The Constitution of Medina

What the document is

Known in Arabic as the Sahifa ("the sheet" or "the writing"), the Constitution of Medina is a pact drawn up under the Prophet Muhammad in the first years after the Hijrah of 622 CE (1 AH). Its parties were the Muhajirun (the emigrants from Mecca), the Ansar of the Aws and Khazraj tribes, and the Jewish tribes and clans of the oasis. Its purpose was practical: Yathrib had just come through a generation of civil war, and the new, mixed community needed agreed rules on defence, blood-feud, justice and who belonged.

The text survives not as an original manuscript but through early Islamic historians — most fully in Ibn Ishaq's biography of the Prophet (as transmitted by Ibn Hisham) and in Abu Ubayd's ninth-century Kitab al-Amwal. Modern editors divide it into roughly 47 to 63 clauses depending on how the articles are counted.

The key provisions

One ummah. The opening clause declares the believers of Quraysh and Yathrib, and those who join and strive with them, "one community (ummah) to the exclusion of other people" — a community defined by covenant rather than by blood alone, a genuine novelty in tribal Arabia.
Religious autonomy. The Jewish clans allied to the Ansar are declared "an ummah alongside the believers; to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion" — each community keeping its own faith and law.
Mutual defence. All signatories must defend Medina together if attacked, share war costs, and none may make a separate peace or shelter the Quraysh of Mecca or their allies.
Ending the feud system. Each clan continues to pay its own blood money and ransoms as before, but private vengeance is curtailed: no believer may kill another believer on behalf of an unbeliever, and the whole community stands against anyone who spreads injustice, sin or corruption — even a member's own son.
Arbitration. Whatever the parties differ over is to be referred "to God and to Muhammad" — establishing the Prophet as final judge in disputes between the communities.
A sacred precinct. The document declares the valley of Yathrib a haram — an inviolable sanctuary — for the people of the pact, and grants protected neighbours the same security as their protectors.

Why it matters

The Sahifa is among the earliest surviving examples anywhere of a written pact ordering a plural society, and it is frequently described as the first written constitution — a claim best understood loosely: it is a treaty-charter for a specific community rather than a modern framework of government. Its real significance lies elsewhere. It replaced kinship with covenant as the basis of political belonging; it recognised non-Muslim communities as parties with rights and obligations; and it gave the Prophet a formally acknowledged judicial role in a town that only months earlier had lacked any common authority. Politically, it turned an oasis of rival clans into a single defensive unit — a unity soon tested at Uhud in 625 CE and above all during the siege of the Trench in 627 CE.

Historiographical caveats: scholars overwhelmingly accept the document as authentic — its archaic language and its generous terms toward the Jewish tribes are hard to explain as later invention — but debate its details. Some argue it is a composite of two or more agreements made at different moments; the dating of its parts (before or after the battle of Badr in 624 CE) is disputed; and the three major Jewish tribes, Qaynuqa, Nadir and Qurayza, are not named in the surviving text, which refers instead to Jewish clients of the Arab clans. Clause numbering also varies between editions, so citations differ from book to book.

Reading it today

English translations of the full text appear in most scholarly biographies of the Prophet, including A. Guillaume's translation of Ibn Ishaq, and the document is a fixture of modern discussions on Islam, citizenship and pluralism. For the setting in which it was written, see Yathrib before Islam and the city's full historical overview; for the community it created around the mosque at its heart, see the Prophet's Mosque.