The Jewish Tribes of Arabia, and the Road to Khaybar

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Before the Battle of Khaybar, a recap of how the Jewish tribes came to central Arabia. One early report even claims Mūsā himself sent them in search of a prophet, a stretch, though it appears in some early books. The more considered view ties them to the Jewish Diaspora: Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of the Temple in 587 BC scattered Jews toward Persia, which is why Iran has held a Jewish population to this day, while the destruction under the Roman emperor Titus in 70 CE (followed by a smaller expulsion under Hadrian in 135 CE) most likely brought Jewish communities south into Yemen, where records of treaties with Yemeni kings attest to a presence going back some two thousand years.

❧FROM YEMEN TO YATHRIB

The shaykh favors the theory that the Jews of Yathrib and Khaybar came up from Yemen perhaps two centuries before the Prophet ﷺ. It explains much: they were Arab in language and culture, and, most tellingly, organized into tribes like the Banū Qaynuqāʿ, Banū Naḍīr, and Banū Qurayẓah, a very Arab arrangement foreign to Jewish communal life elsewhere. It also explains their mastery of fortress-building, a southern Arabian craft the Arabs of the Hijaz never learned, and why the Aws and Khazraj, themselves Yemeni migrants, settled comfortably alongside them. From perhaps twenty founding families, their numbers in Yathrib grew over generations into several thousand.

❧THREE TRIBES, THREE ENDINGS

The Banū Qaynuqāʿ were expelled first, right after Badr in Shawwāl 2 AH, after their veiled threats to the Prophet ﷺ. The Banū Naḍīr were expelled after Uḥud for attempting to assassinate him, inviting him to sit beneath a wall while they prepared to drop a stone, before Jibrīl warned him. The Banū Qurayẓah, last of the three, were not expelled but executed for their treason during the Battle of the Khandaq.

❧WHY KHAYBAR

Elements of the expelled Naḍīr and Qaynuqāʿ, above all the leaders Ḥuyayy ibn Akhṭab, father of Ṣafiyyah, and Sallām ibn Abī al-Ḥuqayq, settled in Khaybar, the nearest Jewish center to Medina, and never stopped instigating. During the Khandaq siege, men of these tribes traveled to Medina and persuaded the Banū Qurayẓah to break their treaty, and Khaybar supplied arms to factions of the confederacy. So once the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah neutralized the Quraysh, the Prophet ﷺ turned to the one remaining threat in his backyard. The shaykh is frank about the framing: there was no treaty between Khaybar and Medina, and in the Arabia of that age, where every settlement fortified itself precisely because raiding was the law of the land, a preemptive strike against a proven, hostile instigator was entirely legitimate. That was the norm for every group of that era, Muslim or otherwise; where a treaty exists, Muslims are bound to honor it.