The Fall of Khaybar

In the 6th year of the Hijrah the Prophet ﷺ saw himself in a dream doing tawaf around the Ka'bah in ihram, having shaved his head, the full rites of an Umrah, and understood it as Allah's command to go to Makkah. He announced his intention to the Muhajirun, the Ansar, and the tribes around Madinah, and around 1,400 set out with him, most of them Muhajirun who had not seen Makkah in six years; the Bedouin tribes around Madinah largely refused to join, preferring to stay with their wealth and families, a hesitation the Qur'an later exposed as an excuse rather than a genuine one (Qur'an 48:11-12). He set out in Dhu al-Qa'dah, one of the sacred months in which fighting was traditionally forbidden even in the Jahiliyyah, a deliberate signal that he came in peace. At the miqat of Dhu al-Hulayfah he prayed two rak'ahs, entered ihram, and consecrated seventy garlanded sacrificial camels, a mark of piety even pagan Arabs respected, as it would prove. From there he sent a single scout, Busr ibn Sufyan al-Khuza'i, from the neutral tribe of Khuza'a and unknown to the Quraysh, ahead to gauge their reaction. At Asfan, roughly midway to Makkah, Busr reported back: the Quraysh had armed for war, brought their women as they had at Uhud, and sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to block the road at Ghumaym. The Prophet ﷺ, grieved that his own people would rather fight than simply let him pass, said, "Woe to the Quraysh, war has consumed them," and vowed he would keep fighting with whatever Allah had sent him "until Allah grants victory or this neck of mine is cut off", while making clear he had no wish for either war or bloodshed. He put the matter to the sahaba; Abu Bakr RA advised sticking to the original purpose (to visit the House of Allah, not to fight anyone unless attacked) and the Prophet ﷺ agreed, setting aside his own initial inclination to strike first at the tribes backing the Quraysh. With Khalid blocking the direct road, a sahabi guided the army along an alternate route through a valley of thorns and volcanic rock that left their feet bleeding; the Prophet ﷺ likened the passage to the gate the Israelites were commanded to enter humbly in exchange for forgiveness (Qur'an 2:58), promising that Allah would forgive everyone who passed through it except one man distracted the whole way by a lost camel, whose reply, that finding his camel mattered more to him than forgiveness, revealed a hypocrite marching in the ranks of a caravan otherwise entirely sincere. Exiting the valley as night fell, the army reached the plain of Hudaybiyyah, and there the Prophet ﷺ's camel, Qaswa', suddenly knelt and would not rise. When the sahaba complained she had turned stubborn, the Prophet ﷺ told them this was not in her nature ("the One who stopped the Elephant has also stopped her") and made camp where she had stopped. The camp's well had all but run dry; the Prophet ﷺ rinsed his mouth with its water, returned it to the well, and after a while the well gave enough for the whole camp and their animals to drink their fill (al-Bara' RA in al-Bukhari; another report in al-Bukhari has him send an arrow down into the well). Anticipating hard terms, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba in advance that he would accept any condition the Quraysh proposed short of compromising the sanctity of Allah's symbols. Quraysh scouts soon located the camp and Khalid's force withdrew toward Makkah; at one point eighty armed men of Makkah (forty or fifty in Ibn Ishaq's report) attempted a surprise raid on the camp from the hills of Tan'im, but Muslim scouts spotted them first, and they were surrounded and captured without a drop of blood spilled on either side (Allah restraining both sides' hands, according to Qur'an 48:24) after which the Prophet ﷺ forgave them all and sent them home. Negotiations opened with Budayl ibn Warqa' of Khuza'a, a neutral tribe sympathetic to the Muslims, who carried the Prophet ﷺ's message (that he had come only to honor the House of Allah, and was willing to agree a truce with the Quraysh, or else to fight) back to the Quraysh; the more hot-headed among them refused to even hear it, and the Quraysh still would not budge, unwilling to let the Arabs say Muhammad ﷺ had gotten the better of them. Urwah ibn Mas'ud al-Thaqafi, a Thaqif leader with close Qurashi ties, volunteered next and met the Prophet ﷺ directly, accusing him of breaking family ties and threatening the Haram's sanctity; when Urwah repeatedly took hold of the Prophet ﷺ's beard in a customary gesture between equals, his own grand-nephew al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, guarding the Prophet ﷺ, struck his hand away each time with a sword hilt. When Urwah mocked the loyalty of the Prophet ﷺ's followers as a rootless "hodgepodge," Abu Bakr RA answered him with a curse so sharp Urwah remarked he would have returned it in kind had he not owed Abu Bakr a personal favor. Urwah returned to the Quraysh visibly shaken, having watched the sahaba compete to catch the Prophet ﷺ's spit and washing-water and lower their voices in his presence (he told them he had visited the courts of Caesar, Kisra, and the Najashi and never seen a king honored the way this man was honored by his own people) and urged the Quraysh to accept the Prophet ﷺ's