Yathrib, the oasis that became Medina

An oasis, not a town

Pre-Islamic Yathrib was not a single walled city like Mecca's compact settlement around the sanctuary. It was a scatter of villages, orchards and small mud-brick forts (utum, plural atam) spread across a fertile basin on the Hejaz plateau. The basin owes its existence to geography: it sits between fields of black basalt — the harrat — that trap groundwater flowing down from surrounding wadis, above all Wadi al-Aqiq. Shallow wells made intensive farming possible in a region that is otherwise desert, and the lava fields to the east and west formed natural defences, leaving the oasis approachable mainly from the north and south. That accident of terrain would later decide the strategy of the Battle of the Trench.

The name Yathrib is ancient — it appears in pre-Islamic inscriptions and in classical geographers' accounts of Arabia. After 622 CE the settlement gradually became known as Madinat an-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet", or simply al-Madinah, and later tradition discouraged use of the old name.

Date farming and trade

Yathrib's wealth was agricultural. Its date palms were famous across Arabia — the ancestor of the trade in Medina dates that still defines the city's markets — and its farmers also grew cereals, vegetables and vines in the shade of the palms. Jewish craftsmen worked as smiths, armourers and jewellers, and the oasis traded dates and manufactured goods for the caravan traffic moving along the western Arabian route between Yemen, Mecca and Syria. Unlike Mecca, however, Yathrib was a community of farmers rather than long-distance merchants.

The tribes of the oasis

By the early seventh century five main tribal groups dominated Yathrib.

• The Aws and the Khazraj, two related Arab tribes which, according to tradition, had migrated north from Yemen — a movement later linked in Arab memory to the failure of the Marib dam. They settled among the older communities and in time became the dominant landholders.
• The Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza, the three principal Jewish tribes, long established in the oasis, holding some of the best agricultural land and the strongest forts, particularly in the south and south-east.

These groups did not live in separate quarters so much as in interlocking networks of alliance. Each Jewish tribe was bound by pacts to one of the Arab factions — Nadir and Qurayza broadly with the Aws, Qaynuqa with the Khazraj — so any quarrel between the Aws and Khazraj tended to pull the whole oasis in.

Bu'ath and the search for an arbiter

And quarrel they did. Generations of feuding between the Aws and Khazraj over land, water and honour culminated in the battle of Bu'ath, fought around 617 CE, a few years before the Hijrah. The fighting was unusually bloody, killed many of the older chiefs on both sides, and settled nothing. Exhausted and leaderless, both tribes understood that the oasis could not survive another round; some accounts say the Khazraj had even considered crowning Abdullah ibn Ubayy as a king before events overtook the plan.

It was in this atmosphere that men of Yathrib met the Prophet Muhammad at the pilgrimage fairs near Mecca. At Aqaba in 621 and again in 622 CE, delegations of the Aws and Khazraj pledged allegiance to him — in part because a respected outside arbiter offered a way out of the cycle of vendetta that no local chief could provide. Those pledges opened the road to the Hijrah, and the tribes who made them became the Ansar, "the helpers".

What changed in 622

The arrival of the Prophet transformed Yathrib from a divided oasis into a governed city. The Constitution of Medina bound emigrants, Ansar and the Jewish tribes into a single defensive community; the mosque that became the Prophet's Mosque gave it a civic centre; and within a decade the former Yathrib was the capital of a state spanning Arabia. The full arc of that story is traced on the history page.