Most of this surah is related to the expedition to Tabuk, but verses 13-16 are about people in Mecca. Muslims are instructed to Fight against them the them probably being those who, in Muhammads view, he considered to be violators of the Treaty of Hudaybiyah so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them. Although there are no explicit qualifications about this fighting, qualifications similar to those in 4:89-90 were probably in play: unbroken treaties were to be respected, and non-aggression was to be answered with non-aggression. (Verbal criticism, however, qualified as an act of aggression.)
Verses 17-19 disqualify non-Muslims from serving as guardians of the Granf Mosque in Mecca, and from mosques anywhere else. Verse 19 may have originated as part of a conversation that Muhammad had with someone earlier in his career, after a battle. Muhammad interrogated his relative Al Abbas, who had been taken prisoner, and Al Abbas said that he deserved some mercy, because he had been a custodian of the Kaaba and had given water to pilgrims there. Muhammad answered him with the sentiment expressed in vv. 19-22: giving water to some thirsty pilgrim is not equal in merit to going on jihad; Allah esteems much more highly those who go on jihad and those who finance jihad; Paradise belongs to them.
Verses 23-35 can be summed up succinctly: choose your friends and helpers well by only having Muslims as friends and helpers. Unbelieving family-members should not be accepted as Auliya (supporters, allies). Verses 25-26 serve as a brief reminder of the battle of Hunain, where the Muslim army had suffered a temporary setback. The occasion is mentioned to remind the troops not to trust in anything but the leadership of Allah and Muhammad; the Muslims superior numbers at Hunein had not guaranteed success. An interesting feature of v. 26 is that it recollects that, at Hunain, Allah did send down His Sakinah upon Muhammad. The term sakinah is typically understood to mean calm or composure; however, this is essentially the same term as Shekinah, the Hebrew term that refers to the active presence of God. In this way, Muhammad drew a parallel between his own battles and the battles fought by some characters in the Old Testament who had Gods Spirit come upon them. The Hebrew term Shekinah isnt the term used in the Old Testament to describe how Gods Spirit came upon those individuals, but it would be exactly the term that later rabbis would be likely to use in the course of alluding to such events.
The teaching that pagans are not to be custodians of the Kaaba is expanded in v. 28: pagans even those who had kept their treaties and would be exempt from Pagan Season would soon be prohibited from approaching the mosque at Mecca, since they are Najasun i.e., impure, having not conformed to Islamic rules of hygiene or to Islamic precepts in general. Some of these pagans had, up to this point, donated large sums of money to the upkeep of the place, and without their help the task of taking care of the Kaaba would be expensive, but the second part of the verse counters that observation.
Another expansion follows in v. 29: Jews and Christians are to be targets of jihad. The Islamic community is to fight against them until they pay the jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. The Jizyah was a head-tax, collected on the grounds that Jews and Christians should join in the payment of the Islamic army, which non-Muslims were not permitted to join. This verse has never been abrogated. Jews and Christians should therefore understand that wherever Islam is allowed to flourish, its genuine adherents will have, as a goal of their faith, the establishment of an Islamic government which will be capable of collecting the jizyah from the Jews and Christians living within its borders. They will follow the Qurans instructions to engage in jihad until this goal is accomplished.
Because of this, I believe that any Christian who claims that Islam is a noble faith is either speaking diplomatically because of political expediencies, or else is thoroughly deluded about what followers of the Quran aspire to do to nations where the government does not collect the jizyah-tax from non-Muslims. The goals of Islam, as defined in this very late surah, include the subjugation of Jews and Christians. It is not some obscure imam that taught this; Muhammad taught this.
9:30-35 criticizes Jews and Christians. In v. 30 Muhammad makes the claim that the Jews say that Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah. Problem: Jews do not actually say that, and theres no evidence that Jews ever did say that. Similarly, in 9:31, the text claims that the Jews and Christians took rabbis and monks as lords. What we probably have here is a nomenclature problem: the phrase child of God meant one thing to Jews and Christians, and something else to Muhammad. Jews could point to numerous passages in their Scriptures in which Israel was called Gods firstborn son. They could also use the phrase a son of God to refer to angels, and even as an idiomatic way of referring to exceptionally righteous men. It is probably this last sort of reference that Muhammad had heard someone use to refer to Ezra.
Muhammad, coming from an Arabic background in which it was assumed that the existence of a son inescapably implied that the son was the product of a conjugal act, even when the father in question was a deity, reacted to this by re-stating that background-assumption: after all, if an Arab who refers to the son of a deity means that the deity has engaged in a conjugal act, doesnt a Jew or Christian who refers to the son of a deity also mean that the deity has engaged in a conjugal act? Apparently Muhammad found no one who was willing or able to explain to him why this was not the case, and so he continued to believe that it was true.
