Le Massacre des Banu Qurayza

Selon ibn Ishaq, les raids agressifs constants et la propension à la guerre de Muhammad avaient poussé les Mecquois, en alliance avec les tribus juives que Muhammad avait expulsées de Yathrib et la tribu arabe du nord, les Ghatafan, à mettre fin à ce prédicateur et à son mouvement une fois pour toutes. Les trois tribus juives originelles de Médine, les Banu Nadir, les Banu Qaynuqa et les Banu Qurayza, avaient vu leur nombre diminuer à une seule car Muhammad avait expulsé les Banu Nadir et les Banu Qaynuqa de Médine pour des prétextes différents. Pendant ce temps, leurs biens, y compris leurs précieux palmiers, avaient été saisis par Muhammad et les Musulmans. Avec les Mecquois et les Ghatafan, les tribus juives exilées de Médine avaient formé une alliance et rassemblé une armée dont les effectifs sont donnés dans la Sira comme étant d'environ 10 000 hommes, dont plus de 600 cavaliers montés, contre très peu de cavalerie pour les Musulmans, et 7 000 hommes plus puissants que l'armée qui avait vaincu Muhammad et les Musulmans à Uhud. A cette époque, Muhammad ne pouvait compter que sur une force d'environ 3 000 hommes. Muhammad a reçu la nouvelle de leur avance et a commencé à prendre des dispositions. Un compagnon perse du prophète nommé Salman, apparemment un vétéran des nombreuses guerres opposant les Sassanides face aux Romains, a conseillé que lorsqu'on était confronté à un grand nombre de cavaliers ennemis comme ceux que possédaient les Juifs confédérés et les Mecquois, une bonne stratégie était de creuser une tranchée défensive. Il a été décidé de poursuivre cette stratégie ^[1]. Les Banu Qurayza n’ont pas fourni d'hommes pour aider, mais ont donné des outils de retranchement et la stratégie des Musulmans a reposé sur les Banu Qurayza, dont le fort se trouvait à l'arrière des défenses Musulmanes, ne rompant pas leur alliance avec Muhammad et ne se joignant pas aux confédérés. La stratégie de la tranchée a fonctionné pour remporter la bataille contre les Mecquois et leurs alliés, et les confédérés ont été repoussés sans beaucoup de pertes pour les Musulmans, mais cela n’a pas mis fin aux combats.

La série d'événements menant à la destruction des Banu Qurayza a commencé lors de la Bataille de la Tranchée. Incapables de briser les défenses des Musulmans Médinois, les Mecquois ont envoyé un émissaire de leurs alliés juifs, "l'ennemi d'Allah, Huyayy ibn Akhtab An-Nadri" ^[2], aux Banu Qurayza dans le but de solliciter leur aide et de mettre fin à l'impasse en attaquant Muhammad et les musulmans à l'arrière de leurs défenses. Selon Ibn Ishaq, initialement, le chef des Banu Qurayza, Ka'b ibn Asad al-Qurayzi, n’a même pas permis à Huyayy ibn Akhtab d'entrer dans le camp, mais a été incité à le faire suite à l'accusation de Huyayy selon laquelle ibn Ka'b ne voulait pas partager sa nourriture. Ibn Ishaq ne précise pas comment il sait cela, mais il affirme que la négociation a échoué en raison de l'insistance des Qurayza pour que les Mecquois offrent des otages afin de garantir qu'ils ne quitteraient pas le champ de bataille tant que Muhammad ne serait pas vaincu (bien qu'ils ont effectivement quitté le champ sans avoir vaincu Muhammad). Selon Ibn Ishaq, les Banu Qurayza, après de nombreux "plaidoyers", ont seulement accepté de ne pas aider les Musulmans ni d’entraver ou de combattre les confédérés. Ibn Ishaq présente comme preuve de la perfidie des Banu Qurayza une chaîne d'Isnad de Yahya ibn ‘Abbaad ibn ‘Abdullah ibn Az-Zubayr avec une histoire selon laquelle une femme musulmane, Safiyah bint ‘AbdulMuttalib, qui a vu un éclaireur juif des Banu Qurayza reconnaître une fortification musulmane se préparer à une attaque. Elle en a informé le commandant du fort, Hassan, et lui a demandé de tuer l'éclaireur, et lorsqu'il a refusé, elle a pris un gourdin et est allé battre l'homme à mort^[3]. En dehors de cela, Ibn Ishaq ne présente aucune preuve que les Juifs des Banu Qurayza étaient de mèche avec les confédérés. Cependant, il relate qu'Allah a "semé la discorde" entre les confédérés et les Banu Qurayza, ce qui a conduit les Mecquois à battre en retraite sans avoir vaincu Muhammad ou a mené une attaque coordonnée contre les musulmans avec les Banu Qurayza.^[4]

