Islam and Judaism: Religious Attitudes and Identity in the Medinan Era

Abstract

For two centuries, Orientalists have consistently questioned the role of Judaism in the early development of Islam. This has resulted in an array of scholarship that attempts to unpack a more accurate relationship of early Islam with Medinan Jews than is found in much of the historiographically tenuous sīra and taʾrīkh literature. This article contributes to this strand of revisionism by assessing religious identity in the Medinan period, utilising what this article argues to be the only two relevant, reputable and proven documents from the early seventh century–the Qurʾān and the Constitution of Medina. Religious attitudes and identities can be derived from a comparative assessment of the semantics of these documents, analysing their implications, including how views on key words and notions can enable us to reorientate early Medinan interreligious attitudes between Muslims and Jews.