Banu Adi ibn Ka'b

When Surah al-Muddaththir told the Prophet ﷺ to rise and warn, he began with the people nearest him, quietly, in Makkah. Khadija had believed before there was anything to believe in, on the strength of the man she knew, and Waraqa ibn Nawfal had affirmed his prophethood and died within days. After them the sources name three, and argue over their order, and the simplest resolution is that Ali, a boy of about ten raised in the Prophet ﷺ's own house, was the first child; Abu Bakr, the first free man; and Zayd ibn Harithah, the first freed slave. Of Abu Bakr's conversion no story survives, only its manner: he accepted the moment it was put to him. Years later in Madinah, in a moment of frustration with Umar, the Prophet ﷺ said that Allah had sent him with the truth and all of them had called him a liar, and only Abu Bakr had said, you speak the truth; and in another hadith, that he had never invited anyone to Islam who did not hesitate, except Abu Bakr. Were he to take an intimate friend, he said, it would be Abu Bakr; and the Qur'an calls him the second of the two in the cave. The next four came through Abu Bakr: Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, about sixteen, whose mother starved herself to force him back to the idols until he swore that were he to have a hundred souls and lose every one of them watching her die he would not leave his religion, whereupon she ate, and the verse came down not to obey parents who press you to associate partners with Allah, but to keep good company with them; Uthman ibn Affan; Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, the Prophet ﷺ's cousin through his aunt Safiyyah, whom he later called his hawari, his disciple, as every prophet had one; and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, about thirty and the eldest of them, a trader who would arrive in Madinah with nothing and ask only to be shown the market. All four were noblemen of the Quraysh and every one of them became a mountain in Islam. Then came Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, neither noble nor slave, a Yemeni hired to herd the sheep of Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt. Two men came to him in the pasture asking for milk, and he told them the sheep were not his to give from. Show us a ewe past milking, one said, and he did, and the man prayed and stroked its udder until it filled, and they milked it and drank; and when he asked who they were, he was told, this is Abu Bakr and this is the Prophet ﷺ, and became a Muslim there. He would learn seventy surahs from the Prophet ﷺ's own mouth, and be named the man to read the Qur'an as it was sent down. After him came the servants and slaves: Bilal, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, Yasir and his wife Sumayyah and their son Ammar. And a Yemeni, Amr ibn Abasah, who had rejected idols on his own and heard of a man in Makkah saying the same, came and found the Prophet ﷺ in hiding and asked what he was; a prophet, sent to join the ties of kinship, break the idols and have Allah worshipped alone; and who followed him? A free man and a slave. Amr asked to follow too and was sent home: did he not see how the Prophet ﷺ had to hide from his own people? Go back, and when you hear that I have prevailed, come to me. He came to the mosque in Madinah years later and asked whether he was remembered, and he was. The dawah in those first years was private, and deliberately so.

As the number of Muslims reached around 20-30, the Prophet ﷺ chose the house of al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam, behind Mount Safa in the center of Makkah, as a secret place to congregate, since many Muslims (especially slaves) had not disclosed their Islam. Al-Arqam was a nobleman of Banu Makhzum, Abu Jahal's own tribe, so no one suspected a Makhzumi of sheltering the Muslims. Dar al-Arqam became the central gathering place of the early Muslims.

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

As open persecution, intimidation, and torture continued, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba that Makkah had become too constricted for them, and suggested those who wished emigrate to the neighboring Christian land of Abyssinia, ruled by a just king (the Najashi, As'hama ibn Abjar) who would allow them to worship without interference. Fifteen people emigrated, 11 men and 4 women, traveling roughly a day and a half to Juddah and then by ship to Abyssinia. Among them were Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Uthman ibn Maz'un, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, Mus'ab ibn Umayr, Abu Salama and his wife Umm Salama, and Amir ibn Rabi'ah and his wife Layla. Only the higher-status Qureshi Muslims, who had the political means to leave, emigrated; enslaved converts such as Bilal, Khabbab, Ibn Mas'ud, and Ammar could not.

Three days after Hamzah became a Muslim, most likely in Dhu al-Hijjah of the sixth year of the dawah, the Muslims of Makkah were given a second man the Quraysh had thought beyond reach. Umar ibn al-Khattab was, with Abu Jahl, the strongest man of his generation in body and in lineage, and one of the two fiercest enemies the new faith had. When Layla was loading her camel for the second emigration to Abyssinia and told him that his cruelty was driving them from their homes to worship Allah, he had softened for a moment and wished her blessing wherever she went; her husband Amir ibn Rabi'ah, hearing of it, said that his father's donkey would accept Islam before Umar did. What neither of them knew was that the Prophet ﷺ had asked Allah to strengthen Islam through whichever of the two men, Abu Jahl or Umar, was dearer to Him. His son Abdullah later said it was Umar who was the dearer. More than one story is told of how it happened, and they are best read as strands of one rope. One night Umar went looking for drink and found none of his companions at home, nor even the wine-seller, and went to the Ka'bah to walk off the craving. He found the Prophet ﷺ alone in the dark, praying, and crept up behind him meaning to beat him, and instead, for the first time, listened. The surah was al-Haqqah. As he told himself this was a poet's verse, the recitation answered that it was not the word of a poet; as he thought it the word of a soothsayer, it answered that too; as he wondered whether the man had invented it, the verses said that had he invented any of it, Allah would have seized him by the right hand and cut his aorta. He stood until the surah was finished and went home. Islam, he said afterwards, entered his heart that night, though he did not yet accept it. Then one day Abu Jahl, holding forth among the Quraysh about the man who had insulted their gods and their fathers, offered a hundred red and black camels and a hundred measures of silver to whoever would rid them of him. Umar went home, took his sword and set out. On the road he met Nu'aym ibn Abdillah al-Nahham, a secret Muslim, who asked where he was going and was told: to kill Muhammad ﷺ. Nu'aym, frightened, asked whether he thought the Banu Abd Manaf would let him walk the earth after killing one of their own, and told him, to turn him aside, that he had better put his own house in order first: his sister Fatima and her husband Sa'id ibn Zayd had accepted Islam. It did not calm him. He went to their house and heard, through the door, the recitation of the Qur'an: Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, whom the Prophet ﷺ had assigned as their teacher, was inside with them. Khabbab hid, Fatima sat on the page, and Umar pounded on the door demanding to know what the murmuring had been. They denied it; he struck at Sa'id and the blow landed on his sister; and she and her husband, bleeding and past fear, told him that yes, they were Muslims, and he could do as he pleased. The sight of that steadiness turned him, as Layla's words had. He asked to see what they had been reading, and Fatima, after he swore not to harm it, told him a mushrik might not touch it until he had washed. He did ghusl, read from Surah Taha, and asked to be taken to the Prophet ﷺ. Sa'id led him, sword still in hand, to the house of al-Arqam, where the Muslims met in secret. Someone inside cried that Umar was at the door with a sword, and Hamzah said to let him in: if Allah meant good by him he would accept Islam, and if not, his own sword would be the end of him. The Prophet ﷺ took hold of his collar and asked what had brought him, and whether he would go on until Allah sent down a punishment on him. Umar said he had come to believe in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The takbir the Prophet ﷺ raised was heard by everyone in the house. That day the Muslims, some forty of them, walked to the Ka'bah in two ranks, Umar at the head of one and Hamzah of the other, and prayed there in public for the first time; no one dared touch them. The Prophet ﷺ named him al-Faruq, the one who divides truth from falsehood, and it is from that day, Ibn Mas'ud said at his deathbed, that the Muslims had never ceased to be in honour. Umar was not a man to hide what he had done. He went to Abu Jahl's door to tell him in person that he now believed in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and had the door slammed in his face with a curse. Then he asked who the worst gossip in Makkah was, was pointed to Jamil ibn Ma'mar al-Jumahi, and confided in him that he had become a Muslim; Jamil ran into the streets barely dressed, shouting that Ibn al-Khattab had become a Sabian, with Umar behind him correcting the word: aslamtu, I have accepted Islam. He was fought by the crowd at the Ka'bah until al-As ibn Wa'il gave him protection. Of him the Prophet ﷺ later said that if there was anyone in his community who was spoken to from the heavens without being a prophet, it was Umar; and under him, as caliph, the faith that had been forty people walking to the Ka'bah spread over most of the known world.