offer. The Prophet ﷺ next sent Khirash ibn Umayyah of Khuza'a on one of his own recognizable camels as a gesture of goodwill; the Quraysh instead hamstrung the camel and were about to kill Khirash before the Ahabish protected him and let him go (Ibn Ishaq). The Quraysh's own next emissary, al-Hulays ibn Alqama al-Kinani, came from a tribe that held sacrificial animals sacred; the Prophet ﷺ, recognizing this, had the sahaba parade their garlanded camels and sheep before him. Al-Hulays never even entered the Muslim camp, the sight alone was enough, and he returned to the Quraysh declaring it forbidden to keep pilgrims and their offerings from the House of Allah, only to be mocked by the Quraysh as an ignorant Bedouin and to swear in response that his own tribal confederation, the Ahabish, would no longer support them. With neutral emissaries exhausted, the Prophet ﷺ turned to sending a Muslim of standing. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, though famous for his fearlessness, asked to be excused (not from fear for himself, but because his well-known hostility toward the Quraysh and lack of protecting kin in Makkah made him likely to be killed before any negotiation could happen) and suggested Uthman ibn Affan RA instead, whose Umayyad kinship with Abu Sufyan gave him standing the Quraysh would respect. Uthman entered Makkah under the protection of his cousin Aban ibn Sa'id, met with Abu Sufyan and the Quraysh leadership, and delivered his message; they told Uthman he might go round the Ka'bah himself, and when he refused to do so before the Prophet ﷺ, they held him (Ibn Ishaq). When Uthman was delayed longer than expected, a rumor spread through the camp that he had been killed. The Prophet ﷺ, unwilling to leave the matter unanswered, called the sahaba to a fresh pledge of allegiance beneath a tree at Hudaybiyyah, committing them to fight the Quraysh rather than retreat, an oath the Qur'an would later commemorate as the moment "Allah's Hand was over their hands" (Qur'an 48:10) and record His pleasure with those who gave it (Qur'an 48:18). Every man present gave the pledge except one hypocrite who hid behind his camel; for Uthman, absent in Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ raised his right hand, saying "This is the hand of Uthman", and struck it on his other hand, saying "This is for Uthman" (al-Bukhari). Word of the pledge reached Makkah and appears to have pushed the Quraysh to finally negotiate in earnest: Uthman returned to camp, and it is related that when the sahaba asked whether he had managed to perform tawaf while inside the city, he told them he would never do so ahead of the Prophet ﷺ even if he had stayed in Makkah a year. The Quraysh first sent Mikraz ibn Hafs, who offered nothing workable, and then their most capable negotiator, Suhayl ibn Amr, a senior Qurashi orator once held as a Badr prisoner in a sahabi's own home, whom the Prophet ﷺ had refused to let Umar RA silence years earlier, telling him a day might come when Suhayl would say something to please him. Seeing him approach, the Prophet ﷺ remarked to the sahaba, "Suhayl has come; things have been made easy for you," reading a good omen in the meaning of his name. Suhayl arrived carrying a grievance of his own: one of his sons, Abdullah, had already defected to Madinah years earlier by slipping away from the Quraysh's own ranks at Badr, and his younger son, Abu Jandal RA, a convert Suhayl had kept in chains and tortured, was still a prisoner back in Makkah. The Prophet ﷺ called for Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to write. When he began, "In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful," Suhayl objected that he did not recognize "al-Rahman" and insisted on the pagan formula "Bismika Allahumma" instead; the Prophet ﷺ agreed rather than let the wording block the treaty. When Ali then wrote "This is what Muhammad ﷺ, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, has agreed with Suhayl ibn Amr," Suhayl objected again (had the Quraysh believed that title, he said, they would never have opposed him in the first place) and demanded "Muhammad ibn Abdillah" instead. The Prophet ﷺ told him, "I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ even if you deny it," but agreed to the wording anyway; when Ali RA refused to be the one to strike out "Messenger of Allah ﷺ" with his own hand, the Prophet ﷺ, unable to write, had Ali RA point to the word and erased it himself. Suhayl then set his central condition: any man of the Quraysh who came over to the Muslims, even as a Muslim, would be returned; no Muslim would ever be handed the other way. The sahaba objected loudly (most of them had themselves fled Makkah for exactly this protection, and reversing it now would have cut off every future refugee) but before the clause was even finished being written, Abu Jandal RA broke free of his chains and stumbled into camp crying out for help, torture marks visible on his body. Suhayl pointed him out 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 yield (al-Bukhari); other reports say Mikraz took him under his protection so that he would not be tortured again. The Prophet ﷺ told Abu Jandal to be patient, that Allah would make a way out for him; Umar RA, standing near him, gestured toward his own sword rather than see him returned, but Abu Jandal, Suhayl still being his father, did not take it, and was led back to Makkah in chains. With that, the remaining terms were set: no Umrah that year, only the next; a ten-year truce with no fighting on either side; freedom for both sides to ally with outside tribes, binding those tribes to the same terms; and any Muslim who defected back to the Quraysh, unlike the reverse, would not be returned. 