Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary Read Free Book Online Page B

of them strapped on weapons and marched out to finish off the upstarts. The Muslims met them with a force of three hundred men at a place called Badr and defeated them soundly. The Qur’an mentions the battle of Badr as proof of Allah’s ability to decide the outcome of any battle, no matter what the odds.
    Before Badr, some of the bedouin tribesmen had worked for merchants in Mecca as contract bodyguards. After Badr, these tribes began to switch sides. The growing solidarity of the Muslim community in Medina began to alarm the Jewish tribes. One of the three renounced the Pact of Medina and tried to instigate an uprising against Mohammed and a return to the pre-Islamic status quo, but the uprising failed, and this tribe was expelled from Medina.
    Now the Quraysh really did have cause to worry. Instead of eliminating Mohammed, it looked like they might have dug themselves the beginnings of a hole. In the year 3 AH, they decided to overwhelm the Muslims while they still had the numbers. They tripled the size of their army, heading for Medina with three thousand men. The Muslims could scratch up only 950 warriors. Again, they would be outnumbered three to one—but after Badr, how could this matter? They had the only asset that mattered: Allah was on their side.
    The second of Islam’s three iconic battles occurred at a place called Uhud. At first the Muslims seemed to be winning again, but when the Meccans fell back, some of the Muslims disobeyed one of Mohammed’s explicit orders: they broke ranks and spilled across the field in a chaotic rush to scoop up their share of booty—at which point the Meccans struck from behind, led by Khaled bin al-Walid, a military genius who later converted to Islam and became one of the Umma’s leading generals. The Prophet himself was wounded at Uhud, seventy Muslims were killed, and many of the rest fled. The Ummasurvived, but this battle marked a bad defeat.
    These seminal battles of Islamic history were so small-scale, measured against most real wars, that they barely qualify as battles. Each one, however, was incorporated into Muslim theology and vested with meaning. Thus, the battle of Badr showed that Allah’s will, not material factors, determined victory in battle. But the battle of Uhud raised a thorny theological question. If Badr showed the power of Allah, what did Uhud show? That Allah could also lose battles? That He was not quite as all-powerful as Mohammed proclaimed?
    Mohammed, however, found a different lesson in defeat. Allah, he explained, let the Muslims lose this time to teach them a lesson. The Muslims were supposed to be fighting for a righteous cause—a just community on earth. Instead, at Uhud they forgot this mission and went scrambling for loot in direct disobedience to the Prophet’s orders, and so they forfeited Allah’s favor. Divine support was not an entitlement; Muslims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and submitting to His will. This explanation for defeat provided a stencil that Muslims invoked repeatedly in later years, after the Mongol holocaust of the thirteenth century, for example, when nomadic invaders from Central Asia overwhelmed most of the Islamic world, and again in response to Western domination, which began in the eighteenth century and continues to this day.
    The Quraysh spent two years planning their next assault. Recruiting allies from other tribes, they built an army of ten thousand men—inconceivably gigantic for that time and place. When Mohammed heard about this force marching on Medina, he had his Muslims dig a moat around their town. The Quraysh arrived on camels, which would not or could not cross the moat. The stymied Quraysh decided to starve Medina with a siege.
    The siege strategy, however, scuttled a secret plan the Quraysh were counting on. After the disastrous battle of Uhud, another of Medina’s Jewish tribes had been exposed as collaborating with the Meccans. Like the first Jewish tribe, they