The Year of the Trench

After the incidents of al-Raji and Bir Ma'una (Safar, 4 AH), the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr RA, and Umar RA went to the Banu Nadir south of Madinah to ask for help paying the blood money owed for two men Amr ibn Umayyah RA had mistakenly killed, as the Constitution of Madinah obliged the wealthy tribes of the city to share such a burden. The Banu Nadir leaders welcomed them and had the Prophet ﷺ and the sahaba wait outside their fortress while they withdrew to confer. Inside, one leader proposed dropping a rock from the fortress wall onto the Prophet ﷺ to kill him; another objected that it would cause serious backlash, but the plan was approved. Before it could be carried out, the Prophet ﷺ suddenly stood and walked back to Madinah without a word, having been told by Jibril AS to leave at once. The sahaba, not understanding why, waited for him to return until they eventually went back to Madinah themselves, where the Prophet ﷺ explained what had happened. Tension already existed between the two sides before this: the Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq reports that some of the Banu Nadir had earlier conspired to murder the People of the Suffa, a plot exposed before it could be carried out; Musa ibn Uqba records that the Banu Nadir gave the Quraysh logistical help and knowledge of the terrain at the Battle of Uhud; and one of their own chieftains, Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, had already been assassinated for his open hostility to the Muslims.

Placed here because: Lecture 53; the cause of the expulsion that lecture 57 opens with.

After the Banu Nadir's attempt to assassinate him, the Prophet ﷺ sent Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA to deliver an ultimatum: leave Madinah within ten days, or be killed. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, their long-standing ally from the Aws and Khazraj, secretly promised the Banu Nadir his full support and 2,000 reinforcements from the Ghatafan, and vowed he would fight alongside them or go into exile with them if needed. Trusting these promises, Huyayy ibn Akhtab persuaded the tribe, over the objection of some of their own people, to defy the ultimatum and stay. The same day, the Prophet ﷺ marched roughly 700 Muslims to their fortresses and laid siege. During the siege he also went to the Banu Qurayza to renew their oaths under the Constitution of Madinah and confirm they would not join the Banu Nadir; they agreed to remain neutral. Abdullah ibn Ubayy never sent the promised help. As the siege dragged on for seven to ten days, the Prophet ﷺ ordered some of the Banu Nadir's date palms cut down and burned to break their resolve, which distressed them greatly and also unsettled some of the sahaba until the Qur'an affirmed it was permitted. With no help coming, the Banu Nadir agreed to an unconditional surrender. The Prophet ﷺ allowed them to leave in exile with as much of their property as their camels could carry, forbidding only weapons; out of spite, many of them tore down their own houses rather than leave them intact for the Muslims. Two or three individuals accepted Islam and were allowed to keep their possessions and remain. The land, orchards, and property left behind were fay' (property gained without battle), which the Prophet ﷺ distributed mainly among the landless Muhajirun so that the Ansar and Muhajirun would be more economically equal, along with three landless Ansar who had fought in a number of battles.

Placed here because: Lecture 57 opens the battle with the expelled Banu al-Nadir's delegation to Makkah.

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

Placed here because: Shawwal to Dhu al-Qa'dah 5 AH (lectures 57 to 60).

Sent to al-Fari' along with the women and children were only a couple of elderly, blind men and one relatively young man, Hassan ibn Thabit, who could not carry a sword and was known to tremble at it (jaban). When the Quraysh and Ghatafan had encamped outside Madinah, the Banu Qurayza broke their covenant and sent two scouts by night to test whether al-Fari' was defended. Safiyyah bint Abdul Muttalib, the Prophet ﷺ's aunt, heard one of them climbing and woke Hassan, the only man present, asking him to act. He could not. She then took a male shawl and a dagger, climbed out herself in the dark, killed the scout, and threw his head down to his companion, who fled believing the fortress well-guarded.

Placed here because: "This particular incident happens another week or later" than the women's move to the fortress, after the Banu Qurayza flipped (lecture 57).