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, then a polytheist, with Ali RA as the writer of the document. As Suhayl left satisfied, Umar RA, voicing what many of the sahaba were feeling, confronted the Prophet ﷺ directly: was he not the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, were the Muslims not upon the truth and their enemies upon falsehood, so how could they accept terms this humiliating? The Prophet ﷺ answered simply that he was Allah's Messenger and would not disobey Him, and that Allah would help him; when Umar RA pressed him on the unfulfilled promise of tawaf, the Prophet ﷺ pointed out he had never said it would be this year. Still unsatisfied, Umar RA put the same questions to Abu Bakr RA, who rebuked him sharply and told him to hold fast to the Prophet ﷺ's stirrup rather than question him. Umar RA later said he did not cease giving charity, fasting, praying and freeing slaves because of what he had said that day (Ibn Ishaq), and he is reported to have admitted as khalifa that no other leader could have made him accept such a condition. When the treaty was written, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba to rise, slaughter their sacrifices and shave their heads, and though he said it three times, not a single person moved, too crushed by what had just happened (al-Bukhari). Retreating to his tent, the Prophet ﷺ told Umm Salama RA that he had commanded them and no one had responded; she advised him to go out and shave his own head first without saying another word, and once they saw this, they would follow. He did exactly that, and the sahaba, released from their paralysis, rushed to shave each other's heads; he made du'a for those who shaved rather than merely trimmed, repeating it three times before finally extending the same mercy to those who had only trimmed on the fourth. The sacrificial animals were slaughtered there, among them a camel that had belonged to Abu Jahal, captured at Badr, with a silver ring in its nose, which enraged the polytheists (Ibn Ishaq). On the return march, Umar RA, still troubled by what had passed between him and the Prophet ﷺ, rode up hoping to make peace; when his greetings went unanswered and he feared the worst, a rider summoned him back; only for him to find the Prophet ﷺ's face lit with joy as he recited Surah al-Fath, revealed on the way back: "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 affirmed it did, and Umar RA is said to have ridden the length of the column announcing the victory. The Prophet ﷺ said the surah was dearer to him than all that the sun shines upon (al-Bukhari). Not long after the return to Madinah, Abu Basir, a convert of Thaqif allied to Banu Zuhrah, became the treaty's first real test: he fled to Madinah, and though the Prophet ﷺ did not turn him away on arrival, when two Quraysh came to invoke the treaty's return clause the Prophet ﷺ honored it and sent him back with them. Along the road, Abu Basir killed one of his two escorts with the man's own sword and let the other flee back to Madinah in terror; when Abu Basir then returned himself, insisting the Prophet ﷺ had fulfilled his obligation and it was Allah who had freed him, the Prophet ﷺ, without directly helping him further, remarked to those nearby, "What a firebrand of war, if only he had others with him", a hint clear enough that Abu Basir took his leave and set up camp at al-'Is, by the sea on the road the Quraysh took to Syria (Ibn Ishaq). Abu Jandal RA, hearing where he had gone, escaped Makkah a second time and joined him, and word spread among the still-persecuted Muslims of Makkah until some seventy to eighty had gathered there, supporting themselves by raiding Quraysh caravans the treaty gave the Muslims no authority, and no obligation, to stop. In time the raids grew costly enough that the Quraysh themselves petitioned the Prophet ﷺ, invoking ties of kinship, to take the whole band into Madinah and end them, which he did, though a later report says Abu Basir died before he reached the city. A further test came when Umm Kulthum bint Uqbah, daughter of the Uqbah ibn Abi Mu'ayt who had once thrown animal entrails on the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah, fled to Madinah as a convert; since the treaty's return clause spoke only of men, Allah revealed Qur'an 60:10 exempting believing women from it outright, and she remained in Madinah, and is reported to have later married Zayd ibn Harithah RA. On one exhausted night during the return march, the Prophet ﷺ asked Bilal RA to stay awake and wake the camp for Fajr; Bilal too fell asleep, and the entire camp, including the Prophet ﷺ, slept past sunrise (Sahih Muslim sets such a night on the return from Khaybar). Rather than pray on the spot, the Prophet ﷺ moved the camp on before leading the delayed prayer at a new location, saying Shaytan had a hand in that particular ground.

