Banu Adi ibn Ka'b

After Surah al-Muddaththir commanded the Prophet ﷺ to arise and warn, he began quietly, with the people closest to him in Makkah. The first to believe was his wife Khadija RA. She believed before she even knew what she was believing in, out of trust in the man she knew. The second was her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal. There was no shahada to say yet, but he affirmed that Muhammad ﷺ was a prophet, and he died soon afterwards. Scholars differ over who came next among three people. A simple way to resolve this is to say that Ali RA was the first child to believe, Abu Bakr RA the first free man, and Zayd ibn Harithah RA the first freed slave. Ali was about ten years old and was being raised in the Prophet ﷺ's own household. No story of Abu Bakr's conversion has survived, only the manner of it. He accepted Islam the moment it was put to him. Years later in Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ was frustrated with something Umar RA had done. He said, "Allah sent me with the Truth, but all of you accused me of being a liar; and it was only Abu Bakr who said, 'You are telling the truth.'" In another hadith he said, "There was not a single person whom I invited to Islam except that he had some doubts before he converted, except for Abu Bakr." He also said that Allah had taken him as His khalil, His close friend, so he could have no other khalil, "but were I to choose a khalil, it would have been Abu Bakr." The Qur'an refers to Abu Bakr as the second of the two in the cave (9:40). Four men then became Muslims through Abu Bakr. All were noblemen of the Quraysh, and each became a great figure in Islam. The youngest was Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, about sixteen years old. His mother refused to eat or drink until he returned to the idols, and she grew weaker and weaker. Finally he swore to her that even if he had a hundred souls and lost every one of them watching her die, he would not give up his religion. Seeing his resolve, she began eating again. Allah then revealed that if parents press you to worship others besides Him, you should not obey them, but should still treat them kindly in this world (31:15). The second was Uthman ibn Affan RA. The third was Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA, the Prophet ﷺ's cousin through his aunt Safiyyah. The Prophet ﷺ later said, "Every prophet has been given a hawari, and Allah has given me as my hawari Zubayr ibn al-Awwam." A hawari is a devoted disciple. The fourth was Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, a trader of about thirty. Years later he would arrive in Madinah with nothing and ask only to be shown the marketplace. Next came Abdullah ibn Mas'ud RA. He was neither a nobleman nor a slave, but a young man from a Yemeni tribe hired to herd the sheep of Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt. One day two men came to him in the pasture and asked for milk. He told them he could not give it, because the sheep were not his. One of them asked him to point out a she-goat that had stopped giving milk. He did, and the man made du'a and rubbed its udder until it filled with milk. They milked it and drank. Amazed, Ibn Mas'ud asked who they were. He was told that this was Abu Bakr and this was the Prophet ﷺ, and he became a Muslim on the spot. He later said that he learned over seventy surahs directly from the Prophet ﷺ's mouth. The Prophet ﷺ said, "If you want to know how to read the Quran, read it the way Ibn Mas'ud does." After him came many from among the slaves and servants of Makkah. The best known are Bilal RA, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt RA, and Yasir, his wife Sumayyah and their son Ammar. Amr ibn Abasah, a man from Yemen, had already rejected idol worship on his own. He heard that a man in Makkah was preaching the same, so he travelled there. He found the Prophet ﷺ living in hiding and asked him what he was. The Prophet ﷺ said, "I am a prophet." Amr asked what a prophet was and what he had been sent with. The Prophet ﷺ told him he had been sent to keep the ties of kinship, to break all idols, and so that Allah alone would be worshipped. Amr asked who had followed him, and he answered, "One free man, and one slave." Amr said he wanted to follow him too. But the Prophet ﷺ said, "You cannot do this now. Don't you see my situation, that I have to hide from my own people?" He told Amr, "Go back to your people, and when you hear that I have been victorious over my people, come back to me." Years later, after the Hijrah, Amr came to the mosque in Madinah and asked the Prophet ﷺ whether he recognized him. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Yes, you are the man who came to me from Yemen in Makkah." In these first years, the call to Islam was private, and deliberately so.

When the Muslims numbered around 20 or 30, the Prophet ﷺ saw that they needed a place to meet. It had to be secret. Many Muslims had not told their families and friends about their faith, and some converted slaves had not told their masters. He chose the house of al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam, which stood behind Mount Safa in the center of Makkah. Al-Arqam was one of the first ten people to accept Islam. He was also a nobleman of Banu Makhzum, the clan of Abu Jahal, which was a rival of the Prophet ﷺ's own clan. The sources do not say why his house was chosen, but likely no one would suspect a Makhzumi of sheltering the Muslims. Its location near the Ka'bah also meant that people coming and going would not draw attention. The house, known as Dar al-Arqam, became the main meeting place of the early Muslims.

Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA narrated that he was in a gathering with the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, when the Prophet ﷺ took a group of pebbles in his hand and all present heard them praising Allah. He then passed the pebbles to Abu Bakr, then Umar, then Uthman, and in each of their hands the pebbles continued praising Allah and all present could hear it. When the Prophet ﷺ left and the pebbles were later picked up again, nothing could be heard from them.

The Muslims in Makkah faced open persecution, threats and torture. In Rajab of the 5th year of the mission, the Prophet ﷺ said to his Companions, "This land has become too constricted for you, so for those of you who want to, why don't you emigrate to the neighboring land of Abyssinia? For there is a Christian king there, who is a just king. He shall allow you to worship without interference." That king was the Najashi (Negus) of Abyssinia, As'hama ibn Abjar. Fifteen people emigrated, 11 men and 4 women. They travelled for about a day and a half to the port of Juddah (today's Jeddah), and from there took a ship to Abyssinia. Among them were Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, the Prophet ﷺ's daughter. Others included Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Uthman ibn Maz'un, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Mus'ab ibn Umayr. Abu Salama went with his wife Umm Salama, and Amir ibn Rabi'ah with his wife Layla. All of those who went were Muslims of high standing in the Quraysh, who had the freedom to leave. The lower-status believers, many of them slaves, could not go, even though they needed it most. These included Bilal, Khabbab, Ibn Mas'ud and Ammar.

Hamzah became a Muslim most likely in Dhu al-Hijjah of the sixth year of the dawah. Three days later, the Muslims of Makkah gained a second man whom the Quraysh had thought could never be won over. This was Umar ibn al-Khattab. He and Abu Jahl were the strongest men of their generation, both in body and in family standing. They were also the two fiercest enemies the new faith had. Before this, Umar had shown a moment of softness. A woman named Layla was loading her camel for the second emigration to Abyssinia. She told him that his cruelty was driving them from their homes just so they could worship Allah. Umar softened for a moment, and wished her blessing wherever she went. Her husband, Amir ibn Rabi'ah, heard about it. He said that his father's donkey would accept Islam before Umar did. Neither of them knew that the Prophet ﷺ had made a du'a about Umar. He had asked Allah to strengthen Islam through whichever of the two men, Abu Jahl or Umar, was dearer to Him. Umar's son, Abdullah, later said that Umar was the dearer of the two. More than one story is told of how Umar came to Islam. They are best read as strands of a single rope. One night Umar went looking for a drink. None of his friends were at home, and even the wine-seller was out. So he went to the Ka'bah to walk off the craving. There he found the Prophet ﷺ alone in the dark, praying. Umar crept up behind him, meaning to beat him. Instead, for the first time, he listened. The Prophet ﷺ was reciting Surah al-Haqqah. Umar told himself that this was a poet's verse. At that moment the recitation said that it was not the word of a poet. He thought it might be the word of a soothsayer, and the recitation answered that too. He wondered whether the man had made it up. The verses said that if he had invented any of it, Allah would have seized him by the right hand and cut his aorta. Umar stood there until the surah was finished, and then went home. He said afterwards that Islam entered his heart that night, even though he did not yet accept it. Then one day Abu Jahl was speaking at length among the Quraysh about the man who had insulted their gods and their forefathers. He offered a reward to whoever would get rid of him. The reward was a hundred red and black camels and a hundred measures of silver. Umar went home, took his sword and set out. On the way he met Nu'aym ibn Abdillah al-Nahham, who was secretly a Muslim. Nu'aym asked him where he was going. Umar said he was going to kill Muhammad ﷺ. Nu'aym was frightened. He asked whether Umar really thought the Banu Abd Manaf would let him go on living after he killed one of their own. Then, to turn him aside, Nu'aym told him he had better put his own house in order first. His sister Fatima and her husband Sa'id ibn Zayd had accepted Islam. This did not calm Umar. He went to their house. Through the door he heard the Qur'an being recited. Khabbab ibn al-Aratt was inside with them, because the Prophet ﷺ had appointed him as their teacher. Khabbab hid, and Fatima sat on the written page to hide it. Umar pounded on the door and demanded to know what the murmuring had been. They denied that there had been anything. Umar struck at Sa'id, but the blow landed on his sister. Fatima and her husband were bleeding, but they were now beyond fear. They told him that yes, they were Muslims, and he could do whatever he liked. Seeing them stand so firm changed him, just as Layla's words had. He asked to see what they had been reading. First Fatima made him swear not to harm it. Then she told him that a mushrik could not touch it until he had washed. Umar did ghusl and read from Surah Taha. Then he asked to be taken to the Prophet ﷺ. Sa'id led him to the house of al-Arqam, where the Muslims met in secret. Umar still had his sword in his hand. Someone inside cried out that Umar was at the door with a sword. Hamzah told them to let him in. He said that if Allah wanted good for Umar, he would accept Islam. If not, Umar's own sword would be the end of him. The Prophet ﷺ took hold of Umar's collar. He asked him what he was doing there. He warned him that if he carried on down this path, Allah would destroy him with a punishment. Umar said he had come to believe in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ cried "Allahu akbar," and everyone in the house heard it. That same day the Muslims, about forty of them, walked to the Ka'bah in two lines. Umar led one line and Hamzah led the other. They prayed there in public for the first time, and no one dared to touch them. The Prophet ﷺ gave Umar the name al-Faruq, meaning the one who separates truth from falsehood. Years later, as Umar lay dying, Ibn Mas'ud said that from the day Umar became Muslim, the Muslims never stopped being held in honour. Umar was not a man to hide what he had done. He went to Abu Jahl's door to tell him in person that he now believed in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. Abu Jahl cursed him and slammed the door in his face. Then Umar asked who the biggest gossip in Makkah was. People pointed him to Jamil ibn Ma'mar al-Jumahi. Umar confided in Jamil that he had become a Muslim. Jamil ran out into the streets, barely dressed. He shouted that Ibn al-Khattab had become a Sabian. Umar followed behind him, correcting the word. He called out, "Aslamtu," which means "I have accepted Islam." A crowd at the Ka'bah fought him until al-As ibn Wa'il gave him protection. The Prophet ﷺ later said something about Umar. He said that there had been people before who were spoken to by the angels without being prophets, and that if anyone in his community was like this, it was Umar. And when Umar became caliph, the faith that had once been forty people walking to the Ka'bah spread over most of the known world.

Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah and Hisham ibn al-As had planned to emigrate to Madinah together with Umar ibn al-Khattab. Hisham never arrived at the meeting point, so Umar and Ayyash set off without him and reached Madinah. Some days later, Abu Jahal and his brother, who were both half-brothers of Ayyash, came to Madinah after him. They told him that his mother had vowed not to eat, drink or shelter from the sun until she saw him again, and that her hair was full of lice. Umar warned Ayyash that it was a trick, and he offered to give him all the money he needed if he would stay. When Ayyash insisted on going back to look after his mother, Umar lent him his own camel, which was faster and stronger than theirs. He told Ayyash to ride straight back to Madinah at the first sign of treachery. On the road, Ayyash gradually let his guard down. Abu Jahal then said his own camel was tired and asked to ride on Ayyash's instead. As soon as Ayyash made his camel kneel, the brothers seized him and tied him up. They brought him into Makkah as a prisoner and paraded him around the town. The Quraysh threw him into a prison they had set up especially for him and for Hisham, who had also been captured.

The Prophet ﷺ asked the sahaba (his companions) how the people should be called to salah, the daily prayer. One suggested using a bell, as the Christians did, but the idea was set aside. There are authentic hadiths that the Prophet ﷺ disliked bells, and that he said, "The angels do not accompany any caravan that has a bell." Others suggested a shofar, a horn, and that was set aside too. The meeting ended without a decision. That night, Abdullah ibn Zayd RA and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA each saw the same dream. In Abdullah's dream, a man taught him the words of the call to prayer, the adhan as Muslims know it today. Abdullah rushed to tell the Prophet ﷺ, who said, "This is a true dream, insha'Allah." The Prophet ﷺ chose Bilal RA to call the adhan because he had the loudest voice. Abdullah ibn Zayd stood beside him and told him each phrase, and Bilal repeated it aloud. While Bilal was calling, Umar RA came rushing into the masjid and said that he had seen the same words in his own dream.

When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in central Madinah, his camel knelt on a piece of land used for drying dates. It belonged to two orphan brothers, Sahal and Suhayl, who had inherited it from their father. They offered it as a gift, but the Prophet ﷺ insisted on paying its due price. The date palms on the land were cut down and used to make the front and back walls of the masjid. The Companions made clay bricks for the other walls. The Prophet ﷺ worked alongside them, taking his place in the line that passed the bricks along. According to al-Bayhaqi's Dala'il, the building took about two weeks, and the masjid measured roughly 100 by 130 feet. It had three public doors. Bab al-Rahma (the Door of Mercy) was on the south side and Bab Jibril (the Door of Gabriel) on the west. Bab al-Nisa' (the Door of Women) was on the east, set aside after Umar RA suggested that men and women should not share an entrance. There were also private entrances from the houses built against its walls, including the house of Abu Bakr RA and the Prophet ﷺ's own house, where Aisha RA lived. At first the roof covered only the northern part, which then faced the qibla towards Jerusalem. When the qibla changed to face Makkah, that covered area became the back of the masjid, and it was known as al-Suffa. A roof over the whole masjid was added later, but it only kept out the sun. Sahih Bukhari records that it rained on the 22nd of Ramadan, probably in 8 AH, and the Prophet ﷺ prostrated on the muddy ground. This shows that the roof leaked. The caliphs after him changed the building in turn. Abu Bakr RA left it as it was. Umar RA strengthened it with wooden pillars and a waterproof roof, and enlarged it by 10 to 15 rows. Uthman RA then enlarged it by about half again.

Umar ibn al-Khattab made his Hijrah openly, as an act of defiance. He armed himself, dressed as a traveler, went to the Ka'bah and walked around it seven times. Then he announced to the Quraysh that he was leaving for Madinah. He told them that anyone who wanted his mother to lose him, his children to become orphans, or his wife to become a widow could meet him in a valley outside the city. No one took up the challenge. Umar chose two other Muslims to travel with him: Hisham ibn al-As and Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah. They agreed to meet at a certain valley outside Makkah on an appointed day. At dawn, whoever was there would set off, and anyone missing would be assumed to have been held back. Hisham did not arrive, so Umar and Ayyash emigrated without him. They reached Madinah safely.

In the early, difficult years in Madinah, before wealth came to the Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ went out of his house one day or night. Outside he found Abu Bakr al-Siddiq RA and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA. He asked them, "What has brought you out of your houses at this hour?" They told him it was hunger. He said, "By Him in Whose Hand is my life, what has brought you out has brought me out too. Get up." The three of them went to the house of an Ansari, a Muslim of Madinah named Abu al-Haytham ibn al-Tayhan RA. He was not at home. His wife welcomed them and said he had gone to fetch fresh water for the family. When Abu al-Haytham RA came back and saw his guests, he praised Allah and said that no one had more honorable guests that day than he did. He brought them a bunch of ripe, dry and fresh dates and told them to eat. Then he picked up his knife to slaughter an animal for them. The Prophet ﷺ said to him, "Beware of killing a milch animal." So he slaughtered a sheep instead. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, the Prophet ﷺ turned to Abu Bakr RA and Umar RA. He said, "By Him in Whose Hand is my life, you will certainly be questioned about this bounty on the Day of Judgment. Hunger brought you out of your house, then you did not return until this bounty came to you."

