Remembering Khaibar.

WHEN AMROZI BIN NURHASIN, the smiling Bali bomber, entered a Bali courtroom on the day of his sentencing, he was shouting, "Jews, remember Khaibar! The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you!" What was this Khaibar, and why should it be remembered?

In the time of Muhammad, Khaibar was a fertile oasis in the Arabian desert. It was populated by Jews, who maintained its irrigation systems and lived off its produce. When Muhammad conquered the oasis in 628 AD, the Jews who lived there managed to negotiate a surrender. The conditions of their surrender were that some of them could remain to tend the date palms and gardens, but in return they had to give half of their harvest to the Muslims. The land itself would henceforth belong to the Muslim community. The Jews of Khaibar were also granted permission to keep practising their faith. Soon after, the Arab Christians of Najran were forced to accept the same conditions.

The right of the Jews of Khaibar to stay on their former lands was a temporary concession, withdrawn in 640 by Umar, in obedience to Muhammad's dying wish: "Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs." In this same year the whole of Arabia was cleared of non-Muslims.

Khaibar is a name all Muslim jurists will recognise, since it was the conquest of Khaibar which set the precedent in Islamic case law for the subsequent treatment of non-Muslims who surrendered to Islamic conquest and rule. (Khaibar also provided Muhammad with one of his wives, Safiya, a leading Jewish woman of Khaibar whom he selected for himself from among the enslaved captives.)

The discriminatory shari'a regulations applying to non-Muslims, who are referred to in Islamic law as dhimmis, are based upon the precedent of Khaibar. Through a twist of history the defeat of the Jews of this little-known Arabian oasis ...