Placed here because: Dhu al-Qa'dah 6 AH; "barely two weeks after Hudaybiyyah" the Prophet ﷺ was planning Khaybar (lecture 68).

After her iddah following the death of her husband Ubaydillah ibn Jahsh, the Prophet ﷺ sent Ramla (Umm Habiba) bint Abi Sufyan a marriage proposal through the Najashi. The Najashi took charge of the arrangement and gifted her the mahr on the Prophet ﷺ's behalf, even though the Prophet ﷺ had not asked him to. She later migrated to Madinah accompanied by a delegation sent by the Najashi.

Placed here because: ~ "A month before Khaybar", contracted in Abyssinia (lecture 68).

Khaybar, 180 km north of Madinah, was the richest agricultural land in Arabia: a spread of date plantations over an underground water table, held by Jewish tribes who had built there the largest fortresses in the peninsula, not one citadel but a dozen or more, each clan behind its own walls, split across two halves of the oasis a few hours' march apart. After Badr the Banu Qaynuqa had been expelled from Madinah, after their attempt on the Prophet ﷺ's life the Banu al-Nadir had followed, and both had settled in Khaybar; from there Huyayy ibn Akhtab and Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq had raised the confederacy that besieged Madinah at Khandaq and talked the Banu Qurayza into treason. No treaty bound Khaybar and the Muslims, and it was the one real threat left in central Arabia. So within weeks of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah removing the threat of the Quraysh, in Muharram 7 AH (Ibn Ishaq; al-Waqidi says Safar, and the two are reconciled by a campaign that began in one month and ended in the next), the Prophet ﷺ marched on it with around 1,700 men, those who had been with him at Hudaybiyyah. The army left in high spirits, shouting the takbir so loudly that the Prophet ﷺ told them to go gently with themselves, for the One they called on was not deaf or absent but nearer than the jugular vein. A number of Ansari women came to nurse the wounded; one of them, a girl of seven or eight with no mount of her own, rode behind the Prophet ﷺ on his own camel and found on the road that her first cycle had begun, and he calmed her, told her how to wash and make herself ready, and after the campaign hung a necklace around her neck that she asked to be buried in. He covered the distance in two days, camped out of sight of the oasis on the last night, and marched before Fajr. The first the people of Khaybar knew of it was the sight of the Muslim army as they came out at dawn with their spades and baskets; they fled back inside shouting "Muhammad ﷺ and the army!" and barred their gates, and the Prophet ﷺ said the words every book records: Allahu akbar, Khaybar is destroyed; when we descend on a people's courtyard, evil is the morning of those who were warned. The design of the oasis was its undoing. Fortresses built to hold off a raiding party could not combine against an army, so each clan of a few hundred faced the whole Muslim force alone, and the Prophet ﷺ took them one at a time. The great fortress of Na'im held for ten days, Abu Bakr RA and then Umar RA leading the assault on successive days, and Mahmud ibn Maslamah RA was crushed to death by a beam dropped from its wall, a kind of fighting the Muslims had never met. On the tenth night the Prophet ﷺ announced that at Fajr he would give the banner to a man whom Allah and His Messenger loved, and through whom Allah would grant the victory. Umar said he had never wished for command in his life as he wished for it that night. In the morning the Prophet ﷺ asked for Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, who was lying in his tent with inflamed eyes, spat into them and cured them, and handed him the banner with the order to go forward and not turn back. Ali went, then stopped and shouted over his shoulder rather than turn: on what terms should he fight them? Until they testified that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger, the Prophet ﷺ called back, for if Allah guided one man through him it was better than a herd of red camels. The champion Mirhab came out, and in single combat with him Amir ibn al-Akwa RA was fatally wounded by his own rebounding sword; Ali then killed Mirhab, as Sahih Muslim reports (Ibn Ishaq instead has Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA kill him, to avenge his brother Mahmud); the garrison then came out to fight and was broken. It was in this fighting that Ali, his shield struck from his hand, wrenched the fortress door from its hinges and fought behind it; Abu Rafi' RA said afterwards that seven of them together