Some time after Ayyash reached Madinah, his half-brother Abu Jahal and another brother travelled there and told him their mother was refusing to eat, drink, or shelter from the sun, and had filled her hair with lice, until she saw him again. Umar ibn al-Khattab warned Ayyash it was a trick and offered him all the money he might need to stay, even lending him his own faster camel with instructions to flee back to Madinah at the first sign of treachery, but Ayyash insisted on going to see to his mother. On the road back, once Ayyash had let his guard down, Abu Jahal asked to swap camels, and as soon as Ayyash knelt his camel down for the exchange, they seized him, bound him, and paraded him through Makkah as a prisoner. Ayyash was thrown into a dungeon the Quraysh had set up especially for him and Hisham ibn al-As, who had also been captured and held prisoner.

The Prophet ﷺ's camel knelt on a plantation-drying ground owned by two orphan brothers, Sahal and Suhayl, who had inherited it from their father. The Prophet ﷺ insisted on paying its due price rather than accepting it as a gift. The date palms on the land were cut down and used for the masjid's front and back walls, with the sahaba building the other walls from clay brick; the Prophet ﷺ personally took part in the construction, carrying bricks alongside the sahaba. It took about two weeks to build (reported in al-Bayhaqi's Dala'il), and was roughly 100x130 feet. It had three public doors: Bab al-Rahma (south), Bab Jibril (west), and Bab al-Nisa' (east, assigned after Umar RA suggested men and women not share an entrance), plus private entrances from adjoining houses, including Abu Bakr RA's and the Prophet ﷺ's own house (Aisha RA's). The roof at first covered only the northern portion (then facing the Jerusalem qibla); after the qibla changed to Makkah that area became the back of the masjid and was known as al-Suffa. A full roof was later added, though only to block the sun; Sahih Bukhari records that it still leaked, since the Prophet ﷺ prayed on the rain-muddied ground on the 22nd of Ramadan, likely 8 AH. Of the later Rashidun, Abu Bakr RA made no changes; Umar RA solidified the structure with wooden pillars, a waterproof roof, and expanded it by 10-15 rows; Uthman RA expanded it by about 50% more.

Before slipping away quietly, Umar ibn al-Khattab first made his Hijrah a matter of open defiance: he armed himself, went to the Ka'bah, performed tawaf seven times, and announced to the assembled Quraysh that he was leaving for Madinah and that anyone who wished to make his mother childless, his children orphans, or his wife a widow could meet him outside the city, and no one took up the challenge. He then arranged to emigrate together with Hisham ibn al-As and Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah, agreeing to meet at a valley outside Makkah at dawn on an appointed day, with anyone who failed to arrive assumed to have been prevented by circumstances. Hisham did not arrive in time, so Umar and Ayyash emigrated without him and reached Madinah safely.

The Prophet ﷺ asked the sahaba how the people should be called to salah. Suggestions of a bell (like the Christians) and a shofar/horn were both raised and set aside (there are authentic hadiths that the Prophet ﷺ disliked bells, saying angels do not accompany a caravan that has one). The gathering ended without a decision. That night, Abdullah ibn Zayd RA and, separately, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA both dreamed the same wording for the call to prayer.

In the early, difficult years in Madinah, before wealth had come to the Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ went out of his house one day or night and found Abu Bakr al-Siddiq RA and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA also outside. When he asked what had brought them out at that hour, they told him it was hunger, and he told them the same hunger had brought him out too, and that they should get up and come with him. The three of them went to the house of an Ansari, Abu al-Haytham ibn al-Tayhan RA, though he was not home; his wife welcomed them and explained he had gone to fetch fresh water. When Abu al-Haytham RA returned and saw the Prophet ﷺ and his two companions, he rejoiced that no one had more honorable guests that day, brought out a bunch of ripe, dry, and fresh dates for them, and took up his knife to slaughter an animal for them, though the Prophet ﷺ cautioned him against killing one of his milch animals; he slaughtered a sheep instead. After they had eaten and drunk their fill, the Prophet ﷺ told Abu Bakr RA and Umar RA that they would be questioned about this bounty on the Day of Judgment, since hunger had brought them out of their homes and they had not returned until this bounty had come to them.

