Expulsion of non-Muslims from the Hijaz (Najran and Khaybar)

A Promise from Tabuk

When ʿUmar ﵁ in the twentieth year of the Hijra took a decision that would forever change the composition of the Hijaz, he did so not out of his own wisdom and not out of a longing for ethnic cleansing, but, so the report bears witness, on the basis of a statement that the Prophet ﷺ had left behind at the end of his life. A statement that had lingered in the mouth of the first Khalifah and was carried out in the deliberation of his successor. The peninsula of the Arabs, the Hijaz, the heart of the revelation, would become a house in which two religions no longer dwelt side by side.

What Suyuti ﵀ records about this event is brief. In enumerating the twentieth year of the Hijra, in the same breath in which he mentions the establishment of the Diwan and the opening of Egypt, he writes: “In that year ʿUmar ﵁ drove out the Jews from Khaybar and from Najran, and he divided Khaybar and Wadi al-Qura among those who had been present at the original battles of the Prophet ﷺ there.” One sentence, a single sentence in the dry chronology of the year-tables, but behind that sentence lay a whole history of treaties, of patience, of postponement, and of a promise that was now being kept.

To understand that sentence, we must go back to the time of the Prophet ﷺ himself, to the victories over Khaybar in the seventh year of the Hijra and to the treaty with the Christians of Najran in the ninth or tenth year. We must understand what the Prophet ﷺ had arranged, and why the Khalifah after him had to revise that arrangement.

Khaybar and the Arrangement under the Prophet ﷺ

Khaybar was conquered by the Prophet ﷺ in the year 7 of the Hijra. The Jewish communities that dwelt there in fortified strongholds and that had mobilized the tribes of the Arabs in revolt against Medina had after a siege become subject to the rule of Islam. When the victory was once accomplished and the Prophet ﷺ was on the point of driving them out, the Jews of Khaybar came to him and asked him for an exception. They were farmers, they knew the date palms of Khaybar as no one else knew them, and they asked whether they might remain to cultivate the land in exchange for half of the harvest.

The Prophet ﷺ consented to this. He let them remain on the land, with half of what it brought forth, “as long as Allah ﷻ wishes you to remain.” That last clause, transmitted by various companions ﵃, was no idle kindness, but a stipulation of time with an open end, for the Prophet ﷺ had taken up the possibility of a future eviction into the very letter of the treaty.

Many years later ʿUmar ﵁ would invoke precisely that clause. He had seen the Muslims who worked in Khaybar suffer under the hardships of the work and under disputes with the Jewish farmers who stood with them on the land. One of his own sons, ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ﵁, had in one of those disputes been attacked by Jewish inhabitants of Khaybar in a nocturnal scuffle in which his hands were dislocated, and when that act of violence reached his ears, together with the broader complaints of the Muslims who returned from Khaybar, ʿUmar ﵁ remembered the words of the Prophet ﷺ.

The Statement of the Prophet ﷺ on His Deathbed

At the basis of what ʿUmar ﵁ carried out in the twentieth year lay a statement that the Prophet ﷺ had made in the last days of his life. The report of it had been preserved among the Sahabah ﵃ and was not carried out in the time of Abu Bakr ﵁ because the young state still had to prove itself in the wars against the apostates. But now, in the stability of the twentieth year, the time had come. The statement was simple:

These words, which the Prophet ﷺ had given as a last administrative directive, formed the legal ground on which ʿUmar ﵁ stood when he ordered the expulsion. It was not his own judgement, no innovation, no alteration of the arrangement of the Prophet ﷺ, but the execution of what the Prophet ﷺ had himself established in his last month. Suyuti ﵀ refers to this implicitly by taking up the event in his year-table without further explanation, for the reasoning was self-evident within the community of the Companions ﵃ and needed no exposition.

