Muhammad and The Jews — Page 122
he said, "May God bless your wealth and family; you just show me the market". c. Abd al-Ral;iman was shown the way to the B. Qaynuqac. market, where he soon. earned a skin of butter and cheese. 1 It is not surprising that the B. Qaynuqi{· were the first to feel threatened by this new mercantile element, and played into the hands of c. Abd Allah b. Ubayy to save their business. The Jewish trading post2 of Ta"if was saved because the people of Ta"if as a whole rejected the Apostle. 3 A section of the Medinan Arabs, on the other hand, brought the Apostle to Medina. Not accustomed to competition the B. Qaynuqac. could not think of buying off the superior business acumen of the Muhajirfm; they tried to remove them instead. The B. al-Na<;lir, the B. Quray~h and other Jewish clans were mainly engaged in farming and agriculture. The danger posed to them by the new entrepreneur class of the Muhajirun was of a different nature. The B. Qaynuqac. through their market provided Yathrib and its environs opportunities to change goods and barter produce, and acted as middlemen and retailers and were an adjunct to the agrarian economy of the oasis. But the Muhajirun did not grow up "in the atmosphere of the desert, but in that of high finance". 4 The Meccans were "financiers skilful in the manipulation of credit, shrewd in their speculations, and interested in any potentialities of lucrative investment from Aden to Gaza or Damascus". 5 The Jewish farmer and land- owner was threatened by the merchant. Not only his social values, but his prosperity, as usual with all agrarian societies, faced danger from the new merchant class. The B. al-Na<;lir and the B. Quray:(:ah fought and lost; other Jewish clans accepted their temporary decline with resignation and re-emerged as an elite, but not dominant, after mastering the technique, which the Muhajir entrepreneur had brought to Yathrib. · It was a local affair. It was not an encounter between the two religions. That encounter began in Mecca, where there were no Jews and reached its highest point under the Abbasids in the Eastern Caliphate and under the Umayyads in Spain during the periods when there was no persecution. The rise of Islam and the Jewish 1 AI-Bukhari, $abi(1, Kitab al-Buyu", Vol. III, pp. 68-69. 2 Al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldcin, ed. by M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1866), p. 56. 3 Ibn Hisham, pp. 279-81. 4 Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, p, 3. 5 Ibid. , p. 3. 122