La Bataille de la Tranchée étant remportée, Muhammad et ses hommes ont déposé leurs armes et outils de retranchement pour rentrer chez eux. Cependant, selon la Sira, Allah avait d'autres plans. L'ange Jibril est apparu à Muhammad juste après qu'il ait déposé son arme et l’a informé que la bataille n'était pas encore terminée car il fallait s’occuper du cas des Juifs des Banu Qurayza en raison de leur trahison mentionnée ci-dessus. Muhammad a informé ses hommes qu'ils ne devaient pas faire la prière de Asr avant d'atteindre le camp des Banu Qurayza, ce qui signifiait qu'il voulait qu'ils s'y rendent rapidement. Les Musulmans ont assiégé le camp pendant des périodes de durées différentes selon la source (Ibn Ishaq affirme 25 jours avant que "Allah ne jette la terreur dans leurs cœurs"). Les Banu Qurayza ont reçu l’ordre de se rendre et d'accepter l'islam, ce qu'ils ont juré de ne jamais faire. Désespérés de leur situation, selon Ibn Ishaq, ils ont discuté de trois options : accepter l'islam, tuer leurs femmes et leurs enfants et se lancer dans une attaque de style banzaï contre les forces musulmanes numériquement supérieures (peut-être que les commentateurs modernes l’ont ajouté en émulation de leurs prédécesseurs religieux à Massada en Palestine), ou s’engager dans une attaque sournoise le jour du sabbat juif. Les Juifs des Banu Qurayza ont trouvé inacceptables les options proposées.

Incapables de prendre une décision et assiégés pendant des semaines, les Banu Qurayza ont demandé à parler à Abu Lubaba, un homme de la tribu des 'Aws, leurs alliés. Abu Lubaba, interrogé sur ce que les Banu Qurayza devaient faire, leur a conseillé de se rendre au Prophète, mais en même temps il a levé la main vers son cou, indiquant qu'ils seraient massacrés ^[5]. Après son départ, il a estimé que son action de révéler aux Banu Qurayza leur destin était une trahison envers le Prophète, et il s’est attaché à un pilier pour demander le pardon d'Allah, un acte que Muhammad a approuvé. Malgré cet avertissement, les Banu Qurayza se sont rendu aux Musulmans le jour suivant ^[6].

La tribu des 'Aws, alliée des Banu Qurayza au temps de la jahiliyyah, a demandé miséricorde pour eux auprès du Prophète. Le Prophète, ne voulant pas causer de dissension dans ses rangs (les serments et les alliances de loyauté étaient très importants dans la société tribale arabe, car en l'absence de tribunaux et de gouvernements établis, la seule garantie de sécurité et de justice qui pouvait être obtenue était la promesse de protection des alliés en cas de meurtre, de querelles familiales ou de guerre), a confié le sort des Banu Qurayza à un ancien cheikh de confiance des 'Aws, Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, qui avait été mortellement blessé pendant la bataille et est mort peu de temps après le massacre des Banu Qurayza. Une fois que Sa'd ibn Mu'adh s’est assuré que les Banu Qurayza et le Prophète respecteraient son jugement, quel qu'il soit, il l’a donné sans hésitation : les hommes des Banu Qurayza devaient être exécutés jusqu'au dernier, tandis que les femmes et les enfants devaient être vendus comme esclaves. Sa'd ibn Mu‘adh a justifié cette décision en déclarant qu’elle provenait de la Torah des Juifs. Ibn Ishaq ne cite pas le verset et le chapitre de la Bible, mais cela est généralement pris comme une référence au livre du Deutéronome 20:12-14.

Bien que les Musulmans modernes citent ce verset pour justifier le verdict de Mu'adh, il convient de noter que ni la tradition Juive ni la tradition Chrétienne ne comprennent ce verset comme une règle générale pour la guerre, mais plutôt comme un commandement spécifique aux Juifs sous le commandement de Josué qui combattaient les peuples païens de la Terre Sainte. Il n'a généralement pas été utilisé par l'une ou l'autre religion pour justifier le genre de massacre qui a eu lieu à Médine dans d'autres contextes historiques.

The prisoners, thus condemned, were kept in the house or compound of a Muslim woman d. Al-Harith of the banu al-Najjaar tribe. In the morning they were marched out to a trench which had been dug in the city's market, and executed by decapitation ^[7] . According to the sira of ibn Ishaq, one woman was amongst them. The other women and the children were given as sexual and labor slaves to the Muslims, with only boys who had not yet reached puberty being allowed to live. According to the sira, the haul of weapons and plunder was substantial, but Muhammad still sent some of the women and children to be sold in the Najd for more horses and weapons ^[8]. Muhammad as was custom received his pick of the loot including his pick of the females, a beautiful Jewish named Rayhana whose husband was decapitated, and the rest went to all the rest of the Muslims, with a Muslim on horse receiving 3 times the spoils of a foot soldier ^[9].