could not lift it. Al-Sa'b, which fell next after three days, was full of grain and stores at the moment the Muslim food had run out, and fed the army for the rest of the campaign. The Castle of al-Zubayr had no well inside its walls, so the Muslims cut 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, at least nine sieges in all, some of a day and some of ten, each fortress emptying its survivors into the next, until only one of the largest remained, packed with everyone who had fled the others. The Prophet ﷺ simply camped in front of it, and after some two weeks its people asked for terms. Whether Khaybar ended as a conquest or a surrender was long argued; the majority, with Ibn al-Qayyim, call it a conquest, since the last fortress gave up only because the rest had been taken by force. Two stories from the fighting were told ever after. A slave who herded his master's sheep came to ask what the Prophet ﷺ was calling to, accepted Islam on the spot, and was told to return the flock to its owner as a trust; the Prophet ﷺ passed his hand over the sheep and they went home by themselves, and the man fought until an arrow killed him, and at his burial the Prophet ﷺ turned his face aside, because, he said, the man's two wives from Paradise had come for him. And a Bedouin who fought so fiercely that the Companions called him a man of Paradise was called by the Prophet ﷺ a man of the Fire; a Companion followed him, saw him wounded in the hand and throw himself on his own sword, and came back repeating the shahada, and the Prophet ﷺ taught them that a man may do the deeds of Paradise until only an arm's length remains and then be overtaken by what was written for him. The people of Khaybar argued that the Muslims did not know how to work the land and offered to stay on as tenants, and a treaty was made: half the produce to the Muslims, all the labour and cost on the Jews, and the arrangement to last only as long as the Muslims wished. It held until near the end of Umar's caliphate, when they were resettled elsewhere and the Jewish presence in central Arabia ended. The neighbouring lands of Wadi al-Qura accepted the same terms, and the people of Fadak, whom no army had approached, wrote to accept them too, so that Fadak came to the Prophet ﷺ without a blow and its income supported his household. Under the treaty the tribes were to surrender their gold and arms, and when Huyayy's kinsman Sa'ya claimed that the treasure Huyayy had carried out of Madinah was all spent, Zubayr RA was set to question him until he named the valley where it was buried. It was after the terms were agreed that a woman of Khaybar whose husband and kin had fallen sent the Prophet ﷺ a roast lamb, having asked which cut he liked best and loaded the shoulder with poison. He took one mouthful and told everyone to stop, for the shoulder had told him it was poisoned; Bishr ibn al-Bara RA had already swallowed and died within days, and the Prophet ﷺ himself felt the poison's effect for the rest of his life and spoke of it on his deathbed. The clan admitted the plot once he had shown them he knew when they lied; the cook said she had wanted to know whether he was a prophet, since if he was the poison would not harm him. He forgave her for himself; for Bishr's death she was executed in retaliation. The spoils were the greatest the Muslims had yet seen, food, arms, armour, livestock and, in land, the largest conquest of the whole Seerah. The men of Hudaybiyyah took their shares, as the Qur'an had promised them; the Muhajirun, who had lived for six years on gifts from the Ansar, returned those gifts and had an income of their own at last. 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 with the emigrants who had been gone for more than a decade, and the Prophet ﷺ kissed his forehead and said he did not know which made him happier, the conquest or Ja'far's return; the Abyssinian party were given shares in Khaybar though they had not fought, as were Abu Hurairah RA and the handful of Daws who reached the camp at the same time. Among the captives was Safiyyah bint Huyayy, daughter of the man who had raised the confederacy, widowed in the fighting; the Prophet ﷺ freed her and married her on the road home, her freedom her dowry. Back in Madinah Asma bint Umays RA won from the Prophet ﷺ the ruling that the emigrants to Abyssinia had made two hijrahs to Umar's one, and several rulings date from the campaign: the prohibition of donkey meat and of temporary marriage, the rule against exchanging dates for dates in unequal measure, and the sharecropping contract that the Khaybar treaty itself established.

