The Return from al-Muraysi'

The Banu al-Mustaliq, allies of the Quraysh who had fought against the Muslims at Uhud, lived at the pond of al-Muraysi' between Makkah and Madinah. After hearing that their chieftain al-Harith ibn Abi Dirar was planning a surprise attack, the Prophet ﷺ sent Buraydah ibn al-Husayb RA to confirm the rumor by posing as a Bedouin wanting to join the raid; Buraydah then slipped away by night to report back. The Prophet ﷺ rallied over 700 sahaba, 30 of them fully mounted and armed, and launched a complete surprise dawn attack while the tribe was unprepared: women collecting water, children playing outside. The tribe surrendered almost immediately. Because the expedition looked so safe, many munafiqun, including Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, joined for the first time, having stayed away from Badr and Uhud.

Placed here because: Sha'ban 5 AH (lecture 54; most books say 6 AH).

Juwayriyya bint al-Harith, daughter of the chieftain of the Banu al-Mustaliq, was captured at al-Muraysi' and given to the Ansari Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas RA, with whom she agreed to purchase her own freedom. She came to the Prophet ﷺ's door asking for help raising the money. The Prophet ﷺ offered instead to free her himself and marry her, making her freedom her mahr, and she agreed.

Placed here because: Among the captives of the expedition (lecture 54).

Al-Harith ibn Abi Dirar came to Madinah to ransom his people, not yet aware his daughter Juwayriyya had married the Prophet ﷺ and that the Ansar had freed all the captives. The Prophet ﷺ told him it was Juwayriyya's own decision whether to return with her father. When al-Harith saw his daughter willingly choose to remain with the Prophet ﷺ over him, he was so affected that he embraced Islam.

Placed here because: After the marriage, the tribe followed (lecture 54).

On the return march from al-Muraysi', a young Ansari and a young Muhajir sent to draw water for the caravan fell into a dispute (the cause was never recorded), which turned into a fistfight. Each called for help using tribal cries, "O Muhajirun!" and "O Ansar!", and both camps rushed out, lining up ready to fight, weapons nearly drawn. The Prophet ﷺ rushed from his tent to intervene and was told the story.

Placed here because: On the return march, at the well (lecture 55).

Angered that the dispute between the Ansar and Muhajirun had been resolved, Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul complained bitterly to his people in his tent: he compared feeding and sheltering the Muhajirun to "fattening a dog so it comes back to eat you," and vowed that once back in Madinah "the honorable will expel the inferior", meaning the Ansar would drive the Muhajirun out. The young Zayd ibn Arqam RA overheard this, reported it to his uncle, and was taken to the Prophet ﷺ. When confronted, Abdullah ibn Ubayy swore repeated, forceful oaths that he had said no such thing, and the Prophet ﷺ chose to accept his denial. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA asked permission to kill him, but the Prophet ﷺ refused, not wanting it said that he killed his own companions. The Prophet ﷺ then ordered an immediate, non-stop 20-hour march back to Madinah to cut off the spreading gossip.

Placed here because: Said the same evening; the surah came down the next morning (lecture 55).

When news of Abdullah ibn Ubayy's exposure and Surah al-Munafiqun reached Madinah by crier, his own son Abdullah ibn Abdullah ibn Ubayy RA went out to meet the Prophet ﷺ before the army arrived. Fearing he could not stop himself from killing whoever was ordered to execute his father, and not wanting to fall into sin by doing so, he offered to carry out the execution himself if the Prophet ﷺ commanded it. The Prophet ﷺ told him instead to remain a good companion to his father, and promised to treat Abdullah ibn Ubayy with gentleness. Relieved but still angry, the son then stood at the gate of Madinah and refused to let his father enter the city until the Prophet ﷺ gave permission.

Placed here because: As the army approached Madinah after the twenty-hour march (lecture 55).