There was someone, though, who was willing to question Muhammads statement in v. 31 that the Jews and Christians take their religious leaders as their lords. When a former Christian named Adi ibn Hatim pointed out to Muhammad that Christians do not worship their monks and scholars, Muhammad explained that what is meant is that the Christians paid more attention to what their priests said was permissible, even when God said it was not permitted. What particular permission did Muhammad have in mind? Apparently permission to worship Jesus. Verse 31 concludes with more verbage that suggests that the Christianity which Muhammad opposed was a deviant (or imagined) form of Christianity that taught that God had a conjugal partner and that Jesus was the result, the way that some of the pagan deities of Arabia had been said to have partnered together and produced offspring.
In verses 32-33 Muhammad begins to focus on the expedition to Tabuk. He wasnt taking a picnic there; he was taking an army to face the Byzantine forces. Why? Because the Byzantines were, he claimed, out to forcibly exterminate Islam. (Actually, the Byzantines wanted to stabilize their borders; their main concern was with the Persians, not the Arabians.) After repeating a self-endorsement (9:33; used earlier in 48:28 and 61:9), the text describes the greediness of many rabbis and monks who devour the wealth of mankind they hoard up gold and silver which will be forged into a branding-iron to brand their foreheads, flanks, and backs on Judgment Day. Except for the branding-iron illustration, this passage very much resembles James 5:1-4 ~ your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days.
Why would Muhammad bring this up in his speeches before the expedition to Tabuk? One reason would be to convey that his troops could reasonably expect that a victory at Tabuk would yield loot. His troops were disappointed later, when after leaving behind their fruits at harvest-time they followed Muhammad on a long expedition, only to learn that the Byzantine army had gone home (which, it would seem, Gabriel could have told Muhammad in Medina and saved everyone the trouble of a long march, but of course Muhammad explained later that the expedition nevertheless was a good thing since it showed who was and wasnt truly committed to the cause of Islam).
By that point, how could Muhammad, after instilling an expectation of loot, salvage the expedition to Tabuk? By switching targets. Some towns near Tabuk had no way of resisting 30,000 soldiers. Muhammad sent threatening letters to them, demanding tribute, and they gave it. The citizens of these towns had posed no threat to Muhammad or to the Arab Muslim community. Muhammad extorted submission from them anyway. On page 188 of Muirs book about Muhammad, which can be read at answering-islam.org.uk/Bo...chap28.htm , the following excerpt, which is presented as part of a letter sent by Muhammad to Ayla (and mentioned in Wackidi 57 and Hishami 400), one of the towns near Tabuk, is displayed:
"To John ibn Rabah and the Chiefs of Aylah. Peace be on you! I praise God for you, beside whom there is no Lord. I will not fight against you until I have written thus unto you. Believe, or else pay tribute. And be obedient unto the Lord and his Prophet, and the messengers of his Prophet. Honor them and clothe them with excellent vestments, not with inferior raiment. Specially clothe Zeid with excellent garments. As long as my messengers are pleased, so likewise am I. Ye know the tribute. If ye desire to have security by sea and by land, obey the Lord and his Apostle, and he will defend you from every claim, whether by Arab or foreigner, saving the claim of the Lord and his Apostle. But if ye oppose and displease them, I will not accept from you a single thing, until I have fought against you and taken captive your little ones and slain the elder.
Having instilled the expectation of battle-loot in his troops, and facing a distinct absence of said loot, since there was to be no battle, Muhammad resorted to money taken by tribute as a substitute. The Christian leaders Ukaidir bin Abdul Malik Kindi of Dumatul Jaiidal, and Yuhanna bin D'obah of Aylah (this is the same individual as John of Aylah, who is addressed in the preceding letter), and the chiefs of Maqna, Jarba' and Azruh also gave in to Muhammads demands. Their territory later briefly served as a buffer zone between the area controlled by Islamic forces and the area dominated by the Byzantine Empire.
All that had not yet happened when 9:34-35 was first spoken. Muhammad was still preparing for the march to Tabuk. It was going to be a long campaign.
