[13] According to traditional Islamic belief, in Muhammad's last years in Mecca, a delegation from Medina from its twelve important clans invited him as a neutral outsider to serve as the chief arbitrator for the entire community.
[14] According to chroniclers such as Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi (785-845 CE), the composition of the population of Medina at that time consisted of two supergroup local Arab tribes, the Aus and the Khazraj, with eight clans and 33 other smaller groups under them.
According to L. Ali Khan, scholars do not agree on whether the constitution was a single document or "a compilation of multiple agreements reached at different times".
[23] According to mid-20th century scholar, Robert Bertram Serjeant, the 'Constitution of Medina' consists of "eight distinct documents ... issued on various occasions over the first seven years or so of Muhammad's Medinan period".
[24] In its first recension, Serjeant hypothesizes that the text sanctioned the establishment of a confederation; in its second, it admonished the Aws and Khazraj to abide by their treaty; in its third, in conjunction with the proceeding verses, it encouraged of Muhammad's adherents to face the Meccan forces they eventually fought at Uhud.
[Note 1] On the other hand, historians have variously characterized it as a "municipal charter” (Gemeindeordnung); or as a "unilateral proclamation" by Muhammad, whose "purpose was purely practical and administrative", rather than a treaty in the modern sense.
Other factors include the perceived archaic style of the text, its abundance of unexplained allusions that were considered to be likely understood only by contemporaries, and its apparent inclination towards tribal law over developed Islamic norms.
[19][34][35][36] In the case of some historians, skepticism is constrained to particular aspects of the Constitution as well as the context of its emergence; disagreements persist on whether the documents resulted from negotiated settlements or were merely unilateral edicts by Muhammad, the identity of participants (including uncertainty about the inclusion of the three major Jewish tribes of Medina—Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza),[37] the quantity of documents, the precise timing of its creation (or that of its constituent parts), and the appropriate approach to its translation, among other issues.
[11] One 20th-century scholar, W. Montgomery Watt, suggested that the Constitution of Medina must have been written in the early Medinan period (i.e., in 622 CE or shortly thereafter), because if the document had been drafted any later, then it would have both had a positive attitude towards the Quraysh and given Muhammad a more prominent place.
[46] Welch in Encyclopedia of Islam states: "The constitution reveals Muhammad's great diplomatic skills, for it allows the ideal that he cherished of an ummah (community) based clearly on a religious outlook to sink temporarily into the background and is shaped essentially by practical considerations.
[47] Tribal identities are still important to refer to different groups, but the "main binding tie" for the newly created ummah is religion.