  

object named “the seven mathānī” and “the
glorious Qur
ān” is actually the entire
Qur
ān. In this case the seven mathānī are
taken as signifying seven repetitive aspects
of the Qur
ān’s contents: () commands
(see ), () prohibitions (see
), () good tidings (see 
), () warnings (see ), () para-
bles (q.v.), () divine mercy, () stories of
past generations (q.v.).
In accordance with the notion that the
seven mathānī are the entire Qur
ān, some
exegetes say that their number denotes
the seven asbā, i.e. the seven parts into
which the Qur
ān is divided, or its seven
volumes.
Uri Rubin
Bibliography
Primary (in addition to other classical com-
mentaries on  :): Ayyāshī, Tafsīr, ed.
Hāshim al-Rasūlī al-Maallātī,  vols., Beirut
; Māwardī, Nukat; abarī, Tafsīr, ed. Shākir;
Suyūī, Itqān, ed. Ibrāhīm, Cairo ; Zarkashī,
Burhān.
Secondary: Horovitz,  , -; Jeffery, For. vocab.,
-; Paret, Kommentar, ; U. Rubin, Exegesis
and adīth. The case of the seven mathānī, in
Hawting and Shareef, Approaches, -; Watt-
Bell, Introduction, -.
Old Age see    ;
      

Olives see  

Omens see ; ;

Omnipotence see  

Opponent see 
576
Opposition to Muammad
Resistance to the political and religious
authority (q.v.) of Muammad. The
Qur
ān is very much a document that
shows the struggle of a new faith (q.v.)
coming into existence, and the career of
Muammad is very much the story of a
man who eventually defeated all odds
when shaping the first community of
believers (see    
 

). Additionally, the qur
ānic
concept of prophecy (see  
) is profoundly marked by
the experience of opposition (see  :;
:). The fact of being opposed both
theologically and politically (see 
  

;   


) has marked Islam from its begin-
nings, and the successful effort to over-
come opposition was an important factor
in its development which led to a self-
confident religion of great appeal to
possible converts.
Theological opposition was leveled
against the tenets of the new faith as
preached by the Prophet; political opposi-
tion was directed first against the social
and economic consequences of nascent
Islam in Muammad’s hometown (see
), then against the claim to hege-
mony of the quickly expanding Muslim
community in Medina (q.v.). The most
serious theological opposition came from
Jews (see   ), while the
Meccan pagans were hardly able, as far as
we know, to counter Muammad’s mono-
theistic vision (see below; see 
 ;  , 
 -). The Christians (see
  ), who are
generally portrayed in a more favorable
light in the Islamic sources, appear less
eager to enter into discussions with the
Prophet (see   )
 577
and are more frequently reported as hav-
ing been persuaded by the new message.
Active political and military opposition
against Muammad and his followers was
primarily the work of the Meccans (see
  ; ); the
Jewish tribes in Medina and Khaybar
opposed the Prophet without resorting to
open aggression (although not a few
sources tend to stress that the Jews either
provoked the Muslims or took active meas-
ures against them). Even Muammad’s
own family (see    )
were guilty of opposing him (cf.  :-,
and commentaries on this sūra).
Muammad, who acted both as prophet
and founder of a new religion and as a
political and military leader of his support-
ers, was, naturally, the main target of the
opponents of early Islam, no matter how
their hostile intentions were defined. With
the concerns of faith and the duties of the
believers inextricably linked in his person,
opposing the Prophet meant opposing
God, or, put differently: “Whosoever
obeys the messenger, thereby obeys God”
( :; see also  :; :; :). As a
result of the opposition that arose against
his person, Muammad suffered, during
his years in Mecca, from humiliation, deri-
sion (see ) and from being treated
either like a madman (see ) or an
outcast. Some people would even fling
pebbles at him while he was praying and
others kicked stones at him so that he had
to run away with bleeding feet. During the
Medinan period (see  
 

), he had to survive various
attempts at his life, be it the poison of a
Jewish woman or the drawn sword of a
bedouin (q.v.; it is nevertheless difficult, as
a perusal of the relevant sources shows, to
link the specific events as reported in Is-
lamic tradition and sīra literature with the
rather vague qur
ānic allusions to such
   