Badr is a well on a plain about 130 km south-west of Madinah, where the road to Syria runs. It was named after the man of the Banu Damra who dug it. The battle fought there on Friday, 17 Ramadan 2 AH, was never meant to be a battle. In the year since the Hijrah, permission to fight had come down. The Muslims had begun to strike at the one thing that made the Quraysh what they were. That was their caravan road, which ran past Madinah. First came the expedition to al-Abwa, then the raid that saw the first arrow shot in the way of Allah, then al-Ushayra. At al-Ushayra, the Prophet ﷺ missed Abu Sufyan's great caravan, on its way north, by a single day. Then came Nakhla, where eight men killed a man of the Quraysh in the sacred month. That handed the Quraysh a grievance. Abu Jahl had once threatened Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA at the Ka'bah for sheltering the Muslims. Sa'd had then sworn in front of the Ka'bah to cut the Quraysh off from their trade, which was dearer to them than tawaf. Shortly before the battle, the qibla turned from Jerusalem to Makkah. Ibn Ishaq places this in Sha'ban. In Ramadan the same caravan was due back from Syria, led by Abu Sufyan. By some reports it had a thousand camels. It carried the money and goods of the Quraysh, and Ibn Ishaq says that thirty or forty men guarded it. The Prophet ﷺ sent out scouts. According to Muslim, one scout, Busaysah, brought his report to a house where only the boy Anas RA was present. Other reports name Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA and Sa'id ibn Zayd RA as the scouts, and Ibn Ishaq names Basbas ibn Amr and Adiy ibn Abi al-Zaghba' as the two sent ahead to Badr. The Prophet ﷺ then told the people that anyone whose mount was ready should ride with him at once. He would not wait for those whose animals were grazing outside the town. In Ibn Ishaq's telling, he named the Quraysh caravan as the target when he called them out. It was meant to be a quick seizure, so the men came as they were. There were around 313 or 315 of them. Of these, 83 were Muhajirun, 62 were from the Aws and 170 were from the Khazraj. By one report they had two horses, which belonged to Zubayr RA and al-Miqdad RA. Ali RA said that al-Miqdad was their only horseman. They had seventy camels, with three men sharing each one. In Ibn Mas'ud RA's report, the Prophet ﷺ shared his camel with Ali RA and Abu Lubaba RA. Ibn Ishaq names Ali RA and Marthad ibn Abi Marthad RA instead. His two companions begged him to ride. He answered that they were no stronger than he was, and that he needed the reward no less than they did. He judged al-Bara' ibn Azib RA and Abdullah ibn Umar RA too young to fight. Hudhayfah RA and his father were held back for another reason. The Quraysh had once made them swear never to fight against Muhammad ﷺ, and an oath is an oath, even to an enemy. A pagan of Madinah, famous for his courage, asked three times to join. He was refused twice, because the Muslims do not seek help from an idolater, until he took the shahada. The blind Ibn Umm Maktum stayed behind in Madinah. By one report, Abu Lubaba RA was sent back from the road to take charge of the city. Abu Sufyan had been on his guard since al-Ushayra. He found the scouts' campsite and broke open the camel droppings. Inside he recognised the date stones of Yathrib. He turned the caravan down to the coast road, and sent Damdam ibn Amr al-Ghifari racing to Makkah. Three days before Damdam arrived, Atikah bint Abdul Muttalib had a dream. In it, a crier on a camel called the Quraysh traitors and promised them death in three days. Then a rock rolled down from Abu Qubays and shattered against every house in the city. Her brother al-Abbas told her to keep the dream to herself. But he told one friend about it, and before long Abu Jahl was sneering at the Banu Abdul Muttalib for producing a prophetess. On the third day Damdam rode in. His camel's nose was slit and his shirt was torn, and he was crying out that Muhammad ﷺ was upon the caravan. Makkah raised an army at speed. Every household sent a man or hired one to go. By some reports the army set out 1,300 strong, with a hundred horses and six hundred coats of mail. Umar RA's report in Muslim and Ahmad says that it stood at Badr about a thousand strong. Abu Lahab stayed behind and paid a man who owed him money to go in his place. By some reports Utbah ibn Rabi'ah did not want to fight his own kin, until his brother Shaybah shamed him into it. The same reports say that Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt had once spat in the Prophet ﷺ's face and had been promised death outside Makkah. He did not dare to go until a kinsman lent him the fastest camel in the city. Umayyah ibn Khalaf, fat and fearful, meant to stay at home. According to al-Bukhari, Abu Jahl told him that if the chief of the valley stayed, the people would stay too. According to Ibn Ishaq, Uqba brought him an incense burner and told him to perfume himself, because he belonged with the women. Umayyah then bought the best camel in Makkah. He told his wife that he meant to go only a short way. Every one of these men was on the list the Prophet ﷺ had named in his prayer on the day the entrails were thrown on his back. By one report, before they marched, the Quraysh held the curtains of the Ka'bah. They asked Allah to give victory to the better of the two parties. The Qur'an says that this prayer was answered, against them. Outside Makkah the army nearly turned back. They were afraid that the Banu Bakr would raid the empty city. Then Iblis himself came to them in the shape of Suraqa ibn Malik, a chief of Kinanah. He promised them his protection and rode with them. At Juhfa, Juhaym ibn al-Salt of the Banu al-Muttalib had a dream. In it a crier named Utbah, Shaybah, Abu Jahl and Umayyah among the dead. He also saw a camel stabbed in the chest, whose blood spattered every tent. Abu Jahl scoffed that here was another prophet from the Banu al-Muttalib. Then a messenger arrived from Abu Sufyan. He said that the caravan was safe and that the army should go home. Abu Jahl said they would go on to Badr anyway. They would camp there for three days, drink and be sung to, and let all Arabia hear that the Quraysh feared no one. Al-Akhnas ibn Shariq told the Banu Zuhrah to lay the charge of cowardice on him and go home. They did, and so did Talib ibn Abi Talib with some others. Meanwhile the Muslims had begun to hear of an army. The Prophet ﷺ had been shown in a dream that he would fight. By some reports he asked them twice what they thought of meeting the Quraysh instead of the caravan. Twice they answered that they had come for a caravan, with no armour and no supplies. The Qur'an records this reluctance, yet still calls them nothing but believers. The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA went scouting themselves. They met an old Bedouin and got from him the exact positions of both the Muslims and the Quraysh. All they told him about themselves was that they were "from water". Then two water carriers of the Quraysh were caught. When the boys said they were from the army, the Companions beat them. The beating went on until the boys said they were from the caravan. The Prophet ﷺ finished his prayer and told the Companions that they had beaten the boys for telling the truth, and let the lie stand. He asked the boys how many camels the Quraysh slaughtered each day. They said nine or ten, and he said the army was nine hundred to a thousand strong. The boys then named its leading men, Utbah, Shaybah, Abu Jahl and Umayyah. The Prophet ﷺ told the Companions that Makkah had thrown them the pieces of its liver. He also pointed to the places on the ground where each of those men would fall. Earlier, at Dhafiran, news had come that the Quraysh had marched, and he had asked the army for its advice. Abu Bakr spoke and sat down. Umar RA spoke and sat down. Then al-Miqdad said that they would not speak as the Children of Israel had spoken to Musa. Instead they would fight at his right and his left, in front of him and behind him. Still the Prophet ﷺ asked again. At last Sa'd ibn Mu'adh understood that he was waiting to hear from the Ansar. In Muslim's report it was Sa'd ibn Ubadah. The Ansar's pledge at Aqaba had been to defend him in Madinah, not to march out to war. Sa'd told him to go wherever he wished. If he rode them into the sea, they would follow him, and perhaps Allah would show him through them something to comfort his eyes. The Prophet ﷺ was delighted. He told them to go forward, because Allah had promised him one of the two parties. It was as though he could already see the enemy lying slain. The Muslims reached the water of Badr before the Quraysh. Al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir RA asked whether this campsite had been chosen by revelation, or was simply a soldier's choice. He was told it was a soldier's choice. So he proposed camping beyond the wells, so that the water lay behind the Muslims and the enemy had only what they carried. The Prophet ﷺ took his advice. The other wells were stopped up, and a cistern was built and filled for the Muslims. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh had a shelter built, from which the Prophet ﷺ could watch the field. That night a light rain fell. It firmed the sand on the Muslim side and, by some reports, drenched the Quraysh. Ali said that all the Companions slept except the Prophet ﷺ. He prayed under a tree until dawn: "O Allah, if this band perishes, You will not be worshipped on earth." While he dozed, he was shown the enemy as few in number. The Qur'an says that this spared the Muslims from quarrelling and despair. At dawn on the 17th he drew the army up in ranks. He straightened the lines with an arrow in his hand. When he prodded Suwad RA in the belly, Suwad demanded his right to retaliate. The Prophet ﷺ bared his own stomach, and Suwad kissed it. Suwad said that if he was to die, he wanted his skin to have touched the Prophet ﷺ's. He had given the flag to Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA. Two black banners were carried, one by Ali and one by a man of the Ansar. He put Qays ibn Abi Sa'sa'a RA in charge of the rearguard. He also ordered that certain men were not to be killed. These were al-Abbas and the Banu Hashim who had been dragged out to fight, and Abu al-Bukhturi, who had helped to break the boycott. Across the plain the Prophet ﷺ saw a man on a red camel riding up and down the lines of the Quraysh. He said that if there was any good in them, it was in that man. The man was Utbah. He was offering to pay the blood money for Amr al-Hadrami, the man killed at Nakhla. He pleaded with the Quraysh not to kill their own sons and brothers, but to leave Muhammad ﷺ to the other Arabs. Hakim ibn Hizam carried the offer to Abu Jahl. Abu Jahl mocked Hakim as Utbah's errand boy. He stirred up al-Hadrami's brother, and called Utbah a coward who had lost his nerve at the sight of the Muslims. Utbah had told them they could blame him for cowardice, but he could not bear to hear it from Abu Jahl. He called for his brother and his son. The Quraysh scout Umayr ibn Wahab reported three hundred men with nothing but their swords. He warned that not one of them would die without taking a man of the Quraysh with him. By one report, Abu Jahl told him that no one had asked his opinion. As the armies closed in, Abu Jahl prayed aloud. He asked Allah to destroy whichever army had cut the ties of kinship and brought a strange religion. It was another prayer against himself. Al-Aswad ibn Abd al-Asad swore to drink from the Muslims' cistern or die trying. Hamzah RA cut him down at the water. He was the first man killed at Badr. Then Utbah, Shaybah and al-Walid ibn Utbah stepped out and called for champions to face them. Three young men of the Ansar answered. They were Awf and Muawwidh, the sons of Afra', and Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA. The Quraysh waved them away. They said they had no quarrel with them, and asked for their equals instead. So the Prophet ﷺ sent Ubaydah ibn al-Harith RA, Hamzah and Ali. In Ibn Ishaq's account, Hamzah and Ali killed Shaybah and al-Walid at once. Ubaydah and Utbah struck each other down, and Utbah cut off Ubaydah's leg. Then the other two turned and killed Utbah. Ali RA's own report in Abu Dawud pairs them differently. In it Hamzah faced Utbah, Ali faced Shaybah, and Ubaydah and al-Walid wounded each other. Ubaydah died of his wound at al-Safra on the way home. This duel is the Qur'an's "two adversaries who dispute about their Lord". The Prophet ﷺ faced the qibla and raised his hands to the sky. He pleaded for the help he had been promised, until his cloak fell from his shoulders. Abu Bakr put it back on him. He told him that it was enough, and that his Lord would give what He had promised. According to Muslim, Allah then revealed that He would help them with a thousand angels. Ibn Ishaq says that the Prophet ﷺ dozed in the shelter and then woke. He told Abu Bakr to be of good cheer. He said that Jibril was there, holding a horse by the rein and leading it, with dust on his front teeth. A thousand angels were coming in file. The Prophet ﷺ recited the verse "the host will be routed and turn their backs". Umar is reported to have said that he had not understood this verse until that morning. Then the Prophet ﷺ took up a handful of pebbles. He threw them at the Quraysh, saying "may these faces be disfigured". By reports in the tafsir, every one of them got grit in his eyes. The Qur'an says that it was not he who threw, but Allah. What happened next can only be told through the dozen stories the Companions left behind. The Prophet ﷺ called on them to rise up to a Paradise as wide as the heavens and the earth. Umayr ibn al-Humam RA was chewing dates at the time. He said that if he lived long enough to finish them, that would be too long a life. He threw them down and fought until he was killed. The Muslims held back their arrows until the enemy was in range. They kept their swords sheathed until the enemy was upon them. Ali said that the Prophet ﷺ was the closest of them all to the enemy. By another report, Ali said he found the Prophet ﷺ three times in his shelter, in prostration, crying "O Living, O Sustaining", with Abu Bakr at his side. The Prophet ﷺ moved between the two. Iblis saw the angels and ran. Al-Harith ibn Hisham grabbed at the man he took for Suraqa, and was thrown onto his back. A mursal report in the Muwatta' tells what the Prophet ﷺ said about this. Satan is never more humiliated than on the day of Arafah, he said, except for what Satan was shown on the day of Badr. On that day he saw Jibril arranging the angels in ranks. Some Companions heard a rider above them urging on his horse, Haizum. They saw the pagan in front of them lose his head before their own blow landed. The man who captured al-Abbas was a slightly built man of the Ansar. Al-Abbas insisted that he had been taken by a handsome horseman on a piebald horse. The Prophet ﷺ told the Ansari to be quiet, because an angel had helped him. By one report the angels wore yellow turbans like Zubayr's, while Ibn Ishaq's report from Ibn Abbas RA says their turbans were white. Ukasha ibn Mihsan RA broke his sword. He was handed a stick of wood, and found a blade in his hand. By a report with a broken chain, Abu Ubaydah RA kept away from his father, Abdullah ibn al-Jarrah. In the end the old man came at him, and Abu Ubaydah killed him. The closing verse of Surah al-Mujadilah came down about him. It says that no believer loves those who fight Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, even if they are his father. Abu al-Bukhturi refused to be taken prisoner without his friend. He was killed by a man of the Ansar who had tried to spare him. The three men of the duel were the father, uncle and brother of Abu Hudhayfah RA. He said aloud that the Muslims were killing their own kin while the Prophet ﷺ's uncle went untouched. He regretted those words until he died at Yamamah. Two boys of the Ansar had each asked Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA to point out Abu Jahl. One was Mu'adh ibn Amr ibn al-Jumuh RA. The other was a son of Afra', called Mu'adh in al-Bukhari and Muawwidh in Ibn Ishaq. When Abd al-Rahman pointed him out, the boys went through the crowd like hawks. Mu'adh leapt and cut off Abu Jahl's leg. It cost him his own arm to Ikrimah's sword, so he tore the arm off and fought on without it. Muawwidh struck the second blow. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud RA was the shepherd whom Abu Jahl had despised. He found Abu Jahl dying and put a foot on his neck. To the end, Abu Jahl said that a man killed by his own people was not disgraced, and that Ibn Mas'ud was standing on a high place. Ibn Mas'ud's own sword had been blunted by the day's fighting, so he took Abu Jahl's sword and finished him with it. By a report with a weak chain in Ahmad, the Prophet ﷺ made Ibn Mas'ud swear three times before going to look for himself. He called Abu Jahl the Pharaoh of this community. Umayyah ibn Khalaf begged his old friend Abd al-Rahman to take him and his son prisoner. He said he was worth more than the coats of mail Abd al-Rahman was carrying. Then Bilal RA saw the man who had tortured him on the sand of Makkah. He called out to the Ansar, and Umayyah and his son died under their spears. Abd al-Rahman was wounded in the foot trying to shield them. Umayyah's body was the only one that could not be moved to the well. It came apart when they lifted it, so they covered it with stones where it lay. Seventy of the Quraysh were dead and about seventy were taken prisoner. That was one man in seven of their army. Fourteen or fifteen Muslims had been killed, and none were taken. The Quraysh fled by the one road the Muslims had left open. The Prophet ﷺ stayed on the field for three days, to bury the martyrs and to make it plain who had won. The Quraysh dead, all except Umayyah, were thrown into a dry well and covered over. On the third day, before leaving, the Prophet ﷺ stood at the mouth of the well. He called the dead by name, Utbah, Shaybah, al-Walid, Abu Jahl and Umayyah. He asked whether they had found their Lord's promise true, for he had found his Lord's promise true. Umar asked how he could speak to bodies without souls. He answered that they heard him no worse than the living did, though they could not reply. While still on the field, the Companions had already started arguing over the spoils. The men who gathered the spoils, the men who chased the enemy and the Prophet ﷺ's bodyguard each claimed the better right. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA asked for the sword he had won. Then the opening verses of Surah al-Anfal came down there, saying that the spoils belong to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. Every man received an equal share. Shares also went to some who had been kept away on duty. Among them was Uthman RA, who was nursing his dying wife Ruqayyah. Looking over the prisoners, the Prophet ﷺ spoke of Mut'im ibn Adi, who had recently died. He said that if Mut'im had asked him for these prisoners, he would have freed every one of them. This was because of the shelter Mut'im had given him after Ta'if. Abu Bakr advised taking ransom, since the prisoners were their kin. Umar advised giving each Companion his own kinsman to kill. The Prophet ﷺ compared the first to Ibrahim and Isa, and the second to Nuh and Musa. He chose ransom. The next day Umar found him and Abu Bakr weeping under a tree, because of verses that had come down. The verses said that no prophet should take captives before he has subdued the land. They also said that but for a prior decree, a punishment would have touched them. Two prisoners were executed on the road home. One was al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, who had mocked the Qur'an as old fables that he could improve on. The other was Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt. Uqba asked who would look after his children, and the answer he was given was the Fire. Their execution was the only time captives of Badr were put to death. Zayd ibn Harithah RA carried the news to Lower Madinah, naming the dead one by one. Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA took it to Upper Madinah. By some reports Zayd was riding the Prophet ﷺ's own camel, and people thought he was mad. Abdullah ibn Ubayy heard him and said that the matter was now settled. The hypocrisy of Madinah dates from that day. Uthman heard the shouting just as he finished burying Ruqayyah. The prisoners were lodged with the men who had captured them. The captors were ordered to treat them well. They gave the prisoners their bread, and ate dates themselves. Suhayl ibn Amr was kept in the Prophet ﷺ's own house. There Sawda RA saw the chief of the Quraysh tied up in a corner, and cried out that he should have died a noble death. When the Prophet ﷺ rebuked her, she said she could not contain herself. Each man's ransom was set according to his means. The poor were freed for nothing. According to Ahmad, some who had nothing to pay with were freed for teaching the children of the Ansar to write. Al-Abbas protested that he was a Muslim. He was told that Allah knew his heart, but he had fought. Then he was told where he and Umm al-Fadl had set money aside when no one else was present. So he paid for himself, and for Aqil and Nawfal too. By one report, he used to say that Allah had given him twenty merchants in return for those twenty ounces. Abu Sufyan refused to pay for his son Amr, having already lost another son on the field. Later he kidnapped an old Ansari pilgrim in Makkah to force an exchange. Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi' was ransomed with a necklace. Khadija RA had given it to her daughter Zaynab RA as a wedding gift. When the Prophet ﷺ saw it, his face changed. At his word the captors returned it, and Abu al-As went home on his promise to send Zaynab to Madinah. In Makkah, the first survivor to arrive was al-Haysaman al-Khuza'i. He listed so many dead nobles that Safwan ibn Umayyah tested him by asking about himself. Al-Haysaman told him that he had watched Safwan's father and brother die. The Quraysh banned wailing for the dead, so that the Muslims would take no pleasure in it. Al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib, who had lost three sons, was overjoyed to hear a woman wailing. Then he learned that she was weeping for a camel. Abu Lahab heard from his nephew, Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith, about men in white on piebald horses whom no one could withstand. Al-Abbas's slave Abu Rafi' said they were angels, and Abu Lahab beat him for it. Then Umm al-Fadl split Abu Lahab's head open with a tent pole. Within days he died of a foul sickness. According to a report in al-Tirmidhi, on the same day, far away, Rome defeated Persia, as Surah al-Rum had foretold. Years earlier, Abu Bakr had made a bet with a Makkan, Ubay ibn Khalaf, that this would happen within six years. The six years had passed, so Abu Bakr had already lost the bet. Within weeks, Umayr ibn Wahab came to Madinah with a poisoned sword to kill the Prophet ﷺ, and went home a Muslim. The Banu Qaynuqa told the Prophet ﷺ that he had beaten only men who knew nothing of war. They were besieged and sent out of Madinah. Jibril asked how the Muslims regarded those who had fought at Badr. He was told that they were the best of the Muslims. Jibril said that the angels regard the angels who were there in the same way.

In the weeks after Badr, Safwan ibn Umayyah sat in the Hijr, the open area beside the Ka'bah, with his cousin Umayr ibn Wahab al-Jumahi. Safwan's father and brother had both been killed at Badr. Umayr had been the scout of Quraysh on the morning of that battle. He had warned Abu Jahl that the Muslims would each kill at least one of the Quraysh before they fell. Now Umayr's own son was a prisoner in Madinah, and Umayr had not paid his ransom. Safwan cursed the new religion and the harm it had done them. Umayr said that if it were not for a debt he owed and a family he had to look after, he would go to Madinah himself and kill Muhammad ﷺ. Safwan came from a wealthy family, and he took Umayr up on it. He promised to pay Umayr's debt and to provide for Umayr's family just as he provided for his own. Umayr agreed, and asked him to keep the plan secret. Umayr went home, sharpened his sword and soaked it in poison. He rode to Madinah alone without telling anyone, not even his wife. He entered the city with his face covered like any traveller and his sword hanging from his neck, and went straight to the mosque. Umar recognised him by his eyes. He said aloud that this enemy of Allah had come with evil intent, and he went to warn the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ told Umar to bring the man in. Umar took his sword and escorted Umayr inside. The Prophet ﷺ told Umar to watch Umayr's every move, and Umar stood by with his hand on his sword. Umayr greeted the Prophet ﷺ with the old Arab greeting, "Good morning." The Prophet ﷺ told him that Allah had given the Muslims a better greeting, the salam, which is the greeting of the people of Paradise. He then asked Umayr why he had come. Umayr said he had come to ransom his son. The Prophet ﷺ asked what the sword around his neck was for. Umayr answered that swords had done them no good at Badr. The Prophet ﷺ asked him again to tell the truth, but Umayr stuck to his story. Then the Prophet ﷺ said, "Rather, you and Safwan were sitting alone in the Hijr and you mentioned your losses at Badr, and you said, were it not for your debt and your family, you would personally go and kill Muhammad ﷺ. So Safwan offered to take care of your debts and your family so that you may come to kill me. But Allah has come between you and your plans." No one else had been in the Hijr. Umayr had told no one, and he had taken the fastest road, so no rider could have reached Madinah before him. He realised there was only one way the Prophet ﷺ could know this. At once he said, "I testify that you are the Messenger of Allah ﷺ." He added that they used to reject the Prophet ﷺ when he said revelation came from the sky, but no one had known of this plan except him and Safwan. The Prophet ﷺ said to Umar, "Teach your brother about the religion, help him to memorize the Quran, and free his captive." Umayr stayed in Madinah for a while to learn. Before he left, he asked permission to go back to Makkah and call people to Islam, just as he had once pushed them away from it. He also wanted to defend the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions, as he had once harmed them. Ibn Ishaq says that many people became Muslim at his hands. Meanwhile in Makkah, Safwan had spent two weeks telling Quraysh that good news was coming. When he learned that Umayr had become Muslim, he vowed never to look at him, speak to him or sit under the same roof with him again. Umayr later made Hijrah to Madinah. Six years later, at the conquest of Makkah, Safwan fled the city, sure that he would not be forgiven. It was Umayr who went after Safwan with the Prophet ﷺ's promise of protection and brought him back. Safwan then said the shahada (the declaration of faith) in front of the man the two cousins had once plotted to kill.

