The Covenant of the City

Madinah was not only believers. It held the recently-Muslim Aws and Khazraj, emigrants from Makkah, Arabs still on their old ways, and three major Jewish tribes, Banu Qaynuqa, Banu an-Nadir, and Banu Qurayzah, with their own faith, wealth and forts. A city this mixed, freshly out of civil war, needed more than goodwill. So the Prophet ﷺ drew up a written document, which the historians preserve, that scholars often call the Constitution of Madinah.

Its terms were remarkable for any age. It declared the believers and those who followed them and strove with them one community, ummah wahidah, distinct from all others. It then bound the Jewish tribes into a single body politic with the Muslims: the Jews of such-and-such are a community alongside the believers; to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims theirs. It guaranteed them their faith, their property and their lives, made them partners in the defence of the city against any attacker, and required disputes to be referred to the Prophet ﷺ as the city's final arbiter.

It outlawed the old tribal blood-feuds within the city, established that a believer would not be killed for a disbeliever, that the oppressed would be helped, that no separate peace would be made by one party in war while others fought, and that Madinah itself was a sanctuary, sacred ground, for all who signed.

Here was a plural society organised by covenant: different religions, equal citizenship in the affairs of the city, freedom of belief, shared defence, and the rule of agreed law over the rule of the strongest tribe. It is a document Muslims point to whenever they are asked how Islam imagines living justly alongside others, written not as theory but as the working charter of the Prophet's ﷺ own city.