The Constitution of Medina: A Primary Source Overview

A document with no original copy

Shortly after Muhammad's emigration (hijra) to Yathrib, soon renamed Medina, in 622 CE, a set of clauses was drawn up governing relations between the Meccan Emigrants, the Medinan Muslims known as the Ansar, and the town's Jewish tribes. No original of this text survives. It is known today only because the historian Ibn Ishaq (d. c. 767 CE) included it in his biography of Muhammad, itself preserved through the later recension of Ibn Hisham (d. 833 CE) ^[1].

That gap (a document allegedly from 622 CE, known only through a source compiled at least a century later) is exactly the kind of problem historians have to reason through carefully rather than around.

Why historians think it's genuinely early

This is a document from Muhammad the prophet [governing the relations] between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib, and those who followed them and joined them and labored with them.

— Constitution of Medina, cl. 1 (trans. Guillaume)

Several features have led most specialists to treat the document as substantially older than the source that preserves it:

• The vocabulary and phrasing are archaic and don't match the Arabic style of Ibn Ishaq's own narration.¹
• The document sits awkwardly within Ibn Ishaq's surrounding narrative: it interrupts the story rather than illustrating it, suggesting he was quoting an existing text rather than composing supporting material himself.
• Its content would have been politically awkward to invent later. Clauses affirming the standing of Medina's Jewish tribes sit uneasily against the memory of the Muslim community's later conflicts with those same tribes, which makes fabrication for propaganda purposes an unlikely explanation.^[2]

Michael Lecker's monograph-length study treats the document as probably combining more than one originally separate agreement, reached at different points, rather than a single text issued on one occasion ^[3].

What the document actually says

An open question, not a settled one

›What remains genuinely disputed

Scholars disagree on: whether the surviving text is one document or a composite of several; its precise date within Muhammad's Medinan period; and how far its terms were actually enforced in practice versus stating an initial, aspirational settlement. None of this is resolved by the document's apparent authenticity as an early text. Authenticity and enforcement are separate questions.

The Constitution of Medina is a useful case study in how historians handle a source that is both probably genuine in substance and definitely mediated through a much later compiler. Treating it as straightforwardly "the text of 622 CE" overstates the evidence; dismissing it because it survives only in an eighth-century biography understates it. The responsible historical position sits between those two extremes.

Footnotes

1. See the discussion of the document's internal linguistic evidence in Serjeant, "The Sunnah Jāmi'ah," 4–9. ↩