After their defeat at Badr, the Quraysh spent a full year preparing for revenge. Four motives drove them together. The first was religious hatred of the new faith. The second was personal grief for the leaders they had lost, since the fathers of both Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal and Safwan ibn Umayyah had died at Badr. The third was economic, because the Muslims now controlled their trade route to Syria and that trade had collapsed. The fourth was political, the threat of a growing Muslim state. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, together with Safwan and Ikrimah, went from door to door. They collected the profits of the Badr caravan from every Qurashi household that had invested in it. They used this money to recruit allied tribes such as Kinana and Tihama. On the 7th of Shawwal, 3 AH, an army of 3,000 set out from Makkah. It had 200 horses and 700 suits of armour. Around two dozen women of the Quraysh came with it, among them Hind bint Utbah, to urge the men on with their songs. The journey to Madinah normally took two weeks, but the army covered it in seven days. Abu Sufyan held overall command. Khalid ibn al-Walid led the right flank, and Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal led the left. There is a report, not found in Ibn Ishaq, about al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, who had stayed behind in Makkah. He sent a trusted servant racing to Madinah with the exact numbers of the army. The servant covered the distance in three days. He found the Prophet ﷺ at Quba, and Ubay ibn Ka'b RA read the letter to him privately. The news was urgent, but the Prophet ﷺ did not act on a single report. He first sent scouts to confirm where the Quraysh were. Only then did he call a general meeting of the Muslims. The meeting took place at the Friday gathering, which was even larger than usual because a funeral had already brought many people out. The Prophet ﷺ explained the threat and asked for advice. He gave his own view first. He wanted to stay inside Madinah and use its natural defences. There were fields of volcanic rock to the east and west, Mount Uhud to the north, and date palm groves to the south. The Quraysh would then be forced into costly fighting in the streets. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, the most experienced warrior in the city, agreed with this plan. He did so not out of any respect for the Prophet ﷺ, but because it was clearly the stronger position. A group of younger Companions argued the other way. Many of them had missed Badr and were eager to prove themselves, so they pressed to meet the Quraysh in open battle. The Prophet ﷺ judged that most people wanted this, so he agreed and went inside to put on his armour. The younger men then had second thoughts. They told him they would not oppose him if he wished to stay in the city. This is in Ibn Ishaq, and some retellings name Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA as the one who said it. The Prophet ﷺ replied that once a prophet has put on his armour, it is not fitting for him to take it off before he has fought. He marched out on Friday, the 14th of Shawwal, with roughly 700 Muslims. He divided them into three groups. Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA led the Muhajirun, Usayd ibn Hudayr RA led the Aws, and al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir RA led the Khazraj. Between them they had only a handful of horses and 100 suits of armour. The Prophet ﷺ led them along a secret route through the date palm groves instead of the main road, so that their position would not be revealed too early. The route passed through the garden of Mirba' ibn Qayzi, a blind hypocrite. He threw dust at the Muslims, and the Prophet ﷺ told the Companions to leave him alone. During the march, Abdullah ibn Ubayy turned back with about 300 men. He said publicly that his advice had been ignored. Abdullah ibn Amr ibn Haram RA confronted him for abandoning the Prophet ﷺ. Abdullah ibn Ubayy insisted that he did not believe there would be any fighting. The Qur'an later exposed this as a lie (Qur'an 3:167). Some of the Aws, from Banu Harithah, and some of the Khazraj, from Banu Salama, also wavered. In the end they stayed, and Qur'an 3:122 credits their steadfastness to Allah's protection. The roughly 700 who remained reached Uhud in the early afternoon of the 14th. The Prophet ﷺ chose the site with care. The mountain protected the army on two sides. The third side was covered by fifty archers under Abdullah ibn Jubayr RA, posted on a hill called Jabal Aynayn. That hill was later renamed Jabal al-Ruma in their honour. The archers had strict orders never to leave their position, no matter how the battle seemed to be going. This left the much larger Quraysh army only one narrow approach to attack through. The Prophet ﷺ arranged the army for battle and sent home the boys he judged too young. Two boys, Rafi ibn Khadij RA and Samura ibn Jundub RA, were allowed to stay. Ibn Hisham says they were fifteen. Rafi' was allowed because he was a good archer, and Samurah because he could beat Rafi' at wrestling. On the morning of the 15th, the Prophet ﷺ offered his own sword to whoever would take it and give it its due. Abu Dujana RA accepted it. He put on his turban of death and walked along the ranks, giving the Muslims courage. Abu Sufyan first sent a message trying to split the Ansar away from the Muhajirun. Then he sent Abu Amir al-Rahib, a former leader of the Aws who had rejected Islam, to appeal directly to his own people. The Ansar refused both approaches. They gave Abu Amir a new name, Abu Amir al-Fasiq. The battle opened with single combat. Talha ibn Abi Talha came out first. He was of Banu Abd al-Dar, the clan that carried the standard of the Quraysh. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA struck him down. Ibn Ishaq counts him among the men Ali RA killed. Another report says that Talha begged Ali RA by the ties of kinship, so Ali RA left him, and he later died of his wounds. The Muslims then charged and broke the ranks of the Quraysh. They killed the standard bearers of Banu Abd al-Dar one after another, until the standard fell. The story of Usayrim belongs to this same morning. He was from Banu Abd al-Ashhal, and for three years he had been the only pagan left in his clan. He accepted Islam after the Fajr prayer and was martyred before Zuhr, without ever having prayed a single rak'ah. In this first phase the Quraysh broke and fled. The Companions became overconfident. They put down their weapons and began collecting the spoils of war. The rules for dividing spoils had not yet been fully settled, and many assumed the battle was over. The fifty archers on Jabal al-Ruma watched the spoils being gathered below. As the minutes passed, no word came from the Prophet ﷺ. The archers began to argue about whether to go down and join in. Abdullah ibn Jubayr RA, their leader, refused to move without a direct command from the Prophet ﷺ. Even so, over perhaps the better part of an hour, forty of the fifty left the position and went down, leaving only ten. Khalid ibn al-Walid had not simply fled. He had been watching carefully, and now he saw his chance. He moved in along a low ditch on the army's right that could not be seen from ground level. He overran the ten archers who were left. Then he led his cavalry, estimated at 100 to 150 riders, around Jabal al-Ruma and attacked the Muslims from behind. This cut the Muslim army in two. On one side was the Prophet ﷺ's own camp. On the other were the scattered Muslims still collecting spoils, most of them unarmed. It is said that the Prophet ﷺ was the first to see Khalid's attack coming. The enemy was hunting for him personally, and shouting would reveal where he was. Even so, he stood up and shouted a warning to the Muslims. The surprise attack threw the Muslims into chaos. Many fled, unable to tell friend from foe. The sources say that shaytan stirred up the confusion, and some Muslims struck down other Muslims in the fighting. One of them was al-Yaman RA, the father of Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA. His own side killed him before Hudhayfah's shouts to stop could be heard. Hudhayfah said, "May Allah forgive you." The Prophet ﷺ paid him the blood money for his father, and Hudhayfah gave it away as charity to the Muslims. As the Muslim army split apart, the Prophet ﷺ was left with a guard of only nine men. Two of them were Muhajirun, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA and Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA. The other seven were Ansar. Ibn Ishaq names Ziyad, or Umarah, ibn al-Sakan among them. A report from al-Bara' RA in al-Bukhari gives the number as twelve. Meanwhile the rest of the army, believing the battle already won, was scattered across the field. One by one, the Ansar in that small group went out to stop the approaching enemy, and each was killed. In the end only Sa'd, Talha and the Prophet ﷺ himself remained. They pulled back into a narrow gap in the mountainside, barely wide enough for one or two people. From the opening, Sa'd and Talha fired arrow after arrow. It is said that the Prophet ﷺ picked spent arrows up off the ground and handed them back to Sa'd to shoot again. Abu Talha al-Ansari RA begged the Prophet ﷺ not to raise his head, for fear of a stray arrow. He offered his own neck and chest in place of the Prophet ﷺ's (al-Bukhari). It was here that the Prophet ﷺ said to Sa'd, "Fidaka abi wa ummi (may my mother and father be given in ransom for you)! Shoot, O Sa'd, shoot!" Ali RA said he never heard the Prophet ﷺ say these words to anyone else. However, al-Zubayr RA reports that the Prophet ﷺ said the same to him at Qurayzah. An attacker reached Talha and cut off several of his fingers, and Talha cried out in pain. The Prophet ﷺ told him that if he had said "Bismillah" instead, the angels would have lifted him up in front of everyone. Qatada ibn al-Nu'man al-Awsi RA took up the Prophet ﷺ's bow and shot with it until it broke. His eye was struck so badly that it hung down on his cheek. The Prophet ﷺ put it back in place with his hand, and it became the better and sharper of his two eyes (Ibn Ishaq). During this same period the Prophet ﷺ was wounded several times. Utbah ibn Abi Waqqas threw a stone that broke his lower right incisor and injured his lip. Abdullah ibn Shihab al-Zuhri wounded his forehead. Ibn Qami'ah struck his cheekbone and drove two rings of his helmet into his cheek. This account is from Ibn Hisham, on the authority of Abu Sa'id al-Khudri RA. Other reports describe the wounds differently. In them, an arrow shot by Utbah passed through his cheek and knocked out a tooth, and a sword blow from Ibn Qami'ah or Abdullah ibn Shihab drove his helmet into his cheekbone. With blood streaming down his face, the Prophet ﷺ was heard to say, "How can a people succeed who have wounded their own Prophet ﷺ while he called them to their Lord?" Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA later said that he saw two men dressed in brilliant white fighting fiercely at the Prophet ﷺ's side that day. He had never seen them before and never saw them again. Around the same time, Ubay ibn Khalaf charged straight at the Prophet ﷺ. Ubay was a Makkan who had long vowed to kill the Prophet ﷺ, and he had been fattening a horse for that purpose. Back then, the Prophet ﷺ had replied that he would be the one to kill Ubay instead. Now he reminded Ubay of that reply. He took a spear from a companion and struck Ubay in the neck. The wound looked minor, but Ubay himself insisted it would kill him. He died on the road home, before he reached Makkah. Ibn Qami'ah cut down Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA and thought he had killed the Prophet ﷺ. He shouted that Muhammad ﷺ was dead. The false news spread quickly and broke the spirit of part of the Muslim line. Some of them simply sat down in the middle of the battle. Anas ibn al-Nadr RA rallied a group of them back into the fight. He asked them what they would do with life after the Prophet ﷺ, and told them to die as he had died. Anas fought on until he was killed. His body was so disfigured that no one could recognise him, until his sister identified him by the tips of his fingers. Ka'b ibn Malik RA was the first to recognise the Prophet ﷺ, by his eyes. He was about to announce that the Prophet ﷺ was alive. The Prophet ﷺ signalled to him to stay silent, so as not to give away his position. A later report adds that the two of them exchanged armour. Abu Bakr RA, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah RA fought their way back to him. They found the two rings of his helmet still stuck in his cheek. Abu Ubaydah did not want to risk hurting him further with his hands. It is reported that he pulled each ring out with his own teeth instead, and lost a tooth each time. As the fighting died down, Abu Sufyan called out from a distance. He asked whether Muhammad ﷺ was still alive. Then he asked about Abu Bakr RA and Umar RA. The Prophet ﷺ told the Muslims not to answer him. Then Abu Sufyan declared victory and gave the credit to the idol Hubal. This time the Prophet ﷺ had the Muslims reply, "Allah is mightier and more worthy of honour." He stayed silent about his own survival, but he would not let shirk against Allah go unanswered. Abu Sufyan swore that the two sides would meet again the next year at Badr, and the Quraysh withdrew. Afterwards the Prophet ﷺ walked over the battlefield. He found the body of his uncle, Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, mutilated by Hind bint Utbah RA. Her father and brother had been killed at Badr, and in revenge she had cut open Hamzah's stomach and taken his liver. The Prophet ﷺ wept. He vowed to mutilate thirty bodies of the Quraysh in return. Then Allah revealed Qur'an 16:126, which limits retaliation to no more than what was suffered. After that, the Prophet ﷺ forbade mutilation completely. On the way back, Hamnah bint Jahsh RA met the army. She was told, one after another, of the deaths of her brother Abdullah, her uncle Hamzah RA and her husband Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA. Wailing for the dead broke out across Madinah. When the Prophet ﷺ heard it, he allowed it once for Hamzah RA's sake. After that he forbade it as a general rule. The martyrs were reported to number around seventy, most of them Ansar. They were buried two, three or four to a grave, in the clothes they had died in, without being washed. The Prophet ﷺ instructed that whoever had memorised the most Qur'an should be placed in the grave first. According to Jabir RA's report in al-Bukhari, no funeral prayer was said over them. A report from Ibn Abbas RA in Ibn Ishaq says that the Prophet ﷺ did pray over Hamzah RA and the others. Only one prisoner was taken in the whole battle, Abu Azzah al-Jumahi. He had earlier been pardoned on condition that he never fight the Muslims again. Because he broke that condition, he was executed. Before all this, the Prophet ﷺ had sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to follow the Quraysh. Ali RA found them riding their camels and leading their horses, a sign that they were heading back to Makkah. The next morning, Sunday the 16th, the Prophet ﷺ called out the men who had fought the day before, wounded as they were. He led them to Hamra al-Asad, about eight miles from Madinah. They stayed there on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. At some point before or during this period, the Prophet ﷺ told the Companions about a dream. Accounts differ on exactly when he told it. He said, "I saw in a dream that I had struck with my sword, but my sword broke, and this is what afflicted the Muslims at Uhud. Then I hit it again, and it came back as good as it ever was, and this was the victory that Allah gave to the Muslims and the coming together of the believers." He went on, "I saw cows, and Allah is good, and this was the believers on the Day of Uhud." In a version in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, he also saw himself wearing protective armour, which he took to mean Madinah itself.

In Safar of 4 AH, the Muslims suffered two massacres, at al-Raji and at Bir Ma'una. Amr ibn Umayyah RA, the only survivor of Bir Ma'una, killed two men on his way home, thinking they belonged to the guilty tribe. In fact they were innocent, so the Prophet ﷺ agreed to pay their blood money. This came to 200 camels, a huge sum. Under the Constitution of Madinah, a burden that fell on the whole city was to be shared by all its tribes. The Banu Nadir were a wealthy Jewish tribe living south of Madinah. Relations with them were already tense. The Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq reports that some of them had plotted to murder the People of the Suffa, a group of companions devoted to learning, but the plot was exposed in time. Musa ibn Uqba, an early historian, records that they had helped the Quraysh at the Battle of Uhud with supplies and knowledge of the land. One of their chieftains, Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, had also been killed for his open hostility to the Muslims. Even so, the Prophet ﷺ went to the Banu Nadir with Abu Bakr RA, Umar RA and others to ask for their share of the blood money. The leaders welcomed them and asked them to wait outside their fortress while they went inside. According to one report, they said they wanted to prepare a feast for their guests. Inside, one leader suggested dropping a rock from the top of the wall onto the Prophet ﷺ. Another warned that this would cause a serious backlash, but in the end the plan was approved. Before they could carry it out, the Prophet ﷺ suddenly stood up and walked back to Madinah without saying a word. His companions did not understand why he had left. They waited a long time for him to return, and finally went back to Madinah themselves. There the Prophet ﷺ explained that Jibril AS had come to him and told him to get up and leave at once.

Hafsa bint Umar RA lost her first husband, Khunays ibn Hudhafah RA, in Madinah. Ibn Sa'd says he died soon after Badr. Ibn Abd al-Barr says he died of wounds he received at Uhud. Her father, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, felt her loss deeply. When her waiting period was over, he offered her in marriage to Uthman ibn Affan RA, whose wife Ruqayyah, the Prophet ﷺ's daughter, had recently died. Uthman said he did not want to marry just then. Umar RA then offered her to Abu Bakr RA, who gave him no answer at all. Umar RA was hurt by both refusals. Neither man could explain. The Prophet ﷺ had privately mentioned Hafsa RA to them, and they could not reveal his secret. Then the Prophet ﷺ proposed to Hafsa RA himself. Uthman RA later married another daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, Umm Kulthum.

In the 5th year after the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ was giving a sermon when he said, "Soon, a delegation will come to you, and they are the best people from the east." A day or two later, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA was in the marketplace of Madinah when he saw a group of travelers arrive. They were from Abd al-Qays, a tribe from the region of Bahrain whose people were a mix of Christians and pagans. Umar RA rushed to greet them and gave them the good news of what the Prophet ﷺ had said about them. All the delegates hurried off to meet the Prophet ﷺ except the youngest, who became known as Ashaj Abd al-Qays. He stayed behind to bathe, put on good clothes and perfume himself, and only then went to the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ said to him, "O Ashaj, you have two characteristics that Allah and His Messenger love." They were forbearance (al-hilm) and calm deliberation (al-anat). Ashaj asked whether he had developed these himself, and the Prophet ﷺ told him that Allah had placed them in him. The delegates explained that the hostile tribe of Mudar lay between them and Madinah. This meant they could only travel during the Sacred Months, when fighting stopped. They asked to be taught something that would bring them into Paradise and that they could teach their people. The Prophet ﷺ replied, "I command you to have Iman in Allah. And do you know what is Iman in Allah? That you say the shahada, you pray the prayers, you fast Ramadan, and you pay zakat." Iman means faith, and the shahada is the declaration of faith. He did not mention Hajj, because it had not yet been made obligatory. They also said they lived in a cold climate and asked whether they could drink alcohol. The Prophet ﷺ forbade it, listing their different kinds of drink one by one. The tribe is said to have been the first to build a mosque outside the Hejaz, and the first to hold the Friday prayer outside Madinah.

"Khandaq" means "the trench", and "Ahzab" means "the confederates". The confederates were the coalition of tribes that marched on Madinah in the fifth year after the Hijrah. The whole affair, from the first spade in the ground to the flight of the confederates, lasted around forty days. That was a week or so of digging and close to a month of siege. Even the date of the battle is a matter of scholarly disagreement. Abdullah ibn Umar RA said that he was fourteen at Uhud and was turned away, and that he was fifteen at Khandaq and was allowed through. This led al-Bukhari, al-Zuhri, al-Nawawi and Ibn Hazm to place the battle in 4 AH. However, Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, al-Tabari and the specialists of the Seerah place it in Shawwal 5 AH. Their reasoning is that the fourth year was taken up by Badr al-Maw'id, and that Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA is agreed to have died right after Khandaq, in the fifth year. Al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa'd give the month as Dhu al-Qa'dah rather than Shawwal. The instigators were the Banu al-Nadir. They had tried to kill the Prophet ﷺ with a rock. After that they were expelled from Madinah and allowed to take only what their camels could carry. They settled in Khaybar, but they still wanted their date groves back. A delegation of their leaders, among them Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq and Huyayy ibn Akhtab, went to the Quraysh in Makkah. They proposed a joint attack and offered money and food on top. The Quraysh seized on the idea. Their trade route to Syria had been all but destroyed, and they had failed to show up at Badr al-Maw'id. Abu Sufyan asked the Jewish delegation which religion was closer to their own, that of the Quraysh or that of Muhammad ﷺ. The delegation answered that the pagans were the better guided. The Qur'an quoted their answer back to them in 4:51. With the Quraysh on board, the Banu al-Nadir turned to the Ghatafan, the largest tribe of the north. The Ghatafan had no trade route at stake, so they had to be paid. The price was half of Khaybar's produce for a year, in return for a single battle. The Quraysh, for their part, called in the smaller tribes that had been hurt by the loss of the caravan road. These included the Banu Asad, the Banu Sulaym, the Banu Murrah, Ashja', Kinana and others. Each of them sent men, horses or weapons. Ibn Sa'd counts around 4,000 men and 300 horses from the Quraysh alone. To these he adds 700 from the Banu Sulaym, 1,000 from the Banu Fizara, 400 each from Ashja' and the Banu Murrah, and 700 from the Banu Asad. Ibn Ishaq puts the whole force at some 10,000 men. Against them, the Muslims had at most 2,500 fighting men. Abu Sufyan was the senior commander, but there was no single leader over the whole army, and this weakness would prove fatal. Never before had ten or fifteen Arab tribes marched together under one banner. Arabia was dividing into two camps, the banner of Islam and the banner of disbelief. An army that size cannot gather in secret. When the news reached the Prophet ﷺ, he consulted the Companions, as he had done before Badr and Uhud. Salman al-Farisi RA had recently been freed, and this was his first battle. He proposed a tactic the Arabs had never seen. He explained that back in Persia, people would dig a trench and shelter behind it. The Prophet ﷺ accepted the idea at once. According to Ibn Sa'd, he himself drew the lines to show where the trench should run. According to Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet ﷺ also had the women and children taken up into the forts. One of these was the fort of the Banu Harithah, one of the strongest in Madinah. He was already thinking several steps ahead. Every man would be out on the perimeter, yet the Banu Qurayza still lived inside Madinah, at al-Awali. They had renewed their covenant three times, most recently only months earlier during the Banu al-Nadir affair. Even so, no one could be sure where their loyalty lay. If they turned, the Muslims would be caught between two fronts. The Prophet ﷺ assigned ten men to each stretch of the trench. Its exact course is unknown. The most careful modern estimates put it at around two kilometres long, ten to thirteen feet wide and seven to nine cubits deep. It cut across the one open approach to the city, from the north. Lava fields to the east and west and dense palm groves to the south already made Madinah impassable to an army from those sides. Ibn Sa'd says the digging took six days, while others say a fortnight. It was done by hand, without slaves or machines, in the cold of winter. The men were hungry from the start. Al-Bukhari records that they ate barley mixed with rancid oil. According to Jabir ibn Abdillah RA, they sometimes ate date stones. Anas ibn Malik RA remembered the Prophet ﷺ coming out to the trench on a cold evening and praying for the Ansar and the Muhajirun. Al-Bara' ibn Azib RA remembered him carrying earth until the dust covered his chest. He chanted a rajaz, a short rhythmic verse, together with the men. It ended with the words "when they want fitna, we refuse, we refuse", and every voice rose on the refrain. Jabir saw a stone tied against the Prophet ﷺ's stomach to dull his hunger. Jabir slaughtered the one small goat he owned. The Prophet ﷺ announced the meal to everyone and blessed it. Jabir then watched a pot meant for a handful of people feed the whole trench, around a thousand men, ten at a time. At one point a boulder on the marked line would not break. The Prophet ﷺ took the pickaxe himself and struck it three times, and each strike was greeted with a takbir. He told the men that he had been shown the red palaces of al-Sham, the white pillars of al-Mada'in in Persia and the gates of Sana'a in Yemen. These were three lands the Muslims would conquer within a generation. He also watched Ammar ibn Yasir RA doing the work of two men. He repeated a prophecy he had first made while building the mosque, that the transgressing party would kill Ammar. It was fulfilled decades later at Siffin. The confederates arrived to find a ditch they could not charge across. So they made camp and settled in to starve the city out. Their commanders included Abu Sufyan, Uyaynah ibn Hisn of the Banu Fizara, and Tulayha al-Asadi of the Banu Asad. Uyaynah was a chieftain so coarse that he had once barged into the Prophet ﷺ's house without asking permission. Tulayha would later claim prophethood, and later still he would die a martyr for Islam at al-Qadisiyyah. The Ghatafan were not eager to fight. They sent an envoy to the Muslims with an offer. They said they would go home if the Muslims gave them a third of Madinah's dates. In Ibn Ishaq's version, the offer came the other way. He says that the Prophet ﷺ sent word to the Ghatafan leaders, Uyaynah and al-Harith ibn Awf, and that a document was drafted but never signed. The Prophet ﷺ consulted Sa'd ibn Mu'adh and Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA, the leaders of the Aws and the Khazraj. They asked him whether this was something Allah had ordered, or something he was doing for their sake. He said it was for their sake, because the Arabs had united against them. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh replied that back when they were idolaters, these people had never eaten a date of theirs except as guests or by buying it. Now that Allah had honoured them with Islam, he said, they would give them nothing but the sword. The Prophet ﷺ was pleased with their answer, and the Ghatafan were sent away with nothing. In Ibn Ishaq's version, Sa'd erased the document himself. Ibn Sa'd dates the Prophet ﷺ's move from his house to a tent by the trench to 8 Dhu al-Qa'dah. The Muslims camped facing the ditch, with their backs to Jabal Sila', and were divided into shifts. All night, patrols walked the line shouting the takbir, so that anyone approaching would think it was heavily manned. The Prophet ﷺ took his own turn on watch. Umm Salama RA witnessed al-Muraysi', Khaybar, Hudaybiyyah, the Conquest and Hunayn. She is reported to have said that none of them was as exhausting or as frightening as Khandaq. There is also a story of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA coming by night in his armour to guard the Prophet ﷺ, so that he could sleep. It is sometimes told as part of the siege. However, Aisha RA's report in al-Bukhari places it on a night after his arrival in Madinah. Then came the blow that changed everything. Huyayy ibn Akhtab slipped into Madinah, a city he had known all his life. He made for the fortress of the Banu Qurayza and their chieftain, Ka'b ibn Asad. At first Ka'b barred the door against him. He said he had a treaty with Muhammad ﷺ and had seen nothing from him but truthfulness. Huyayy shamed him into opening it by accusing him of not wanting to share his food. Huyayy then pressed Ka'b all through the night with promises of oceans of men. He swore that if the confederates left, he would share whatever fate befell the Banu Qurayza. Ka'b told him that he was like a cloud that promised rain but brought only thunder and lightning. Even so, by morning Ka'b had given way, and he tore up the covenant. The Prophet ﷺ sensed that something was wrong and asked for a volunteer to find out. Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA went. It was on this occasion that the Prophet ﷺ said that every prophet has a disciple, and that his disciple was Zubayr. Zubayr came back convinced that the Banu Qurayza had broken the treaty. But a war is not fought on presumption. So the Prophet ﷺ sent the four Ansar leaders who had been closest to the Banu Qurayza in the old days. They were Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, Sa'd ibn Ubadah, Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA and Khawwat ibn Jubayr RA. He told them that if there had been treachery, they should signal it indirectly, so as not to spread panic. If the treaty still held, they should announce it aloud. The four found the Banu Qurayza foul-mouthed and defiant. The Banu Qurayza denied that there was any Messenger of Allah ﷺ or any treaty. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, a man with a temper, cursed them, and they cursed him back, until Sa'd ibn Ubadah pulled him away. The envoys brought back a report of just two words, "Adl and al-Qarah". These were the tribes behind the treachery of al-Raji. The Prophet ﷺ answered, "Allahu akbar, good news!" It was a double-edged phrase, and it kept the camp calm. The news spread anyway. The Companions called it the worst night of their lives. There were ten thousand enemies outside the trench and two thousand more inside the city, and their families were in an unguarded fortress. The Qur'an describes that time in 33:10 and 33:11. It says that the enemy came from above them and from below them, that eyes rolled in terror and hearts rose into throats, and that the believers were shaken violently. According to a report not found in Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet ﷺ split his thin patrol. He sent Zayd ibn Harithah RA and Salama ibn Aslam RA with a small group to guard the forts. Around this time, the Banu Qurayza sent scouts to test whether the fortress was defended. Safiyyah bint Abdul Muttalib killed one of them with her own hands. This was the defence of al-Fari'. Meanwhile, the hypocrites asked permission to go home to "protect their families". One of them mocked aloud that Muhammad ﷺ had promised them the treasures of Khosrow and Caesar, yet now none of them dared to go out to relieve himself. For a siege of this size, the fighting was small. At most six or seven Muslims were killed, most of them by arrows, and three or four of the enemy. The Companions counted this as a sign from Allah (47:7). A handful of horsemen did get across at a narrow point. Amr ibn Abd Wud, an elder of the Quraysh famed for his ferocity, had put on a red turban, a known sign that he had come to kill. He called out for a challenger. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA offered to fight him. Amr called out three times. Each time Ali stood up, and each time the Prophet ﷺ held him back, reminding him that this was Amr ibn Abd Wud. The third time, Ali said that he would fight him even if he was Amr, and the Prophet ﷺ let him go. Amr sneered at the idea of fighting a youth, and Ali replied that he had every desire to kill him. Ibn Ishaq says that the dust raised by their horses hid the fight, and that a takbir rang out to announce Ali's victory. Another report says that Amr's blow split Ali's shield, and in the same instant Ali killed him with one stroke to the neck. Nawfal ibn Abdillah rolled down into the trench and was killed. In al-Tabari's report from Ibn Ishaq, it was Ali RA who killed him, while other retellings say it was Zubayr RA. Al-Tirmidhi reports that the Quraysh wanted to buy back Nawfal's body. The Prophet ﷺ refused to take money for it, but he told them to come and take the body and bury it. According to Ibn Ishaq, Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal fled back across, throwing away his spear. Later reports add Khalid ibn al-Walid as well. Both men were still pagans at the time. The costliest arrow was the one shot by Hiban ibn al-Ariqah. Aisha had watched Sa'd ibn Mu'adh say goodbye to his mother in the fortress, and she had wished aloud that his breastplate covered more of him. The arrow struck him exactly there, cutting the vein of his arm. Sa'd prayed that if the Quraysh were going to fight again, he might live to fight them. If this was the last time, he asked to be taken as a martyr, but not before his eyes had been comforted by what became of the Banu Qurayza. He was moved, bleeding, to the hospital tent of Rufayda al-Aslamiyyah RA. He would live just long enough for that prayer to be answered. On one of those days the fighting was so intense that the Muslims missed the Asr prayer altogether. After sunset, Umar RA came to the Prophet ﷺ to confess it. The Prophet ﷺ answered that he too had not prayed. He cursed the enemy for keeping them from the middle prayer mentioned in Qur'an 2:238. Then he prayed Asr and then Maghrib, in that order. The fiqh of making up missed prayers is derived from that evening. As the siege wore on, the tide was turned by a single man. Nuaym ibn Mas'ud RA was a second-rank noble of the Ghatafan. He had carried messages for Abu Sufyan in the past and had dealt with the Banu Qurayza for years. One night he walked into the Muslim camp and waited for the Prophet ﷺ to finish praying. Then he said that Allah had thrown Islam into his heart, and that he would do whatever he was told. He was the only Muslim in his tribe, and no one knew it. The Prophet ﷺ told him that he was only one man, but that he should do what he could. Nuaym asked whether he was allowed to say whatever he liked. The Prophet ﷺ gave his famous answer that war is khid'a, a ruse. A ruse is not khiyana, the betrayal of a trust. Nuaym went first to the Banu Qurayza. Speaking as an old friend, he advised them not to fight until the Quraysh handed over some of their nobles as hostages. Later accounts give the number as seventy. Otherwise, he warned, the Quraysh could ride away and leave the Banu Qurayza to face the consequences. The next morning he went to Abu Sufyan and warned him, in confidence, that the Banu Qurayza regretted their treachery. He said they had offered Muhammad ﷺ the heads of seventy men of the Quraysh to make amends, and that a request for hostages would be the sign. Then he told his own tribe the same thing. Within hours, Azzal ibn Samuel arrived from the Banu Qurayza. He demanded a date for a joint assault and seventy nobles as a guarantee. Abu Sufyan was hearing exactly what Nuaym had predicted. He sent Azzal away, saying "let me think about it", and then told the Quraysh not to hand anyone over. Nuaym went back to the Banu Qurayza and told them that Abu Sufyan had sworn not to give them even a baby camel. Ka'b ibn Asad began to lament that Huyayy had brought them nothing but ruin, and al-Zubayr ibn Batta saw plainly that if the confederates left, nothing awaited his people but the sword. Abu Sufyan now feared that the Banu Qurayza would switch sides again. He ordered a general attack for the next morning and sent Ikrimah to tell them so. It was Friday, after Asr. The Banu Qurayza answered that the next day was the Sabbath, on which they would not fight. Even on Sunday, they said, they would not move without the seventy hostages. The Quraysh had never lived beside Jews. To them, a day on which one may not fight sounded like an excuse to run to Muhammad ﷺ. Abu Sufyan demanded an explanation from Huyayy. He dismissed the Sabbath as just a day between Sunday and Friday, and he swore by al-Lat and al-Uzza that this was treachery. Huyayy was terrified. He crept away to beg the Banu Qurayza to break the Sabbath just this once, but Ka'b refused in fury. Huyayy was too afraid to go back to Abu Sufyan, so he stayed inside the fortress. That choice would cost him his life. That Friday night the weather broke. The Companions remembered it as the coldest, darkest and windiest night of their lives. It was so black that a man could not see his own fingertips, and the wind roared like thunder. Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA told the story as an old man in Iraq. He was speaking to a young man who boasted of what he would have done if he had been with the Prophet ﷺ. Hudhayfah recalled that the Prophet ﷺ asked three times who would bring him news of the enemy. He promised that whoever went would be his companion on the Day of Judgment. Three times, after a month of siege, no one answered. Then the Prophet ﷺ said, "O Hudhayfah". Hudhayfah admitted that after that he had no choice but to go. He stood up shivering. Yet, as Muslim reports, he felt warm, as if he were walking in a heated bath, until he reached the enemy. The Prophet ﷺ had prayed for his protection from every side, and Hudhayfah said that after that prayer his fear left him. He walked through the storm into the camp of the Quraysh, unrecognised in the dark. He found himself close enough to Abu Sufyan to shoot him, but he remembered his order to stay hidden. Abu Sufyan told every man to check who was sitting beside him. Hudhayfah seized the hand of the man next to him and demanded his name first. Then Abu Sufyan stood up and spoke to the Quraysh. He told them that their horses and camels were dying and that the Banu Qurayza had betrayed them. The wind would not let a pot stand or a fire burn. Whatever the rest of them decided, he said, he was leaving. He untied his camel and rode away, and the Quraysh went with him. Hudhayfah had a second clear shot at him, and again he let him go. Al-Bayhaqi reports that on the way back, Hudhayfah met twenty horsemen with veiled faces. They told him to tell his companion that they had fought on his behalf. These horsemen were the angels. Hudhayfah found the Prophet ﷺ standing in prayer, wrapped in a blanket belonging to one of his wives. He was drawn in under the blanket to warm himself until the prayer ended. Then he gave the news. The Prophet ﷺ had spent the night in supplication against the confederates. He called on Allah as the Sender of the Book, the Swift in reckoning, the Mover of the clouds and the Defeater of the confederates, asking Him to shake them and defeat them. Allah answered with the Saba wind. This is the eastern wind of mercy that gathers rain clouds, not the Dabur wind that destroyed the people of Ad. It broke the confederates' camp but killed none of them, and many of those men would one day become Muslims. The Qur'an speaks of it in 33:9, which mentions a wind and forces you could not see. When the Muslims woke the next morning, the plain was empty and every tent had been overturned. The Prophet ﷺ had barely laid down his armour when Jibril AS came to him. Jibril told him that the angels had not yet laid down theirs. So the army was sent on without pausing, to the fortress of the Banu Qurayza. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh lived long enough to give the judgment on them, and then he died of his wound. Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq, who had financed the confederacy, was killed in Khaybar in the months that followed. The Prophet ﷺ had said that from now on, the Muslims would be the ones to march. His words came true at Hudaybiyyah, Khaybar and finally Makkah itself.