Badr is a well, named for the man of the Banu Damra who dug it, on the plain 130 km south-west of Madinah where the road to Syria runs. The battle fought there on Friday, 17 Ramadan 2 AH, was never meant to be a battle. In the year since the Hijrah permission to fight had come down and the Muslims had begun to strike at the one thing that made the Quraysh what they were, the caravan road past Madinah: al-Abwa, the first arrow shot in the way of Allah, al-Ushayra, where the Prophet ﷺ missed Abu Sufyan's great caravan on its way north by a single day, and Nakhla, where eight men killed a Qurashi in the sacred month and handed the Quraysh a grievance. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh RA, threatened by Abu Jahl at the Ka'bah for sheltering the Muslims, had sworn in front of it to cut the Quraysh off from something dearer to them than tawaf: their trade. Shortly before the battle, in Sha'ban by Ibn Ishaq's report, the qibla turned from Jerusalem to Makkah. When the same caravan was due back from Syria in Ramadan, a caravan under Abu Sufyan, by some reports a thousand camels, carrying the money and merchandise of the Quraysh and guarded, Ibn Ishaq says, by thirty or forty men, the Prophet ﷺ sent out scouts. One of them, Busaysah, brought his report to a house where only the boy Anas RA was present (Muslim); other reports name Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA and Sa'id ibn Zayd RA, and Ibn Ishaq names Basbas ibn Amr and Adiy ibn Abi al-Zaghba' as the two sent ahead to Badr. He told the people that whoever had his mount ready should ride with him at once, and would not wait for those whose animals were grazing outside the town; in Ibn Ishaq's telling he named the Quraysh caravan as the target when he called them out. It was to be a quick seizure, and the men came as they were: around 313 or 315 of them, 83 Muhajirun, 61 of the Aws, 170 of the Khazraj, with two horses by one report, belonging to Zubayr RA and al-Miqdad RA (Ali RA said al-Miqdad was their only horseman), and seventy camels shared three to a beast. The Prophet ﷺ shared his with Ali RA and Abu Lubaba RA in Ibn Mas'ud RA's report (Ibn Ishaq names Ali RA and Marthad ibn Abi Marthad RA), and when they begged him to ride he answered that they were no stronger than he, and he no less in need of the reward than they. He judged too young to fight al-Bara' ibn Azib RA and Abdullah ibn Umar RA. Hudhayfah RA and his father were held back because the Quraysh had once made them swear never to fight against Muhammad ﷺ, and an oath is an oath even to an enemy. A pagan of Madinah famous for his courage asked three times to join and was refused twice, for the Muslims do not seek help from an idolater, until he took the shahada. The blind Ibn Umm Maktum stayed behind in Madinah, and by one report Abu Lubaba RA was sent back from the road to take charge of it. Abu Sufyan, on his guard since al-Ushayra, found the scouts' campsite, broke open the camel droppings and recognised the date stones of Yathrib. He turned the caravan down to the coast road and sent Damdam ibn Amr al-Ghifari racing to Makkah. Three days before Damdam arrived, Atikah bint Abdul Muttalib had dreamt of a crier on a camel calling the Quraysh traitors and promising them death in three days, then a rock rolled from Abu Qubays that shattered against every house in the city; her brother al-Abbas told her to keep it to herself, told one friend, and before long Abu Jahl was sneering at the Banu Abdul Muttalib for having produced a prophetess. On the third day Damdam rode in with his camel's nose slit and his shirt torn, crying that Muhammad ﷺ was upon the caravan. Makkah raised an army at speed, every household sending a man or hiring one; by some reports it set out 1,300 strong with a hundred horses and six hundred coats of mail, and it stood at Badr about a thousand strong (Umar RA's report in Muslim and Ahmad). Abu Lahab stayed behind and paid a debtor to go in his place. By some reports Utbah ibn Rabi'ah had no wish to fight his own kin until his brother Shaybah shamed him into it. Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt, who, the same reports say, had once spat in the Prophet ﷺ's face and been promised death outside Makkah, dared not go until a kinsman lent him the fastest camel in the city. Umayyah ibn Khalaf, fat and fearful, meant to stay at home until Abu Jahl told him that if the chief of the valley stayed the people would stay (al-Bukhari), and Uqba brought him a censer and told him to scent himself, for he belonged with the women (Ibn Ishaq); he bought the best camel in Makkah and told his wife he meant to go only a short way. Every one of these men was on the list the Prophet ﷺ had named in his prayer the day the entrails were thrown on his back. Before they marched, by one report, the Quraysh held the curtains of the Ka'bah and asked Allah to give victory to the better of the two parties, a prayer the Qur'an says was answered, against them. Outside Makkah the army nearly turned back for fear that the Banu Bakr would raid the empty city, until Iblis himself, in the shape of the Kinani chief Suraqa ibn Malik, promised them his protection and rode with them. At Juhfa Juhaym ibn al-Salt of the Banu al-Muttalib dreamt of a crier naming Utbah, Shaybah, Abu Jahl and Umayyah among the dead and of a camel stabbed in the chest whose blood spattered every tent, and Abu Jahl scoffed at another prophet from the Banu al-Muttalib. Then Abu Sufyan's messenger arrived: the caravan was safe, go home. Abu Jahl said they would go on to Badr, camp three days, drink and be sung to, and let Arabia hear that the Quraysh feared no one. Al-Akhnas ibn Shariq told the Banu Zuhrah to lay the charge of cowardice on him and go home, and they did, as did Talib ibn Abi Talib with some others. The Muslims meanwhile had begun to hear of an army. By some reports the Prophet ﷺ, who had been shown in a dream that he would fight, asked them twice what they thought of meeting the Quraysh instead of the caravan, and twice they answered that they had come for a caravan, with no armour and no supplies, a reluctance the Qur'an records without calling them anything but believers. He and Abu Bakr RA went scouting themselves and drew from an old Bedouin the exact positions of both the Muslims and the Quraysh, telling him only that they were "from water". Two Qurashi water-carriers were caught; the Companions beat them for saying they were from the army until they said they were from the caravan, and the Prophet ﷺ, finishing his prayer, told them they had beaten the truth out of the boys and let the lie stand. He asked instead how many camels the Quraysh slaughtered each day, nine or ten, and said the army was nine hundred to a thousand strong; when the boys named its nobles, Utbah, Shaybah, Abu Jahl, Umayyah, he told the Companions that Makkah had thrown them the pieces of its liver, and pointed out on the ground where each of those men would fall. Earlier, at Dhafiran, when news came that the Quraysh had marched, he had asked the army for its counsel. Abu Bakr spoke and sat, Umar RA spoke and sat, al-Miqdad said they would not say as the Children of Israel said to Musa but would fight at his right and his left and before and behind him, and still the Prophet ﷺ asked again, until Sa'd ibn Mu'adh (Sa'd ibn Ubadah in Muslim's report) understood that he was waiting for the Ansar, whose pledge at Aqaba had been to defend him in Madinah, not to march out to war. Sa'd told him to go where he wished: were he to ride them into the sea they would follow, and perhaps Allah would show him through them what would comfort his eyes. The Prophet ﷺ was delighted, and told them to go forward, for Allah had promised him one of the two parties, and it was as though he already saw the enemy lying slain. The Muslims reached the water of Badr before the Quraysh. Al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir RA asked whether the campsite was revealed or a soldier's choice, and being told the latter, proposed camping beyond the wells so that the water lay behind the Muslims and the enemy had only what they carried; the Prophet ﷺ took his advice, the other wells were stopped and a cistern built and filled for the Muslims. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh had a shelter built from which the Prophet ﷺ could watch the field. That night a light rain fell that firmed the sand on the Muslim side and, by some reports, drenched the Quraysh, and the Companions slept, all of them, as Ali said, except the Prophet ﷺ, who prayed under a tree until dawn: O Allah, if this band perishes, You will not be worshipped on earth. In a doze he was shown the enemy as few, which the Qur'an says spared the Muslims dispute and despair. At dawn on the 17th he drew the army up in ranks, straightening the lines with an arrow in his hand; when he prodded Suwad RA in the belly and Suwad demanded his right of retaliation, he bared his own stomach, and Suwad kissed it, saying that if he was to die he wanted his skin to have touched the Prophet ﷺ's. He had given the flag to Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, with two black banners carried by Ali and by one of the Ansar, and put Qays ibn Abi Sa'sa'a RA over the rearguard. He ordered that al-Abbas, the Banu Hashim who had been dragged out to fight, and Abu al-Bukhturi, who had helped break the boycott, were not to be killed. Across the plain he saw a man on a red camel riding up and down the Quraysh lines and said that if there was any good in them it was in that man: it was Utbah, offering to pay the blood money for Amr al-Hadrami, the man killed at Nakhla, and pleading with the Quraysh not to kill their own sons and brothers but to leave Muhammad ﷺ to the other Arabs. Hakim ibn Hizam carried the offer to Abu Jahl, who mocked him as Utbah's errand-boy, stirred up al-Hadrami's brother, and called Utbah a coward who had lost his nerve at the sight of the Muslims. Utbah, who had told them to blame him for cowardice, could not bear to hear it from Abu Jahl, and called for his brother and his son. The Quraysh scout Umayr ibn Wahab reported three hundred men with nothing but their swords and warned that not one of them would die without taking a Qurashi with him; Abu Jahl, by one report, told him no one had asked his opinion, and as the armies closed he prayed aloud that Allah destroy whichever army had cut the ties of kinship and brought the stranger religion, another prayer against himself. Al-Aswad ibn Abd al-Asad swore to