attempts:  :; :, ; :; :;
see    

).
Muammad’s reaction against his oppo-
nents varied in time and according to the
possibilities within his reach. In the Mec-
can period, he was satisfied — due to the
lack of effective means and a large group
of followers — to merely censure the activ-
ities of his opponents and to turn his back
on them in patience and to leave their
punishment to God (see  
;  ). This
attitude becomes obvious from numerous
qur
ānic verses that are traditionally reck-
oned to belong to Meccan sūras (e.g.
 :-; :; :; :-; :-,
etc.). Also, the so-called “punishment sto-
ries” (Straflegenden; see the list in Watt-Bell,
Introduction, ) were to provide the
Prophet with fitting examples of what had
happened in earlier times and in analogous
situations. Once in Medina, however, and
with military means at his disposal, the
Prophet did not limit himself anymore to
simply accusing and warning (q.v.) his
opponents, but called his followers to
actively fight for the cause of Islam
( :-, ; :; : f., ,  f.;
:, ; : f., , ; :; :) and
was himself ordered to be the first in line
( :; see 
). The cause of Islam was
thus no longer the cause of God alone, and
Muammad exhorted the members of his
community: “O believers! Fight the unbe-
lievers who are in your vicinity and let
them find you ruthless! And know that
God supports the godfearing” ( :; see
  ) — a sentiment very
much in contrast to Muammad’s passive
stance during his former stay in Mecca.
The transfer of power from God’s hands
into those of humans, that is, the switch
from relying on eschatological punishment
to settling matters in this world, seems
complete (see ).
    
As mentioned above, the two main
groups of opponents during the career of
Muammad were the Meccan pagans and
the Jews. Both were eventually subdued by
more or less violent means (see below). The
Christians — much fewer in number than
the Arabian Jews — never posed the same
threat to the Prophet’s community, and the
encounter with the Christian population in
northern Arabia (see - 
  

) and southern Syria (q.v.)
in the last years of Muammad’s lifetime
generally did not lead to bellicose events;
any conflicts were settled peacefully, e.g. by
contracts (see   ).
The same may be said of the bedouin
tribes of the ijāz (al-arāb, see ),
who often opposed the Prophet’s efforts to
rally them to his cause (e.g.  :, ) and
thus, for a long time, were not an integral
part of the nascent Islamic community (see
 :-). Also, tensions among the inhab-
itants of Medina had led to the formation
of an, as it were, intra-Islamic group of
opponents (a considerable part of whom
were Jewish converts) known as “the hypo-
crites” (al-munāfiqūn, see  
;    ).
Even though they feature prominently in
the Medinan sūras (e.g.  : f.; :-,
but also :, ), their role can only be
reconstructed from the extant sources with
difficulty; nevertheless, their influence on
the course of events in Medina as well as
their potentially detrimental activities do
not appear very threatening, at least when
compared to those of the Meccans and
the Jews.
The Meccan pagans
From the beginning of his prophetic mis-
sion, Muammad had to cope with the
fierce opposition of many of his Meccan
compatriots. Curiously, the qur
ānic data
suggest that their opposition was primarily
directed against elements of monotheist
578
belief ( :), such as the resuscitation of
the dead (see ), the day of
judgment (see  ) or the
denial of the existence of Arabian deities.
In Islamic tradition, however, the pagans
hardly figure as opponents on religious
grounds. The few pagan “priests” (kuhhān,
see ) who appear in sīra litera-
ture and related genres are not depicted as
Muammad’s opponents but rather foretell
or announce his prophethood. The Mec-
can leaders, on the other hand, are shown
as being driven by the interest to preserve
the status quo of the Meccan hierarchy,
as well as by economic considerations (in
order to save their sources of income
which depended on pagan festivities); this
is in accordance with the Qur
ān, which
often censures their material greed (e.g.
 :-; :-; see ; ;
  ; ). When
speaking, however, about the Meccan
period as represented in the Qur
ān, W.M.
Watt rightly observes: “There are virtually
no factual details about the persons who
accepted Islam, and only a modicum of
general information about the opponents.
Most of this last is about the verbal argu-
ments between these and Muammad”
(Watt, Mecca, ).
What the Qur
ān does, in fact, convey is
the sense of oppression Muammad must
have felt in Mecca, coupled with an inabil-
ity to counteract such adversities and even
a fear of giving in to the pagans ( : f.;
see  ). Over the years,
Muammad’s followers grew in number;
with this, the opposition of the Meccans
became less restrained. Some Muslims
resorted to leaving their hometown and
went into exile in Ethiopia (see ).
The Prophet himself first tried to gain a
foothold in nearby ā
if but, when this had
failed, he reached an agreement with the
people of Medina at Aqaba. Thus the
emigration (q.v.) of the Prophet to Medina
 579
was, initially, the outcome of the Meccans’
opposition ( :). Many of his followers
accompanied Muammad, and the Qur
ān
alludes in a number of verses not only to
the general hardships endured by the early
Muslims ( :, :, :, :), but
also to the painful experience of losing
one’s home and possessions: “And those
that emigrated in God’s cause (see 
 ) after they were wronged, we shall
surely lodge them in this world in a goodly
lodging; and the wage of the world to
come is greater, did they but know”
( :; see also  : f., :, :,
: f.).
The Medinan period brought about the
change from putting up with pagan oppo-
sition to striking back. Muslims and Mec-
cans met each other in various skirmishes
and bigger clashes, several of which are
described at length in the Qur
ān, al-
though even among the “orthodox” non-
qur
ānic sources, there is no complete
unanimity — with the exception of  :
(battle of Badr),  :- (War of the
Ditch; see    ; -
  ) and  : f. (battle
of unayn [q.v.]) — as to which verses re-
fer to which event. The early tafsīr works in
particular, e.g. those by Mujāhid (d. ⁄
) and Muqātil (d. ⁄), often yield
accounts different from the later accepted
versions. Up to the decisive treaty of al-
udaybiya, traditionally associated with
  (Sūrat al-Fat, “Victory”), however,
the Meccan opposition had gradually lost
much of its force, and the Muslim con-
quest of Mecca largely put an end to the
Meccan opposition ( , Sūrat al-Na+r,
“Succor”).
The Arabian Jews
Muammad encountered the opposition of
Jews while still living in Mecca, although
non-verbal conflict broke out only when he
was in Medina. Aside from the pagans,
   