The famed mufassir ibn Kathir, drawing upon his own sources as well as many other classical commentators, in his commentary on sura 33 Al-Ahzab الأحزاب  "The Confederates" reaffirms many of the pertinent details from the sira narrative. In particular, ibn Kathir reads into the Quran's denouncement of the people of the book the perfidious Jews of the tribe of Banu Qurayzah and their betrayal of the prophet:

He refers here to Surah 33:

ibn Kathir confirms that it was the angels themselves who implored Muhammad not to stop fighting:

Thus in the view of ibn Kathir the fate of the Banu Qurayzah was the work of their own hand, a fate approved of and commanded by heaven itself. According to ibn Kathir, there fate was exactly what ibn Ishaq had described:

The hadith of Bukhari provide witness for the incidents described by Ishaq. Bukhari confirms that it was the angels who decree that the war be carried to the Banu Qurayza:

Similiarly, he confirms that it is was Sa'ad who condemned them to their fate:

Incidentally, Bukhari mentions that even though ibn Sa'd was called upon to provide a fair judgement to the Banu Qurayzahas a former ally, in fact he went to his death, caused by wounds suffered during the battle of the trench, wishing for death to the infidels:

Bukhari also mentions the fate of the Banu Qurayza, carried out in accordance with Sa'd's judgement:

Sunan Abi Dawud tells us exactly how it was determined, whether a male youth would be spared, based on whether he had had reached puberty or not:

In the clip above Muslim scholar Yasir Qadhi, well respected for his degrees from the Islamic University of Medina as well as from Yale, makes the argument that Muhammad was dealing with treachery and he had taken the maximum punitive actions against it. Qadhi argues that the prophet was justified in every step and showed as much restraint as necessary, being motivated purely by concerns on statecraft and practicality, not by malice. As he says, it is possible to accuse the prophet of being "harsh" but not of acting with malice towards the Banu Qurayzahor the Jews in general, as this would not be "academically valid." Ibn Ishaq makes the same point:

Yasir Qadhi states that the punishment was "harsh" and yet it is sometimes necessary to be harsh. Yaqeen institute scholar Abu Amina Elias (Justin Parrott) makes the cases that killing the "fighting men" prisoners of the Banu Qurayzahwas an "act of self-defense" on the part of the Muslim community and cites Deuteronomy 20:12-14 to justify the actions of the Muslims, agreeing with ibn Ishaq that Sa'd was judging the Jews by their own law. He also claims that the prophet only sent his men their with arms to "defend themselves" and that the women and children of the Banu Qurayzahwere taken "into captivity" for their protection since all of their men folk had bee slaughtered ^[10]. Karen Armstrong, in her book A Short History of Islam, likewise claims  "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."^[11] These arguments are all echoes of the original arguments found in the material above. Ibn Ishaq claims that the Jews of Banu Qurayzahposed a threat to the Muslims via their betrayal and does portray Muhammad as hesitating to decide their fate. ibn Ishaq even recounts of how "harsh" the punishment was:

Yet critics of these pro-Islam viewpoints have pointed out that the verse cited by modern Muslims from Deuteronomy to justify the extermination of the Banu Qurayzahyet in fact this is not how the verse has been viewed in traditional Christian or especially Jewish scholarship. According to Jewish doctrine, these verses were revealed to him before the Israelites entered the Holy Land, specifically instructing them on how to deal with the people living there ^[12]. Morever, the claim that there was no apparent animus towards the Jews of Banu Qurayzahon the part of Muhammad is contradicted by ibn Ishaq's account:

In mocking them as apes, Muhammad is here echoing the Qur'an, which claims that (some) Jews were turned into apes for violating the sabbath (Qur'an 50:60). Jewish anti-jihad scholar Andrew Bostrom points out that Muhammad took one of the most beautiful Jewish women of the Banu Qurayza, Rayhanah, as his wife and that the Muslims benefited handsomely from the destruction of this tribe, so self-defense was clearly not the only concern. ^[13]. Abu Amina Elias's view that the Muslims took such women and children as Rayhana captive simply for their protection also cannot be true, as ibn Ishaq recounts that some of them were taken to the far-off region of the Najd to be sold for weapons and horses. Yasir Qadhi himself points out that the Banu Qurayzahwere offered freedom to live on were they to accept Islam, and according to the sira only their hard, petulant hearts which rejected Muhammad despite knowing he was a prophet of the Lord prevented them from allowing themselves to be saved by conversion to Islam. So clearly, at least in the eyes of the sirah, their Jewish religion did, in fact, have something to do with the pitilessness with which Muhammad dealt with them, going against Qadhi's point that the prophet acted without malice or religious animus according to the sources we have. Bukhari also mentions that the prophet commanded his men to abuse the Banu Qurayzahwith poetry, which was in ancient Arab times one of the premier ways of promoting enmity with an enemy (Muhammad ordered poets who did this to him to be killed):

