The Army of Commanders

Al-Harith ibn Umayr al-Azdi was sent by the Prophet ﷺ as an envoy carrying a letter to Heraclius. Passing through the lands of the Ghassanids (the largest Arab Christian tribe, and Arab vassals of the Romans) he was captured and brought before their chieftain, Shurahbil ibn Amr. When al-Harith identified himself as the Prophet ﷺ's envoy and asked to be let go, Shurahbil mocked and tortured him, then killed him with his own hands and spear, a grave violation of the customary protection given to envoys and messengers.

Placed here because: ~ Al-Waqidi's reason for the expedition (lecture 73).

As the Muslim army marched toward Mu'tah in Jumada al-Awwal, 8 AH, news reached them at Ma'an that the Ghassanids, alarmed at their approach, had rallied a much larger force than expected; their Christian Arab allies (Lakhm, Judham, al-Qayn, Bahra, and Bali) together with a Roman contingent. The army halted for two days at Ma'an, debating whether to send back to the Prophet ﷺ for further orders or turn back outright, until Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA's speech persuaded them to press on and meet the enemy regardless of the odds.

Placed here because: On the march, before the plain of Mu'tah was chosen (lecture 73).

Mu'tah, a village between Amman and al-Karak in what is now Jordan (the Arabs call it al-Mazar, the shrine, for the three commanders buried there), was the only battle the Muslims fought against the Romans in the Prophet ﷺ's lifetime and the largest they fought in the north. Three thousand men marched, more than most expeditions the Prophet ﷺ led himself, so the early scholars called it a ghazwa though he was not present; the Companions called it Jaysh al-Umara, the Army of Commanders, because never before or after did he name three commanders in succession. Why it was fought is less certain than what happened. Al-Waqidi's account, the earliest, is that the Prophet ﷺ's envoy al-Harith ibn Umayr al-Azdi RA, carrying a letter north, was seized by the Ghassanids, the Christian Arab clients of Rome, and tortured and speared to death by their chief Shurahbil ibn Amr with his own hands. An envoy is inviolable everywhere, and a chief who kills one himself is announcing that he is out of reach. Ibn Kathir adds a wisdom rather than a cause: Mu'tah was the first domino, teaching the Companions that Islam would have to go beyond Arabia, with Tabuk the next year and al-Sham the first land opened after the Prophet ﷺ's death. In Jumada al-Awwal 8 AH the Prophet ﷺ announced the target openly, since it was a month's march, and around 3,000 volunteered, ten times the army of Badr six years before. He named Zayd ibn Harithah RA commander, with Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA to succeed him if he fell and Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA after Ja'far, and, by one report, the army to choose for itself after that. All three were among the dearest of men to him: Zayd, once his adopted son, of whom Aisha RA said that he was never sent out except in command and would have been chosen over anyone had he outlived the Prophet ﷺ; Ja'far, back from Abyssinia barely a year; and Ibn Rawahah, poet of the Ansar and a man of Aqaba, who had carried the news of Badr into Madinah. The army left on a Friday; Ibn Rawahah RA stayed behind to pray Jumu'ah with the Prophet ﷺ first and was told that all the wealth of the world given in charity would not buy back the reward of having gone out with them at dawn. The Prophet ﷺ handed them a white banner and walked with them to Thaniyat al-Wada', where travellers took their leave. Ibn Rawahah was seen weeping, not for the world, he said, but for the verse that every soul must pass over the Fire; and on the road, riding with the orphan Zayd ibn Arqam RA whom he had raised, he sang of dying a martyr until the boy cried, and teased him that then he would have the camel to himself on the way home. They marched to Ma'an. There the news reached them that the Ghassanids, alarmed, had called in the Christian tribes of Lakhm, Judham, al-Qayn, Bahra and Bali, and that a Roman contingent under the vicarius Theodore, said to be Heraclius's own brother, had joined them. The books say a hundred thousand; the Arab tribes together did not number so many, and a realistic figure is perhaps ten thousand, a thousand of them Roman, but Roman soldiers were of another class in arms, horses and training, and the Muslims knew it. For two days the army halted and argued: send to the Prophet ﷺ for orders, a fortnight each way; or go home, having shown their strength; or go on. Zayd asked Ibn Rawahah for his opinion knowing what it would be, because Ibn Rawahah had the tongue to carry the rest. What you fear, he told them, is exactly what you came for; Allah does not help through numbers or weapons but through this religion, and one of two good things awaits, victory or martyrdom. They went on. A village on the way showered their rear with arrows and killed a man; Zayd refused to be drawn off, since the enemy was ahead, and it was the Muslims who chose the ground, the plain of Mu'tah with its water and, as it turned out, a line of retreat. Abu Hurairah RA, in his first battle, stared at the host across the plain until a Companion who had been at Badr told him that they had not won there by numbers either. Zayd charged with the banner in his hand and was surrounded and killed. Ja'far took it, and fought the fiercest single combat recorded of any Companion: his horse was hamstrung under him, he fought on foot inside a ring of enemies, his right hand was cut off and he caught the banner in his left, his left was cut off and he held it to his chest with the stumps, until a Roman cut him in two from behind. Ibn Umar RA, who helped find the body afterwards under a heap of dead, counted more than ninety wounds, nearly all of them in front, and for the rest of his life greeted Ja'far's sons as the sons of the man with two wings, for the Prophet ﷺ said he had seen Ja'far in Paradise with wings in place of his hands. Ibn Rawahah took the banner and, for a moment, hesitated; then he spoke to his own soul in verse, telling it that it would go forward or be made to, that what it had longed for was here, and charged, and was killed. Thabit ibn Arqam RA caught the falling banner, carried it out of the press and shouted for the Muslims to choose a leader, refused it himself, and every eye went to the man who had been a Muslim for barely two months and had done them more harm at Uhud than anyone alive: Khalid ibn al-Walid RA. Khalid saw that the battle could not be won and that the only victory left was to bring the army home. He posted archers to check the Roman advance, among them the old Waqid ibn Abdillah al-Tamimi RA, whose eyes had failed and who had two younger men lift him on a shield and aim him, and led charge after charge himself; nine swords broke in his hand that day, he said, and only a Yemeni blade survived. By nightfall the two armies had drawn apart beyond bowshot, and behind a hill the Muslims buried their dead, the three commanders in one grave. What happened the next morning the early books do not say; a later account has Khalid send men to raise dust far off as though reinforcements were coming from Madinah, and use the pause to march the army away. However it was done, fewer than twenty of three thousand had fallen, and on the way home they punished the village that had shot at them. A Yemeni volunteer who had killed a Roman officer in gilded armour with nothing but a goatskin for a shield claimed the man's horse and arms as his by the Prophet ﷺ's own rule; Khalid, not knowing it, kept part of it back. In Madinah the Prophet ﷺ had already told the Companions what was happening while it happened, weeping as he spoke: Zayd took the banner and was killed, then Ja'far, then Ibn Rawahah, until a sword among the swords of Allah took it and Allah gave him the opening. When the news came by messenger he sat down, and Aisha, watching from a corner of the house, saw the grief on his face. A man came three times to say that Ja'far's women were wailing and could not be stopped, and the third time the Prophet ﷺ told him, in the Arab idiom of exasperation, to throw dust in their mouths, and Aisha told the man that he had neither stopped them nor spared the Prophet ﷺ. He ordered food cooked for Ja'far's household, since grief had put them past cooking, and after three days went to them himself: let no one weep for my brother after today. He had Ja'far's boys' tangled hair cut, told Muhammad ibn Ja'far RA that he looked like their grandfather Abu Talib and Abdullah ibn Ja'far RA that he looked and acted like himself, prayed three times for Ja'far's line and for blessing in Abdullah's dealings, and, when Asma bint Umays RA said they were orphans now, asked whether she feared poverty for children whose guardian in this world and the next he would be. Whenever he saw Usama ibn Zayd RA afterwards his eyes filled. To Companions weeping in the mosque that the best of them were gone he answered that his community was like a garden whose owner prunes it so that each year's crop is better than the last, and that Allah would not disgrace a community with him at its beginning and the Messiah at its end. Within days a whisper began against the men who had come back, that they had run from the way of Allah; Salama ibn Hisham RA would not leave his house for the taunts. The Prophet ﷺ answered it from the mosque with one changed letter: not furrar, deserters, but kurrar, men who would return to the charge. When the Yemeni came to complain of Khalid, the Prophet ﷺ ordered the whole prize returned to him; when the man crowed over Khalid, he reversed himself, and told him to leave his commanders to him, take the good from them and overlook the rest. The Roman side remembered the day too: the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, writing of the Arab attack near Mu'tah, records the commanders killed and the one who escaped, "Khalid, whom they call the Sword of God", the very title the Prophet ﷺ had given him, which is why, the scholars say, the Sword of Allah could only be sheathed by the One who drew it, and Khalid died in his bed.

