custom.
Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with
them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to
assassinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the
nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up support for Abu
Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even
more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah
sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it
seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no
mercy. The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their
women and children sold as slaves.
The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be
a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a
very primitive society: the Muslims themselves had just narrowly
escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the Qurayzah
they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought
another war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief
was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah. The
executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the
pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the
allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and
everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did
not indicate any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards
the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets
and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish
groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians,
enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic empires. Anti-semitism
is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim
world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the
subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were
compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into
Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own.
Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims
now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle
with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By
taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the
message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt
no such hatred of Judaism.
Muhammad's intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to
bring hostilities to an end as soon as possible. The Quran teaches
that war is such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in
their power to restore peace and normality in the shortest possible
time.18 Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to
fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad
was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed.
But after the Battle of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca
and quashed the opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to
abandon the jihad and begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in
train a daring and imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to
a close. He announced that he was going to make the hajj. to Mecca,
and asked for volunteers to accompany him. Since pilgrims were
forbidden to carry arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into
the lions' den and putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and
resentful Quraysh. Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to
join the Prophet and set out for Mecca, dressed in the traditional
white robes of the hajji. If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the
Kabah or attacked bona fide pilgrims they would betray their sacred
duty as the guardians of the shrine. The Quraysh did, however,
dispatch troops to attack the pilgrims before they reached the area
outside the city where violence was forbidden, but the Prophet evaded
them and, with the help of some of his Bedouin allies, managed to
reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at Hudaybiyyah and awaited
developments. Eventually the Quraysh were pressured by this peaceful
demonstration to sign a treaty with the ummah. It was an unpopular
move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager for action, and
felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was determined to
achieve victory by peaceful means.
Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the
Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible
trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by
attacking one of the Prophet's tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon
Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming
force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh
conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca
without shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the
Kabah, rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan
rites of the hajj, an Islamic significance by linking them to the
story of Abraham, Hagar and Ismail. None of the Quraysh was forced to
become Muslim, but Muhammad's victory convinced some of his most
principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan, that the old religion had
failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms of his beloved wife
Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah as
Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the ummah could
not, of course, attack one another, the ghastly cycle of tribal
warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended. Single-handedly,
Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
[end quote]
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