Placed here because: Muharram to Safar 7 AH (lectures 68 and 70).

When the terms at Khaybar were settled and the Prophet ﷺ was its new master, its people did what people do for a new ruler and sent him a gift: a great tray of the finest food, with a roasted lamb. What the Muslims did not know was that it had been cooked by a woman whose husband had died in the fighting, who had asked which cut of meat Muhammad ﷺ liked best, been told the shoulder, and poisoned the whole lamb and the shoulder most of all. The Prophet ﷺ sat down with his Companions, took one bite, and told them all to stop: the shoulder of the lamb had told him it was poisoned. Bishr ibn al-Bara had already swallowed his, and died of it a few days later; others spat theirs out and had to be treated. The Prophet ﷺ had not swallowed, but he felt the poison for the rest of his life, and on his deathbed four years later he told Aisha that he still felt the effects of what he had eaten at Khaybar. He sent for the Jews who had given the gift and asked whether they would answer him truthfully. They said they would. Who was their ancestor? They named one; he told them they lied, and named the right one, and they conceded it. Would they tell him the truth now? Abu al-Qasim, they said, you have shown us that you know when we lie. Who then would enter the Fire? They would, they said, for a while, and then Allah would take them out, and Muhammad ﷺ and his people would stay in it forever. Stay there, then, he said, humiliated; by Allah we will never follow you into it. And a third time: would they tell the truth? Had they poisoned the lamb? They had. Why? If he was a liar they would be rid of him, and if he was a prophet it could not harm him. Their honesty, perhaps, is what saved them. They named the cook. Asked why, she said he had killed her husband and her uncle and her people, and she had wanted to kill him. Some Companions wanted her put to death. The reports differ on what followed, and Ibn al-Qayyim reconciles them: the Prophet ﷺ forgave her for what she had tried to do to him, and when Bishr died of it days later she was executed in retaliation for him, since his blood was not the Prophet ﷺ's to forgive.