A dispute arose between the Prophet ﷺ and Hafsa bint Umar RA; according to one narration he considered divorcing her, and according to another he issued a single talaq. Jibril AS came to the Prophet ﷺ and told him Allah commanded he take her back, for she was sawwama qawwama (one who fasts and prays much) and would be his wife in Jannah. On another occasion of tension between them, her father Umar RA, finding her in tears, warned her that if the Prophet ﷺ divorced her again he would never speak to her again.

During the expedition of al-Muraysi', a quarrel between the Ansar (the Muslims of Madinah) and the Muhajirun (the emigrants from Makkah) had just been settled. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, the head of the hypocrites, was angry that it had ended peacefully. In his tent, among his own people, he complained bitterly about the Muhajirun. He said that sheltering and feeding them was like "fattening a dog so it comes back to eat you." He also swore that once they were back in Madinah, "the honorable will expel the inferior." He meant that the people of Madinah would drive the Muhajirun out. A young boy, Zayd ibn Arqam RA, overheard this. He told his uncle, who took him to the Prophet ﷺ. When the Prophet ﷺ confronted Abdullah ibn Ubayy, he swore oath after oath that he had said no such thing. The Prophet ﷺ chose to accept his denial. After Abdullah ibn Ubayy left, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA asked permission to kill him. The Prophet ﷺ refused, because he did not want people to say that he killed his own companions. He then ordered the army to march straight back to Madinah. They marched non-stop for about 20 hours, which kept the gossip from spreading.

Zaynab bint Jahsh RA was a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ through her mother. She had been married to his adopted son, Zayd ibn Harithah RA, but the marriage did not work and Zayd divorced her. According to the strongest opinion, the Prophet ﷺ married her at the beginning of Dhu al-Qa'dah in the 5th year after the Hijrah. When her waiting period was over, the Prophet ﷺ sent Zayd himself to tell her of his interest. She said she would not answer until she had prayed istikhara, the prayer for guidance. While she prayed, Allah revealed verse 33:37 of the Qur'an, which says, "We married her to you." There was no guardian, no dowry and no witnesses. It was the only marriage in history contracted by Allah Himself. The same verse gives the reason. It shows that there is no wrong in marrying the former wife of an adopted son, because an adopted son is not a blood relative. The verses of hijab were revealed on the night of this wedding (see Legislation of Hijab). The wedding feast was the most generous the Prophet ﷺ ever gave for any of his wives. He sent Anas ibn Malik RA to invite people, starting with Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali. Then Anas invited the poor who lived at the masjid, known as the People of Suffa, then anyone in the masjid or on the road, and anyone he met. Anas thought the small dish of food would feed two or three people, but more than seventy ate from it.

In the 6th year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ had a dream. He saw himself doing tawaf around the Ka'bah in ihram, with his head shaved, completing the full rites of an Umrah. He understood the dream as Allah's command to go to Makkah. He announced his plan to the Muhajirun, the Ansar and the tribes around Madinah. Around 1,400 people set out with him. Most of them were Muhajirun who had not seen Makkah for six years. The Bedouin tribes around Madinah mostly refused to come, preferring to stay with their wealth and families. The Qur'an later exposed this hesitation as an excuse rather than a genuine reason (Qur'an 48:11-12). He set out in Dhu al-Qa'dah. This was one of the sacred months, in which fighting was traditionally forbidden even before Islam, in the Jahiliyyah. Travelling in this month was a deliberate signal that he came in peace. At the miqat of Dhu al-Hulayfah, he prayed two rak'ahs and entered ihram. He also dedicated seventy sacrificial camels, garlanded to mark them as offerings. Even pagan Arabs respected such animals as a sign of piety, as events would later prove. From there, he sent a single scout ahead to see how the Quraysh would react. The scout was Busr ibn Sufyan al-Khuza'i. He came from Khuza'a, a neutral tribe, and the Quraysh did not know him. At Asfan, roughly halfway to Makkah, Busr came back with his report. He said that the Quraysh had armed for war and brought their women with them, as they had at Uhud. They had also sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to block the road at Ghumaym. The Prophet ﷺ was grieved that his own people would rather fight than simply let him pass. He said, "Woe to the Quraysh, war has consumed them." He vowed that he would keep fighting with whatever Allah had sent him "until Allah grants victory or this neck of mine is cut off". At the same time, he made it clear that he did not want war or bloodshed. He asked the sahaba for their advice. Abu Bakr RA advised them to stick to their original purpose. They had come to visit the House of Allah, he said, and should not fight anyone unless they were attacked. The Prophet ﷺ agreed. He set aside his own first inclination, which had been to strike first at the tribes that were backing the Quraysh. Because Khalid was blocking the main road, one of the sahaba guided the army along another route. It ran through a valley of thorns and volcanic rock, and their feet were left bleeding. The Prophet ﷺ compared this passage to the gate that the Israelites had been commanded to enter humbly, in return for forgiveness (Qur'an 2:58). He promised that Allah would forgive everyone who passed through it, except for one man. That man had spent the whole way distracted by a camel he had lost. He replied that finding his camel mattered more to him than forgiveness. His answer showed that he was a hypocrite, marching in a caravan that was otherwise entirely sincere. As night fell, the army came out of the valley and reached the plain of Hudaybiyyah. There, the Prophet ﷺ's camel, Qaswa', suddenly knelt down and would not get up. The sahaba complained that she had turned stubborn. The Prophet ﷺ told them that this was not in her nature. "The One who stopped the Elephant has also stopped her," he said. He made camp where she had stopped. The well at the camp had almost run dry. The Prophet ﷺ rinsed his mouth with its water and returned the water to the well. After a while, the well gave enough water for the whole camp and their animals to drink their fill. This is reported by al-Bara' RA in al-Bukhari. Another report in al-Bukhari says that he sent an arrow down into the well. The Prophet ﷺ expected the terms to be hard. He told the sahaba in advance that he would accept any condition the Quraysh proposed, as long as it did not compromise the sanctity of Allah's symbols. Quraysh scouts soon found the camp, and Khalid's force pulled back toward Makkah. At one point, eighty armed men from Makkah tried to make a surprise raid on the camp from the hills of Tan'im. Ibn Ishaq's report gives their number as forty or fifty. Muslim scouts spotted them first, and they were surrounded and captured. Not a drop of blood was spilled on either side. According to Qur'an 48:24, it was Allah who held back the hands of both sides. Afterwards the Prophet ﷺ forgave all of them and sent them home. The negotiations began with Budayl ibn Warqa' of Khuza'a, a neutral tribe that was sympathetic to the Muslims. Budayl carried the Prophet ﷺ's message back to the Quraysh. The message was that he had come only to honour the House of Allah. He was willing to agree a truce with the Quraysh, and otherwise he was ready to fight. The more hot-headed Quraysh refused even to hear the message. The Quraysh as a whole still would not move. They did not want the Arabs to say that Muhammad ﷺ had got the better of them. Next, Urwah ibn Mas'ud al-Thaqafi volunteered to go. He was a leader of Thaqif with close ties to the Quraysh. He met the Prophet ﷺ in person and accused him of breaking family ties and threatening the sanctity of the Haram. As he spoke, Urwah kept taking hold of the Prophet ﷺ's beard, a customary gesture between equals. Each time, al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, who was guarding the Prophet ﷺ, struck his hand away with the hilt of his sword. Al-Mughira was Urwah's own grand-nephew. Urwah then mocked the loyalty of the Prophet ﷺ's followers, calling them a rootless "hodgepodge". Abu Bakr RA answered him with a curse so sharp that Urwah said he would have replied in kind, if he had not owed Abu Bakr a personal favour. Urwah went back to the Quraysh visibly shaken. He had watched the sahaba compete to catch the Prophet ﷺ's spit and the water he washed with, and lower their voices in his presence. He told the Quraysh that he had visited the courts of Caesar, Kisra and the Najashi. He had never seen a king honoured the way this man was honoured by his own people. He urged the Quraysh to accept the Prophet ﷺ's offer. The Prophet ﷺ then sent Khirash ibn Umayyah of Khuza'a to the Quraysh. As a gesture of goodwill, he sent him riding one of his own well-known camels. The Quraysh responded by hamstringing the camel. They were about to kill Khirash when the Ahabish protected him and let him go (Ibn Ishaq). The Quraysh's own next envoy was al-Hulays ibn Alqama al-Kinani. He came from a tribe that held sacrificial animals sacred. The Prophet ﷺ knew this, so he had the sahaba parade their garlanded camels and sheep in front of him. Al-Hulays never even entered the Muslim camp, because the sight alone was enough for him. He went back to the Quraysh and declared that it was forbidden to keep pilgrims and their offerings away from the House of Allah. The Quraysh mocked him as an ignorant Bedouin. In response, he swore that his own tribal confederation, the Ahabish, would no longer support them. The neutral envoys had now all been tried, so the Prophet ﷺ decided to send a Muslim of standing. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA was famous for his fearlessness, but he asked to be excused. He was not afraid for himself. His hostility toward the Quraysh was well known, and he had no kin in Makkah to protect him. He was therefore likely to be killed before any negotiation could take place. Umar RA suggested Uthman ibn Affan RA instead. Uthman was an Umayyad, related to Abu Sufyan, and this gave him a standing the Quraysh would respect. Uthman entered Makkah under the protection of his cousin Aban ibn Sa'id. He met Abu Sufyan and the leaders of the Quraysh and delivered his message. They told Uthman that he himself could go round the Ka'bah. He refused to do so before the Prophet ﷺ had done it, and so they held him (Ibn Ishaq). Uthman was away longer than expected, and a rumour spread through the camp that he had been killed. The Prophet ﷺ was not willing to leave this unanswered. Beneath a tree at Hudaybiyyah, he called the sahaba to make a fresh pledge of allegiance. In it they committed themselves to fight the Quraysh rather than retreat. The Qur'an later honoured this oath as the moment when "Allah's Hand was over their hands" (Qur'an 48:10). It also recorded Allah's pleasure with those who made it (Qur'an 48:18). Every man present made the pledge except one hypocrite, who hid behind his camel. Uthman was away in Makkah, so the Prophet ﷺ pledged on his behalf. He raised his right hand and said, "This is the hand of Uthman." Then he struck it on his other hand and said, "This is for Uthman" (al-Bukhari). News of the pledge reached Makkah. It seems to have pushed the Quraysh to negotiate seriously at last. Uthman came back to the camp. It is related that the sahaba asked him whether he had managed to do tawaf while he was in the city. He told them that he would never do it before the Prophet ﷺ, even if he had stayed in Makkah for a year. The Quraysh first sent Mikraz ibn Hafs, but he offered nothing workable. Then they sent their most capable negotiator, Suhayl ibn Amr. Suhayl was a senior speaker of the Quraysh. After Badr he had been held as a prisoner in the home of one of the sahaba. Years earlier, Umar RA had wanted to silence him, but the Prophet ﷺ refused to allow it. He told Umar that a day might come when Suhayl would say something that pleased him. When the Prophet ﷺ saw Suhayl approaching, he said to the sahaba, "Suhayl has come; things have been made easy for you." He was reading a good omen in the meaning of Suhayl's name. Suhayl came with a grievance of his own. One of his sons, Abdullah, had already gone over to Madinah years earlier. He had slipped away from the Quraysh's own ranks at Badr. His younger son, Abu Jandal RA, had become a Muslim. Suhayl had kept him in chains and tortured him, and he was still a prisoner back in Makkah. The Prophet ﷺ called for Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to write the treaty. Ali began with "In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful." Suhayl objected that he did not recognise "al-Rahman". He insisted on the old pagan formula, "Bismika Allahumma", instead. The Prophet ﷺ agreed, rather than let the wording block the treaty. Ali then wrote, "This is what Muhammad ﷺ, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, has agreed with Suhayl ibn Amr." Suhayl objected again. He said that if the Quraysh had believed in that title, they would never have opposed him in the first place. He demanded "Muhammad ibn Abdillah" instead. The Prophet ﷺ told him, "I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ even if you deny it." Even so, he agreed to the change. Ali RA refused to strike out the words "Messenger of Allah ﷺ" with his own hand. The Prophet ﷺ could not write, so he asked Ali RA to point to the words, and he erased them himself. Suhayl then set out his central condition. Any man of the Quraysh who came over to the Muslims would be sent back, even if he came as a Muslim. But no Muslim would ever be handed over in the other direction. The sahaba objected loudly. Most of them had fled Makkah themselves to find exactly this protection. Reversing it now would shut the door on every future refugee. Before the clause had even been fully written, Abu Jandal RA broke free of his chains. He stumbled into the camp crying out for help, with the marks of torture visible on his body. Suhayl pointed to him as the first person the clause would apply to. The Prophet ﷺ pointed out that the treaty had not yet been written, and asked Suhayl to let him keep Abu Jandal. Suhayl refused outright. Mikraz ibn Hafs said, "We allow you to keep him," but Suhayl would not give way (al-Bukhari). Other reports say that Mikraz took Abu Jandal under his protection so that he would not be tortured again. The Prophet ﷺ told Abu Jandal to be patient, because Allah would make a way out for him. Umar RA was standing near Abu Jandal. Rather than see him sent back, Umar gestured toward his own sword. But Suhayl was still Abu Jandal's father, and Abu Jandal did not take the sword. He was led back to Makkah in chains. After that, the remaining terms were agreed. There would be no Umrah that year, only the next year. There would be a ten-year truce, with no fighting on either side. Both sides were free to make alliances with other tribes, and those tribes would be bound by the same terms. And any Muslim who went back over to the Quraysh would not be returned, unlike in the other direction. Ibn Ishaq names the witnesses as Abu Bakr RA, Umar RA, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, Abdullah ibn Suhayl RA, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, Mahmud ibn Maslamah RA and Mikraz, who was then still a polytheist. Ali RA was the one who wrote the document. As Suhayl left, satisfied, Umar RA confronted the Prophet ﷺ directly. He was voicing what many of the sahaba felt. He asked whether the Prophet ﷺ was not the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. He asked whether the Muslims were not on the truth and their enemies on falsehood. If so, he asked, how could they accept such humiliating terms? The Prophet ﷺ replied, "I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and I will not disobey Allah, and He will help me." Umar RA then asked whether the Prophet ﷺ had not told them that they would go round the House of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Indeed, I told you. But did I say we will do it this year?" Umar RA admitted that he had not. The Prophet ﷺ told him, "You will do it next year." Umar RA was still not satisfied, so he put the same questions to Abu Bakr RA. Abu Bakr rebuked him sharply. He told Umar to hold fast to the Prophet ﷺ's stirrup rather than question him. Umar RA later said that, because of what he had said that day, he kept on giving charity, fasting, praying and freeing slaves (Ibn Ishaq). It is also reported that, when he was khalifa, he admitted that no other leader could have made him accept such a condition. Once the treaty was written, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba to get up, slaughter their sacrificial animals and shave their heads. He said it three times, but not a single person moved. They were too crushed by what had just happened (al-Bukhari). The Prophet ﷺ went back to his tent. He told Umm Salama RA that he had given them a command and no one had obeyed. She advised him to go out and shave his own head first, without saying another word. Once they saw him do it, she said, they would follow. He did exactly that. The sahaba were freed from their paralysis and rushed to shave each other's heads. He made du'a for those who had shaved their heads rather than only trimming their hair. He repeated this du'a three times. On the fourth time, he finally included those who had only trimmed. The sacrificial animals were slaughtered there. Among them was a camel that had belonged to Abu Jahal and had been captured at Badr. It had a silver ring in its nose, and the sight of it enraged the polytheists (Ibn Ishaq). On the march home, Umar RA was still troubled by what had passed between him and the Prophet ﷺ. He rode up hoping to make peace. His greetings went unanswered, and he feared the worst. Then a rider came to call him back. He found the Prophet ﷺ's face lit up with joy as he recited Surah al-Fath, which had been revealed on the way back. It begins, "Indeed, We have granted you a clear triumph" (Qur'an 48:1). Umar RA asked in disbelief whether this really counted as a triumph. The Prophet ﷺ confirmed that it did. Umar RA is said to have ridden the whole length of the column, announcing the victory. The Prophet ﷺ said that this surah was dearer to him than everything the sun shines upon (al-Bukhari). Not long after the return to Madinah, the treaty faced its first real test. Abu Basir was a convert from Thaqif, allied to Banu Zuhrah, and he fled to Madinah. The Prophet ﷺ did not turn him away when he arrived. But then two men of the Quraysh came to invoke the treaty's return clause. The Prophet ﷺ honoured the treaty and sent Abu Basir back with them. On the road, Abu Basir killed one of his two escorts with the man's own sword. The other escort fled back to Madinah in terror. Then Abu Basir himself came back. He insisted that the Prophet ﷺ had fulfilled his obligation, and that it was Allah who had set him free. The Prophet ﷺ did not directly help him any further. Instead, he remarked to the people near him, "What a great warrior he is. If only he had someone else to help him." Abu Basir understood the hint. He left and set up camp at al-'Is, by the sea, on the road the Quraysh used to travel to Syria (Ibn Ishaq). Abu Jandal RA heard where Abu Basir had gone. He escaped from Makkah a second time and joined him. Word spread among the Muslims of Makkah who were still being persecuted. Eventually some seventy to eighty of them gathered there. They supported themselves by raiding Quraysh caravans. Under the treaty, the Muslims had no authority to stop them, and no obligation to. In time, the raids became so costly that the Quraysh themselves appealed to the Prophet ﷺ. Invoking their ties of kinship, they asked him to take the whole band into Madinah and put an end to the raids. He did so. A later report, though, says that Abu Basir died before he reached the city. Another test came with Umm Kulthum bint Uqbah. She was the daughter of Uqbah ibn Abi Mu'ayt, the man who had once thrown animal entrails on the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah. She became a Muslim and fled to Madinah. The treaty's return clause spoke only of men. Allah revealed Qur'an 60:10, which exempted believing women from the clause entirely. So she stayed in Madinah. She is reported to have later married Zayd ibn Harithah RA. One night during the march home, everyone was exhausted. The Prophet ﷺ asked Bilal RA to stay awake and wake the camp for Fajr. Bilal fell asleep too, and the whole camp, including the Prophet ﷺ, slept past sunrise. Sahih Muslim places a night like this on the return from Khaybar instead. The Prophet ﷺ did not pray on the spot. He moved the camp on and led the late prayer at a new place, saying that Shaytan had a hand in that particular ground.

