Muhammad and The Jews — Page 103
CHAPTER VI THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE CONFLICT What does it profit the reader to wade through wars and battles and sieges of towns and enslavements of peoples, if he is not to penetrate to the knowledge of the causes which made one party succeed and other fail in the respective situations? -POLYBIUS The Jews of the I:Iijaz on the eve of the Hijrah, as we discussed in the first chapter, were a declining elite, a group which was in the process of losing its dominance, though it was not necessarily aware of the loss. Group status reversal is not a new phenomenon. History is full of cases where the dominant elite declined and became a sub- ordinate minority. The reversal of such status can be either sudden and violent or peaceful and gradual. A shift in economic conditions and change in the skills required for dominance, such as the invention of gunpowder, the industrial revolution, replacement of the mastery of the seas by air power, can greatly contribute to the decline of a group, which for: various reasons, has not been able to keep up with the times. Towards the end of the fifth century the Jews ruled I:Iimyar, the last of the successive kingdoms of al-Yaman, dominated Yathrib and controlled Tayma"", Fadak , Khaybar and Wadi al-Qura on the line of the caravan route running from north to south. With the reign of Dhii Nuwas (510-525) which "provides one of the most remarkable atrocity stories of history"l, the Jewish dynasty of Saba ended after a run of a_ century and a half. This may be taken as the beginning of the decline of the Jewish dominant elite. About 522 Dhii Nuwas gave the Christians of Najran the choice between apostasy 1 H. St. J. B. Philby, The Background of Islam (Alexandria, 1947), p. 119. 103