Placed here because: "After these negotiations took place" (lecture 68).

On the very day the Prophet ﷺ finished the negotiations concluding the conquest of Khaybar, Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA arrived from Abyssinia together with around fifty Muslim men and women who had been away for over a decade. The Prophet ﷺ stood to greet Ja'far RA and kissed him on the forehead. Although the Abyssinia emigrants had not fought at Khaybar, they were all given a share of its spoils in recognition of the hardships of their long exile, including living through a civil war in the land of the Najashi.

Placed here because: Ja'far arrived "on the same day" the last fortress fell (lecture 68).

Abd al-Rahman ibn Sakhr, known as Abu Hurairah, of the tribe of al-Daws in Yemen, had set out on Hijrah to Madinah. Hearing that the Prophet ﷺ was at Khaybar, he diverted there along with two or three other Dawsi Muslims, arriving after the conquest; the same day as the Muhajirun returning from Abyssinia. Though neither group had fought at Khaybar, the Prophet ﷺ gave the Abyssinian emigrants a share of the spoils, and the Dawsis, after the Prophet ﷺ sought the Companions' agreement, were likewise given a share. The delegation was led by Tufayl ibn Amr al-Dawsi RA, chieftain of Daws, who gave up his chieftaincy and his tribe entirely to become a Muhajir and settle permanently in Madinah, and many of his people, moved by his own strength of Iman, chose to emigrate with him.

Placed here because: ~ The Daws reached Khaybar with the Abyssinians, after the conquest (lecture 70).

In the aftermath of the conquest of Khaybar, the nearby Jewish community of Fadak, hearing of the Muslims' victory, sent a letter to the Prophet ﷺ agreeing on their own initiative to the same terms imposed on Khaybar (half their produce going to the Muslims), without any army marching against them or any threat being made.

Placed here because: ~ A letter sent after the fall of Khaybar, before the return (lecture 68).

Under the Khaybar treaty, the Jews of Khaybar were required to hand over their gold, silver, weapons, and armor to the Muslims in exchange for remaining on the land. The Prophet ﷺ questioned Sa'ya, uncle (or, by another report, brother) of Huyayy ibn Akhtab, about the gold Huyayy had carried out of Madinah with him. Sa'ya insisted it was gone, but the Prophet ﷺ did not accept this given how recently Huyayy had left and how much money was involved. When Sa'ya continued to insist he knew nothing, the Prophet ﷺ handed him over to Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA to be questioned further, after which Sa'ya revealed a valley where the gold might be hidden, and it was found there.

Placed here because: ~ "Post-Khaybar", told before the marriage to Safiyyah (lecture 70).