Placed here because: Jumada al-Awwal 8 AH (lectures 73 and 74).

A few weeks after the Battle of Mu'tah, the Prophet ﷺ called for Amr ibn al-As, then only about three months a Muslim, and appointed him to lead 300 men in a surprise attack on the tribe of Quda'a, which lay northeast of Madinah between it and the Ghassanids and had aided the Ghassanids at Mu'tah. When Amr came to him, the Prophet ﷺ looked him up and down, told him Allah would protect him and grant him much ghanima, and said he was optimistic Amr would gain much wealth. Amr, feeling the remark implied he had embraced Islam for money, protested that he had only wanted to be a Muslim and to be with the Prophet ﷺ; the Prophet ﷺ replied that pure money is no fault for a righteous man. It was winter, and Amr marched only by night to avoid detection, refusing to let the army light any fire the whole trip despite the bitter cold (threatening to push into it anyone who lit one) because he did not want the enemy to see how few they were. Reaching the outskirts of Quda'a territory, he judged 300 too few and sent to Madinah for reinforcements. The Prophet ﷺ sent 200 more, bringing the force to 500, under Abu Ubaydah Amir ibn al-Jarrah (among them Abu Bakr and Umar RA) and told Abu Ubaydah to make sure he and Amr agreed and did not disagree. When the reinforcements arrived and the iqama was called, Abu Ubaydah stepped forward to lead the prayer, since the leader of the salah was understood to be the leader of the army; Amr objected that he was the appointed leader and the 200 were only reinforcements. Some of Abu Ubaydah's men sided with him, but Abu Ubaydah, senior to Amr in every sense, chose to step aside rather than divide the army, citing the Prophet ﷺ's instruction, and let Amr lead both the prayer and the army. Amr then led the combined force in a surprise attack; Quda'a, seeing 500 armed men appear without warning, fled rather than fight. The Muslims did not attempt to subdue the whole tribe, but took much ghanima and returned with no major casualties. On one of the nights of the expedition, Amr had a wet dream in the freezing desert and, fearing a ghusl would kill him, performed tayammum instead and led his companions in Fajr prayer in that state. Other sahaba complained to the Prophet ﷺ on their return that Amr had led them while in janaba; when the Prophet ﷺ asked him about it, Amr explained that he had recalled the Qur'anic verse against killing oneself [4:29] and feared the cold bath would do exactly that. The Prophet ﷺ laughed and did not rebuke him.

Placed here because: ~ Narrated after Mu'tah in lecture 75; the next expedition north.