drink from the Muslims' cistern or die trying, and Hamzah RA cut him down at the water: the first man killed at Badr. Utbah, Shaybah and al-Walid ibn Utbah stepped out and called for champions. Three young Ansar answered, Awf and Muawwidh, the sons of Afra', and Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA, and were waved away: the Quraysh had no quarrel with them, send us our equals. The Prophet ﷺ sent Ubaydah ibn al-Harith RA, Hamzah and Ali. In Ibn Ishaq's account Hamzah and Ali killed Shaybah and al-Walid at once, while Ubaydah and Utbah felled each other, Utbah cutting off Ubaydah's leg, until the other two turned and killed Utbah; in Ali RA's own report in Abu Dawud, Hamzah faced Utbah, Ali faced Shaybah, and Ubaydah and al-Walid wounded each other. Ubaydah died of the wound at al-Safra on the way home, the Qur'an's "two adversaries who dispute about their Lord". The Prophet ﷺ faced the qibla with his hands raised to the sky, pleading for the promised help until his cloak fell from his shoulders and Abu Bakr put it back and told him it was enough, his Lord would give what He had promised; and Allah revealed that He would help them with a thousand angels (Muslim). In the shelter, Ibn Ishaq says, he dozed and woke to tell Abu Bakr to be of good cheer: here was Jibril holding the rein of a horse and leading it, with dust on his front teeth. A thousand angels were coming in file. He recited "the host will be routed and turn their backs", a verse Umar is reported to have said he had not understood until that morning, took up a handful of pebbles, threw them at the Quraysh with "may these faces be disfigured", and, by reports in the tafsir, every man of them got grit in his eyes; the Qur'an says it was not he who threw but Allah. What followed can only be told in the dozen stories the Companions left. The Prophet ﷺ called them to rise to a Paradise as wide as the heavens and the earth, and Umayr ibn al-Humam RA, chewing dates, said that if he lived to finish them it would be too long a life, threw them down and fought until he was killed. Arrows were held until the enemy was in range and swords sheathed until they were upon them. Ali said the Prophet ﷺ was the nearest of them all to the enemy, and, by another report, that he found him three times in his shelter in prostration crying "O Living, O Sustaining", Abu Bakr at his side; he moved between the two. Iblis saw the angels and ran; al-Harith ibn Hisham caught at "Suraqa" and was flung on his back, and in a mursal report in the Muwatta' the Prophet ﷺ said Satan is never more abased than on the day of Arafah, except for what he was shown on the day of Badr, when he saw Jibril arranging the angels in ranks. Companions heard a rider above them urge his horse, Haizum, and saw the pagan before them lose his head before their own blow landed; the man who brought in al-Abbas was a slight Ansari, and al-Abbas insisted he had been taken by a beautiful horseman on a piebald horse, and the Prophet ﷺ told the Ansari to be quiet, an angel had helped him. By one report the angels wore the yellow turban of Zubayr; Ibn Ishaq's report from Ibn Abbas RA says white turbans. Ukasha ibn Mihsan RA broke his sword, was handed a stick of wood, and found a blade in his hand. By a report with a broken chain, Abu Ubaydah RA avoided his father Abdullah ibn al-Jarrah until the old man came at him and he killed him, and the closing verse of Surah al-Mujadilah came down about him, that no believer loves those who fight Allah and His Messenger ﷺ even if they are his father. Abu al-Bukhturi refused to be taken without his friend and was killed by an Ansari who had tried to spare him. Abu Hudhayfah RA, whose father, uncle and brother were the three of the duel, said aloud that the Muslims killed their own kin while the Prophet ﷺ's uncle went untouched, and regretted it until he died at Yamamah. Two boys of the Ansar, Mu'adh ibn Amr ibn al-Jumuh RA and a son of Afra' (Mu'adh in al-Bukhari, Muawwidh in Ibn Ishaq), had each asked Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA to point out Abu Jahl, and when he did they went through the press like hawks; Mu'adh's leap took off Abu Jahl's leg and cost him his own arm to Ikrimah's sword, which he tore off and fought on without, and Muawwidh struck the second blow. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud RA, the shepherd Abu Jahl had despised, found him dying, put a foot on his neck, heard him say to the end that a man killed by his own people was not disgraced and that Ibn Mas'ud stood on a high place, and finished him with his own sword. By a report with a weak chain in Ahmad, the Prophet ﷺ made him swear three times before he went to look, and called Abu Jahl the Pharaoh of this community. Umayyah ibn Khalaf begged his old friend Abd al-Rahman to take him and his son prisoner saying he was worth more than the coats of mail Abd al-Rahman was carrying; Bilal RA saw the man who had tortured him on the sand of Makkah, called the Ansar, and Umayyah and his son died under their spears while Abd al-Rahman was wounded in the foot trying to shield them. Umayyah's corpse was the only one that could not be moved to the well; it came apart when lifted, and they covered it where it lay with stones. Seventy of the Quraysh were dead and about seventy taken, one man in seven of their army; fourteen or fifteen Muslims had been killed and none taken. The Quraysh fled by the one road the Muslims had left open. The Prophet ﷺ stayed three days on the field, to bury the martyrs and to make plain who had won. The Quraysh dead were thrown into a dry well and covered, all but Umayyah, and on the third day, before leaving, he stood at its mouth and called them by name, Utbah, Shaybah, al-Walid, Abu Jahl, Umayyah, and asked whether they had found their Lord's promise true, for he had found his; when Umar asked how he could speak to bodies without souls, he answered that they heard him no worse than the living, though they could not reply. On the field the Companions had already fallen to arguing over the spoils, the collectors, the pursuers and the Prophet ﷺ's bodyguard each claiming the better right, and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA asking for the sword he had won; the opening verses of Surah al-Anfal came down there, that the spoils belong to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and every man received an equal share, with shares for some who had been kept away on duty, among them Uthman RA, nursing his dying wife Ruqayyah. Looking over the prisoners the Prophet ﷺ said that if Mut'im ibn Adi, lately dead, had asked him for them he would have freed every one, for the shelter Mut'im had given him after Ta'if. Abu Bakr counselled ransom, they were kin; Umar counselled giving each Companion his own kinsman to kill; the Prophet ﷺ likened the one to Ibrahim and Isa and the other to Nuh and Musa, and chose ransom, and the next day Umar found him and Abu Bakr weeping under a tree at the verses that had come down, that no prophet should take captives before he has subdued the land, and that but for a prior decree a punishment would have touched them. Two prisoners were executed on the road home, al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, who had mocked the Qur'an as fables he could better, and Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt, who asked who would look after his children and was told, the Fire. That was the end of the only two Badr captives put to death. Zayd ibn Harithah RA brought the news to Lower Madinah, naming the dead one by one, while Abdullah ibn Rawahah RA took it to Upper Madinah; by some reports Zayd rode the Prophet ﷺ's own camel and was thought mad; Abdullah ibn Ubayy, hearing him, said the matter was now settled, and the hypocrisy of Madinah dates from that day. Uthman heard the shouting as he finished burying Ruqayyah. The prisoners were lodged with their captors, who were ordered to treat them well and gave them their bread while they themselves ate dates; Suhayl ibn Amr was kept in the Prophet ﷺ's own house, where Sawda RA, seeing the chief of the Quraysh bound in a corner, cried out that he should have died a noble death, and when the Prophet ﷺ rebuked her, said she could not contain herself. The ransoms were set by each man's means, the poor freed for nothing and and some who had nothing to pay for teaching the children of the Ansar to write (Ahmad); al-Abbas, who protested that he was a Muslim, was told that Allah knew his heart but he had fought, and then told where he and Umm al-Fadl had set money aside when no one else was present, and paid for himself, Aqil and Nawfal too; by one report he used to say that Allah had given him twenty merchants for those twenty ounces. Abu Sufyan refused to pay for his son Amr, having already lost a son on the field, and later kidnapped an old Ansari pilgrim in Makkah to force an exchange. Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi' was ransomed with a necklace that had been Khadija RA's wedding gift to their daughter Zaynab RA; the Prophet ﷺ's face changed at the sight of it, the captors returned it at his word, and Abu al-As went home on his promise to send Zaynab to Madinah. In Makkah the first survivor to arrive, al-Haysaman al-Khuza'i, reeled off so many dead nobles that Safwan ibn Umayyah tested him by asking after himself, and was told he had watched Safwan's father and brother die. The Quraysh banned wailing so that the Muslims should take no pleasure in it, and al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib, who had lost three sons, was overjoyed to hear a woman keening until he learned she wept for a camel. Abu Lahab, who heard from his nephew Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith of men in white on piebald horses that no one could withstand, beat al-Abbas's slave Abu Rafi' for saying they were angels until Umm al-Fadl split his head with a tent pole, and died of a foul sickness within days. On the same day, at the far end of the world, Rome beat Persia as Surah al-Rum had foretold, too late for the Makkan who had bet Abu Bakr it never would. Within weeks Umayr ibn Wahab came to Madinah with a poisoned sword to kill the Prophet ﷺ and went home a Muslim, and the Banu Qaynuqa, who told the Prophet ﷺ he had beaten only men who knew nothing of war, were besieged and sent out of Madinah. Jibril asked how the Muslims regarded those who had fought at Badr, and was told, the best of the Muslims; so, he said, do the angels regard the angels who were there.