Khaybar lies 180 km north of Madinah. It was the richest farmland in Arabia, a spread of date plantations watered from an underground water table. It belonged to Jewish tribes, who had built the largest fortresses in the peninsula there. There was not one citadel but a dozen or more, with each clan behind its own walls. The fortresses were split between two halves of the oasis, a few hours' march apart. After Badr, the Banu Qaynuqa had been expelled from Madinah. Later the Banu al-Nadir were expelled too, after their attempt on the Prophet ﷺ's life. Both tribes settled in Khaybar. From there, Huyayy ibn Akhtab and Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq raised the alliance of tribes that besieged Madinah at Khandaq. They also persuaded the Banu Qurayza to betray the Muslims. No treaty bound Khaybar and the Muslims, and it was the one real threat left in central Arabia. The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had just removed the threat from the Quraysh. Within weeks, the Prophet ﷺ marched on Khaybar with around 1,700 men, among them the men who had been with him at Hudaybiyyah. Ibn Ishaq dates this to Muharram 7 AH, while al-Waqidi says Safar. The two can be reconciled if the campaign began in one month and ended in the next. The army set out in high spirits. The men shouted "Allahu akbar" so loudly that the Prophet ﷺ told them to go easy on themselves. He reminded them that the One they were calling on was not deaf or far away, but nearer to them than their jugular vein. A number of women of the Ansar came along to nurse the wounded. One of them was a girl of seven or eight who had no animal of her own to ride. She rode behind the Prophet ﷺ on his own camel. On the road she found that her first period had begun. He calmed her and told her how to wash and make herself clean. After the campaign he hung a necklace around her neck, and she later asked to be buried with it. He covered the distance in two days. On the last night he camped out of sight of the oasis, and he marched on before Fajr. At dawn the people of Khaybar came out with their spades and baskets, and only then did they see the Muslim army. They fled back inside, shouting, "Muhammad ﷺ and the army!" and they barred their gates. The Prophet ﷺ then said the words that every book records. "Allahu akbar, Khaybar is destroyed. When we come down into the courtyard of a people, evil is the morning of those who were warned." The layout of the oasis was its downfall. The fortresses were built to hold off a raiding party, and they could not join together against an army. So each clan, of a few hundred men, faced the whole Muslim force alone, and the Prophet ﷺ took them one at a time. The great fortress of Na'im held out for ten days. Abu Bakr RA led the assault for a few days, and then Umar RA took over. Mahmud ibn Maslamah RA was crushed to death by a beam dropped from its wall. The Muslims had never met this kind of fighting before. On the tenth night, the Prophet ﷺ made an announcement. He said that at Fajr he would give the banner to a man whom Allah and His Messenger ﷺ loved, and through whom Allah would give them victory. Umar said that he had never in his life wished to be given command as much as he did that night. In the morning, the Prophet ﷺ asked for Ali ibn Abi Talib RA. Ali was lying in his tent with sore, inflamed eyes. The Prophet ﷺ spat into his eyes and they were cured. Then he handed Ali the banner and ordered him to go forward and not turn back. Ali set off, then stopped. Rather than turn around, he shouted over his shoulder to ask on what terms he should fight them. The Prophet ﷺ called back that he should fight until they testified that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger. He added that if Allah guided even one man through Ali, it would be better for him than a herd of red camels. Khaybar's champion, Mirhab, came out to fight in single combat. Amir ibn al-Akwa RA, a man of the Ansar, took up the challenge first and was killed in the duel. Sahih Muslim reports that Ali then killed Mirhab. Ibn Ishaq instead says that Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA killed him, to avenge his brother Mahmud. After that, the garrison came out to fight and was defeated. During this fighting, Ali's shield was knocked out of his hand. He tore the fortress door off its hinges and fought from behind it. Abu Rafi' RA said afterwards that seven of them together could not lift that door. The fortress of al-Sa'b fell next, after three days. It was full of grain and supplies, just when the Muslims' food had run out, and it fed the army for the rest of the campaign. The Castle of al-Zubayr had no well inside its walls. So the Muslims cut off its water, and its defenders came out and were beaten. Then the army crossed to the second half of the oasis and did it all again. There were at least nine sieges in all, some lasting a day and some lasting ten. Each time a fortress fell, its survivors fled into the next one. In the end only one of the largest fortresses was left, packed with everyone who had fled from the others. The Prophet ﷺ simply camped in front of it. After about two weeks, its people asked for terms. Scholars long argued over whether Khaybar ended as a conquest or a surrender. Most of them, including Ibn al-Qayyim, call it a conquest. They point out that the last fortress gave up only because all the others had been taken by force. Two stories from the fighting were told for ever after. In the first, a slave who herded his master's sheep came to ask what the Prophet ﷺ was calling people to. He accepted Islam on the spot. The Prophet ﷺ told him to return the flock to its owner, because it had been placed in his trust. The Prophet ﷺ passed his hand over the sheep, and they went home by themselves. The man then fought until an arrow killed him. As he was being buried, the Prophet ﷺ closed his eyes. He explained that the man's two wives from Paradise had come for him. In the second story, a Bedouin fought so fiercely that the Companions called him a man of Paradise. But the Prophet ﷺ said that he was a man of the Fire. A Companion followed the Bedouin. He saw him wounded in the hand, and then saw him throw himself on his own sword. The Companion came back repeating the shahada. The Prophet ﷺ then taught them a lesson. He said that a man may do the deeds of the people of Paradise until he is only an arm's length away from it, and then be overtaken by what was written for him. The people of Khaybar argued that the Muslims did not know how to farm the land. They offered to stay on as tenants, and a treaty was made. The Muslims would receive half the produce. The Jews would do all the work and bear all the costs. The arrangement would last only as long as the Muslims wished. It held until near the end of Umar's caliphate. Then they were resettled elsewhere, and the Jewish presence in central Arabia came to an end. The neighbouring lands of Wadi al-Qura accepted the same terms. No army had gone near the people of Fadak, but they wrote to accept the terms too. So Fadak came to the Prophet ﷺ without any fighting, and its income supported his household. Under the treaty, the tribes had to hand over their gold and weapons. Huyayy's relative Sa'ya claimed that the treasure Huyayy had carried out of Madinah had all been spent. Zubayr RA was given the task of questioning him. In the end Sa'ya named the valley where it was buried. After the terms had been agreed, a woman of Khaybar whose husband and family had been killed sent the Prophet ﷺ a roast lamb. She had asked which cut he liked best, and she had filled the shoulder with poison. He took one mouthful and told everyone to stop. He said that the shoulder had told him it was poisoned. But Bishr ibn al-Bara RA had already swallowed some, and he died within days. The Prophet ﷺ himself felt the effects of the poison for the rest of his life, and he spoke of it on his deathbed. The Prophet ﷺ called her clan and first showed them that he could tell when they were lying. Then he asked them whether they had poisoned the lamb, and they admitted it. They explained their reasoning. If he were lying about being a prophet, they would be rid of him. If he really was a prophet, the poison would not harm him anyway. They named the woman who had cooked it. She told him that she had done it because her husband, her uncle and others of her family had been killed in the battle. The reports differ on what happened to her. Ibn al-Qayyim brings them together. He says that the Prophet ﷺ forgave her for what she had done to him, but that when Bishr died, she was executed in retaliation for his death. The spoils were the greatest the Muslims had yet seen. There was food, weapons, armour and livestock. In land, it was the largest conquest of the whole Seerah. The men of Hudaybiyyah took their shares, as the Qur'an had promised them. The Muhajirun had lived for six years on gifts from the Ansar. Now they returned those gifts and at last had an income of their own. Ibn Umar RA said that they never ate their fill until Khaybar. On the very day the last fortress fell, Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA arrived from Abyssinia. He came with the emigrants who had been away for more than ten years. The Prophet ﷺ kissed his forehead. He said that he did not know which made him happier, the conquest or Ja'far's return. The party from Abyssinia were given shares in Khaybar even though they had not fought. So were Abu Hurairah RA and the small group from the tribe of Daws who reached the camp at the same time. Among the captives was Safiyyah bint Huyayy. She was the daughter of Huyayy, the man who had raised the alliance against Madinah, and her husband had been killed in the fighting. The Prophet ﷺ freed her and married her on the way home, and her freedom was her dowry. Back in Madinah, Asma bint Umays RA won a ruling from the Prophet ﷺ. He ruled that the emigrants to Abyssinia had made two hijrahs, while Umar had made only one. Several rulings also date from this campaign. Eating donkey meat was forbidden, and so was temporary marriage. Exchanging dates for dates in unequal amounts was forbidden. The Khaybar treaty itself established the sharecropping contract.

Asma bint Umays RA was one of the Muslims who had emigrated from Makkah to Abyssinia years earlier. A day or two after the Muslims came back to Madinah from Khaybar, she visited her friend Hafsa bint Umar RA, a wife of the Prophet ﷺ. The two had not seen each other for ten to fifteen years. Hafsa's father, Umar RA, was there and asked who the visitor was. When he heard it was Asma bint Umays, he half-teasingly called her "the Abyssinian." He told her that those who had emigrated to Madinah with the Prophet ﷺ had more right to him than the emigrants to Abyssinia. Asma RA was deeply hurt. She told Umar RA that he was wrong. He and the others had been with the Prophet ﷺ for these ten years, while the emigrants had suffered as strangers in a foreign land. She swore she would not eat or drink until she had told the Prophet ﷺ what Umar RA had said. She went straight to the masjid and, in front of the sahaba, repeated Umar RA's words to the Prophet ﷺ. He said, "He (Umar) does not have any more right over us than you; go back and tell him, he made one Hijrah, (but) you people made two Hijrahs." Asma RA went back with this answer. The news spread quickly, and all day the emigrants from Abyssinia came to her to hear exactly what the Prophet ﷺ had said.

In Dhu al-Qa'dah 7 AH, the Prophet ﷺ left Madinah with around 2,000 Muslims. They were going to make up the Umrah (the lesser pilgrimage) that they had been prevented from performing the year before at Hudaybiyyah. This time they brought all their weapons. A Quraysh delegation led by Mikraz ibn Hafs came out to ask why, since the agreement allowed them to enter only with swords in their sheaths. The Prophet ﷺ assured them that the Muslims would enter Makkah only as they had agreed. The weapons were left outside the Haram, the sacred area, under a guard of 200 men. The guards took turns, so that everyone could perform tawaf (circling the Ka'bah). The Quraysh of Makkah split into three groups during the visit, and none of them wanted contact with the Muslims. Some stayed in their houses. Some gathered in Dar al-Nadwa, their council house. Others camped in the hills outside the city. One of the Quraysh spread a rumor that the diseases of Madinah had worn the Muslims down, and that they had come back as weaklings. When the Prophet ﷺ heard this, he told the Muslims to raise their voices in the talbiyah, the chant of the pilgrims. He told them to uncover their right shoulders and to perform raml, a brisk walk that is almost a run, for the first three rounds of tawaf. This is how these practices of the Sunnah began. The Quraysh were struck by the Muslims' energy, and the sight of 2,000 Muslims around the Ka'bah left a deep impression on them. The Prophet ﷺ stayed for three days, and the Quraysh kept to the treaty without any incident.

A few weeks after the Battle of Mu'tah, around Jumada of 8 AH, the Prophet ﷺ sent an expedition against the tribe of Quda'a. Quda'a lived to the northeast of Madinah, between it and the Ghassanids, and had helped the Ghassanids at Mu'tah. The expedition takes its name from a pond in the area called Dhat al-Salasil. The Prophet ﷺ called for Amr ibn al-As, who had been a Muslim for only about three months, and told him to come in his armour. Amr later described the meeting. The Prophet ﷺ looked him up and down and said, "I wish to appoint you as a leader of an army, and Allah will protect you and give you much ghanima. And I am optimistic for you that you will get much wealth." Ghanima means the spoils of war. Amr felt hurt, as if the Prophet ﷺ thought he had become Muslim for money. He said that he had accepted Islam only to be a Muslim and to be with the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ replied, "O Amr, how beautiful is pure money for the righteous man." Amr was then given 300 men and told to launch a surprise attack on Quda'a. It was winter. Amr marched only by night, so that the enemy would not hear of his coming. Despite the bitter cold, he refused to let the army light any fire for the whole journey, and threatened to push into it anyone who did. He later explained that he did not want the enemy to see how few they were. When he reached the edge of Quda'a's lands, he decided that 300 men were not enough, and sent word to Madinah asking for more. The Prophet ﷺ sent 200 more men, bringing the force to 500. They were led by Abu Ubaydah Amir ibn al-Jarrah, and among them were Abu Bakr and Umar RA. The Prophet ﷺ told Abu Ubaydah to make sure that he and Amr agreed and did not disagree. When the reinforcements arrived, it was time to pray, and Abu Ubaydah stepped forward to lead the prayer. At that time, whoever led the prayer was understood to be the leader of the army. Amr objected that he was the appointed leader and that the 200 were only reinforcements. Some of Abu Ubaydah's men took his side. Abu Ubaydah was senior to Amr in every way, but he chose to step aside rather than divide the army. He reminded Amr of the Prophet ﷺ's instruction, and let Amr lead both the prayer and the army. Amr then led the whole force in a surprise attack. When Quda'a saw 500 armed men appear without warning, they dropped everything and fled. The tribe was too large for the Muslims to subdue entirely, but they took a great deal of booty and suffered no major casualties. On one night of the expedition, Amr woke in a state of major ritual impurity (janaba) after a wet dream. Normally this requires a full bath (ghusl) before prayer. But the desert night was freezing, and he feared that the cold water would kill him. So he performed tayammum, the dry ablution with clean earth, and led his companions in the Fajr prayer. When they returned, some of the companions complained to the Prophet ﷺ that Amr had led them while in janaba. The Prophet ﷺ asked Amr about it. Amr explained that he had remembered the verse "Do not kill yourselves. Surely, Allah is ever Merciful to you" (Qur'an 4:29), and feared that the bath would do exactly that. The Prophet ﷺ laughed and did not rebuke him.

The Banu Bakr, allies of the Quraysh, had attacked the Khuza'a, who were allied to the Muslims, and the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was close to collapse. With the approval of the Quraysh, Abu Sufyan travelled alone to Madinah to try to renegotiate it. The reports differ on the order of his visits. Ibn Ishaq says he went first to the Prophet ﷺ, who gave him no response at all. Only then did he go to Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and Ali ibn Abi Talib in turn. Ibn Sa'd says he visited Abu Bakr, Umar, and Ali first, and the Prophet ﷺ last. Sh. Yasir Qadhi leans toward Ibn Ishaq's version. Abu Bakr, his friend from before Islam, told him plainly that he could not help. Umar, his former business partner, refused even more bluntly. Ali was his third cousin and his closest relative in Madinah. Ali heard him out, but told him that once the Prophet ﷺ had decided a matter, they would not try to change it. Abu Sufyan then turned to Fatima, who was there with her little son Hasan. He asked her to have the boy seek protection for him. Fatima replied that her son was too young to grant protection, and that no one could give protection against the Prophet ﷺ. As a last resort, Ali advised Abu Sufyan to stand in the mosque and publicly ask for protection. Under Arab custom, any member of a tribe could grant protection, and Islam kept this rule for any Muslim, male or female, old or young. Abu Sufyan made the plea, but no one came forward, since the Prophet ﷺ himself had said nothing. Before leaving Madinah, Abu Sufyan visited his daughter Umm Habiba, a wife of the Prophet ﷺ. He had not seen her in over 13 years, since she emigrated to Abyssinia. When he went to sit down, she quickly folded away the bedding. She told him it was the bed of the Prophet ﷺ, and that he, as an idolater, would not sit on it. Abu Sufyan returned to Makkah empty-handed. When he told the Quraysh that he had begged for protection in the mosque, they told him he had been made a fool of.

According to a report in al-Tabari, Hafsa bint Umar RA was once away from home, and the Prophet ﷺ called Maria al-Qibtiyya RA to Hafsa's house. Maria was a Coptic woman who had been sent to the Prophet ﷺ as a gift from Egypt. Hafsa came back earlier than expected and saw Maria leaving. She was angry, and asked the Prophet ﷺ whether that was how much respect he had for her, in her own house and on her own day. He kept trying to calm her, until she made him promise never to see Maria again. He said, "I have made Maria haram for myself," and told Hafsa to keep this between the two of them. He said, "Do not tell Aisha." But Hafsa did tell Aisha RA, boasting that she had made the Prophet ﷺ give up Maria. Hafsa and Aisha were sometimes the best of friends and at other times rivals, and both were jealous of Maria's beauty. It is said that this jealousy was also why the Prophet ﷺ moved Maria to al-Awali, an area far from the Masjid. When the Prophet ﷺ asked Hafsa, "Why did you tell Aisha?", she asked who had told him, thinking it was Aisha. In fact, Allah had informed him. Allah then revealed the opening verses of Surah al-Tahrim (66:1-5). They told the Prophet ﷺ to free himself from his oath, warned Hafsa and Aisha against plotting against him, and warned the Prophet ﷺ's wives in general. The Prophet ﷺ paid the kaffarah (the expiation for breaking an oath), and Maria returned to him.

