In the 6th century A.D. Houdaibiyeh was a hamlet a few hours’ camel
ride away from Mecca, the large urban-commercial centre dominated by the Koraish
tribe and site of a pagan shrine long sacred to all the Arabs of the
peninsula. Houdaibiya would never have
earned any mention in the history books had it not been for an event there
that engraved it in the
collective memory of literate Arabs in
the Middle East and of well-read
Muslims anywhere. Just as the name of
the Italian monastery at Canossa earned a page in the history of Europe as the
site of an act of formal submission in 1077 of German emperor Henry IV to the
authority of Pope Gregorius VII.
Muhammed, messenger of Islam, was born in Mecca in 570 and began preaching his new faith to his pagan
fellow citizens when he was about 40. His missionary zeal soon irritated the majority in his city, won him few
followers and finally a threat of violence to his person. He and some 70 followers fled in 622 to Yathrib, due north
of Mecca, just in time before he was chased out, at best, or before an attempt was made on his life, at worst.
In Yatrib and its neighbourhood he fared better than in Mecca as a preacher. In a few years he converted
thousands, grew into a charismatic personality and leader in the area, and was acknowledged as such by the
change of the town’s name to Medinah, City of the Prophet, in his honour. Muhammad never forgot the humiliation
by his hometown. In the typical style of Middle East strongmen he built up a small armed force, engaged in
surprising and plundering passing caravans, subdued and dispossessed nearby pagan and Jewish tribes and made converts. Six years after his flight, in 628, he felt strong enough militarily and politically to march against Mecca.
He pretended to plan a campaign north of Medinah, but secretly moved south. The Koraish learnt in time of their vindictive enemy’s true intention and sent a force to meet the raiders head-on. The two met at Houdaibiyeh,
some ten miles from Mecca. Muhammad saw that his plan to take the town by surprise had failed. Instead he
pleaded for admission as an unarmed pilgrim, an inter-tribal traditional right the Meccans could not deny him.
After lengthy talks an agreement known as the Treaty of Houdaibiyeh was signed admitting Muhammad the
next year as an unarmed pilgrim to the Kaaba, for centuries a shrine holy to all Arabians, and pledging a ten-year period of non-aggression by the two rival towns. Though he had not been able to enter Mecca as a victor he had at least gained a diplomatic success from his enemies in that he was, by implication, recognized as a man of power and equal standing to be reckoned and negotiated with, despite vocal protests in his own camp against conciliation.
During the next two years his power and influence kept growing so much and so fast that he felt strong enough
for another attempt at overpowering Mecca. In 630 he was able to muster reportedly about ten thousand men,
then a force unprecedented for size in Arabia. He did not only not trouble to disguise his campaign, but flaunted it, had his men rest for the night near Mecca, with thousands of camp fires lit to show the Meccans what and how many enemies to expect. They saw that they had no chance to resist and surrendered the town without a fight. The next day Muhammad entered Mecca at the head of his force, cleansed the Kaaba of its pagan features and dedicated the whole shrine to the exclusive worship of Allah.
This chapter in the biography of Muhammad is summarized here as background to examining the question of whether Muhammad was dishonest when he put his signature to the Houdaibiyeh ten-year non-aggression treaty in 628, or when he broke it in 630. Our Middle East Desk team, aware of the cultural-political gap between Eastern and Western concepts, is agreed that he was not. “Pacta sund observanda” – the ancient rule of Roman law has become the Western norm in international relations rather late in the Second Millenium. And deviations from that norm still happen also in the West. A charge that Muhammad acted in bad faith in breaking the Houdaibiyeh Treaty would
mean measuring Oriental practice by fairly recent Western standards.
Hitler had his foreign minister Ribbentrop sign a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939,
then broke it suddenly in June 1941 with an unprovoked invasion of its territory. The Middle East Desk sees
a basic difference between these seemingly similar treaty violations in Arabia and Europe. Hitler deliberately lied when he entered into the obligation of the non-aggression treaty. He had reason to believe that Stalin who trusted
the Germans and disbelieved the warnings even of his own intelligence services, would swallow the lie. In his mind Hitler knew that one day soon he would attack the Soviet Union, planned and carefully prepared for it as secretly as possible, intent to take Stalin by surprise. And succeeded.
In the political “in-house” tradition of the Orient a treaty is observed as long as it can be enforced by one of the signatories. But both (or all) of them know well enough in advance that it merely serves the convenience of the moment and may be broken when circumstances change or when its obligations can no longer be enforced. This has been an accepted Oriental (indeed all-Asian) understanding of a contractual obligation long before Islam, but
surprises the ignorant in the West to this day. A typical historic, pre-Islamic example has been the relationship between ancient Rome and the city of Carthage, the Phoenician-Oriental colony in North Africa.
The two cities rivaled long for commercial, political and military dominance in the Mediterranean and
intermittently fought three wars between 264 and 101 B.C. Rome won the first two. Peace (or armistice) treaties were signed after the first two wars and broken by the Phoenicians as soon as they had recovered enough
strength after defeat. When they broke the treaty the third time the Romans had enough of what they called
contemptuously “fides Punica” (Phoenician trustworthiness), declared war for the third time and annihilated
Carthago and its population of about half a million. Even so, it took the Roman Senate years to arrive at its fateful decision.
The most recent example of Western ignorance of the Orient’s political tradition is the Oslo Treaty of 1993 between the government of Israel (then headed by its prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated two years later
by a Jewish fanatic) and Palestine Liberation Front chairman Yassir Arafat. The accord, signed in Cairo in May 1994, provided for self-government of the Arab minority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the gradual withdrawal of Israel from these territories, the cessation of all hostilities, gradual progress towards peaceful coexistence and economic cooperation.
In the six years passed since then implementation of the treaty has made little, if any progress towards peace.
The Middle East Desk doubts whether it has any chance of success. The ultimate purpose of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab nation as a whole has remained unchanged: to end Jewish sovereignty in Israel and to reclaim its territory as their own. The motives of their enduring hostility are religious and nationalist, similar to the conflicts
with the Crusaders in the distant past, or the Hindus and Muslims in India and Kashmir today. The Arab politicians, whatever their public pronouncements, deny the right of the Jewish people to rebuild in Israel its ancient homeland.
It is mainly the fanatics among the religious Muslim leaders who call without diplomatic veil for Israel’s elimination
by all available means, including a holy war and unrestricted terrorism.
The Israeli representatives who engaged in the clandestine Oslo negotiations were motivated by a desire
for peace and prosperity in a what they hoped would be a “New Middle East”, encouraged by the example of the peace treaty with Egypt. But they were also handicapped by ethnocentric Western ignorance of the political
culture of the Orient in general, the Haidoubiye precedent in particular, and altogether by the Arab value system
so different from their own. Because of their mainly Western background they were naively unaware of the unbridgeable gap between the two civilizations, of the history of the Arab nation, of Islam and its formative impact on the Oriental way of experiencing the realities of the modern world.
We cite the warning of a Western scholar hundred years ago, Ignaz Goldziher, professor at the University of Budapest, one of the founders of modern Oriental Science. He concluded that “he who has not read the Koran cannot understand the Arabs. And he who reads o n l y the Koran, cannot understand the Arabs either.”