Najran and the Christians

In Najran, far in the south of the peninsula, on the plateau that passes over into Yemen, there lived a community of Arab Christians that in the tenth year of the Hijra had sent a delegation to Medina. That delegation had debated with the Prophet ﷺ about the nature of ʿIsa ﵇ and had finally concluded a treaty: in exchange for a fixed annual payment and the right to keep their worship, they might remain on their land and would stand under the protection of Allah ﷻ and His Messenger ﷺ. The treaty of Najran had become famous for its mildness, for churches would not be torn down, clergy not replaced, property not expropriated.

But the treaty of Najran knew, just like that of Khaybar, no clause of eternity. It bound the Christians to the Muslims under conditions, and it allowed the Khalifah to revise the arrangement when there was cause for it. When ʿUmar ﵁ carried out the statement of the Prophet ﷺ about the peninsula, Najran too came into consideration for relocation. The Christians of Najran were not expropriated in the sense of a punishment, but relocated to lands that the Muslims had by then opened, to Iraq, to the north, to regions that lay outside the peninsula of the Arabs and where they could continue their community under the same conditions of protection. Their treaty was not broken; it was relocated.

Compensation and Redistribution

What ʿUmar ﵁ did was not without care. Suyuti ﵀ mentions in the same sentence in which he names the expulsion that ʿUmar ﵁ divided Khaybar and Wadi al-Qura “among those who had been present at the original battles of the Prophet ﷺ there.” That detail is telling, for the land that the Jewish farmers left was not abandoned empty and not given to some arbitrary new group, but allotted to the Sahabah ﵃ who in the seventh year of the Hijra had marched to Khaybar with the Prophet ﷺ and who on the basis of that participation had gained a right to a share in the spoils.

For the Jews themselves the value of what they left behind in Khaybar was compensated. Their palm groves, their tools, their stores were appraised by the Khalifah and the equivalent value was paid out to them from the treasury of Medina, or land in replacement regions was assigned to them where they could continue their labours. It was no expulsion into poverty and it was no expropriation without compensation, but an orderly relocation under judicial guidance, with a timeline and with an arrangement for compensation.

The Juridical Reasoning of Suyuti ﵀

For the scholars who came after Suyuti ﵀, and for Suyuti ﵀ himself, the expulsion of the twentieth year formed an important fiqh precedent. It proved that a treaty which the Prophet ﷺ had concluded did not have to have the same effect forever, for a treaty could be reinterpreted, revised or terminated by the Khalifah, as long as that happened on the basis of a higher statement of the Prophet ﷺ himself and as long as the other party was not expropriated without compensation. The Khalifah was no lawgiver; he was the executor of what the Prophet ﷺ had established. But within that execution he had room to order arrangements according to the overarching principles that the Prophet ﷺ had left behind.

In the scholarly traditions after Suyuti ﵀ this event has often been cited as proof of the stability of Islamic governance, for not everything that had once been set down had to continue to exist in exactly the same way for eternity. The ruler might revise as long as he remained within the guidelines of revelation and report, and what ʿUmar ﵁ did in the twentieth year became the touchstone against which later rulers could measure their own revisions.

What the Expulsion Was Not

It is important to understand what this event was not. It was no driving out of all non-Muslims from all regions that stood under Islamic governance, for the Christians of Syria remained Christians, the Jews of Iraq remained Jews, and the Zoroastrians of Persia remained in great numbers on their land. Even in Egypt, which was opened in those same years, the Coptic Christians remained on their land under the protection that the Khalifah had pledged to them through the mediation of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁. It concerned one specific region: the peninsula of the Arabs, and of that in practice above all the Hijaz, and of that in concrete terms above all Khaybar and Najran as the two places where mixed communities were still substantially present.

It was no punishment. No one was carried into captivity, no one was expropriated without compensation, no one was persecuted for his faith. The communities that were relocated found in their new dwelling places the same protection, the same tax arrangements and the same legal standing as they had had in their old dwelling places. What changed was not their status as protected communities under Islamic law, but the place where they exercised that status.

