The constitution of Madinah

Five pages history almost mislaid

Begin with a strange fact: the most important political document of the seerah reaches us without a chain of narrators. Not every early reference book even records it. Ibn Ishaq, whose sira every student meets through Ibn Hisham's summary, carries the treaty whole, but introduces it only with: it has been narrated to me. Between Ibn Ishaq and the Prophet ﷺ stand a hundred and fifty years. The Musnad of Imam Ahmad preserves a single line of it with attribution: that the Prophet ﷺ wrote a document between the people of the new city in which every group would carry its own debts and obligations. That thinness has led some to deny there was ever a treaty at all.

Sheikh Yasir lays out why the scholars of our age overwhelmingly accept it anyway, and the reasoning is a small masterclass in source criticism. The text runs some five pages, in an Arabic so archaic that even in Ibn Ishaq's day nobody wrote that way anymore: long, knotted sentences that wander where modern treaties march in rows. And it names everybody. Not simply the Aws and the Khazraj, but some forty of their subtribes, clan by clan, names so obscure most have fallen out of history, and the Jewish tribes the same way, each with its own clause. A forger makes a document smooth, quotable, convenient. Reality is cluttered. The clutter, he argues, is the signature of authenticity.

So take the treaty in hand the way the Sheikh does: not clause by crawling clause, but in four bundles. What it asks of the Muslims. What it agrees with the Jewish tribes. What it says to the pagans. And what it lays down for everyone at once.

One ummah, and the word Yathrib

The first bundle opens with a sentence that rearranges Arabia: the believers of Quraysh and of Yathrib, and those who follow them and join them, are one ummah, distinct from all mankind. One community, to the exclusion of every older loyalty. And notice the city's name. The document says Yathrib, the old name the Prophet ﷺ himself would soon retire in favor of Madinah. A later forger would have written Madinah without thinking. The parchment says Yathrib because it was written for people who had not yet learned the new word, one more fingerprint of how early it is; even the term muhajirun had not yet settled, so the text simply says the believers of Quraysh.

Then the clauses turn practical, because an ummah still has to pay its bills. Every subtribe, the forty named, keeps the duties it carried before Islam: its own blood money, the ransom of its own prisoners, the care of its own poor. Welfare in the Prophet's ﷺ state was local before it was national. Blood money alone ran to a hundred camels, a sum no single man could survive, so the clan shouldered it together. If someone near you falls, you are the one standing closest.

Two more clauses bind the believers to one another. All of them shall stand together against whoever commits injustice, even if he is one of their own: an echo of hilf al-Fudul, the pact of justice the Prophet ﷺ had stood in as a young man in Makkah, sworn long before prophethood and now written into the law of a city. And the protection of the Muslims is one: the humblest of them can grant safe passage into Madinah. A slave can grant it. Even a child old enough to understand what he is granting can grant it, on the majority view, and once given, no Muslim on earth may violate it. In extending protection, the doorman and the chief carry the same seal.

An ummah alongside the believers

The second bundle belongs to the Jewish tribes, and it refuses to treat them as a faceless bloc. Clause after clause, around a dozen of them, each names its own tribe in turn: the Jews of this banu, the Jews of that banu. We summarize three Jewish tribes; the treaty honors the layers of clans inside them, every one by name. And over them all stands a line astonishing for its century: these Jews are an ummah along with the believers. Sheikh Yasir is careful here, and asks you to be: not identical in every ruling, but a recognized community of the same city, a standing he describes as, in some ways, equivalent. Their religion is theirs and the Muslims' religion is the Muslims'. If that is not the height of equality for its age, he asks, what is?

Inside their own walls they govern themselves. Their disputes, their blood money, their internal cases: their affair, their courts, and the Muslims do not interfere, unless a matter crosses the line between the two communities, and then it rises to the Prophet ﷺ. The same financial logic applies as for the Muslim clans: your poor are yours, ours are ours. But let an enemy march on the city and the ledgers merge. Muslims and Jews are each other's support against whoever fights the people of this treaty, and the Jews spend alongside the Muslims for as long as the war lasts. Domestic life separate, defense shared.