The moment the Muslims returned home from Khandaq and the Prophet ﷺ had barely set down his sword, Jibril AS arrived (the angels, he said, had not yet put theirs down) and relayed Allah's command to march on the Banu Qurayza at once. The Prophet ﷺ sent a crier through Madinah: "Whoever hears must obey! And nobody is allowed to pray Asr except at Banu Qurayza!" As the sahaba set out in batches, some were caught by sunset before arriving; unable to agree whether the order meant to hurry or to be taken literally, some prayed Asr where they were and others delayed it until they reached the Banu Qurayza, missing its time. When told of this on arrival, the Prophet ﷺ criticized neither group, a report that "both of you have done correctly" is not authentic, but his silence itself became a foundational example for later scholars of how equally qualified mujtahids may reach different, even mutually exclusive, conclusions without either being blameworthy, even though only one can match the truth in Allah's sight. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA reached the massive fortress of the Banu Qurayza first and planted the Prophet ﷺ's flag outside it. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived, Ali RA tried to steer him away so he would not hear the insults the Banu Qurayza were hurling at him; the Prophet ﷺ set his camp directly in front of the fortress anyway, and called out, "O group of the Jews! Didn't Allah humiliate you? Hasn't Allah's anger come upon you?" He then called them to surrender, and they refused. The siege lasted 25 days. Inside were Huyayy ibn Akhtab, the exiled leader of the Banu Nadir who had chosen to stay and face their fate rather than risk Abu Sufyan's wrath, and Ka'b ibn Asad, chieftain of the Banu Qurayza. As supplies dwindled, Ka'b ibn Asad offered his people three choices in turn: accept the Prophet ﷺ's message (for they all knew, and none denied, that he was the very messenger foretold in their own scripture); kill their own families and make a desperate final sortie; or break their own Sabbath to launch a surprise attack on a Saturday. His people refused all three, the last refusal on the grounds that Allah would punish them for breaking the Sabbath, provoking Ka'b to despair of them ever making a decision. The Banu Qurayza twice sent messengers offering to leave with their wealth, as the Banu Nadir had been allowed to; the Prophet ﷺ refused both offers, insisting on nothing less than unconditional surrender. On the 25th day the Banu Qurayza surrendered. The Aws, who had been allied with the Banu Qurayza since Jahiliyyah, pleaded with the Prophet ﷺ to be as merciful to their ally as he had been to the Khazraj's ally, the Banu Qaynuqa. The Prophet ﷺ let the Aws choose their own judge, and named Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, their own leader, who was still dying of the wound he had taken at Khandaq. Carried to the fortress on a mule while the Aws pressed him for mercy the whole way, Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA pronounced: their fighting men were to be executed, their property distributed, and their women and children taken captive. The Prophet ﷺ declared that Sa'd had decreed the very judgment of Allah from above the seven heavens. Trenches were dug on land belonging to a woman of the Banu Najjar, and the men of the Banu Qurayza were executed in batches. Seerah sources vary widely on the toll: Ibn Ishaq, the most authoritative, gives 600-700, noting some exaggerate to 800-900, while a hadith in Musnad Imam Ahmad gives around 400. No children were executed, and only one woman was put to death, for having killed a Muslim during the siege by dropping a grinding stone on him from the fortress wall. Some of the Banu Qurayza had already embraced Islam and were spared, as was anyone a Muslim vouched for out of a personal debt of honor. Considerable booty was taken (some 1,500 swords, 1,500 shields, 2,000 spears, 300 suits of armor, and large numbers of livestock) and it was around this time that the shares of ghanima were fixed, with a cavalry rider receiving three shares (one for his mount, two for himself) against one for a man on foot, with a fifth reserved for the Islamic state per Surah al-Anfal.

Placed here because: Jibril AS came "the next morning" at Zuhr after the confederates left (lecture 61).

During the siege of the Banu Qurayza, after the Prophet ﷺ had refused every offer short of unconditional surrender, their messenger asked that Abu Lubaba be sent in to them. He was a man of the Aws, who had been the Qurayza's allies before Islam, and a close friend of theirs, and they hoped he would intercede; he was also a Companion of standing, counted among the men of Badr and present at Uhud and after. The Prophet ﷺ sent him. Inside the fortress the women and children ran to him weeping and begging for mercy, and Ibn Ishaq says his heart softened. They asked him whether they should surrender. Yes, he said, and as he said it his hand went to his throat: surrender meant death. He told it himself afterwards: his feet had not moved from the spot before he knew that he had betrayed Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. He had spoken without knowledge, for the Prophet ﷺ had told him nothing of their fate; and at the tensest moment of the siege he had shown where his sympathy lay, and it was not with the Muslims. He left the fortress, walked past the army and past the Prophet ﷺ without a word, went straight to the mosque in Madinah, and tied himself to one of its pillars, swearing that he would not leave it until Allah accepted his repentance, and that he would never again set foot among the Banu Qurayza, where he had disobeyed Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The pillar is still pointed out in the mosque as the Pillar of Repentance. When the Prophet ﷺ heard, he said that had Abu Lubaba come to him he would have asked forgiveness for him, but now that he had bound himself by a vow there was nothing he could do; only Allah could release him. He stayed tied for a week or more. Then one dawn the Prophet ﷺ came out to Fajr laughing, and Umm Salama, who prayed that Allah keep him laughing all his life, asked why. Allah had accepted Abu Lubaba's repentance. Might she tell him? If she liked. Her house then opened straight onto the mosque and the verses of hijab had not yet come down, and she went out and called to him to rejoice. The Companions gathered for the prayer moved to untie him and he would not let them, until the Prophet ﷺ himself came and loosed the rope with his own hands. Two verses are said to have come down about him: the warning in Surah al-Anfal not to betray Allah and the Messenger ﷺ nor the trusts you carry, and his pardon in Surah al-Tawbah, of others who confessed their sins and mixed a good deed with a bad one, whom Allah may yet forgive; and Ibn Abbas said that when Allah says may, He does. Al-Hasan al-Basri called it the most hopeful verse in the Qur'an.