In the weeks after Badr, Safwan ibn Umayyah, whose father and brother had both been killed there, sat in the Hijr beside the Ka'bah with his cousin Umayr ibn Wahab al-Jumahi, the scout who had ridden round the Muslim lines on the morning of the battle and warned Abu Jahl that three hundred men with nothing but their swords would each take a Qurashi with them before they died. Umayr's own son was a prisoner in Madinah and he had not paid his ransom. Safwan cursed the new religion and what it had cost them, and Umayr said that but for a debt he could not pay and a family he could not leave, he would go to Madinah himself and kill Muhammad ﷺ. Safwan, a rich man, took him up on it: he would pay the debt and keep Umayr's family as he kept his own. Umayr agreed and asked him to tell no one. He went home, sharpened his sword, soaked it in poison, and rode alone to Madinah without a word to his wife. He came into the city with his face wrapped like any traveller and the sword slung from his neck, and walked to the mosque. Umar knew him by his eyes and said aloud that this dog, this enemy of Allah, had come for no good; he went to the Prophet ﷺ, who told him to bring the man in, and Umar took his own sword, escorted Umayr in, and stood with his hand on the hilt, having been told to watch every move, for this one could not be trusted. Umayr greeted the Prophet ﷺ in the old way, a good morning, and was told that Allah had given the Muslims a better greeting, the greeting of the people of Paradise. Why had he come? For his son's ransom. Then what was the sword for? What good had swords done them at Badr? Tell me the truth, Umayr. He held to his story. So the Prophet ﷺ told it for him: he and Safwan had sat alone in the Hijr and spoken of their dead at Badr, and Umayr had said that but for his debt and his family he would kill Muhammad ﷺ, and Safwan had taken both on himself so that Umayr would come and do it; but Allah had come between him and his plan. No one had been in the Hijr but the two of them. Umayr had told no one, not even his wife; he had ridden the fastest road, and no rider could have outrun him. There was only one way the man in front of him could know, and Umayr said it at once: I bear witness that you are the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. They had called him a liar, he said, when he told them revelation came from the sky; but this no one knew except him and Safwan. The Prophet ﷺ told Umar to teach his brother his religion, teach him the Qur'an, and free his prisoner. He stayed in Madinah learning, and before he left asked leave to go back to Makkah and call people to Islam as hard as he had once driven them from it, and to defend the Prophet ﷺ as he had once tormented him. Ibn Ishaq says many became Muslims at his hands. In Makkah Safwan had spent a fortnight promising the Quraysh good news, and when he learned what the news was he swore never to look at Umayr, speak to him or sit under a roof with him again. Umayr made Hijrah to Madinah, and at the conquest of Makkah six years later it was he who went after Safwan, now the one in flight, and brought him back under the Prophet ﷺ's protection to say the shahada in front of the man they had once plotted to kill.