Verses 36-37 suddenly and briefly changes the subject: these verses are about the calendar. Some pagans, it seems, had a way of occasionally re-defining which months of the year were to be considered sacred truce-months; one way in which they did this was to add the usual intercalated month (the leapmonth of the lunar calendar, one could say) before, or after, it was technically due. However innocuous this may seem, it was regarded by Muhammad as something which went against Allahs will. This passage forbids that custom, with the result that the Muslims would keep track of the truce-months and the non-truce-months in unison.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
Verses 17-19 disqualify non-Muslims from serving as guardians of the Granf Mosque in Mecca, and from mosques anywhere else. Verse 19 may have originated as part of a conversation that Muhammad had with someone earlier in his career, after a battle. Muhammad interrogated his relative Al Abbas, who had been taken prisoner, and Al Abbas said that he deserved some mercy, because he had been a custodian of the Kaaba and had given water to pilgrims there. Muhammad answered him with the sentiment expressed in vv. 19-22: giving water to some thirsty pilgrim is not equal in merit to going on jihad; Allah esteems much more highly those who go on jihad and those who finance jihad; Paradise belongs to them.
Verses 23-35 can be summed up succinctly: choose your friends and helpers well by only having Muslims as friends and helpers. Unbelieving family-members should not be accepted as Auliya (supporters, allies). Verses 25-26 serve as a brief reminder of the battle of Hunain, where the Muslim army had suffered a temporary setback. The occasion is mentioned to remind the troops not to trust in anything but the leadership of Allah and Muhammad; the Muslims superior numbers at Hunein had not guaranteed success. An interesting feature of v. 26 is that it recollects that, at Hunain, Allah did send down His Sakinah upon Muhammad. The term sakinah is typically understood to mean calm or composure; however, this is essentially the same term as Shekinah, the Hebrew term that refers to the active presence of God. In this way, Muhammad drew a parallel between his own battles and the battles fought by some characters in the Old Testament who had Gods Spirit come upon them. The Hebrew term Shekinah isnt the term used in the Old Testament to describe how Gods Spirit came upon those individuals, but it would be exactly the term that later rabbis would be likely to use in the course of alluding to such events.
The teaching that pagans are not to be custodians of the Kaaba is expanded in v. 28: pagans even those who had kept their treaties and would be exempt from Pagan Season would soon be prohibited from approaching the mosque at Mecca, since they are Najasun i.e., impure, having not conformed to Islamic rules of hygiene or to Islamic precepts in general. Some of these pagans had, up to this point, donated large sums of money to the upkeep of the place, and without their help the task of taking care of the Kaaba would be expensive, but the second part of the verse counters that observation.
Another expansion follows in v. 29: Jews and Christians are to be targets of jihad. The Islamic community is to fight against them until they pay the jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. The Jizyah was a head-tax, collected on the grounds that Jews and Christians should join in the payment of the Islamic army, which non-Muslims were not permitted to join. This verse has never been abrogated. Jews and Christians should therefore understand that wherever Islam is allowed to flourish, its genuine adherents will have, as a goal of their faith, the establishment of an Islamic government which will be capable of collecting the jizyah from the Jews and Christians living within its borders. They will follow the Qurans instructions to engage in jihad until this goal is accomplished.
Because of this, I believe that any Christian who claims that Islam is a noble faith is either speaking diplomatically because of political expediencies, or else is thoroughly deluded about what followers of the Quran aspire to do to nations where the government does not collect the jizyah-tax from non-Muslims. The goals of Islam, as defined in this very late surah, include the subjugation of Jews and Christians. It is not some obscure imam that taught this; Muhammad taught this.
9:30-35 criticizes Jews and Christians. In v. 30 Muhammad makes the claim that the Jews say that Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah. Problem: Jews do not actually say that, and theres no evidence that Jews ever did say that. Similarly, in 9:31, the text claims that the Jews and Christians took rabbis and monks as lords. What we probably have here is a nomenclature problem: the phrase child of God meant one thing to Jews and Christians, and something else to Muhammad. Jews could point to numerous passages in their Scriptures in which Israel was called Gods firstborn son. They could also use the phrase a son of God to refer to angels, and even as an idiomatic way of referring to exceptionally righteous men. It is probably this last sort of reference that Muhammad had heard someone use to refer to Ezra.
Muhammad, coming from an Arabic background in which it was assumed that the existence of a son inescapably implied that the son was the product of a conjugal act, even when the father in question was a deity, reacted to this by re-stating that background-assumption: after all, if an Arab who refers to the son of a deity means that the deity has engaged in a conjugal act, doesnt a Jew or Christian who refers to the son of a deity also mean that the deity has engaged in a conjugal act? Apparently Muhammad found no one who was willing or able to explain to him why this was not the case, and so he continued to believe that it was true.