Muammad appealed particularly to the
Jews ( :-), despite knowing that their
aversion was the greatest: “That because
God has sent down the book (q.v.) with the
truth; and those that differ regarding the
book, are showing strong enmity [?]”
( :; cf. Paret, Mohammad, ; see
   ). And although the
Qur
ān repeatedly stresses that putting in
doubt elements of faith and resorting to
dispute is merely a general human trait
( :; :, ), the Jews — both in the
Qur
ān and the Islamic tradition — are
portrayed as having been the most tena-
cious antagonists of Muammad (although
the Christians, too, had a share in that; cf.
 :; :). In sīra literature, already in
the pivotal account by Ibn Isāq (d. ⁄
), we normally find one or more lengthy
chapters that deal with Muammad’s
theological discussions with the Jews,
together with indications of which qur
ānic
verses were either the subject or the result
of those disputes; such discussions, both
with Jews and other opponents, are
reflected variously in the Qur
ān, in
particular in the verses which start with the
phrase “They question you about…” (e.g.
 :, ; :; :; :; :, etc.).
Inevitably, the Prophet is depicted as
defeating the arguments of his opponents,
who then take to cheating (q.v.) or will not
argue on the accurate record of their
revealed scriptures ( :; see also :-,
; see ).
In Medina, when Muammad distanced
himself from pagan opposition, the Jewish
opposition soon became a major preoccu-
pation. After initial and intense follow-ups
to the disputes in Mecca, between the
years ⁄ and ⁄ the Muslim com-
munity got rid of the three major Jewish
tribes: they expelled the Jewish Banū
Qaynuqā and Banū l-Na-īr from Medina,
while the Banū Quray.a were killed and
enslaved (see ,  -; 
;
   , 
). The qur
ānic verses tradition-
ally associated with these events by the
Muslim scholars are  : f. and
 :-. Moreover, during the same pe-
riod some leaders of the Jewish opposition,
notably Kab b. al-Ashraf, were assassi-
nated either in Medina or Khaybar; the
latter town was conquered in ⁄. In the
sources it remains unclear, however,
whether at that point there were no Jews
left in the ijāz or whether some Jewish
settlements (e.g. Fadak) persisted.
Finally, it must be remarked that a recon-
struction of the events relating to the
opposition to Muammad and their rele-
vant chronology relies heavily on the infor-
mation provided in the vast Islamic
tradition, as well as on the commonly
accepted chronology of qur
ānic verses.
Many studies in recent years have shown
that the historical value of this tradition
cannot always be trusted (see 
  

;    

;
-  
  

). On the other hand, by no
means should Islamic tradition be consid-
ered irrelevant, as it might be utilized
either in tracing the ideological differences
within early Islam or in unearthing ac-
counts which do not fit the “canonical”
Islamic view (as developed from the late
second⁄eighth century onwards); it could
thus deepen or change our future under-
standing of early Islamic history.
Marco Schöller
Bibliography
Primary (see also other works in the genres of
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asbāb al-nuzūl] and the “proofs of prophethood”
[dalāil or alām al-nubuwwa], as well as adīth
anthologies and the Qur
ān commentaries on the
verses mentioned in the article): al-Bayhaqī, Abū
Bakr Amad b. al-usayn, Dalāil al-nubuwwa
wa-marifat awāl āib al-sharīa, ed. A. Qal
ajī,
 vols., Beirut ; Wāidī, Asbāb.
580
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Oppressed on Earth, The
Those with no political or other power; the
downtrodden. Several verses of the Qur
ān
refer to those who are “weak” ( aīf, pl.
uafā, and other derivatives of --f;
 :, ; :; :; :; :; :)
or those who are “deemed or made weak”
(musta af, pl. musta afūn, as well as the
tenth verbal form of --f;  :, -;