Was Madina a social contract?

When the Prophet migrated from Makkah to Madina, the city was divided by old rivalries, especially between the Arab tribes of Aws and Khazraj, while Jewish tribes were also part of its life. A written agreement, known today as the Constitution or Charter of Madina, set out how the Muhajirun (the emigrants), the Ansar (the helpers), the Jewish tribes and their allies would live together. The paper asks whether this document can be called a social contract: the idea in Western political thought that legitimate government rests on an agreement among the governed.

The authors work from Ibn Ishaq's biography of the Prophet, where the text is preserved, along with the Qur'an, hadith and modern scholarship. They take seriously Ilyas Ahmad's 1944 argument that Madina was a real, not imaginary, social contract, while warning that he fits it too neatly into Western theory. They also note the cautions of Michael Lecker, R. B. Serjeant and Uri Rubin, who question whether the document was one text written at one time. Even so, the paper finds real contractual elements: the Pledges of ʿAqabah, in which Madinans invited the Prophet and promised to protect him; a clause making the believers “one community”; shared defence; rules on blood money that moved disputes away from tribal revenge; and the referral of serious disputes to Allah and His Messenger.

Jewish groups kept their religion while sharing duties of defence and peace, which the authors call treaty-based or covenantal pluralism. It had limits: groups that broke the agreement or joined hostile coalitions lost its protection. Compared with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Madina shared their concerns with security, consent and community, but its final authority was revelation and prophethood, not consent alone. The Qur'an's commands to fulfil agreements (5:1) and to judge with justice (4:58) frame this order.

The authors conclude that the document is best read as a covenantal political compact. It was neither a modern liberal constitution nor merely a symbolic text. Its lessons for today, they argue, are principles such as justice, keeping covenants, accountable leadership and shared membership across communities, not a blueprint to copy.