There was someone, though, who was willing to question Muhammads statement in v. 31 that the Jews and Christians take their religious leaders as their lords. When a former Christian named Adi ibn Hatim pointed out to Muhammad that Christians do not worship their monks and scholars, Muhammad explained that what is meant is that the Christians paid more attention to what their priests said was permissible, even when God said it was not permitted. What particular permission did Muhammad have in mind? Apparently permission to worship Jesus. Verse 31 concludes with more verbage that suggests that the Christianity which Muhammad opposed was a deviant (or imagined) form of Christianity that taught that God had a conjugal partner and that Jesus was the result, the way that some of the pagan deities of Arabia had been said to have partnered together and produced offspring.
In verses 32-33 Muhammad begins to focus on the expedition to Tabuk. He wasnt taking a picnic there; he was taking an army to face the Byzantine forces. Why? Because the Byzantines were, he claimed, out to forcibly exterminate Islam. (Actually, the Byzantines wanted to stabilize their borders; their main concern was with the Persians, not the Arabians.) After repeating a self-endorsement (9:33; used earlier in 48:28 and 61:9), the text describes the greediness of many rabbis and monks who devour the wealth of mankind they hoard up gold and silver which will be forged into a branding-iron to brand their foreheads, flanks, and backs on Judgment Day. Except for the branding-iron illustration, this passage very much resembles James 5:1-4 ~ your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days.
Why would Muhammad bring this up in his speeches before the expedition to Tabuk? One reason would be to convey that his troops could reasonably expect that a victory at Tabuk would yield loot. His troops were disappointed later, when after leaving behind their fruits at harvest-time they followed Muhammad on a long expedition, only to learn that the Byzantine army had gone home (which, it would seem, Gabriel could have told Muhammad in Medina and saved everyone the trouble of a long march, but of course Muhammad explained later that the expedition nevertheless was a good thing since it showed who was and wasnt truly committed to the cause of Islam).
By that point, how could Muhammad, after instilling an expectation of loot, salvage the expedition to Tabuk? By switching targets. Some towns near Tabuk had no way of resisting 30,000 soldiers. Muhammad sent threatening letters to them, demanding tribute, and they gave it. The citizens of these towns had posed no threat to Muhammad or to the Arab Muslim community. Muhammad extorted submission from them anyway. On page 188 of Muirs book about Muhammad, which can be read at answering-islam.org.uk/Bo...chap28.htm , the following excerpt, which is presented as part of a letter sent by Muhammad to Ayla (and mentioned in Wackidi 57 and Hishami 400), one of the towns near Tabuk, is displayed:
"To John ibn Rabah and the Chiefs of Aylah. Peace be on you! I praise God for you, beside whom there is no Lord. I will not fight against you until I have written thus unto you. Believe, or else pay tribute. And be obedient unto the Lord and his Prophet, and the messengers of his Prophet. Honor them and clothe them with excellent vestments, not with inferior raiment. Specially clothe Zeid with excellent garments. As long as my messengers are pleased, so likewise am I. Ye know the tribute. If ye desire to have security by sea and by land, obey the Lord and his Apostle, and he will defend you from every claim, whether by Arab or foreigner, saving the claim of the Lord and his Apostle. But if ye oppose and displease them, I will not accept from you a single thing, until I have fought against you and taken captive your little ones and slain the elder.
Having instilled the expectation of battle-loot in his troops, and facing a distinct absence of said loot, since there was to be no battle, Muhammad resorted to money taken by tribute as a substitute. The Christian leaders Ukaidir bin Abdul Malik Kindi of Dumatul Jaiidal, and Yuhanna bin D'obah of Aylah (this is the same individual as John of Aylah, who is addressed in the preceding letter), and the chiefs of Maqna, Jarba' and Azruh also gave in to Muhammads demands. Their territory later briefly served as a buffer zone between the area controlled by Islamic forces and the area dominated by the Byzantine Empire.
All that had not yet happened when 9:34-35 was first spoken. Muhammad was still preparing for the march to Tabuk. It was going to be a long campaign.
Verses 36-37 suddenly and briefly changes the subject: these verses are about the calendar. Some pagans, it seems, had a way of occasionally re-defining which months of the year were to be considered sacred truce-months; one way in which they did this was to add the usual intercalated month (the leapmonth of the lunar calendar, one could say) before, or after, it was technically due. However innocuous this may seem, it was regarded by Muhammad as something which went against Allahs will. This passage forbids that custom, with the result that the Muslims would keep track of the truce-months and the non-truce-months in unison.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