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah allowed either side to make alliances with outside tribes. Any tribe that joined a side was automatically covered by the terms agreed at Hudaybiyyah. The Khuza'a took the side of the Muslims. They were kin to the Prophet ﷺ through his great-great-great-grandmother, and they were bound to Banu Hashim by an old alliance made by Abdul Muttalib. The Banu Bakr took the side of the Quraysh. In the 8th year of the Hijrah, the Banu Bakr raided the Khuza'a by night at the pond of al-Watir, just outside the boundary of the Haram. The Banu Bakr had old blood feuds to settle. The Quraysh knew the raid would break the treaty, yet they approved it. Some of their leaders, such as Suhayl ibn Amr and Safwan ibn Umayyah, gave the Banu Bakr weapons, and some men of Quraysh are reported to have fought beside them in the dark. In his verses, Hassan ibn Thabit later laid the blame on these two men. The raid turned into a massacre. More than twenty people of Khuza'a were killed, including women and children. One man of Khuza'a fled into the Haram and called on his pursuer from Banu Bakr to fear his God. The pursuer answered, "There is no God today," and killed him inside the sanctuary. The chieftain of Khuza'a, Amr ibn Salim al-Khuza'i, went to Madinah. There he recited a poem that called on the old treaty and described the massacre in the same breath. The Prophet ﷺ was moved, and he promised, "You shall be helped, O Amr ibn Salim." The Quraysh sent Abu Sufyan ibn Harb to Madinah to negotiate the treaty again, but he found every door closed to him. Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA both refused to speak for him. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and his infant son Hasan could offer him nothing. Even his own daughter, Umm Habiba RA, would not let him sit on the Prophet ﷺ's bedding. He went back to Makkah having achieved nothing. The Prophet ﷺ called for a full mobilization, but he did not say where the army was going. He told no one, not even Abu Bakr RA or Aisha RA. By some reports, he also sent a small decoy party of eight men north toward Batn Idam, to make it look as if Syria was the target. Then he told the people that he was going to Makkah. He prayed, "O Allah, take eyes and ears from the Quraysh so that we may take them by surprise in their land." It was at this point that Hatib ibn Abi Balta'ah RA tried to warn the Quraysh. Hatib had fought at Badr. By the strongest opinion he was a mawla, a client member of a tribe, from Yemen, and his family in Makkah had no tribe to protect them. He paid a mawla woman of Banu Hashim to smuggle a warning letter to the Quraysh, hidden in the braids of her hair. News of this came to the Prophet ﷺ from heaven, and he told his men where to find her. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA caught up with her caravan at Rawdatu Khakh, outside Madinah. At first she denied carrying anything. Ali swore that neither the Prophet ﷺ nor Jibril AS could have been mistaken, and he threatened to search her by force. At that, she asked them to turn around out of modesty. Then she untied her hair and handed over the letter. When Hatib was confronted, he confessed. He explained that his loyalty to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ had never wavered. He had acted only out of fear for his unprotected family, not out of love for the Quraysh. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA had asked at once to execute him. But the Prophet ﷺ declared, "Hatib has spoken the truth. Nobody should say anything about Hatib anymore except good." Umar asked a second time, saying that Hatib had betrayed Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ refused again. He reminded Umar that Hatib had fought at Badr, and told him that Allah may already have forgiven everyone who took part in Badr. Umar was moved to tears. After this, Allah revealed the opening of Surah al-Mumtahanah (Qur'an 60:1), which tells the believers not to take His enemies as allies. The army moved remarkably fast. It left Madinah on the 10th of Ramadan and reached the outskirts of Makkah on the 19th, a march of nine days. By then the force had grown to more than 10,000. Every man of the Muhajirun and the Ansar marched, and allied tribes such as the Muzayna and Banu Sulaym joined along the way. Barely six years earlier, only 300 Muslims had fought at Badr. When the army reached Qudaid, the Prophet ﷺ broke his Ramadan fast, and the army broke theirs with him. At the valley of Juhfa, the army met al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle. He was riding out of Makkah with his family to make his own Hijrah, and he did not know that the Conquest was already under way. By a weak report, the Prophet ﷺ called him the last of the Muhajirun. At Niq al-Uqab, between Makkah and Madinah, two of the Prophet ﷺ's first cousins came out to ask to see him. Both had long mocked and opposed him. One was the poet Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abdul Muttalib RA. The other was Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah RA, the brother of Umm Salama RA. At first the Prophet ﷺ refused to see them. He said that one had wounded his pride and the other had insulted him in Makkah. Then Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith, with his young son at his side, threatened to go and die in the desert rather than be turned away. Only then was the Prophet ﷺ moved to give way. Both men accepted Islam. The army's last camp was at Marr al-Zahran, later known as Wadi Fatima. There its campfires lit up the plain. Al-Abbas RA had just joined the army, and he was anxious to spare his people needless bloodshed. That night he went out, hoping to persuade the Quraysh to surrender peacefully. On the way he came across three leaders of Quraysh and Khuza'a who were out looking for news. They were Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Hakim ibn Hizam and Budayl ibn Warqa'. Al-Abbas brought Abu Sufyan into the camp on the Prophet ﷺ's own white mule. On the way they passed Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, who wanted Abu Sufyan executed on the spot. The Prophet ﷺ had Abu Sufyan spend the night in al-Abbas's tent. The next morning, pressed by both men, Abu Sufyan reluctantly testified to the shahada. The Prophet ﷺ then declared that anyone who entered the Haram, stayed in their own home, or entered the house of Abu Sufyan would be safe. He also had al-Abbas show Abu Sufyan the army as it marched past, tribe by tribe. Abu Sufyan marveled at its size and said to al-Abbas, "The kingdom of your nephew has become great." Al-Abbas corrected him, "It is not a kingdom. It is prophethood." The final entry came on the morning of the 20th of Ramadan. The people of Makkah still did not know what was coming. The secret had been kept so completely, over a force of more than 10,000, that it was remembered as nothing short of a miracle. At Dhu Tuwa, the Prophet ﷺ divided the army. According to Ibn Ishaq, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA took the left and Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA led the Ansar. Khalid ibn al-Walid RA took the right, with Aslam, Sulaym, Ghifar, Muzayna, Juhayna and other Arab tribes. Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah RA led the troops ahead of the Prophet ﷺ. As Sa'd ibn Ubadah passed Abu Sufyan, he called out, "Today is the day of a great battle, and today the Ka'bah will be made lawful!" Abu Sufyan reported this to the Prophet ﷺ. According to al-Bukhari, the Prophet ﷺ said that Sa'd was wrong. Today, he said, Allah would honour the Ka'bah, and today it would be covered. In Ibn Ishaq's account, the Prophet ﷺ had the banner taken from Sa'd and given to Ali RA. In al-Bukhari's account, Zubayr RA carried the Prophet ﷺ's own flag. Al-Abbas RA then sent Abu Sufyan back into the city to warn the Quraysh not to fight. Abu Sufyan ran through the streets calling, "Come to my house and you will be safe!" His wife, Hind bint Utbah, was still a pagan, and she was furious. She seized him by the moustache and called for him to be killed as a wretched protector of his people. But Abu Sufyan held his ground. When people pressed him on what one house could do for the whole city, he spelled out the full terms of safety. They would be safe in the Haram, in their own homes, or in his house. The army entered Makkah from the east and the west. The Prophet ﷺ ordered that no one be killed unless they attacked first. He named only a small number of people who were left out of this general amnesty. A handful of Quraysh made a brief, hopeless stand in the alleys of the city. They were led by Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal, Safwan ibn Umayyah and Suhayl ibn Amr. The books report that around 13 to 20 men of Quraysh were killed. Only two Muslims were killed, both in the flank of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA. The resistance soon collapsed. The Prophet ﷺ then entered the city on his camel, wearing armour. His head was bowed so low that it nearly touched the camel's back, and he was reciting Surah al-Fath (Qur'an 48:1). He rode to the Ka'bah and performed tawaf on his camel. There were more than 350 idols around it, and some say 360. As he passed each one, he pointed his staff at it, and it fell. All the while he was reciting, "Truth has come, and falsehood has departed" (Qur'an 17:81). He then had Uthman ibn Talha bring the key, and he cleared the idols and images out of the Ka'bah. One image showed Ibrahim AS with divination arrows. The Prophet ﷺ said, "May Allah curse them! By Allah, neither Ibrahim nor Isma'il practised divination by arrows." A report in Ibn Sa'd also mentions a picture of Mary and Jesus, but that report is very weak. The Prophet ﷺ is also reported to have prayed inside the Ka'bah, with Bilal RA beside him. Bilal RA said that he prayed two rak'ahs between the pillars, but Ibn Abbas RA reported that he did not pray inside. He once told Aisha RA that he would have rebuilt the Ka'bah on Ibrahim AS's original foundations, and lowered its door to the ground, if the Quraysh had not been so new to Islam. Even now, he chose not to force that renovation through. Speaking from the door of the Ka'bah, the Prophet ﷺ declared, "There is no God but Allah alone. He has fulfilled His promise, and He has aided His servant, and He has destroyed all the enemies by Himself." He abolished every claim of the Jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance before Islam, except two. These were the custodianship of the Ka'bah and the feeding of pilgrims. He also recited Qur'an 49:13, on the equality of all mankind before Allah. He asked the assembled Quraysh what they thought he would do with them. They answered, "Good. You are a noble brother, son of a noble brother." The Prophet ﷺ said, "Go your way, for you are the freed ones" (Ibn Ishaq). Some tellings add the words of Yusuf AS, "No blame on you today" (Qur'an 12:92). Ali ibn Abi Talib RA asked whether both the custodianship of the Ka'bah (sadana) and the feeding of pilgrims (siqaya) could be given to Banu Hashim. Instead, the Prophet ﷺ called for Uthman ibn Talha and said, "Here is your key; today is a day of good faith" (Ibn Ishaq). Other reports link this to Qur'an 4:58. The custodianship has stayed with Uthman's clan, the Banu Abd al-Dar, ever since. In the immediate aftermath of the conquest, by one report, the Prophet ﷺ allowed the Khuza'a to take revenge on the Banu Bakr until the time of Asr. After that he forbade any more bloodshed in the Haram. The next day, men of Khuza'a killed Ibn al-Athwa' of Hudhayl. The Prophet ﷺ told them to stop, and he paid the blood money himself. He ruled that from then on a victim's family could choose either retaliation or blood money. He stressed that Allah alone had allowed him to fight inside the sanctuary, and only for a short time. Unusually among the conquests of human history, no war booty, prisoners or land were taken. Almost no fighting took place at all. Out of the whole city, only a small number of people were denied the amnesty by name, and the lists differ. Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal fled to Yemen, meaning to sail for Abyssinia. He turned to Islam at the sea. In Ibn Ishaq's account this was because the ship's master demanded belief in one God, while other tellings say it happened during a storm. He came back under the protection that his wife, Umm Hakim, obtained for him. He later died a martyr fighting the Romans. Abdullah ibn Khatal had killed the Muslim freedman who served him, and he had turned murtad, leaving Islam. He clung to the curtain of the Ka'bah for protection, but he was executed. Miqyas ibn Subaba was executed for assassinating a sahabi in revenge for his brother's accidental death at al-Muraysi'. Abdullah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi al-Sarh had once been the Prophet ﷺ's scribe. He had turned murtad and slandered the revelation of the Qur'an. His foster brother, Uthman ibn Affan RA, pleaded for him, and he was pardoned. Ibn Khatal had two singing girls, Fartanah and her companion. One of them was killed, and the other fled and was later pardoned. Sarah had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah, and she too was later pardoned. Habbar ibn al-Aswad had caused the miscarriage of Zaynab bint Muhammad ﷺ. He later repented and was forgiven. Al-Huwayrith ibn Nuqaydh was one of those who had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah, and he was executed by Ali ibn Abi Talib RA. By another report, he had attacked Fatima and Umm Kulthum RA on their journey to Madinah. Wahshi, who had killed Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, fled to Ta'if and converted about a year later. In the end, four of those named were killed. They were Ibn Khatal, Miqyas, al-Huwayrith and one of the singing girls. After the khutbah, the Prophet ﷺ had Bilal ibn Rabah RA climb onto the Ka'bah and give the first adhan ever called in Makkah. Bilal was an Abyssinian former slave. Now he was raised, literally and symbolically, above the Quraysh who had once tortured him. As Bilal gave the adhan, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb was standing with two leading men of Quraysh, al-Harith ibn Hisham and Itab ibn Asid. Itab said that his late father had been spared the humiliation of seeing Bilal raised above them. Al-Harith said that if he thought this man was on the truth, he would follow him. Abu Sufyan, a new Muslim, would not say anything. He said that if he spoke, even the stones would tell the Prophet ﷺ. Later, as the Prophet ﷺ left the Haram, he repeated to each of the three, word for word, what they had said. Al-Harith accepted Islam on the spot, and Itab accepted it later. Al-Harith is the Companion who asked the Prophet ﷺ how revelation came to him. Al-Bukhari reports this without saying when it happened. By one report, al-Harith died a martyr at the Battle of Yarmouk in 15 AH. Water meant for him was passed on twice. He gave it to Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal RA, who passed it to Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah RA. All three died before it could be drunk. The Prophet ﷺ then sat at Mount Safa, where the public call to Islam had begun two decades earlier. There he took the bay'ah, the pledge of allegiance, from the men of Quraysh, fulfilling Qur'an 110:2. Mujashi' ibn Mas'ud RA brought his brother to pledge to make the Hijrah. The Prophet ﷺ said that there was no migration after the Conquest, but that he would take his pledge for Islam. In Ibn Abbas RA's report, he said, "There is no emigration after the Conquest, but jihad and intention." He then took the pledge of the women of Quraysh, following Qur'an 60:12. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA administered it in person, since the Prophet ﷺ never touched the hand of a woman who was not related to him. Hind bint Utbah came veiled, and at first she was not recognized. She argued with each condition in turn. She objected that women were being asked for more than men. She admitted that she had secretly taken some of Abu Sufyan's wealth, and he forgave her on the spot. She protested that a free woman would never commit zina. When the pledge forbade killing children, Hind retorted that the Muslims had killed the sons of Quraysh as grown men at Badr. Umar laughed uncontrollably at that reply. The Prophet ﷺ had recognized her when Abu Sufyan spoke, and he asked, "Then you are Hind bint Utbah?" She asked him to forgive what was past, and he went on with the pledge. Meanwhile, some of the Ansar worried among themselves. They feared that now the Prophet ﷺ had returned to his own people, he had grown soft toward them. Revelation came to him, and he told the Ansar, "I migrated towards Allah and towards you. I will live with you and will die with you." They wept (Muslim). The Prophet ﷺ stayed in Makkah for 19 days. During that time, several notable figures held out for a while before finally accepting Islam. By a weak report, a young man named Fudala ibn Umayr was enraged at the defeat. He hid a dagger, meaning to kill the Prophet ﷺ during tawaf. The Prophet ﷺ confronted him by name, and Fudala lied about what he intended. The Prophet ﷺ laughed, asked Allah's forgiveness, and placed a hand on his chest. Fudala later said that from then on no one was more beloved to him. He accepted Islam on the spot. Safwan ibn Umayyah had joined the hopeless resistance. He fled to Jeddah, intending to drown himself. Umayr ibn Wahb RA begged the Prophet ﷺ to grant Safwan protection. Then he caught up with Safwan, carrying the Prophet ﷺ's own turban as proof. He talked him out of boarding the ship and brought him back toward Makkah. Safwan asked for two months to decide, and he was given four. He accepted Islam later, after Hunayn. By some reports, this was after he had lent the Muslims armour and had been given a large share of the spoils of Hunayn. Suhayl ibn Amr had been the Quraysh's negotiator at Hudaybiyyah. By a report not found in Ibn Ishaq, he locked himself in his house in terror. He sent his Muslim son, Abdullah ibn Suhayl RA, to beg for protection on his behalf. The Prophet ﷺ granted it at once. He told the sahaba to receive Suhayl with respect, since "he is too intelligent to be ignorant of Islam". Suhayl accepted Islam about a month later, after Hunayn and the Siege of Ta'if. Abu Quhafa was the blind, elderly father of Abu Bakr RA, and he had long opposed Islam. His granddaughter, Asma bint Abi Bakr RA, led him by the hand to the Prophet ﷺ, who was sitting with Abu Bakr. The Prophet ﷺ asked Abu Bakr why he had not left the old man at home, so that he could go to him there. Abu Bakr answered that it was more fitting for his father to come. The Prophet ﷺ stroked Abu Quhafa's chest and invited him to Islam. He told them to change the whiteness of his hair, but to avoid black. Umm Hani' bint Abi Talib RA also embraced Islam during this time. She was a daughter of Abu Talib, a full sister of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, and a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ. She had kept her old faith right up until the Conquest. Two of her in-laws from Banu Makhzum fled to her, and Ali RA swore that he would kill them. She bolted her door on them and went to the Prophet ﷺ. She found him bathing, screened by his daughter Fatima RA. He welcomed her and said, "O Umm Hani', we grant protection to whomever you have granted protection." The right to grant protection belongs to any Muslim, man or woman. Umm Hani' RA also narrated that she saw the Prophet ﷺ pray eight rak'ahs of Salat al-Duha that morning. It is the only surviving report of how many rak'ahs he himself prayed of that prayer. One of the last holdouts was Abdullah ibn al-Zab'ari of Banu Sahm, the official poet of the Quraysh. For years he had traded stinging verses with Hassan ibn Thabit RA. At the Conquest he fled to Najran rather than face the Muslims. Then a single verse that Hassan RA aimed at him stung him, and he resolved to return and embrace Islam. In some tellings his cousin objected, and he answered him, "Why should I not convert? ... Should I not go back to my own kith and kin, my own cousin? He is the best of all mankind." By reports not found in Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet ﷺ saw him approaching the Ka'bah from a distance. He remarked to the sahaba, "That is Ibn al-Zab'ari; and I see from him the nur of Iman." Ibn al-Zab'ari then gave the shahada and made a moving declaration of repentance for his years of hostile poetry. The Prophet ﷺ told him, "Islam wipes away all that you have done in the past." He spent the rest of his life writing poetry in praise of Islam. By one report, the Prophet ﷺ gave him his cloak for it. The Prophet ﷺ no longer had a house of his own in Makkah. Abu Talib had died a mushrik. Under the ruling that a Muslim does not inherit from a disbeliever, his house passed instead to his non-Muslim sons, Talib and Aqil, and Aqil later sold it. So the Prophet ﷺ set up a tent at al-Hujun for his 19 days in the city. Ali RA asked whether they would go back to their old family house, and the Prophet ﷺ replied, "And did Aqil leave any property for us to live in?" In al-Bukhari's report it was Usama ibn Zayd RA who asked where they would stay, and the reply is given as "Has Aqil left for us any house to lodge in?" He shortened his prayers throughout the stay. Ibn Abbas RA put the stay at nineteen days, and Ibn Ishaq at fifteen nights. During these 19 days, the Prophet ﷺ gave short sermons teaching the new Muslims the basics of the religion. He reaffirmed that Makkah would always be sacred. He declared, "Allah has made Makkah sacred the day that He created the heavens and the earth, and it shall remain sacred until the Day of Judgment ... Makkah was never halal before me, nor shall it be halal after me. And even for me, it was made halal just for an hour of the day." He forbade the sale of alcohol, carcasses, pigs and idols. This ended the Makkans' profitable trade in carving idols. It also established the fiqh principle that whatever is unlawful to use is also unlawful to sell. Scholars differ on when zawaj al-mut'ah was prohibited, but most place its final prohibition at the Conquest. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA fell ill in Makkah. In al-Bukhari's main report, this happened in the year of the Farewell Hajj. His only heir was one daughter, and he asked the Prophet ﷺ whether he could leave two-thirds of his wealth by will. The Prophet ﷺ said, "No, too much." Sa'd asked about half, and got the same answer. Then Sa'd proposed a third. This led to a ruling still followed in Islamic inheritance law. A bequest to anyone outside the Qur'anic heirs may not be more than one-third. A noblewoman of Banu Makhzum was caught stealing, and Usama ibn Zayd RA, who was beloved of the Prophet ﷺ, pleaded for her. The Prophet ﷺ became angry and answered, "Do you intercede in a case connected with Allah's prescribed punishments?" Then in a sermon he said that if Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad ﷺ, were to steal, he would cut off her hand. The woman later visited Aisha RA regularly, and Aisha passed on her requests to the Prophet ﷺ. This shows that a punishment does not brand a person a criminal for life. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA and Abd ibn Zam'ah RA also had a dispute over a boy born to the slave-girl of Zam'ah. Sa'd claimed the boy for his brother Utbah. Abd ibn Zam'ah claimed him as his own brother, born on his father's bed. The Prophet ﷺ settled the case with his verdict, "The boy is for the bed, and the stone is for the adulterer" (al-Bukhari). The Prophet ﷺ also sent small expeditions to destroy the remaining centres of idol worship. He commanded every household to destroy its own idols. He sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to destroy the great idol al-Uzza, which is mentioned in Qur'an 53:19. By other reports, he sent another party to destroy Manat (Qur'an 53:20). At Nakhla, al-Uzza's guardian, a man of Sulaym, hung his sword on the idol and climbed the mountain. He called on al-Uzza to strike Khalid down. Khalid destroyed the idol and returned (Ibn Ishaq). This success was spoiled by a mistake of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA, who was a very recent convert and did not yet know fiqh well. He was sent to invite the Banu Jadhimah to Islam, a tribe that had killed his uncle in the Jahiliyyah. They took up their weapons, and he told them to lay them down, since everyone had accepted Islam. They did so, saying "Saba'na, saba'na", because they could not say "Aslamna". Khalid then had them tied up, and he killed a number of them (Ibn Ishaq; al-Bukhari). Abdullah ibn Umar RA and his companions refused Khalid's order to kill their captives. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA told Khalid that he had committed a pagan act in Islam. The two men quarrelled, and Khalid insulted him. When the Prophet ﷺ heard the news, he stood facing the Ka'bah, raised his hands, and declared, "O Allah, I am free from what Khalid has done." He then sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA with money to pay blood money and to apologize to the grieving families on his behalf. When he heard about the quarrel, the Prophet ﷺ said, "None should revile my Companions, for if one among you were to spend as much gold as Uhud, it would not amount to one mudd of one of them, or half of it" (Muslim). The 19 days secured only the area immediately around Makkah. Ta'if, the fortified city on a plateau that had once driven out and stoned the Prophet ﷺ, was still beyond the army's reach. It would be dealt with in the campaigns that followed.

After the Siege of Ta'if, the Prophet ﷺ returned to Ji'ranah. The ghanima, the spoils of war, and the prisoners taken at Hunayn had been kept there under guard. He camped there for over a week. He was waiting for the tribe of Hawazin to come and accept Islam, so that their families and property could be returned to them. The same thing had happened before with the Banu al-Mustaliq. Nearly a month after Hunayn, the Hawazin still had not come, so the Prophet ﷺ began to distribute the ghanima. Spoils left behind by a fleeing enemy, rather than taken from the slain, are given out at the ruler's discretion. So the soldiers had no guaranteed share of them. One by one, the Prophet ﷺ gave the largest gifts that had ever been seen in Islam up to that point. Most went to leading men of the Quraysh who were new Muslims or not yet Muslim at all. These were the muallafati qulubuhum, "those whose hearts needed reconciling to Islam". Among those who received 100 camels each were four men. The first was Abu Sufyan ibn Harb RA. The second was Safwan ibn Umayyah RA, who was still not a Muslim and was moved to accept Islam by this generosity. The third was Uyaynah ibn Hisn of the Ghatafan tribe, and the fourth was al-Aqra' ibn Habis of the Tamim tribe. He also gave large gifts to Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan and to al-Harith ibn Hisham RA, the full brother of Abu Jahal. Perhaps 60 to 70 people received gifts in total. Smaller shares were also given to the Muhajirun. The Ansar received nothing from this particular large share. Some of the younger Ansar began to grumble. Their swords were still dripping with the enemy's blood, they said, and yet they had earned nothing, while the Quraysh went home with fortunes. Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA, the chief of the Ansar, told the Prophet ﷺ about this. The Prophet ﷺ gathered the Ansar alone in a tent. There he gave one of the most moving speeches of his life, in praise of them. He said, "I give to some people because I fear for their greed and desires; and I don't give to others because I trust what Allah has given in their hearts is more than what I can give them." Then he asked them a question. Others would go home with sheep and camels. Were they not content to go home with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself? The Ansar wept, and said that they were content with Islam and with him. As word of the Prophet ﷺ's generosity spread, Bedouins flocked in asking for money. One chieftain grabbed the Prophet ﷺ's collar and demanded a share. The Prophet ﷺ only smiled and told those handing out the wealth to give him some. On another occasion, Bedouins crowded around him begging, so closely that his garment caught on a thorn bush. When the money was gone, he told them that if he had as many camels as there were shrubs around them, he would give them all away. He would never be found to be miserly. It was also here that a man with a straggly beard accused the Prophet ﷺ of being unjust in the distribution. This was the beginning of what would become the mindset of the Khawarij. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA asked permission to execute him for it. The Prophet ﷺ refused, for the sake of the community's wellbeing. He foretold that from this man's kind would come people who recite the Qur'an without it going beyond their throats, and who leave Islam as an arrow passes through its target. Eventually the Hawazin came and accepted Islam. They hoped their property could still be returned. The Prophet ﷺ told them it was too late for their property. He let them choose between their property and their families, and they chose their families. The next day, after the Zuhr prayer, the Prophet ﷺ gave up his own tribe's share of the prisoners first. This led the other Quraysh leaders to follow his example and release their captives freely. A few Bedouin tribes who had newly become Muslim asked to be paid for their captives instead. The Prophet ﷺ promised to compensate them from future revenue. In this way, all of the Hawazin's families were restored to them, though not their property. Before leaving Ji'ranah for Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ entered ihram there and performed an Umrah. It was the third of the four Umrahs he performed in his lifetime. Among the Hawazin who came to Ji'ranah, the Prophet ﷺ asked in particular about their chieftain, Malik ibn Awf al-Nasri. Malik had fled into Ta'if with the Thaqif tribe rather than surrender. The Prophet ﷺ sent word to him with an offer. If Malik came to him as a Muslim, his family and property would be restored to him, along with a hundred camels besides. Malik was unwilling to live on without his tribe, his family and his wealth. So he accepted, came to the Prophet ﷺ and embraced Islam. He was made chieftain over his own people again. Malik then composed verses declaring that the Prophet ﷺ was a true prophet. The Tamimi chieftain al-Aqra' ibn Habis also reflected on how vast the Prophet ﷺ's generosity had been. He said, "I have just come from a man who doesn't care about poverty! Wallahi, this man is a prophet, for no king would do what he has done!"