After their defeat at Badr, the Quraysh spent a full year preparing for revenge, driven by four converging motives: religious animosity toward the new faith, personal grief for slain leaders (Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal's father and Safwan ibn Umayyah's father had both died at Badr), the economic collapse of their Syria trade route now that the Muslims controlled it, and the political threat of a growing Muslim state. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, together with Safwan and Ikrimah, went door to door reclaiming the profits of the Badr caravan from every Qurashi household that had invested in it, and used the funds to enlist allied tribes such as Kinana and Tihama. On the 7th of Shawwal, 3 AH, an army of 3,000 (with 200 horses and 700 suits of armor, and accompanied by around two dozen Qurashi women, among them Hind bint Utbah, to spur the men on with song) covered the two-week journey from Makkah to Madinah in seven days. Abu Sufyan held overall command, with Khalid ibn al-Walid on the right flank and Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal on the left. By a report not found in Ibn Ishaq, al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, who had remained behind in Makkah, sent a trusted servant racing to Madinah with the army's exact numbers; the servant covered the distance in three days and reached the Prophet ﷺ at Quba, where Ubay ibn Ka'b RA read him the letter in confidence. Rather than act on a single report, however urgent, the Prophet ﷺ sent scouts to confirm the Quraysh's position before calling a general meeting of the Muslims. When the Friday gathering convened, swelled further by a funeral that had drawn much of the city out already, the Prophet ﷺ laid out the threat and asked for counsel, giving his own view first: to stay inside Madinah and use its natural defenses, volcanic rock fields to the east and west, Mount Uhud to the north, and date palm groves to the south, which would force the Quraysh into costly street fighting. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, the city's most seasoned warrior, agreed, not out of any regard for the Prophet ﷺ, but because it was plainly the sounder position. A group of younger Companions, many of whom had missed Badr and were eager to prove themselves, pressed instead to meet the Quraysh in open battle; when the Prophet ﷺ judged that the majority wanted this, he agreed and went in to put on his armor. They then had second thoughts and told him they would not oppose him if he wished to stay (Ibn Ishaq; some retellings name Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA as the one who said so), but the Prophet ﷺ replied that once a prophet has put on his armor, it is not fitting for him to remove it before he has fought. He marched out on Friday, the 14th of Shawwal, dividing the roughly 700 Muslims into three contingents (the Muhajirun under Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, the Aws under Usayd ibn Hudayr RA, and the Khazraj under al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir RA) with only a handful of horses and 100 suits of armor between them, and led them by a secret route through the date-palm groves rather than the main road so as not to reveal their position early, passing through the garden of Mirba' ibn Qayzi, a blind hypocrite who threw dust at them and whom the Prophet ﷺ told the Companions to leave alone. On the march, Abdullah ibn Ubayy withdrew with about 300 men, publicly claiming his advice had been ignored; Abdullah ibn Amr ibn Haram RA confronted him over abandoning the Prophet ﷺ, but he insisted he did not believe there would be a fight, a claim the Qur'an later exposed as a lie (Qur'an 3:167). Some of the Aws (Banu Harithah) and Khazraj (Banu Salama) also wavered before staying, their perseverance credited to Allah's protection in Qur'an 3:122. The roughly 700 who remained reached Uhud in the early afternoon of the 14th; the Prophet ﷺ chose the site deliberately, its mountain shielding two sides and a third covered by fifty archers posted on Jabal Aynayn (later renamed Jabal al-Ruma in their honor) under Abdullah ibn Jubayr RA, with strict orders never to abandon the position regardless of how the battle appeared to be going, leaving only one narrow approach for the far larger Quraysh army to attack through. The Prophet ﷺ arranged the army for battle, turning back boys he judged too young, though Rafi ibn Khadij RA and Samura ibn Jundub RA, fifteen by Ibn Hisham's account, were allowed to remain, Rafi' as a good archer and Samurah because he could outwrestle him. On the morning of the 15th, the Prophet ﷺ offered his own sword to whoever would take it by its right; Abu Dujana RA accepted it and, in his turban of death, walked the ranks to embolden the Muslims. Abu Sufyan first tried to detach the Ansar from the Muhajirun by message, then sent Abu Amir al-Rahib (a former Aws leader who had rejected Islam) to appeal to his own people directly; the Ansar refused both approaches and renamed him Abu Amir al-Fasiq. The mubaraza opened with Talha ibn Abi Talha of Banu Abd al-Dar, the Quraysh standard-bearers, being struck down by Ali ibn Abi Talib RA: Ibn Ishaq counts him among those Ali RA killed, while another report says Ali RA left him when he begged by the ties of kinship, and he died of his wounds. The Muslim charge that followed broke the Quraysh ranks and killed the flag-bearers of Banu Abd al-Dar one by one until their standard fell. The story of Usayrim of Banu Abd al-Ashhal, who had remained the sole pagan of his subtribe for three years, belongs to this same morning: he embraced Islam after Fajr and was martyred before Zuhr, without having prayed a single rak'ah. After the Quraysh broke and fled in this initial phase, the sahaba grew complacent enough to lay down their arms and begin collecting the ghanima; the rules for dividing spoils had not yet been fully finalized, and many assumed the battle was over. The fifty archers atop Jabal al-Ruma, watching the ghanima being gathered below with no word from the Prophet ﷺ for the better part of an hour, fell into their own dispute over whether to join in; over time all but ten, led by Abdullah ibn Jubayr RA, descended from the position despite his refusal to move without the Prophet ﷺ's own command. Khalid ibn al-Walid, who had been carefully watching rather than fleeing outright, saw his opening: he worked his way in from a low-lying ditch on the army's right hidden from ground level, overran the ten remaining archers, and brought his cavalry, an estimated 100 to 150 strong, around Jabal al-Ruma to fall on the Muslims from behind, cutting the army in two: the Prophet ﷺ's own camp on one side, and the scattered, largely unarmed Muslims still collecting spoils on the other. It is said that the Prophet ﷺ was the first to see Khalid's counterattack coming and, at the risk of giving away his own location to an enemy targeting him personally, stood and shouted a warning to the Muslims. The surprise attack threw the Muslim ranks into chaos; many fled without recognizing friend from foe, and in the confusion, which the sources attribute to shaytan's instigation, some Muslims struck down