The narrative of the Banu Qurayzahis an accepted part of Islamic law, and multiple Islamic jurists have cited it, including when ruling that certain populations of Jews and other non-believers be massacred. As such there is no question amongst orthodox Muslims that it happened ^[14]. Yet the historiography of the subject is not without its own problems.

Within the Islamic tradition, ibn Ishaq was frequently criticized for giving too much weight to Jewish stories and being biased in general in his retellings of certain events. Malik ibn Anas accusses ibn Ishaq of being a "liar" for listening to "Jewish stories" ^[15].

Modern scholarship has cast much more serious doubts on the scholarship of Islamic scholars working in the 8th century (2nd Islamic century) such as ibn Ishaq. As Fred Donner points out, one of the earliest documents we have from the nascent proto-Islamic movement is the Constitution of Medina  صحيفة مدينة also known as the Ummah Document or صحيفة الأمة. This remarkable document, preserved by the Islamic historian Al-Tabari, lays out a compact for the "believers" of Medina, an "ummah" or national community that includes the Jews as "believers" on the same level as the Arab believers. Fred Donner believes this document actually points to an early, occulted history of Islam in which Arab monotheists joined with Jews into one "ummah" under the command of Muhammad. Troublingly for the historical narrative, this document makes mention of many different Jewish tribes, but the main 3 tribes of the sira, the Banu Qurayza, the Banu Qaynuqaa', and the Banu Nadir are conspicuously absent. It is in fact the absence of these tribes which convinces scholars that the document must be very old despite being preserved only in the 9th-century works of Tabari, since a younger document would presumably would have been changed to agree with the established historical narrative. Donner mentions that many early 7th century mosques do not include the qibla facing towards Mecca, and concludes that this story of the massacre of the Banu Qurayzahmay have been invented or embellished in order to explain a much later break between the Jewish and Muslim communities ^[16].

Patricia Cronner and Michael Cook in their groundbreaking work Hagarism likewise report on an Armenian historian writing in the 7th century known as pseudo-Sabeous. This historian imputes the Arab invasions to a confederation of Jews and Arabs led by Muhammad himself, contradicting the Islamic narrative that Muhammad died before the invasion of Palestine and the Middle East. Pseudo-Sebeos likewise imputes to the Arabs and Jews a shared monotheism and brotherhood through their ancestry to Abraham and his wife Hagar ^[17]. If this account is to be believed, there could not have been any great massacre of the Jews by Muhammad as we has working with them when he invaded Palestine. Stephen Shoemaker in his work The Death of a Prophet adds further evidence to thesis of Crone and Cook, marshaling evidence from a wide variety of sources, almost all of which predate the first Islamic sources, that Muhammad himself was actually the leader of the believers when they entered Palestine and he died only after its conquest. In particular he calls attention to a Jewish apocalypse from the 7th century, the Secrets of Rabbi ben Shim'on, which seems to paint Muhammad as the redeemer of the Jews from the oppression of the Romans in the Holy Land. If this is to be believed, and this source predates every Islamic source we have, the massacre of the Banu Qurayzahcould not have taken place, since Muhammad, the leader of the invasion of Palestine, was seen as a savior of the Jewish people ^[18]. This would seem to indicate that the break between the Muslims and the Jews took place after his death, and would indicate that stories such as the massacre of the Banu Qurayzahwere fabricated in order to "back date" the break with the Jews to the prophet's own lifetime.

• List of Killings Ordered or Supported by Muhammad

• What really happened to the Banu - Collection of articles from Answering Islam

• Rebuttal to Answering Islam's Article "The Bani Quraytha Jews: Traitors or Betrayed? - Muslim Rebuttal to Answering Islam's Article "The Bani Quraytha Jews: Traitors or Betrayed?"

• Muhammad, the QurayzahMassacre, and PBS - Andrew G. Bostom, FrontPageMagazine

• Muhammad and Massacre of the QurayzahJews - James Arlandson, American Thinker

• Massacre of the Banū Qurayẓa: A Re-Examination of a Tradition - M. J. Kister, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 61-96