Page:Muhammad and the Jews According to Ibn Ishaq.pdf/4

Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013) I will be using Alfred Guillaume’s English translation of Ibn Ishaq, published by Oxford University Press, quoting passages in roughly the order of Ibn Ishaq’s narrative. (In what follows, page numbers in the text in parentheses refer to Guillaume’s translation; all other references are given in footnotes.) My main concern will be with the ideological conflict between Muhammad and the Jews, and only secondarily with the military and political aspects of this conflict. My thesis is that the root of the conflict between Muhammad and the Jews, as depicted by Ibn Ishaq, was Muhammad’s insistence, and the Jews’ denial, that the Jewish scriptures unambiguously identify Muhammad as the final prophet for whom the Jews have been waiting for centuries. This theological conflict underlay the political and military dimensions of the conflict and led Muhammad to unleash an intense campaign of anti-Jewish propaganda that spawned anti-Jewish stereotypes that endure even today in the Muslim world. This paper will provide evidence supporting Neil J. Kressel’s assertion that “far from being a byproduct of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jew-hatred has roots in the long history and complex theology of Islam.”

LIFE OF MUHAMMAD UP TO THE HIJRA (570-­622)

Ibn Ishaq sets the stage for Muhammad’s relations with the Jews early in the sira with his account of a trip to Syria on which the very young Muhammad accompanied his uncle, Abu Talib. “When the caravan reached Busra in Syria, there was a monk there in his cell by the ISSN: 2164-­6678