other Muslims in the melee, among them al-Yaman RA, the father of Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA, killed by his own side before Hudhayfah's shouts to stop could be heard; Hudhayfah said, "May Allah forgive you", and when the Prophet ﷺ wanted to pay the blood money, Hudhayfah gave it as alms to the Muslims. As the Muslim ranks split, the Prophet ﷺ found himself down to a guard of nine (Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA and Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA among the Muhajirun, and seven of the Ansar, among them, by Ibn Ishaq's account, Ziyad or Umarah ibn al-Sakan; al-Bara' RA's report in al-Bukhari says twelve) while the rest of the army, believing the battle already won, was scattered across the field. One by one the Ansar of that small group went out to intercept the approaching enemy and were killed, until only Sa'd, Talha, and the Prophet ﷺ himself remained, retreating to a narrow crevice in the mountainside barely wide enough for one or two people. Sa'd and Talha fired volley after volley from the opening (the Prophet ﷺ, it is said, gathering spent arrows off the ground and handing them to Sa'd to reuse) while Abu Talha al-Ansari RA begged him not to raise his head for fear of a stray arrow, offering his own neck and chest in place of the Prophet ﷺ's (al-Bukhari). It was here that the Prophet ﷺ addressed Sa'd with words Ali RA said he never heard him use for anyone else, though al-Zubayr RA reports him saying the same to him at Qurayzah, "Fidaka abi wa ummi (may my mother and father be given in ransom for you)! Shoot, O Sa'd, shoot!" When an attacker reached Talha and severed several of his fingers, Talha cried out in pain; the Prophet ﷺ told him that had he said "Bismillah" instead, the angels would have carried him up before everyone's eyes. Qatada ibn al-Nu'man al-Awsi RA, took up the Prophet ﷺ's bow after he had shot with it until it broke, and his eye was struck so that it hung upon his cheek; the Prophet ﷺ put it back in its place with his hand, and it became his better and keener eye (Ibn Ishaq). In this same period the Prophet ﷺ was wounded several times: a stone thrown by Utbah ibn Abi Waqqas broke his lower right incisor and injured his lip; Abdullah ibn Shihab al-Zuhri wounded his forehead; and Ibn Qami'ah struck his cheekbone, driving two rings of his helmet into his cheek (Ibn Hisham, from Abu Sa'id al-Khudri RA). Streaming blood, the Prophet ﷺ was heard to say, "How can a people succeed who have wounded their own Prophet ﷺ while he called them to their Lord?" Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA later reported seeing two men dressed in dazzling white fighting fiercely at the Prophet ﷺ's side that day whom he never saw before or since. Around this same time, Ubay ibn Khalaf, a Makkan who had long vowed to kill the Prophet ﷺ on a horse he was fattening for that purpose, charged him directly; the Prophet ﷺ, reminding him of his own earlier reply that he would be the one to kill Ubay instead, took a spear from a companion and struck him in the neck. The wound looked minor, but Ubay himself insisted it was fatal, and he died on the road home before reaching Makkah. After cutting down Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, his killer Ibn Qami'ah thought he had killed the Prophet ﷺ and shouted that Muhammad ﷺ was dead, and the false report spread fast enough to demoralize part of the Muslim line, some of whom sat down mid-battle, before Anas ibn al-Nadr RA rallied a group of them back into the fight asking what they would do with life after him and telling them to die as he had died, and fought on until he was killed, disfigured beyond recognition except by his sister identifying the tips of his fingers. It was Ka'b ibn Malik RA who first recognized the Prophet ﷺ by his eyes and moved to announce he was alive; the Prophet ﷺ signed to him to be silent rather than give away his position; a later report adds that the two exchanged armour. Abu Bakr RA, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA, and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah RA fought their way back to him; finding the two rings of his helmet still lodged in his cheek, Abu Ubaydah is reported to have pulled each free with his own teeth rather than risk further injury with his hands, losing a tooth each time. As the fighting wound down, Abu Sufyan called out from a distance asking whether Muhammad ﷺ was still alive, and then whether Abu Bakr RA or Umar RA were; the Prophet ﷺ told the Muslims not to answer him. When Abu Sufyan declared victory and credited the idol Hubal, the Prophet ﷺ had the Muslims answer this time, "Allah is mightier and more worthy of honor", unwilling to let shirk against Allah go unchallenged even while staying silent about his own survival. Abu Sufyan swore the two sides would meet again the following year at Badr, and the Quraysh withdrew. Surveying the field afterward, the Prophet ﷺ found Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, his uncle, mutilated by Hind bint Utbah RA (who had cut open his stomach and taken his liver in revenge for her own father and brother killed at Badr) and wept, vowing to mutilate thirty Quraysh bodies in return before Allah revealed Qur'an 16:126 limiting retaliation to no more than what was suffered, after which he forbade mutilation outright. On the way back, Hamnah bint Jahsh RA met the army and was told in turn of the deaths of her brother Abdullah, her uncle Hamzah RA and her husband Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA. Wailing broke out across Madinah for the dead before the Prophet ﷺ, hearing it for Hamzah RA's sake, allowed it once and then forbade it thereafter as a general rule. The martyrs (reported as around seventy, most of them Ansar) were buried two, three, or four to a grave in the clothes they had died in, without ghusl, and by Jabir RA's report in al-Bukhari without funeral prayer (a report from Ibn Abbas RA in Ibn Ishaq says he prayed over Hamzah RA and the others), on the Prophet ﷺ's instruction to bury whoever had memorized the most Qur'an first; only one prisoner was taken the entire battle, Abu Azzah al-Jumahi, executed for breaking a previous pardon on condition he never fight the Muslims again. Before that, the Prophet ﷺ had sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to follow the Quraysh, and he found them riding their camels and leading their horses, a sign they were making for Makkah. The next morning, Sunday the 16th, the Prophet ﷺ called out those who had fought the day before, wounded as they were, and led them to Hamra al-Asad, about eight miles from Madinah, where they stayed the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Sometime before or during this period, accounts differ on when he told it, the Prophet ﷺ recounted a dream to the sahaba: he had seen his own sword break in his hand, then return whole; and he had seen cattle, which he took as a good sign. He later explained the broken sword as the setback the Muslims suffered, its mending as the victory and unity Allah would restore to them afterward, and a third image, of himself wearing armor, as pointing to Madinah itself as their protection.