Placed here because: During the twenty-five-day siege, after the envoys' pleas and before the surrender (lecture 61).

Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA, chieftain of the Aws, was struck during the Battle of Khandaq by an arrow from Hiban ibn al-Ariqah that entered the upper arm beside the neck, exactly where Aisha RA had wished aloud that his armour covered more. He prayed that if the Quraysh would ever fight again he be spared to fight them, and if not, that he be taken as a martyr, but only after his eyes had been comforted by what became of the Banu Qurayza. He was carried to the hospital tent of Rufayda al-Aslamiyyah RA and lay there bleeding through the twenty-five days of the siege of the Banu Qurayza, until the Prophet ﷺ named him judge over them and he was brought on a mule, unable to walk, to pronounce the verdict the Prophet ﷺ called the judgment of Allah from above the seven heavens. He died a few days later, aged thirty-seven. The Prophet ﷺ said that the Throne of Allah shook at his death, whether in welcome or in anger at his killing, and that the angels prayed over him. When the Companions carried his body they found it strangely light, and the Prophet ﷺ told them that seventy thousand angels who had never before descended to the earth were carrying it with them. At the grave he addressed him: "May Allah reward you from among the leaders of the people; you fulfilled your promise to Allah, and Allah will fulfil His promise to you." As the body was laid down the Prophet ﷺ's face changed and he began repeating subhan Allah, and the whole of al-Baqi' repeated it with him, until he said Allahu akbar. Asked why, he explained that even this righteous servant, for whom the Throne had shaken and the gates of heaven had opened, had been squeezed once in the grave and then released, and that if anyone were to be spared that squeeze it would have been Sa'd. Two years later, when the ruler of Bahrain sent a robe so fine that the Companions crowded round to touch it, the Prophet ﷺ told them that Sa'd's handkerchief in Paradise was better than it. Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa'd describe him as tall, broad-shouldered, fair and handsome, with a full beard. He had been among the earliest converts of Madinah at the hands of Mus'ab ibn Umayr, and his whole clan had followed him into Islam.

Placed here because: "As soon as the Battle of Khandaq finished, a few days later, he died", after giving the verdict (lectures 59 and 61).

The Prophet ﷺ married Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, his cousin and the former wife of his adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah RA, in the beginning of Dhu al-Qa'dah of the 5th year of the Hijrah. After Zayd divorced her, the Prophet ﷺ sent Zayd to convey his own interest in marrying her; while she prayed istikhara, Allah revealed Qur'an [33:37], directly declaring the marriage, "We married her to you", without any wali, mahr, or witnesses, the only marriage in history contracted by Allah Himself. Its purpose, per the same verse, was to establish that there is no wrong in marrying the ex-wife of one's adopted son, since an adopted son is not a blood relation. The verses of hijab were revealed the same night (see Legislation of Hijab). The walima was the most lavish the Prophet ﷺ ever held for any wife: he had Anas ibn Malik RA invite the Muhajirun, the Ansar, the People of Suffa, and all he met, and a small dish of food fed more than seventy guests.

Placed here because: ~ "Around this time", end of 5 AH (lecture 62); the details are in lecture 69.

Around the beginning of Dhu al-Qa'dah of the 5th year of the Hijrah, the verses of hijab were revealed: on the very night of the Prophet ﷺ's marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, per Anas ibn Malik RA's report in Sahih al-Bukhari.

Placed here because: ~ "End of 5th year/beginning of 6th" (lecture 62); Aisha RA notes the verses had not yet come down at Khandaq (lecture 59).