If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

In the early Medina years, notes Reza Aslan in No god but God, Muhammad stressed that his message was for all the People of the Book, and so he took care to promote acts that would build allegiances between the Muslim and Jewish communities. In the first Muslim state in Medina, the Prophet Muhammad guaranteed nonaggression between the Muslims and the rest of the population, including the Jewish, Christian, and pagan clans. “He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian,” said Muhammad, “will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.” The Muslim fast was to be observed on the same day as Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Like the Jews, Muslims were commanded to pray facing Jerusalem. Muhammad picked Friday as the day of communal prayer so as to be in concert (and not conflict) with the Jewish Sabbath. As the Muslim roots in Medina grew, so did the distinctions between its Jews and Muslims. Some of the town’s Jewish population began showing up in the mosque to jeer at the Muslim community, and to scoff at the differences between the Quran’s version of certain stories and the Torah’s. After a year and a half in Medina, the Prophet received a revelation that ordained that Muslims should switch their qibla, or direction of prayer, from Jerusalem to Mecca. This shift of orientation to the Kaaba was a sign, notes the author Karen Armstrong, “of a proud new Muslim identity.”