Muhammad and The Jews — Page 87
THE FAILURE OF THE CONFEDERACY hard-hearted executioner. ""Ali's partner in the execution, al-Zubayr b. al-"" Awwiim, was also renowned for gallantry and took part in all the great battles and campaigns of the Apostle's lifetime. The very idea of such a massacre by persons who neither before nor after the killing showed any sign of a dehumanised personality is inadmissible from a psychological point of view. To write history, one must know how to count. 1 lbn Jsl). iiq, al-Wiiqidi and lbn Sa""d could not only count, but took care, wherever possible, to check their information. But they were writing approxi- mately two centuries after the event and had no way of checking the number of people executed. Six hundred to nine hundred, given by lbn Isl). iiq, is an impressionistic round figure. There was no method of taking a tribal census at that time. Circumstantial evidence such as tax figures,jizyah and kharaj accounts and the register of pension payments to the Companions were introduced in ""Umar's time. Nabia Abbott 2 in discussing the number of Muslim martyrs of Bj<'r Ma""iinah (4/625) pointed out that Ibn Isl). iiq gave the number of people sent to Bi""r Ma""iinah by the Apostle as forty. a Ibn I;Ianbal4 and al-Bukhiiri 5 however reported seventy, which is now accepted. According to Ibn I;Iabib 6 , however, the number of the missionaries who went was thirty. Since the whole party was massacred and only one companion was left alive, sixty-nine companions were killed. But al-Waqidi lists only sixteen. Ibn Sa""d has not given any list, but taking account of all the entries in Ibn Sa"d one cannot arrive at a figure of more than twenty slain. There is a discrepancy of forty-nine. Even if the conservative figure of Ibn Isl;laq is taken into account, there is a fifty per cent exaggeration. Kister, who has collected all the available versions of the incident and analysed them, has reached the conclusion that the Apostle sent 1 Georges Lefebvre's dictum, Pour faire de l'histoire, ilfaut savoir compter, quoted by David Thompson, The Aims of History (London, 1969), p. 84. (Cf. ) Ibn Khaldiln: "It is the common desire for sensationalism, the ease with which one may just mention a higher figure, and the disregard of reviewers and critics". The Muqaddimah tr. by Franz Rosenthal (Rev. ed. , Princeton, 1970), p. 13. 2 Nabia Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, I, pp. 76-77. 3 Ibn Hisham, pp. 648-49. 4 Al)mad ibn Mul)ammad ibn l;lanbal, Al-Musnad (6 volumes, Cairo, 1895), Vol. III, p. 196. 5 Al-Bukhari, SaW;. Ill, p. 91. 6 Mul)ammad Ibn I;Iabib, Kitiib al-Mu(iabbar, (Hyderabad, 1942), p. 118. 87