No one knows the year this happened. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas says it was the ninth year of the Hijrah. Others say the fourth, fifth or sixth. Some clues point to a late date. By then the Prophet ﷺ was married to all nine of his wives: Sawda, Aisha, Hafsa, Umm Salama, Juwayriyya, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Umm Habiba, Safiyyah and Maymunah. Also, Umar was worried at the time about an attack by the Ghassanids, and that fear ended after Tabuk. On the other hand, Umar went in to see Aisha, which points to a time before the verses of hijab. The verses revealed about the episode are in Surah al-Ahzab, but that proves nothing about the date, because the verses of a surah did not have to come down together. The cause is easier to state than the date. The Prophet ﷺ had never lived in comfort. As a boy he worked as a shepherd for pennies. He lived as a lodger in Abu Talib's crowded house. He had no riding animal of his own until the Hijrah. When wealth came, it went to the community rather than to him. It came in the ransoms of Badr, the fields of Khaybar, and the gift of Fadak, which fed his household. Greatest of all were the spoils of Hunayn. He kept none of them for himself, even though the law allowed a ruler his share. This was his own choice. An angel who had never come down before had once brought him an offer from his Lord. He could be a king and messenger, or a slave and messenger. Jibril signalled to him to humble himself, and he chose to be a slave. The narrator says that after that day he was never seen eating while leaning back against a wall. His wives saw the standard of living rising all around them in Madinah, but not in their own rooms. At some point, most likely in the eighth or ninth year, they went to him together and asked for more. No book records exactly what they asked for, and that is right, because it was a private household matter. What is clear is that they asked together, that Aisha and Hafsa led them, and that what they wanted was lawful. He answered with an ila'. This is an oath before Allah to stay away from one's wives. The law allows it for up to four months, when a marriage needs time to cool down. He swore it for one month. Then he withdrew to a small loft near the mosque, which was reached by a ladder. Umar later told the story to Ibn Abbas. Ibn Abbas had waited more than a year for a chance to ask him about the two wives addressed in Surah al-Tahrim. Umar began with the affair of Maria. He explained that the men of the Quraysh had been used to ruling over their women. In Madinah they found people whose women ruled over them, and their own wives began to learn the same ways. One day, at his house in al-Awali, Umar's wife answered him back. When he scolded her, she told him that the Prophet ﷺ's own wives answered him back. Some of them even stayed away from him for a whole day when they were angry. Umar went straight to his daughter Hafsa and asked if this was true. She said it was. He told her that any woman who did that had lost everything. He warned her never to answer the Prophet ﷺ back again, and never to trouble him for anything. If she needed something, she should bring it to her father. He also told her not to be misled by what her co-wife could get away with. Aisha was more graceful than Hafsa and dearer to the Prophet ﷺ, he said, and she would be forgiven things that Hafsa would not. Umar and a neighbour of his from the Ansar used to take turns. One would work the land while the other spent the day with the Prophet ﷺ and brought back the news. In those days everyone was talking about a Ghassanid army that was said to be shoeing its horses to march on them. One night after Isha, the neighbour hammered on Umar's door. Umar asked whether the Ghassanids had come. The neighbour said no, it was something worse. He said the Prophet ﷺ had divorced his wives. Umar went at first light. He found the mosque full of men sitting in silence, turning pebbles over in their hands. In one telling, he went first to Aisha. He asked whether the daughter of Abu Bakr had troubled the Prophet ﷺ so much that he had left all of them. She told him to mind his own business. Then he went to Hafsa and found her weeping. He reminded her that he had warned her. He told her she knew the Prophet ﷺ did not love her, and that if she were not his daughter, the Prophet ﷺ would have divorced her long ago. Hafsa did not know whether they had been divorced. She only knew that he had gone up to the loft. A servant stood at the foot of the ladder. One version says it was Bilal. Umar asked him to ask permission for him to come in. The servant came back and said he had mentioned Umar, but the Prophet ﷺ had said nothing. Umar went and sat by the minbar. Then he came back and was refused a second time. The third time, Umar called up loudly. He said he thought the Prophet ﷺ believed he had come on Hafsa's behalf. He swore by Allah that if he were told to strike off her head, he would do it. Then he was let in. Inside, he found a room with some barley, a half-tanned water-skin, a chamber pot and a few animal hides. The Prophet ﷺ was lying on a mat of palm fibre, and its weave had left marks on his side. Umar asked whether he had divorced his wives. The Prophet ﷺ said he had not. Umar said "Allahu akbar." He could see the tension, so he told the Prophet ﷺ the whole story about the women of Madinah. He also told him how he had warned Hafsa not to compare herself with Aisha. The Prophet ﷺ smiled, then smiled again, and invited Umar to sit. Umar looked around the room and could see nothing else in it. He asked why the Prophet ﷺ did not pray for his people to be given wealth, as Persia and Rome had been, when those nations did not even worship Allah. Then Umar began to cry. When the Prophet ﷺ asked him why, Umar said it was because the mat had marked the side of Allah's chosen one, while Kisra and Caesar lay in silk. The Prophet ﷺ sat up. He said, "O son of al-Khattab, are you in doubt? Are you not content that Allah has chosen us over them for the Next world and given them this world?" Umar asked him to pray for Allah's forgiveness for him. Another version adds something Umar said. He told the Prophet ﷺ that if he wished to divorce any of his wives, then Allah, Jibril and Mika'il, Abu Bakr, Umar himself and all the believers were with him. Umar used to say that he hoped Allah would confirm what he had said. Allah did, in the fourth verse of Surah al-Tahrim. It was one of three times the Qur'an came down in agreement with Umar. After twenty-nine days the Prophet ﷺ came back down. Aisha reminded him that he had sworn to stay away for a month, and it had only been twenty-nine days. He said, "The month may be 29 days as well." He went to her room first. He told her he was going to put something to her. He asked her not to answer in haste, and to consult her parents before she replied. Then he recited the verses Allah had sent down: "O Prophet ﷺ, say to your wives, if you desire the life of this world and its adornment, come and I will provide for you and release you graciously. But if you desire Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Home of the Hereafter, then Allah has prepared for those of you who do good a great reward." Aisha understood why he had told her to consult her parents. He knew they would never tell her to leave him. She asked what there was to consult about. She said she chose Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Hereafter. Then she asked him not to tell the other wives what she had chosen. He refused. He said Allah had sent him to convey the message, not to make things hard. He put the same choice to each of his wives in turn, and every one of them chose as Aisha had. The whole city had known about the quarrel, and Allah put it into the Qur'an. The problem it revealed did not lie with the wives. It lay in a standard of living that a messenger who had chosen to be a slave could not share with them. The episode is the source of the law of ila'. It is also the source of the husband's right to give his wife the choice of divorce. And it gives the plainest picture the Companions left of how the Prophet ﷺ chose to live.

During the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, a companion named Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA died. His nickname means "the one with the two coarse garments." When he became Muslim, his tribe threw him out with only one garment. On reaching Madinah he was so embarrassed that he tore it in two, so that it would look as if he had two garments. Ibn Mas'ud RA reports that he woke one night and saw a fire in the distance. Around it were the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr RA and Umar RA. He went over and found that Abdullah had died, and that the three of them were preparing to bury him. The Prophet ﷺ himself went down into the grave and asked Abu Bakr and Umar to hand him the body. As he filled the grave, he said, "O Allah, I am pleased with this servant of Yours, so You as well be pleased with him." Ibn Mas'ud RA said afterwards how much he wished he had been the one lying in that grave.

Amr ibn al-As RA found the Prophet ﷺ so gentle and kind toward him that he believed he was the Prophet ﷺ's favorite. So one day he asked the Prophet ﷺ who he loved most. The Prophet ﷺ answered at once, "Aisha." Amr said he meant among the men. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Her father." Amr asked who came after him, and the Prophet ﷺ said, "Umar." Amr kept asking until he understood that his own name was not coming, and then he stopped.

After the Conquest of Makkah, the tribe of Thaqif decided to fight. Thaqif was the tribe of the city of Ta'if, whose idol was al-Lat. They understood that the conquest meant the end of idol worship in Arabia unless they acted. With the Quraysh now defeated, they also wanted to take control of the Ka'bah for themselves. Thaqif sent messengers to every pagan tribe in the region. More than 20,000 pagan fighters gathered under their banner, the largest gathering of pagan Arabs in Arabian history. The two largest groups were Thaqif and the Bedouin tribe of Hawazin, who together made up about 10,000. The Prophet ﷺ sent Abdullah ibn Abi Hadrat RA, a new convert, to scout the forces of Ta'if. He came back and reported that he had never seen such a large gathering. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA doubted the report. Abdullah rebuked him, reminding him that Umar had once disbelieved the Prophet ﷺ himself. The Prophet ﷺ then gathered about 12,000 men. Of these, 10,000 had come with him from Madinah. The other 2,000 were new converts from Makkah, and some of them were not yet even Muslim. One of these was Safwan ibn Umayyah RA. The Prophet ﷺ borrowed a hundred coats of mail, with their weapons, from Safwan, as a loan to be returned. The Muslims left Makkah on the 6th of Shawwal, 8 AH. According to Sahih al-Bukhari they had stayed there about 19 days, though other reports give shorter periods. They reached the valley of Hunayn on the 10th. They camped there rather than at Ta'if itself, because Thaqif had already gathered their forces in that area. On the pagan side, the young chieftain Malik ibn Awf al-Nasri had just been chosen as leader. An old, blind nobleman named Durayd ibn al-Sima gave him advice. He urged Malik to send the tribe's women, children and livestock back to safety, and not to bring them onto the battlefield. He warned that having them there would not help the men fight. Malik refused. He even threatened to kill himself rather than be overruled. So the families and flocks stayed on the field. Thaqif and Hawazin had set a trap. They placed a small decoy force at the mouth of the valley that the Muslims had to cross. The main part of their army, with hundreds of archers, hid in the mountains on both sides. As the Muslims advanced, the decoy force ran away and drew the Muslim army deep into the pass. Then the hidden archers above let fly volleys of arrows, and the main pagan army charged. Many in the Muslim army were inexperienced new converts without proper armour. They panicked and fled in every direction. The Prophet ﷺ was left almost alone on his mule. Among the small group who stayed near him was Umm Sulaym, a woman of the Ansar. She jumped down from her mount and drew a small dagger. She told the Companions she would use it on anyone who reached her. The Prophet ﷺ called out, "Come to me! I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ! I am Muhammad ﷺ, the son of Abdullah!" He also declared, "I am the Prophet ﷺ, there is no lie about this! I am the son of Abdul Muttalib." In this way he called on both his prophethood and his family line. His uncle, al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, was known for his powerful voice. The Prophet ﷺ asked him to call the fleeing Muhajirun and Ansar back, by name and by tribe. Al-Abbas stood up on his mount and called on them to return. As they came back fighting, the Prophet ﷺ declared, "Now the real fight begins!" This is the first recorded use of that Arabic expression. Then he took a handful of dust and threw it towards Thaqif. He said, "May the faces be disfigured." After that the battle turned, and the Muslims surged forward. Allah then sent down His sakina, or tranquillity, upon the Prophet ﷺ and the believers. As Surah al-Tawbah 9:25-26 relates, He also sent unseen forces to help them. A number of people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, reported seeing these angels come down. One of them was Jubayr ibn Mut'im RA. He described a thick black cloud coming down from the sky and spreading out among the people like ants. In the middle of the chaos, there was another danger. Shayba ibn Uthman was a distant cousin of the Prophet ﷺ from the Banu Abd al-Dar, and he had only recently converted. His father, Uthman ibn Abi Talha, had been killed at Uhud fighting against the Muslims. Shayba rode at the Prophet ﷺ's unguarded back, meaning to avenge his father. A blinding light stopped him. The Prophet ﷺ turned, sensed what was happening, and made du'a for Shayba to be guided. Iman entered Shayba's heart at once. He turned and fought alongside the Muslims for the rest of the battle. Thaqif and Hawazin had relied completely on the ambush, and they had no backup plan. Once the Muslims regrouped and charged, the pagan coalition fled in every direction. The Prophet ﷺ ordered the Companions to chase them into the surrounding valleys and mountains before the scattered tribesmen could regroup. A long series of small expeditions followed. Several sahaba were wounded or killed in them. One of those killed was Abu Amir RA, the uncle of Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA, who was fatally struck by a javelin. Afterwards, the Prophet ﷺ walked across the battlefield. He came upon the body of a woman who had been killed, and he said it was not right that she had been killed. He learned that Khalid ibn al-Walid RA had killed her. The Prophet ﷺ sent word to Khalid, forbidding him to kill any more women, children or other non-combatants. A second large part of the fleeing coalition regrouped at a place called Awtas. Another skirmish took place there. Some Muslims were killed or wounded before the Muslims won. Only four Muslims were killed in the Battle of Hunayn itself, though many were wounded. Famously, the wounded included all four of the future Khulafa al-Rashidun: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali RA. All four stood with the Prophet ﷺ, and all four were wounded that day.

The Battle of Tabuk has two names, and the sahaba used both. The first is Ghazwa Tabuk, because the Muslim army was saved at Tabuk. On the march the sahaba had run out of water. Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA reports that the Prophet ﷺ told them they would reach the spring of Tabuk the next day, at the hottest part of the day. He warned them not to touch its water until he arrived. Two men touched it before he came, and they were rebuked. The Prophet ﷺ then washed his hands and face in what water remained, and the water gushed out until the whole army drank from it. The army is traditionally reported as 20,000 men, though figures like this in the sources were often inflated. The second name is Jaysh al-Usrah, the Army of Difficulty. Imam al-Bukhari records this name alongside Ghazwa Tabuk in his own chapter heading. The army earned the name because this campaign was harsher than any other. Managing so large an army strained food, water and supplies. The march took place in the hottest part of the year, with temperatures around 110°F. It was also the longest distance any army led by the Prophet ﷺ ever marched, roughly 650 km northwest of Madinah. Finally, it fell during Madinah's August harvest. This was a farming society with no idea of a steady salary, so leaving meant giving up the year's main income. The expedition took place in the month of Rajab, 9 AH, exactly six months after the Siege of Ta'if. It was the Prophet ﷺ's final ghazwa, or military campaign. After it he made his Farewell Hajj and fell ill, and from there the seerah moves toward his death and the khilafa. No swords actually clashed at Tabuk. The difficulty was the march itself. Every able-bodied man was called to take part, even men from as far away as Makkah. The most famous story of the expedition, however, is not about the march. It is about the people who missed it. Ka'b ibn Malik RA was one of the earliest Ansari converts, from Banu Salama, and he had taken part in the Bay'at al-Aqaba. He owned two camels and was healthier and wealthier than he had ever been. Even so, he kept putting off his preparations day after day, until the army had gone too far to catch. Ka'b was not alone. Apart from the hypocrites and those with a genuine excuse, the whole city had marched. When the Prophet ﷺ returned, more than eighty of the men who had stayed behind came to him, swore oaths and offered excuses. He accepted what they said at face value and left their true intentions to Allah. Qur'an 9:43 later mildly rebuked him for this. Only three men refused to lie and told the Prophet ﷺ the plain truth. They were Ka'b, Murara ibn al-Rabi' al-Amri RA and Hilal ibn Umayyah al-Waqifi RA. Murara and Hilal were both veterans of Badr. The Prophet ﷺ forbade the whole community to speak to the three of them. For fifty nights everyone shunned them. In Ka'b's case, this included his own cousin Abu Qatada RA. During this time the King of Ghassan sent Ka'b a letter to lure him away. Ka'b burned it, seeing it as a test. Forty days in, the three men were also ordered to separate from their wives. On the fiftieth morning, Ka'b was praying Fajr on his rooftop. A man of the Aslam tribe climbed Jabal Sal', the mountain you can see as you leave the Masjid al-Nabawi. He called out that Allah had accepted their repentance. His voice reached Ka'b before a horseman who had been sent to bring the news in person. Ka'b gave that horseman the only clothes he owned. He then had to borrow a garment from a neighbour so that he could go to the Prophet ﷺ. The repentance of Ka'b and his two companions was announced across Madinah. It was the occasion for Qur'an 9:117-119, which speaks of Allah turning in mercy to "the three who were left behind." Of all the Muhajirun, only Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA stood up to congratulate Ka'b. From that day on, Ka'b resolved never again to knowingly tell a lie. Before the army set out, the Prophet ﷺ called for donations from the minbar, and the sahaba raced to give. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA thought he could finally outdo Abu Bakr RA. He brought half his wealth and told the Prophet ﷺ that he had left an equal amount for his family. This is narrated in Sunan al-Tirmidhi. Then Abu Bakr RA brought everything he owned. He said he had left his family only "Allah and His Messenger ﷺ." Umar admitted that he could never compete with him again. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA had arrived in Madinah with nothing but the clothes on his back. Now he gave 200 uqiyas of grain. Uthman ibn Affan RA gave on two occasions that are remembered. The first was during the Prophet ﷺ's khutbah. Uthman pledged a hundred camels, then raised it to two hundred, and finally to three hundred with everything they carried. At that, the Prophet ﷺ came down from the minbar and declared, "Uthman has no sin after what he has done today." The second came when one of Uthman's trading caravans returned from Syria around the same time. He sold the whole caravan for roughly a thousand gold coins and poured the coins out before the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ said, "Whatever Uthman does after today, it will not harm him." Years later, when the neo-Kharijites turned against Uthman, Ibn Abbas RA reminded them of this promise in his defence. The hypocrites, by contrast, gave nothing and mocked those who did. A poor Ansari man had earned two handfuls of dates by drawing water all night, and he brought one of them. Two hypocrites jeered at him. They said that Allah had no need of so little, and that the man needed it more than anyone. This prompted Qur'an 9:79. Other hypocrites made excuses to avoid marching at all. Al-Jad ibn Qays asked to be let off, claiming he feared he would lose self-control around Roman women. The Prophet ﷺ simply turned away from him, and Qur'an 9:49 is tied to this. Qur'an 9:81-82 and 9:42 rebuke the wider group of hypocrites for rejoicing at staying behind and for finding the journey too far. On the other side were the Bakka'un, "the Criers." They were roughly seven men, including relatives of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari and Irbad ibn Sariya RA. They wanted to march but had no mount. When the Prophet ﷺ told them so, they wept (Qur'an 9:92). Later, at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba that sincere companions like these, back in Madinah, shared fully in the army's reward. Ulba ibn Zayd RA had no wealth to give. Instead, he pledged to defend the Prophet ﷺ with his own honour against the hypocrites' taunts. The Prophet ﷺ accepted this as charity. Wathila ibn al-Asqa' RA also had no money and no mount. Every day he went to the marketplace and offered his future share of the ghanima, the spoils of war, to anyone who would take him along. In the end, an elder of the Ansar agreed to share a camel and meals with him. Later, Wathila tried to hand over the very camels he had won as booty in payment, but the elder refused to accept them. Two other companions also put off their preparations, as Ka'b ibn Malik RA had, and nearly missed the expedition. But they recovered themselves at the last moment. Abu Khaythama al-Ansari RA delayed just as Ka'b did. Then he came home and found that his wife had prepared a shaded, watered rug and food for him. He rebuked himself for enjoying comfort while the Prophet ﷺ endured the heat, and he rushed out alone to catch up. The Prophet ﷺ spotted a lone rider in the distance and said, "Let it be Abu Khaythama." When he arrived, the Prophet ﷺ asked him why he had been delayed. Once he heard the story, he gently rebuked him, saying, "Woe to you, Abu Khaythama!" Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA fell behind because his camel was unfit to travel. So he loaded its burden onto his own back and walked the whole distance alone. The Prophet ﷺ saw a solitary figure approaching on foot and said, "Let it be Abu Dharr!" Then he remarked, "May Allah have mercy upon Abu Dharr. He is walking by himself, he will die by himself, and he will be resurrected by himself." Years later, this was fulfilled almost exactly when Abu Dharr died alone in the desert. Ibn Sa'd places his death in the khilafa of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA. His exile and death have their own separate event. The hypocrites also organised opposition during this same period. This included building Masjid al-Dirar as a rival headquarters. That story is treated as its own event (see Masjid al-Dirar), because it unfolded on a separate track at the same time as the march. Before leaving Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ put Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA in charge of the city's affairs. He always appointed someone to run the city whenever he left it. He told Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to stay behind and take charge of his household, the Mother of the Believers and the Ahl al-Bayt, since the journey would take more than a month. The munafiqun, the hypocrites, mocked Ali RA for staying behind and called him unfit to fight. Ali RA was well known for his bravery, but the taunt stung him. He armed himself and caught up with the army to protest. The Prophet ﷺ reassured him with what is known as the hadith of manzila. He said, "Are you not content to be with me like Harun was with Musa, except that there is no prophet after me?" Ali RA was left in charge only of the Prophet ﷺ's family, not of Madinah itself. Madinah was Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA's responsibility. Sunni scholars point to this detail against the Shia reading of the hadith, which takes it as evidence of a designated political succession. The army left by way of Thaniyat al-Wada'. This is the hill north of the Haram where Madinan families traditionally gathered to say farewell to travellers. There the Prophet ﷺ paused to organise the army into battalions by tribe, each with its own leader and flag. It was the largest army ever assembled under him. He had no military training, yet this organisation showed his skill. On the march, the sahaba began falling asleep on their mounts after Fajr, and their camels scattered. Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA found himself riding alone, close to the Prophet ﷺ. He took the chance to ask him privately what deed would gain him Jannah. This conversation is preserved at length in Musnad Imam Ahmad (see the Sayings & Actions below). The army camped at Tabuk for twenty days, and the Prophet ﷺ prayed qasr, the shortened prayer of a traveller, throughout. Later fiqh discussions cite this when asking how long a traveller (musafir) praying qasr may stay in one place. The morning after they arrived, he ﷺ also delivered a khutbah, which Uqba ibn Amir al-Juhani RA preserved (see the separate Khutbah at Tabuk event). During the twenty days at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ also sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to Dawmat al-Jandal. There Khalid captured Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik, the Kindah chieftain. Through treaties, he sealed the whole northern frontier against Rome (see the separate Dawmat al-Jandal expedition). Over the twenty days at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ gave many short khutbahs and khatirahs, or brief talks. Several of them are preserved in the books of hadith and seerah. In one, he ﷺ said that Allah had given him five things granted to no prophet before him. First, he ﷺ was sent to all of mankind, not to one people alone. Second, Allah made him victorious through the awe his enemies felt a month's journey away. Third, ghanima was made lawful for him ﷺ, though it had not been for earlier nations. Fourth, the whole earth was made a place of purification and prayer, so his ﷺ ummah could pray anywhere, not only in a house of worship. Fifth, he ﷺ had saved his own personal request to Allah for the Day of Judgment, and he promised it to whoever testifies la ilaha illallah. This is understood as the Great Intercession. In another talk, narrated by Awf ibn Malik RA, he ﷺ foretold six signs before the Day of Judgment. The last of them are a truce and then a betrayal by the Bani al-Asfar, the Romans. The stay also saw repeated miracles in which food and water increased when supplies ran low. These were reported four or five times on this expedition alone. There was also a karamah, in which a companion who was lost in the dark found his way back to camp by the light of his own glowing fingers. One Fajr, the Prophet ﷺ was delayed while performing wudu, so Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA led the salah. Al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA helped the Prophet ﷺ with his wudu and narrated what happened. His account includes the Prophet ﷺ's instruction to leave his khuff, his leather socks, on rather than take them off for washing. The Prophet ﷺ then prayed the rak'ah he had missed behind Abd al-Rahman. It was the only time in his life ﷺ that he prayed a full rak'ah led by a companion. During these days the companion Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA also died, and the Prophet ﷺ buried him with his own hands (see the separate event on his death and burial). The hadith literature also dates several fiqh rulings to Tabuk. One is that washing each limb once in wudu is enough when water is scarce. Another is that the Prophet ﷺ prayed with a sutrah roughly the size of a camel's saddle. A third is that he ﷺ combined salahs only while actually on the move, and not once he had settled, even briefly. He had done the same at the Conquest of Makkah the year before. At Tabuk he still prayed qasr for the whole twenty days, but he did not combine. The last is that the skin of a dead animal becomes pure, and so usable, once it is tanned. On the return march, the army passed through al-Hijr. These are the rock-carved dwellings of the ancient people of Thamud and of Prophet Saleh AS (see the separate event on passing by al-Hijr). At one point the animals grew too weak to carry the army. The Prophet ﷺ made a du'a over them, and they were strengthened. Decades later, at the Muslim conquest of Cyprus in 28 AH, the companion Fudala RA recognised that this du'a had been fulfilled. When water ran short, the Prophet ﷺ prayed for rain. After a night of rain, he gave a khutbah. In it he contrasted the believers, who credited the rain to Allah, with the hypocrites, who credited it to a star. Then the Prophet ﷺ's own camel went missing. A hypocrite mocked him ﷺ, saying that he claimed revelation from heaven yet did not know where his own camel was. The Prophet ﷺ then announced, through revelation, exactly where the camel was, and it was found there. A companion who learned who had made the mocking remark expelled the man from his unit. Elsewhere on the march, some hypocrites mocked the Prophet ﷺ's prophecies that Rome and Persia would be conquered. They were exposed when Qur'an 9:64-66 was revealed. The verses quoted the mocker's excuse before he could even finish giving it (see the separate event on the munafiqun's mockery). Separately, a group of some fourteen or fifteen hypocrites made a sudden, unplanned attempt to throw the Prophet ﷺ off a cliff at night. His own evasive action foiled them. Ammar ibn Yasir RA and Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA were watching, but did not realise what was happening (see the separate event on the assassination attempt). The army finally returned to Madinah after some fifty to sixty days away. The city's women and children came out to greet it at Thaniyat al-Wada'. Among them was the companion al-Sa'ib RA, who was then a child. This welcome is popularly linked to the Hijrah, but Sh. Yasir Qadhi and others hold that it belongs here instead (see the separate event on the return to Madinah). Also on the return march, one of the munafiqs was reported to have said that if Islam were true, it would mean that they themselves were more misguided than donkeys. He then swore under oath that he had never said it. Allah exposed the lie in Surat al-Tawba (Qur'an 9:74). Other hypocrites, who had stayed behind, told one another, "Do not march forth in the heat." The same surah replied that the Fire of Hell is far hotter (Qur'an 9:81-82). There is also a popular story that is widely repeated as the reason Qur'an 9:75-77 was revealed. In it, a named sahabi begs the Prophet ﷺ for wealth and promises to become generous. Once Allah grants him riches, he turns stingy. Later he repents, but his charity is refused. Sh. Yasir Qadhi rejects this story as unreliable. Its chain is weak, and it also has the Prophet ﷺ refusing the charity of a man who had repented. That contradicts the Qur'an's own teaching that Allah accepts repentance. The verses instead describe the hypocrites in general. Some of them vowed to give charity if they were made wealthy, then grew stingy once Allah provided for them.