Safiyyah was a girl in Madinah on the day the Prophet ﷺ arrived there, the favourite of her father Huyayy ibn Akhtab, chief of the Banu Nadir, and of her uncle Abu Yasir. She ran to them when they came home from seeing him and they walked past her, shoulders down, and she heard her uncle ask, is it him? and her father answer, by the Lord of Moses, it is him; and what then? we will oppose him as long as we live. She was exiled with her tribe and married in Khaybar, and when the Banu Nadir threw themselves into the front of Khaybar's defence more of them died than of Khaybar's own, her husband Kinana among them. She was a widow when the fighting ended, and a captive, and in the division she fell to Dihyah al-Kalbi. Companions said to the Prophet ﷺ that the daughter of the chief of the Banu Nadir should be his and not left to Dihyah, so he paid Dihyah her price and took her. No one knew at first whether he had taken her as a servant or a wife, so they watched. When it was time to leave Khaybar he couched his camel, knelt, and made his thigh a step for her to mount by, and she, out of respect, set her knee on it rather than her foot. Then he covered her with his cloak, and the Companions understood, for that veil was for his wives. Safiyyah did not yet know what it meant. When he went to her on the first night she refused him, and he let her be; a night's journey from Madinah she agreed, and he asked Umm Sulaym to make her ready. Umm Sulaym hung two cloths between trees and the women did what they could with what little they had, fretting that they had no perfume or jewellery for her, and when they had finished they smelt a scent finer than any they knew. When he entered he said the hard thing first: her father Huyayy had been the most open of the Jews in his enmity until Allah took him. It was a test of what was in her heart, and she answered from the Qur'an, that no soul bears the burden of another. Then he gave her the choice as she understood it, to accept Islam and stay with him, or to keep her faith and perhaps be freed and returned to her people. She said she had inclined to Islam before he offered it and had already believed in him; she had no people to go back to, her father and brother were gone; and Allah and His Messenger ﷺ were dearer to her than her own kin. He freed her, and her freedom was her dowry, and he married her. He had seen a bruise on her face and asked about it: her husband had struck her when she told him of a dream in which the moon rose from Yathrib and fell into her lap, and asked whether she expected the king of the Arabs to marry her. He had read the dream rightly. Asked afterwards why she had refused the first night, she said that so close to Khaybar she had feared the Jews would retaliate, and he loved her the more for it. Abu Ayyub al-Ansari stood outside the tent all night with his sword drawn, afraid of what a woman whose family had died at Muslim hands might do, and when the Prophet ﷺ found him there in the morning he laughed and prayed for him. The wedding feast was whatever anyone had, dates, a little clarified butter and barley mixed together. On the road, when the walls of Madinah came in sight and the riders whipped their camels forward as Madani custom was, the Prophet ﷺ's camel stumbled and threw them both; every Companion turned his face away, and only Abu Talha cried out to ask whether he was hurt. He was not, and he was on his feet at once with his cloak over her. In Madinah the wives came to look at her and Zaynab bint Jahsh said to Juwayriyya that this one would be trouble. She belonged to neither camp among them, having no family of her own, and perhaps that is why he was so tender with her. When Hafsa called her the daughter of a Jew and she wept, he asked why she had not answered that her father was a prophet, Harun, and her uncle a prophet, Musa, and her husband a prophet; on the Farewell Hajj he stopped speaking to Zaynab for refusing her a camel; and in his last illness, when Safiyyah wished she could take his fever on herself and the other wives murmured, he told them to rinse their mouths, for she had spoken the truth. She died in 52 AH.

Placed here because: On the road home; consummated a night's march from Madinah (lecture 70).

A day or two after the Muslims returned from Khaybar to Madinah, Asma bint Umays RA (who had migrated to Abyssinia) visited her friend Hafsa bint Umar RA, wife of the Prophet ﷺ, whom she had not seen in ten to fifteen years. Umar RA, present at the time, semi-teasingly told Asma RA that the Muhajirun who emigrated directly to Madinah had more right to the Prophet ﷺ than the Abyssinia emigrants. Asma RA, upset, went straight to the Prophet ﷺ in the masjid and repeated what Umar RA had said in front of the sahaba.

Placed here because: "After a day or two" back in Madinah (lecture 68).

A number of legal rulings are dated to the time of Khaybar: the prohibition of eating donkey meat (narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari); the prohibition against approaching a concubine before she completes her cycle (iddah); the prohibition of zawaj al-mut'ah, marriage with a fixed time clause, agreed upon as impermissible by all four Sunni madhahib; the prohibition of riba al-fadl (bartering specific commodities like dates in unequal amounts), occasioned by a man bringing the Prophet ﷺ a bag of especially fine Khaybar dates; and the legislation of al-muzara'ah (sharecropping), the arrangement the Prophet ﷺ himself made with the people of Khaybar allowing them to work the land in exchange for a share of its produce.

Placed here because: ~ "Around the time of the incident of Khaybar" (lecture 70).