Two clauses complete the picture. No one of the Jewish tribes may leave Madinah without the Prophet's ﷺ permission, and the Sheikh unpacks what leaving meant in that world: not changing a job, but changing a camp. Where you lived was your passport, your army, your allegiance. To slip away unannounced was to defect, so the treaty requires what states still require of anyone renouncing citizenship: declare it openly. And if any Jew chooses freely to follow the believers, he is to be helped and protected, with no injustice done to him. No one may touch him for his choice.

The pagans who stayed pagan

Here is the detail that surprises most readers: in the Prophet's ﷺ own capital, in the first year of the first Islamic state, there were still idol worshippers. They remained until Badr; only when he ﷺ returned victorious from that battle did the last of them read the times and enter Islam. Until then they lived in Madinah as pagans, and the constitution covers them too.

And it does not order them to convert. Sit with that, because this is the Prophet ﷺ legislating over the very idolatry he was sent to end, and his clause asks only this: no pagan of Madinah may grant protection to Quraysh, to their persons or their property, nor stand between Quraysh and the believers, not for money and not for loyalty. Your heart, in other words, is your own. Your sword and your wealth will not serve Makkah's war. Believe what you believe; the one thing forbidden is treachery.

Centuries later the jurists would debate whether idol worshippers could reside under an Islamic state at all. Everyone agreed the people of the book and the Zoroastrians could. The Hanafi school extended the same shelter to idol worshippers, and this treaty is among their evidences; it is the position that later made it workable for Muslim empires to govern whole lands of them. Sheikh Yasir weighs in plainly: the broader reading seems the stronger case, that under the Shariah the freedom to remain upon your faith is open to anybody.

A sanctuary with four corners

The final bundle belongs to everyone. First, the Prophet ﷺ declares the interior of Yathrib a haram for the people of this treaty: sacred ground, where what is permitted outside becomes forbidden inside. No weapon unsheathed. No wild tree cut. No game hunted. And he drew its borders himself, four markers around the city: two small mountains to the north and south, and the two black volcanic plains on either side, places the people of Madinah still point to by name today.

Second, a single court of final appeal. Whatever dispute arises between the peoples of this treaty that threatens to tear the city open shall be decided by Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. Pause on that clause, because it is the cornerstone of everything built afterward: an Islamic state, whatever else it becomes, is a place where quarrels submit to revelation.

Third, the price of betrayal. No believer who accepts this treaty may aid or shelter anyone who rises against it; whoever does carries the curse of Allah, of the angels, and of all mankind until the Day of Judgment, with no good deed accepted from him. Madinah will be conspired against in the years ahead, and this clause is the city's immune system. Then, after the thunder, the treaty exhales: whoever stays in Madinah is safe, and whoever leaves is safe, except the one who commits injustice or sin. Come in peace, go in peace. And its last words set the seal: Allah protects the pious and the righteous, and Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger.

Two ways to misread a treaty

Now set the parchment down and deal with its readers, because this document attracts myths from two directions. The first myth inflates it. In the 1980s a paper by a prominent American Muslim academic made the rounds claiming this treaty was the basis of the American Constitution, that Thomas Jefferson took his idea from it. Dr. Yasir Qadhi names that claim for what he believes it is: an inferiority complex, the reflex that cannot admire anything good without insisting we invented it, and a fast way to become a laughingstock. The sober truth is grand enough. The treaty was genuinely novel, genuinely unique in its world, and some of its concepts did travel west and evolve across the centuries, by what he wryly calls twenty degrees of separation. That is influence. It is not authorship.

The second myth blackens it. Critics treat it as settled fact, he says frankly, that the Prophet ﷺ dealt with the Jews in bad faith, and they read this treaty as the first move: see, he separates them, he loads them with obligations. The answer sits in the text. Every obligation placed on the Jewish tribes rests, literally word for word, on the Muslims too: carry your own poor, your own blood money, your own ransoms. The same duties, the same protections, plus a recognition no power of that age offered a religious minority: an ummah alongside the believers, their faith their own.

Then comes the verdict the next years of the seerah will test. Had the Jewish tribes lived by this treaty, the Sheikh says, they of all people would have risen with the city. They were its tradesmen, jewelers, craftsmen, and financiers; Madinah's flourishing would have been their flourishing. What happened instead, as the coming episodes will show, is that the agreement was broken from their side, and broken at its clearest line: do not side with the pagans against us. So when consequences came, they came for what was done, never for who they were. Hold that distinction; the Sheikh insists on it every time this subject returns, and he promises to take those chapters frankly when they arrive.