It was also no sudden decision. The Prophet ﷺ had made his statement about the two religions in his last month, Abu Bakr ﵁ had not been able to carry out that statement in his short khilafah because the Ridda wars wholly absorbed his attention, and ʿUmar ﵁ waited until the sixth year of his own khilafah, until the foreign fronts were stable and the financial infrastructure of the Diwan had been set up, before he began the execution. Between the statement of the Prophet ﷺ and the execution by ʿUmar ﵁ lay about ten years of gradual preparation.

Najran in Its New Home

The Christians of Najran were chiefly relocated to the region around Kufa, to a place that in later sources was called “an-Najraniyya”: the Najran of the north, founded by the rehoused Christians who brought their city name with them to the new land. There they built their churches anew, resumed their trade, and kept under Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ and his successors the legal standing that they had had in Najran itself. Their clergy remained their clergy, their bishop remained their bishop, their treaty remained in principle in force, though in geographically relocated form.

One detail that the scholars of later generations have noted is that the lettered Christians of Najran contributed to the early scholarly culture of Kufa. Their presence in a city that in those same years had been established by Saʿd ﵁ as a military camp produced a meeting between Islamic governance and the Christian scholars of the peninsula, and that the Muslims in Kufa soon came to a cultural flowering that accompanied the founding of its great madrasahs has partly to do with the presence of this lettered, Arabic-speaking Christian community that had come over from Najran.

Khaybar under the Companions ﵃

The palm groves and fields of Khaybar were, as Suyuti ﵀ mentions, redistributed among the Sahabah ﵃ who had been present there in the seventh year at the original conquest. For some of them, who by then served in high posts in Medina, in Iraq or in Syria, their share in Khaybar had become a kind of pension, and for others it became the basis of a family estate that would continue for generations. The names of a few well-known owners of Khaybar holdings turn up in the juridical literature of the first centuries as witnesses in disputes over irrigation rights or as donors of waqf endowments.

In this lay a justice that was self-evident in the logic of the time. Whoever had risked his life in the seventh year to open Khaybar had a right to a share in the fruits of it, and that this share was only actually received into one’s own keeping thirteen years later, because in the meantime the Jewish farmers had cultivated the land on the basis of a temporary treaty, did nothing to diminish the validity of the original claim. ʿUmar ﵁ restored what in his eyes had been the original distribution of the Prophet ﷺ.

One Peninsula, One Faith

What ʿUmar ﵁ brought about in the twentieth year was the establishment of the Hijaz as the core territory of Islam, the region from which the Messenger ﷺ had come forth and in which his grave and the House of Allah ﷻ were found. For the administrative logic of that time it was unthinkable that the region around Mecca and Medina, the region where the revelation had descended and where the first community had been formed, should remain two-layered in its administrative composition. The land over which the Prophet ﷺ had preached became the land in which his community could live undivided.

That decision may in the scholarly reading of today call forth different reactions. For the Muslim who accepts the report, it is the execution of a word of the Prophet ﷺ by his most responsible successor; for the historian who looks at the facts, it is an orderly relocation with compensation and not a violent cleansing; for the jurist it is a precedent on how treaties can be revised under higher prescriptions of revelation; and for the ruler it is an example of a Khalifah who showed patience by waiting ten years before he carried out something that he could have carried out from the first moment of his khilafah.

Suyuti ﵀ mentions it in one sentence, because in his time no one asked whether this was fitting. For him it was a fact as the opening of Egypt was a fact. What is worth the trouble of explanation for us was for the scholars of the third, fourth and fifth century of the Hijra a self-evidence upon which they built their fiqh reasoning around treaties, revision and expulsion.

In the next article we follow ʿUmar ﵁ to the last chapter of his life. Three years after he had carried out the expulsion, three years after he had established the Diwan, three years after he had seen Egypt and Nahavand opened, he himself would be struck by a stranger’s hand in the morning of the Fajr prayer. The Khalifah who had ordered his peninsula would leave it in a manner that he had not chosen but had indeed foreseen.