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Christians were the only ones linked so intimately to Islam. In fact, because of a shared tradition, Jews, Muslims, and Christians could all be considered People of the Book. They were all members of a family, a family created by God. And just as a brother cannot kill his brother no matter how misguided that brother is, Muslims had to find a way to tolerate Christians andJews, no matter how lost, foolish, and sinful they were.
    In looking for the foundation of relations between the faiths, it makes sense to focus primarily on how Muslims dealt with Jews and Christians rather than on how Jews and Christians dealt with Muslims. Judaism evolved over centuries before the emergence of Christianity, and early Christianity had to grapple with Judaism but not with Islam. Muslim identity, however, was tied to the People of the Book. There was never atime when Muslims did not have to grapple with Jewish and Christian arguments against Islam. From the start, they had to figure out how to deal with Jews and Christians living next to them and under them as conquered people. As a result, Muslims had to think through relations between the faiths far more than Christians and Jews ever did. The subsequent history of relations between the three, therefore, begins with how Muslims treated Jews and Christians. Only after the first wave of Muslim conquests were Jews and Christians forced to invent theologically acceptable compromises that would allow them to acquiesce to Muslim rule.
    THE CONQUESTS
    MUHAMMAD’S political achievements were impressive. What happened shortly after his death was astonishing. Between 627 and 632, Muhammad removed the Jews from Medina, defeated the last of the Meccan resistance, and extended the reach of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula and north toward the fringes of the Byzantine and Sasa-nian Empires. When Muhammad died, in 632, his father-in-law and one of the earliest and oldest converts to Islam, Abu Bakr, was chosen as his successor and given the title khalif rasai Allah. The title literally translates as “successor to the messenger of God,” but what that meant in practice was anyone’s guess. It clearly did not suggest that Abu Bakr was also a messenger of God, because Muhammad was heralded as “the seal of the prophets,” and therefore the final emissary to be sent by Allah before the end of days. It also did not mean that Abu Bakr or any subsequent caliph had the same moral or religious authority that Muhammad had possessed.
    The issue of religious authority raises a freighted question: what is the connection between church and state in Islam? Because of Muhammad’s role as both prophet and leader, it is sometimes said that Islam was born as a theocracy. In some respects, that is true. The community of Medina was both a religious community of the faithful and a political community composed of Muslim emigrants, the Arab tribes of Medina, and for a time Jews, with Muhammad as the first among equals. But while Muhammad was blessed as a prophet and revered, he was not seen as infallible, at least not during his lifetime. His was, therefore, a theocracythat understood that distinction between an all-powerful God and an honored leader.
    Though Medina under Muhammad is revered by Muslims as an ideal, it has never been a viable model for Muslim society. When Muhammad was alive, there was no church-state dichotomy. However, as the Muslim community took on a military character after his death, there was a clear sense that the political and military realms were separate from the spiritual and personal. That was supported by the Quran, which drew an unambiguous distinction between the spirit and the flesh, and between the earthly world and the world beyond. Some verses in the Quran speak to human history and worldly affairs; others speak to the mysterious power of God and man’s insignificance in the face of that. Muhammad was both prophet and political leader, but while those roles were united in him,