What one word holds

إِنَّ إِبْرَاهِيمَ كَانَ أُمَّةً قَانِتًا لِّلَّهِ حَنِيفًا وَلَمْ يَكُ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ

“Indeed, Abraham was a [comprehensive] leader, devoutly obedient to Allāh, inclining toward truth, and he was not of those who associate others with Allāh.”

Surah an-Nahl 16:120Listen Read 16:120 with tafsir

Step back from the clauses and the deepest revolution comes into focus. Arabia ran on a single operating system: you are who your father was. Lineage decided your protector, your rank, your debts, your grave. This document quietly replaces it. The ummah is entered by faith, not by birth; whoever accepts Islam becomes a full member the moment he does, and no chief, no pedigree, no permission stands in the way. Bilal, radiyallahu anhu, a freed slave, and Abu Bakr, of the noblest lineage in Makkah, stand in it at exactly the same rank. Fourteen centuries on, we take that completely for granted. In its own day, nobody had organized human beings by theology before.

And the word chosen for this new belonging repays a minute of Arabic, the kind of minute Sheikh Yasir loves. Ummah grows out of umm, mother, and beneath both sits a root that means to aim for, to head toward: the imam takes his name from the same root, the one in front whom everyone follows. A newborn has exactly one direction, one object of all its attention, its mother. An ummah, then, is a people so gathered upon one direction that they might as well share one mother. The Qur'an even stretches the word over a single man: Ibrahim is called an ummah by himself, one chest carrying what whole nations are made of.

That is the word written across the top of Madinah's constitution. Not a federation of bloodlines holding its breath between wars: a mother-bond of believers, aimed in one direction, with room inside its city even for those who had not yet joined it.

Masjid, brotherhood, constitution

So what kind of state did the document build? One with a head: the treaty makes official what everyone in the city already understood, that the man invited from Makkah as an arbiter is now the accepted ruler of Madinah, the address for every dispute that crosses communal lines. And one with light hands: each community runs its own internal affairs, its own courts, even its own inherited customs (the Prophet ﷺ retained each tribe's accepted norms wherever they did not collide with revelation, the principle of urf that became one of the five great maxims of fiqh), while defense and high justice belong to the center. Some moderns call it a federal system, and the Sheikh allows the comparison cautiously, since reading modern labels backward has its hazards, but the structure is honestly there: autonomy below, unity above, a state that interfered remarkably little. And one law for all: crime is crime, whoever commits it. No one may shelter a criminal, and simply being a Muslim gets nobody off the hook.

Two absences are worth naming. There is no jizya in this constitution, and the reason is plain chronology: the verses commanding it would not come down for years yet, so the treaty neither contradicts nor contains what had not been revealed. And there is no compulsion anywhere in it. Under the order this document inaugurates, non-Muslims kept their worship, their family law, their own courts, even, the Sheikh notes to a startled room, their wine among themselves: the jurists ruled that a Muslim husband could not forbid his Christian wife what her own religion allowed her outside his house. Known limits, such as not proselytizing among the Muslims, sat around a freedom the ancient world simply did not offer.

He cannot resist the historical irony, and it deserves a hearing. The civilization that calls Islam intolerant spent those same centuries hunting its own dissenters: from Constantine onward the church outlawed every Christianity but its own, and Arius, whose creed sounded strikingly close to Islam, fled south, it is said as far as Abyssinia, which is how the rulers there came to know a belief so near to ours. The church, the Sheikh reminds you, killed its own dissenters in numbers that run into the millions. And when John Locke, the philosopher Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams actually read, wanted to shame Christendom into tolerance around 1689, he pointed east and said: look at the Turks, who let every creed live side by side among them. By its critics' own testimony, the working model of religious coexistence in that world traced back to the order this treaty founded.

Then the episode closes by stepping back, and the first year in Madinah snaps into a sequence so deliberate it reads like architecture. First the Prophet ﷺ built a masjid: the compass, the daily reminder of why anyone is alive at all. Then he built the brotherhood, pairing muhajir to ansari: the hearts. Then he wrote this treaty, ratifying the place of every soul in the city: the order. A mosque, a family, a law. On those three foundations stood the first Islamic state, and the rest of the seerah watches what it does.