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One of the oldest extant documents in Islamic history records a set of deeds executed by Muhammad after his migration (hijra) in 622 from Mecca to Yathrib, subsequently known as "the City [madina] of the Prophet." Marking the beginning of the Islamic era, the document comprising the deeds has been the subject of well over a century of modern scholarship1 and is commonly called the "Constitution of Medina"--with some justification, although the first modern scholar who studied it at the end of the 19th century, Julius Wellhausen, more accurately described it as the "municipal charter" (Gemeindeordnung) of Medina.2 In 1889, Wellhausen highlighted the text's antiquity, which has been acknowledged by even the most skeptical of contemporary "source-critical" scholars, Patricia Crone, who thinks that, in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, "it sticks out like a piece of solid rock in an accumulation of rubble."3
The significance of the text cannot be reduced to its antiquity, however. Furthermore, this significance varies from generation to generation. History is an open book, and the past can always be reread in the light of present concerns and from the horizon of expectations of the future.4 Medieval Muslim scholarship primarily followed Ibn Ishaq in seeing the document as "Muhammad's pact with the Jews of Medina" but also recognized it as an important text in public law. In fact, the text used as the basis of my interpretation and translation is taken from a 9th-century treatise on public law, Abu [MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING]Ubayd's Kitab al-Amwal.
The constitutionalist reading of the document that accounts for its designation in modern scholarship as the Constitution of Medina (CM) acquires new immediacy with the current widespread preoccupation of Muslims throughout the world with Islamic constitutionalism. The agenda for research in the human sciences, including historiography, is set by the values of each epoch. As "the light of the great cultural problems moves on," this research, as Max Weber puts it, "follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors."5 This study of the CM as proto-Islamic public law is accordingly guided by the prominence of a constitutional rereading of Islam...