The slander, al-ifk, was the last and most painful of three things that happened on the road home from the expedition of al-Muraysi' against the Banu al-Mustaliq in Sha'ban of 5 AH (most books of Seerah, following Ibn Ishaq, say 6 AH). It had been the largest concentration of hypocrites ever to march with the Muslims: the target was close, there was no harvest to keep men at home, and victory was certain, so Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul and his followers came along. On the way back a scuffle at a well between a Muhajir and an Ansari became a stand-off between the two halves of the army until the Prophet ﷺ dismissed the old tribal war-cry as rotten. Ibn Ubayy, who had hoped for a fight, said in his tent that the honourable would expel the inferior once they reached Madinah; the boy Zayd ibn Arqam RA reported it, Ibn Ubayy swore he had said no such thing, and that morning Surah al-Munafiqun came down quoting his words back at him. The Prophet ﷺ then marched the army twenty hours without a halt so that the gossip had no time to breathe. Exposed by the Qur'an itself, Ibn Ubayy looked for revenge, and found it in the Prophet ﷺ's own household. Aisha RA told the whole story herself, in narrations in Sahih al-Bukhari that run to pages. The Prophet ﷺ drew lots among his wives before a journey, and hers had come up; the verses of hijab had already been revealed, so she travelled inside a howdah on her camel. On the last night before Madinah, when the order came to make camp, she walked out beyond the army to relieve herself, felt at her neck on the way back and found that her necklace of Yemeni onyx had broken. She went back to look for it. While she searched, the order came to move; the men who carried her howdah lifted it onto the camel without noticing she was not inside, because, as she said with characteristic gentleness towards them fifty years later, she was a slight young girl who ate little, and the army moved off. She found the necklace under the place where her camel had knelt, returned to an empty camp, and, certain they would miss her and come back, wrapped herself up and fell asleep. She woke to a man saying "la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah". It was Safwan ibn al-Muattal RA, who had fallen behind the army and overslept its departure. He had seen her before the hijab and recognised her; she covered her face; he said nothing more, knelt his camel, turned his back while she mounted, and led it on foot until they caught the army where it had halted in the heat of the day. At the tail of the column, where the hypocrites always rode, was Abdullah ibn Ubayy, and that was when the talk began. Out of respect for her the books of Seerah never record what was said; they call it simply "the slander". Aisha herself heard none of it. She fell ill with a fever on reaching Madinah and spent a month in bed, noticing only that the Prophet ﷺ was not as tender with her as usual, and not knowing why. When she recovered she went out one night with Umm Mistah bint Abi Ruhm RA, her father's cousin, to the open ground the Arabs still used before they built latrines in their houses. Umm Mistah tripped on her cloak and cursed her own son, Mistah RA. Aisha rebuked her for cursing a man who had fought at Badr, and Umm Mistah asked whether she truly had not heard. Then she told her. Aisha went home more ill than before, asked the Prophet ﷺ's leave to go to her parents, and asked her mother Umm Ruman RA what people were saying. Her mother tried to soften it: a beautiful woman loved by her husband, with co-wives, will always be talked about. Aisha understood that it was all true, and wept through the night until she thought her liver would burst. The ones who had set the story going were Ibn Ubayy and some of his Khazraj followers; the only believers who had repeated it were Mistah, the poet Hassan ibn Thabit RA, and Hamnah bint Jahsh, sister of Aisha's one real rival among the wives, Zaynab bint Jahsh RA. Zaynab herself, when the Prophet ﷺ asked her, said she would not sully her ears or her eyes and knew nothing but good of Aisha; her religion protected her, as Aisha put it, while her sister was ruined for her sake. Meanwhile the Prophet ﷺ, to whom no revelation had come in a whole month, took counsel with the two young men closest to his household. Usama ibn Zayd RA, born and raised in his house, said flatly that it was impossible. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA answered that Allah had not confined him to one woman, and that he should question her maidservant Barirah RA, who would know. Barirah, terrified, could find no fault with her mistress except that she sometimes fell asleep over the dough and let the family goat eat it. The Prophet ﷺ then stood on the minbar and asked who would excuse him against a man who had wounded him through his own family, when he knew nothing but good of his wives and of the man they named. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA of the Aws answered that if the man were of his tribe he would behead him, and if of the Khazraj, he needed only the order; Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA of the Khazraj, a righteous man in whom, as Aisha said, the old tribal feeling flared for a moment, called him a liar who would never dare; Usayd ibn Hudayr RA called Sa'd ibn Ubadah a hypocrite defending hypocrites, and the two tribes were on their feet before the Prophet ﷺ quieted them. The next day he came to her at her parents' house, where an Ansari woman sat weeping with her, sat down, praised Allah, and said that if she was innocent Allah would clear her, and if she had slipped she should ask His forgiveness, for He forgives whoever repents. Her tears dried on the instant. She asked her mother to answer for her, and her mother did not know what to say; she asked her father, and Abu Bakr RA did not know what to say. So she answered for herself with the words of the father of Yusuf, whose name she could not recall in her distress: "Patience is beautiful, and Allah is the One whose help is sought against what you describe" (Qur'an 12:18). Then she turned to face the wall. She had hoped Allah might show her innocence in a dream; she never imagined He would send down Qur'an about her. But the Prophet ﷺ had not left the room when the signs of revelation came over him, the heaviness and the sweat on a cold day, and when it lifted he was laughing: "O Aisha, Allah has declared you innocent." The opening of Surah al-Nur had come down, from 24:11, calling the affair a lie, promising its ringleader the worst of punishments, fixing eighty lashes for anyone who accuses a chaste woman without four witnesses, and asking the believers why they had not simply said what Abu Ayyub al-Ansari RA had said to his wife when she asked him whether he had heard: glory be to You, this is a monstrous slander. Her mother told her to rise and thank the Prophet ﷺ; she would rise, she said, and thank only Allah. The three believers who had repeated the story were flogged; the hypocrites who had invented it were left to the Hereafter. Abu Bakr, who had been supporting his poor kinsman Mistah, swore never to give him another coin, and a verse came down asking whether he did not wish Allah to forgive him; he swore then to support Mistah for life. Before the matter was settled Safwan had struck Hassan with the flat of his sword for repeating the talk, and the Prophet ﷺ ruled for Hassan, since no man takes the law into his own hands, then asked Hassan to forgive; Hassan forgave, for his sake, and was given a garden. Safwan swore he had never lifted the veil of any woman; he married afterwards and died a martyr in the time of Umar RA. Aisha, who made excuses for everyone in the story as she told it, would never allow anyone in her presence to speak ill of Hassan.

Placed here because: "The third and last incident that happened on the way back" (lecture 55); begun the night of Surah al-Munafiqun.