The Muslim army's final camp before the Conquest of Makkah was at Marr al-Zahran, now known as Wadi Fatima. There the ten thousand men lit their campfires. Al-Abbas RA, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle and a new Muslim, feared that the Quraysh would be destroyed if Makkah were taken by force. He asked permission to go and persuade them to submit. The Prophet ﷺ gave him his own mule, Duldul, to ride. That night al-Abbas came across three leaders of the Quraysh and Khuza'a, who had been coming out each night to look for the Muslim army. Among them was Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the last senior chief left in Makkah. Al-Abbas told him to come along and promised to ask the Prophet ﷺ to forgive and protect him. He brought Abu Sufyan into the camp on the Prophet ﷺ's mule. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA saw them and followed them to the Prophet ﷺ's tent. He asked for Abu Sufyan to be executed, while al-Abbas insisted that Abu Sufyan was under his protection. The Prophet ﷺ told al-Abbas to keep Abu Sufyan in his tent overnight and bring him back in the morning. The next morning Abu Sufyan, after much hesitation, accepted Islam. The Prophet ﷺ then announced that whoever entered the Haram, stayed in his own house, or entered the house of Abu Sufyan would be safe. He also had al-Abbas show Abu Sufyan the army marching past, tribe by tribe, and Abu Sufyan was astonished at its size.

Umar ibn al-Khattab RA once came in to see the Prophet ﷺ, who was lying in his small room attached to the mosque in Madinah. The room held nothing but a jug of water and a small bed made from the branches of a date palm. By this time, the seventh or eighth year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ was the undisputed leader of a large part of Arabia. When Umar RA came in, the Prophet ﷺ sat up to greet him. Umar RA saw that the palm branches had pressed a red mark into his side. Umar RA began to weep. He said they could not let the Prophet ﷺ live like this, when the kings of Rome and Persia lived in such luxury. The Prophet ﷺ replied, "O Umar, are you not happy that they have the dunya, and we have the akhira?" The dunya is this world, and the akhira is the Hereafter.

The entire tribe of Muzayna, roughly 400 people, came to Madinah in the Year of Delegations to embrace Islam. When they prepared to return home, the Prophet ﷺ instructed Umar ibn al-Khattab RA to provide them food for the journey. Umar had only one bag of dates at home, but obeyed anyway, and found his room filled with dates to the ceiling. All 400 delegates filled their sacks from it, and the pile was reported unchanged when the last of them left.

Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul was the leader of the munafiqun (hypocrites) of Madinah. He was the last surviving senior leader of Yathrib from before Islam. The other chiefs of the Aws and Khazraj had either died in the Wars of Bu'ath or left the city within a year or two of the Prophet ﷺ arriving. Ibn Ubayy accepted Islam only hesitantly after Badr, under social pressure. He soon showed where his loyalty really lay. At Uhud he turned back with a third of the army. At the Battle of the Trench he went around trying to terrify the Muslims. After the expedition against the Banu al-Mustaliq, he said that the honourable would drive the lowly out of Madinah, meaning the Muhajirun, the emigrants from Makkah. Surah al-Munafiqun was revealed about this. He also started the Slander of Aisha RA. More than once, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA asked the Prophet ﷺ for permission to execute him. The Prophet ﷺ always refused. He did not want people to say that Muhammad ﷺ killed his own followers. Around a month after the return from Tabuk, Ibn Ubayy fell fatally ill. He asked the Prophet ﷺ to visit him on his deathbed, and even asked him ﷺ to seek forgiveness for him. Umar RA asked why the Prophet ﷺ would visit such an enemy of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ replied that he hoped Allah would use the visit to bring other people to Islam. Soon afterwards, Ibn Ubayy died. There are two reports about who asked the Prophet ﷺ for a shirt to use as a shroud. One says Ibn Ubayy asked for it himself before he died. The more authentic report says his son, Abdullah ibn Abdullah ibn Ubayy RA, a sincere believer, asked for it after his death. Both may be true. The Prophet ﷺ did give his shirt, and the son also asked him ﷺ to lead the funeral prayer. The body was brought to the masjid. As the Prophet ﷺ stood up to pray, Umar RA held on to his lower garment. He listed Ibn Ubayy's many wrongs and asked whether Allah had not already forbidden praying for the hypocrites. The Prophet ﷺ replied that Allah had given him a choice rather than a prohibition. He was referring to the verse which says that even if he asked forgiveness for them seventy times, Allah would not forgive them [Quran, 9:80]. He said that if he knew asking seventy-one times would win forgiveness, he would ask seventy-one times. The Prophet ﷺ then prayed over him and went with the body to the grave. According to Tarikh al-Tabari, he ﷺ went down into the grave himself and helped to bury him.

The Prophet ﷺ's final illness began with a fever, around the 1st or 2nd of Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH. He was in the house of Maymunah RA when it started. For the first few days he kept to his usual practice of staying at each wife's house in turn. When he grew too weak for this, he asked his wives for permission to stay in the house of Aisha RA for the rest of his illness, and they agreed. In Aisha RA's house, she often recited ruqya over him and poured water on him to bring the fever down. Once Aisha RA complained that she had a headache. Even though he was in pain himself, the Prophet ﷺ gently teased her. He said that his own pain was worse, and that he would outlive her so that he could wash her body and pray over her. She teased him back, saying he would only enjoy that because it would leave him free for his other wives. As the illness got worse, he asked for buckets of cool water from a particular well to be poured over his head, to ease the throbbing pain, so that he could go out and advise the people. He came out with a cloth tied around his head. The Prophet ﷺ had never been this ill before. People heard that he was leading only shortened prayers and leaving quickly afterwards. Out of concern, Umar RA, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA and other sahaba who had no houses nearby began camping in the Masjid. It grew crowded with people waiting for news. Al-Abbas RA and Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, the closest of his Ahl al-Bayt, carried the Prophet ﷺ to the Masjid on their shoulders. He spoke to the people from the minbar, probably on a Friday. He ordered that all the private doors opening from houses straight into the Masjid be closed. He made only one exception, the door of Abu Bakr RA. This honour was understood to mark Abu Bakr RA out above the rest of the sahaba. One night, traditionally dated to that same Thursday or Friday, the Prophet ﷺ was too weak to get up and lead Salat al-Isha. He fainted several times as he tried. He told Aisha RA to have Abu Bakr RA lead the prayer in his place. Aisha RA did not want her father to be linked with what she feared might be the Prophet ﷺ's death. Twice she tried to have Umar RA, the father of Hafsa RA, lead instead. The Prophet ﷺ saw through the plan. He compared the two women to the women around Yusuf AS, and insisted on Abu Bakr RA. From then until the Prophet ﷺ's death, Abu Bakr RA led the congregational prayers. In ten years in Madinah, this was the first time anyone other than the Prophet ﷺ had led them as a standing arrangement. A day or two before his death, the Prophet ﷺ found enough strength to be carried out to a Zuhr prayer that had already begun. He signalled to Abu Bakr RA to stay where he was. Out of respect, Abu Bakr RA insisted that the Prophet ﷺ take the imam's place instead. The Prophet ﷺ then led the prayer sitting down, while Abu Bakr RA stood beside him and repeated his takbirs aloud for the people. Sunni scholars read this moment as the clearest sign of whom the Prophet ﷺ wanted the ummah to follow after him. He gave that sign without ever naming a successor outright. After that Zuhr prayer, he stood on the minbar for the last time. He urged the people to take care of the Ansar, because they had fulfilled what they owed. In those last days he also gave orders from his sickbed. He ordered that the polytheists be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula. He ordered that delegations be honoured with gifts, as he had honoured them. Three days before his death, he told the people that none of them should die except while thinking well of Allah. Ali RA reports that among his very last words were "The prayer, the prayer, and fear Allah regarding those whom your right hands possess." On the Sunday before he died, the Prophet ﷺ asked Aisha RA how much money was left in the house. She brought him the seven silver coins (dirhams) that remained. He insisted that they be given away at once. He asked what he could expect from Allah if he met Him with those coins still in his possession. When he died he owned no gold or silver at all. He left only some barley in a small cup, his mule, and a plot of land he had already given to the poor. His armour was pledged to a Jewish creditor in Madinah for 30 sa' of barley. At Fajr on Monday, 12 Rabi' al-Awwal, he was too weak to lead the prayer himself, so Abu Bakr RA led it as usual. The Prophet ﷺ asked to be sat up so that he could lift the curtain between his room and the Masjid. When he saw his ummah praying in rows, his joy was plain to see. The sahaba were so happy that they nearly broke off their own prayer. It was the last time they ever saw his face. In those final days Fatimah RA, the last of his children still alive, came to see him. He told her privately that his time had come. He also told her that she would be the first of his family to join him, and that she would be the leader of the women of Jannah. She kept this news secret until after his death, and then she told Aisha RA. As the pangs of death grew stronger, he was heard repeating, "There is no god but Allah. Verily, death has its pangs." He also made du'a, asking Allah to help him bear it. Usama ibn Zayd RA had turned his expedition back when he heard of the illness, and he came to visit. The Prophet ﷺ could no longer speak. He could only make a weak gesture towards the sky, again and again, in silent blessing. Aisha RA held him against her chest. Later she gave him a miswak she had borrowed from her brother, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr RA, and he used it with unusual vigour. At midday on Monday, 12 Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH, in the heat of the day, his gaze was lifted upward. Aisha RA leaned in to listen. She heard him ask to be joined with the prophets, the truthful, the martyrs and the righteous. Three times he repeated, "O Allah, forgive me, have mercy on me, and let me be with al-Rafiq al-A'la." These were his last words. He passed away in her house, on her day, in her lap. The news of his death threw Madinah into shock. Umar RA could not accept it. He threatened to strike anyone who repeated the claim. He insisted that the Prophet ﷺ had only gone to Allah, as Musa AS once had for forty days. That morning, Abu Bakr RA had seen the Prophet ﷺ smile and assumed he was recovering, so he had gone home to Awali. Now he rode back at once. He confirmed the death at Aisha RA's house and kissed the Prophet ﷺ's forehead. Then he spoke to the people in the Masjid from the lower step of the minbar. He did not stand on its top step, and every khalifa and khatib after him kept to the same restraint. Abu Bakr RA declared that whoever worshipped Muhammad ﷺ should know that Muhammad ﷺ had died. But whoever worshipped Allah should know that Allah is ever-living and does not die. Then he recited Qur'an 3:144. When Umar RA heard the verse, he collapsed. He said it was as if he had never heard it before. Several sahaba composed elegies (ritha') for the Prophet ﷺ. The most famous were by his poet, Hassan ibn Thabit RA. On Tuesday, his household gathered to wash his body. Ibn Ishaq names them as al-Abbas RA, al-Abbas RA's sons al-Fadl RA and Qutham RA, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, Usama ibn Zayd RA, and the freed slave Shuqran. It is reported that an unseen voice guided them to wash him with his clothes still on. He was shrouded in three plain white cloths from Yemen, without a shirt or turban. The sahaba disagreed about where to bury him. Abu Bakr RA remembered that the Prophet ﷺ had said a prophet is buried wherever his soul is taken. So a grave was dug under the very spot in Aisha RA's room where he had died. No one led the funeral prayer. Instead, the people of Madinah came in and prayed over him in groups, first the men, then the women, then the children. He was buried in the middle of the night between Tuesday and Wednesday. Fatimah RA saw the fresh grave where his bed had been, and she could not hold back her grief. Anas ibn Malik RA had served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years. He remembered that on the day the Prophet ﷺ entered Madinah, everything in it was lit up. On the day he died, everything in it went dark. Anas RA said they had hardly dusted the earth off their hands from burying him before they felt their hearts had changed.

Toward the end of Safar in the 11th year after the Hijrah, a few weeks before his death, the Prophet ﷺ ordered an expedition into the lands of the Romans (the Byzantine Empire). Its target was al-Sham, the region of Greater Syria, and in particular Palestine. He told the Companions to gather their weapons, including Abu Bakr RA, Umar RA and many other senior Companions. He chose Usama ibn Zayd RA to lead them. Usama was only 17 or 18 years old. He was the son of Zayd ibn Harithah RA, the freed slave whom the Prophet ﷺ had once adopted. Usama had been born and raised in the Prophet ﷺ's household, and his father Zayd had been killed by the Romans at Mu'tah. Some people in Madinah murmured about the choice. They said Usama was too young, that he was not from the Quraysh, and that his father had been a freed slave. None of the senior Companions objected, but the talk spread in the city. The Prophet ﷺ gathered the people and answered the criticism. He said, "If you dislike his leadership, then remember that you also criticized the leadership of his father before him." He swore that Usama was worthy to lead, and said that he was the most beloved of people to him after his father. Usama set out from Madinah on the last day of Safar. When the army was one or two days away, a messenger came to tell him that the Prophet ﷺ had fallen ill. Usama camped outside the city for a few days. He came back into Madinah and visited the Prophet ﷺ on the day of his death, one of the last people to see him.

On the 9th of Dhu al-Hijjah, 10 AH, the Prophet ﷺ stood in the Valley of Aranah at Arafah and addressed the huge crowd of pilgrims. That year the day fell on a Friday, and he called it the Day of al-Hajj al-Akbar (the Great Hajj). He asked his uncle Abbas RA and his cousin Ali RA to quieten the crowd so that his words could carry. Some sahaba reported that they could hear him even from their tents, which is counted among his miracles. It was on this occasion that Allah revealed the verse, "This day, I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion" [Qur'an, 5:3]. It was one of the last verses to be revealed, though not the very last. The Prophet ﷺ opened by saying, "O people, listen to me, for I know not whether I shall meet you again after this year." He declared that the blood, wealth and honour of every Muslim were sacred, as sacred as that day, that month and that land. He abolished the customs of the days before Islam (Jahiliyyah), and he began with his own family. First he cancelled the unpaid blood money his family was owed by the tribe of Hudhayl. Then he cancelled the riba (interest) still owed to his uncle al-Abbas RA. He told the people to fear Allah in how they treated women, and he set out the rights that husbands and wives have over each other. He told them that he had left them the Book of Allah, and that as long as they held to it they would never go astray. He then told them that they would soon be asked about him, and asked what they would say. The people replied that they would testify he had conveyed the message, done his duty and been sincere with them. He raised his hands and said three times, "O Allah, bear witness."

When Abu Bakr became caliph, he gave every Companion the same stipend from the Bayt al-Mal, the public treasury. He said it was not his place to prefer one believer over another, since only Allah knows who has the most taqwa (God-consciousness). Umar became caliph two years later and changed this. He graded the stipends by how early each person had accepted Islam, which placed Umar himself only in the third grade. Khabbab ibn al-Aratt was one of the earliest converts, so he received one of the highest stipends. He used it to build a modest house in Kufa. There he kept an open treasury, and anyone in need could take from it without being questioned.

During the Wars of Ridda, many Muslims were killed fighting Musaylimah al-Kadhdhab. Among the dead were many of the People of the Suffa, the poor Companions of the Prophet ﷺ who had once lived in a shelter in his mosque. Many of them were among the foremost memorizers of the Qur'an. Alarmed at these losses, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA went to the caliph, Abu Bakr RA. He warned him that unless he did something, more memorizers would die and the Qur'an itself would be at risk.

During the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt paid him a visit. Umar asked about the mistreatment Khabbab had suffered as a slave under his former owner, Ummi Anmar. She used to burn his back with the iron he used for making swords. Khabbab did not answer in words. He lifted his shirt and showed Umar his scarred back. Umar swore that he had never seen anything like it. He seated Khabbab beside him in his gathering and gave him great honour.

Years after the Conquest of Makkah, during his caliphate, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA held a senior council of the elder Companions from the Ansar and the Quraysh. The youngest person he admitted was Ibn Abbas RA, a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, who was only about 15 or 16 years old. Some of the elders objected. They told Umar that they had sons older than Ibn Abbas who were not allowed to attend, and asked why this young man was. To show them why, Umar RA asked the gathering one day to explain Surah al-Nasr (Qur'an 110). One Companion said that Allah was telling them to thank Him when He blesses them. Others gave similarly general answers. Then Umar turned to Ibn Abbas and asked him to explain it. Ibn Abbas RA said that the elders had not understood it correctly. In his reading, Allah was informing the Prophet ﷺ that once Makkah was conquered, his time on earth was coming to an end. He should therefore prepare to meet Allah by increasing his worship and seeking Allah's forgiveness. Umar RA replied that this was all he himself knew of the surah. The elders now saw why the young man had a place in the council.

Maria al-Qibtiyya RA, mother of the Prophet ﷺ's son Ibrahim, died some four to five years after the Prophet ﷺ's passing, during the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, who led her funeral prayer. She was buried in Baqi' al-Gharqad, confirming that she had indeed embraced Islam.

During the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, Suhayl ibn Amr and Abu Sufyan ibn Harb came to visit him in Madinah. They found a line of people waiting at Umar's door, and they had to wait while others went in before them. Those others included Bilal, Suhayb al-Rumi, Ibn Mas'ud and other Companions whom the leaders of Quraysh had once looked down on. Abu Sufyan was angry that these men were given precedence over them. Suhayl told him that if he wanted to be angry, he should be angry at himself. They had all been called to Islam, but those men had raced ahead while the two of them had lagged behind. The blessing those men had gained by accepting Islam early was far greater than the honour of entering Umar's door first.

During his caliphate, Umar ibn al-Khattab once heard Hassan ibn Thabit reciting poetry in the Prophet ﷺ's mosque, and he struck him with his stick. Hassan asked why he was hitting him. Umar replied that he was reciting poetry in the Prophet ﷺ's mosque. Hassan answered that he had recited poetry in that very mosque when someone far better than Umar was present. He then turned to Abu Hurairah and asked him, by Allah, whether he had not heard the Prophet ﷺ say, "Stand up, O Hassan, and write poetry, and the angel Jibril will help you." Abu Hurairah confirmed that he had.

During the Hijrah, Suraqa ibn Malik chased after the Prophet ﷺ on horseback. According to the report of Ibn Abd al-Barr, as Suraqa turned to leave, the Prophet ﷺ said to him, "How will you be the day that you put on the bracelets of Kisra?" Kisra was the title of the emperor of Persia. Within a few years of the Prophet ﷺ's death, the Persian (Sassanid) Empire fell after the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, and Persepolis was conquered. Its treasures, including the bracelets of Kisra, were sent to Umar ibn al-Khattab RA in Madinah. Umar seated Suraqa in his own chair and placed the bracelets on his hands in front of the congregation.

Before Islam, the Arabs had no shared calendar. Each tribe counted years from its own local milestones, such as the death of a chieftain. On top of this, powerful tribes practised al-Nasi: they swapped the sacred months around to suit themselves, which threw the months out of order. The Qur'an condemns this practice (9:37). The Prophet ﷺ did not set up a calendar himself. The need for one came up most likely in the 17th year after the Hijrah, under the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab RA. Two men brought him a dispute over a debt that was due "by Sha'ban." One meant the Sha'ban just passed, and the other meant Sha'ban of the following year. Around the same time, Umar RA received a letter, reportedly from Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA or one of his governors. It said that when Umar RA gave an instruction for a certain month, they could not tell which year he meant. Umar RA gathered the Companions (sahaba) to decide on a calendar. One or two suggested following the Roman or Persian calendar, but this was rejected. The Companions then differed over which event should mark year one. Some proposed the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, some his death, and some the Battle of Badr. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA suggested the year of the Hijrah, and Umar RA accepted this as the wisest opinion. Next they differed over which month should begin the year. Some suggested Ramadan, Dhu al-Hijjah or Rajab. In the end Uthman ibn Affan RA settled on Muharram.

During his caliphate, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA set the stipend of Usama ibn Zayd RA higher than that of his own son, Abdullah ibn Umar RA. Abdullah complained to his father about the difference. Umar RA replied that Usama had been more beloved to the Prophet ﷺ than Abdullah was. He added that Usama's father, Zayd ibn Harithah RA, had been more beloved to the Prophet ﷺ than Abdullah's own father.

In the 18th year of the Hijrah there was a great drought, and people were dying of thirst. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA gathered the Muslims to perform Salat al-Istisqa', the prayer for rain. At the end of his khutbah (sermon), he called on al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ. Umar RA said that they used to approach Allah through the Prophet ﷺ, and now they would do so through his uncle. He asked al-Abbas to stand and make du'a (supplication) for rain on behalf of the whole community. This was tawassul, which here means asking a righteous person to make du'a for you.

Zaynab bint Jahsh RA was a wife of the Prophet ﷺ who was famous for her generosity. People called her the Mother of the Orphans and the Mother of the Poor. During the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, Umar set up yearly stipends for the Muslims. He placed the wives of the Prophet ﷺ in the highest category, at 12,000 dirhams a year. When Zaynab's stipend was poured out in front of her, she sent it away, portion by portion, to people in need. She did not go to sleep until none of it was left. When Umar heard of this, he praised her and sent her another 1,000 dirhams, and she gave that away as well. She died in the 20th year of the Hijrah, before her next stipend arrived. She was the first of the Prophet ﷺ's wives to die after him.