Banu Qurayza

Banu Qurayza — the last of Yathrib's great Jews — whose sentencing after the Trench siege is the most disputed event of Medina in narration and reading alike.

Medina accused them of opening the channels to the polytheists during the Trench siege. Besieged for days, they surrendered to the arbitration of Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, who ruled that their fighting men be killed and their dependants taken captive — some six hundred men were executed, and the pits were dug in Medina's market ¹.

In the Sunni tradition it is a just ruling on treachery — Sa'd himself, one of their allies, was brought in ill, and his verdict was "by God's ruling", meaning the law of Moses — while in the academic reading it is a turning point from the plural society to the unitary state ^{2 3}.

The Qurayza affair — the Muslims' heaviest case against critics, from medieval churchmen to today's writers — remains the one event in the Prophet's sira that defenders and critics alike prefer to consider on its own ³.