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.

Hafsa bint Umar RA was widowed when her first husband Khunays ibn Hudhafah RA died in Madinah, soon after Badr according to Ibn Sa'd, or of wounds from Uhud according to Ibn Abd al-Barr. Her father Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, grieved for her, offered her in marriage first to Uthman ibn Affan RA (recently widowed of Ruqayyah bint Muhammad ﷺ) and then to Abu Bakr RA; both, aware the Prophet ﷺ had privately mentioned an interest in Hafsa RA, declined without explaining why, paining Umar RA. The Prophet ﷺ then proposed for Hafsa RA himself. Uthman RA subsequently married Umm Kulthum bint Muhammad ﷺ.

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

In the 5th year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ prophesied in a khutbah that a delegation of "the best people from the east" would soon arrive. Days later, delegates of Abd al-Qays, a tribe from the area of Bahrain mixed between Christians and pagans, reached Madinah. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, recognizing them from the marketplace, rushed to greet them with the good news. The youngest delegate, later known as Ashaj Abd al-Qays, alone stayed behind to bathe and dress properly before meeting the Prophet ﷺ, who praised him for the Allah-given qualities of al-hilm and al-anat. The delegation explained that the hostile tribe of Mudar lay between them and Madinah, so they could only travel during the Sacred Months, and asked to be taught something that would admit them to Jannah so they could teach their people. The Prophet ﷺ answered by defining Iman as the shahada, prayer, fasting Ramadan, and zakat (Hajj not yet mentioned, as it had not been legislated). He ﷺ also forbade them the various alcoholic drinks common to their cold climate. The tribe is said to have been the first to build a masjid outside the Hejaz and the first to pray Jumu'ah outside Madinah.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ left Madinah in Dhu al-Qa'dah 7 AH with around 2,000 Muslims to make up the Umrah they had been prevented from performing the year before at Hudaybiyyah. They brought their weapons, but left them outside the Haram under a rotating guard of 200 men so the rest could perform tawaf, honoring the Hudaybiyyah agreement to enter with only sheathed swords. A Quraysh delegation led by Mikraz ibn Hafs questioned the weapons; the Prophet ﷺ affirmed he would only enter as agreed. The Quraysh of Makkah split into three groups during the visit (some stayed in their houses, some gathered in Dar al-Nadwa, and some camped outside the city) avoiding contact with the Muslims. When a rumor spread that the Muslims had returned from Madinah as weaklings worn down by disease, the Prophet ﷺ commanded the Muslims to raise their voices in talbiyah, expose their right shoulders, and perform raml (a brisk, almost-running walk) for the first three rounds of tawaf: the origin of this Sunnah. The Quraysh were struck by their energy and this display, along with the visible size and unity of 2,000 Muslims around the Ka'bah, left a deep psychological impact. The Prophet ﷺ stayed three days, and the Quraysh honored the treaty without incident.

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.

With no resolution reached, Abu Sufyan (with Quraysh's approval) travelled alone to Madinah to try to renegotiate the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. Accounts differ on the order of his visits: Ibn Ishaq has him go first to the Prophet ﷺ, who gave him no response at all, and only then to Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and Ali ibn Abi Talib in turn; Ibn Sa'd instead has him visit Abu Bakr, Umar, and Ali first, going to the Prophet ﷺ last (Sh. Yasir Qadhi favors Ibn Ishaq's version). Abu Bakr, his old friend from the days of Jahiliyyah, refused to help him. Umar, his former business partner, refused even more bluntly. Ali, his third cousin and the closest relative to him in Madinah, would not intervene with the Prophet ﷺ's decision either, though he heard Abu Sufyan out and, when Abu Sufyan tried appealing through Ali's young son Hasan and then through Fatima directly, advised him as a last resort to make a public plea for protection in the mosque; protection which, under Arab custom, any Muslim (male, female, young, or unable to fight) had standing to grant. Abu Sufyan did so, but no one came forward, since the Prophet ﷺ himself had said nothing. Before leaving Madinah, Abu Sufyan visited his daughter Umm Habiba, a wife of the Prophet ﷺ whom he had not seen in over 13 years since her emigration to Abyssinia; she refused to let him, a mushrik, sit on the Prophet ﷺ's own bedding. Abu Sufyan returned to Makkah empty-handed and was mocked by the Quraysh for having had to beg publicly in the mosque.

While Hafsa bint Umar RA was away from home, the Prophet ﷺ called Maria al-Qibtiyya RA to Hafsa's house. Hafsa returned earlier than expected and saw Maria leaving. Angered, she confronted the Prophet ﷺ, who placated her until she made him promise never to see Maria again; he swore he had made Maria forbidden to himself, and told Hafsa to keep this between the two of them, not to tell Aisha RA. Hafsa nonetheless told Aisha, boasting that she had caused the Prophet ﷺ to give up Maria: the two of them were, at times, close friends and at other times rivals, and both were jealous of Maria's beauty (it is said this jealousy was also why the Prophet ﷺ moved Maria to al-Awali, away from the Masjid). When the Prophet ﷺ asked Hafsa how she had found out, Hafsa asked who had told him, not realizing Allah had informed him directly. Allah then revealed the opening verses of Surah al-Tahrim [66:1-5], instructing the Prophet ﷺ to break his oath (paying the kaffarah), rebuking Hafsa and Aisha for their conspiracy, and warning the Prophet ﷺ's wives generally. Maria was returned to the Prophet ﷺ.

No one knows the year. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas says the ninth year of the Hijrah; others say the fourth, fifth or sixth. That the Prophet ﷺ was by then married to all nine of his wives, Sawda, Aisha, Hafsa, Umm Salama, Juwayriyya, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Umm Habiba, Safiyyah and Maymunah, and that Umar was at the time worrying about an attack by the Ghassanids, which was no longer a fear after Tabuk, point to a late date; that Umar went in to Aisha points to a time before the verses of hijab; that the verses revealed about it sit in Surah al-Ahzab proves nothing, since a surah's verses need not come down together. The cause is easier to state than the date. The Prophet ﷺ had never lived well: a shepherd for pennies as a boy, a lodger in Abu Talib's crowded house, without a riding animal of his own until the Hijrah. Wealth came to the community rather than to him, in the ransoms of Badr, the fields of Khaybar and the gift of Fadak that fed his household, and then, greatest of all, the spoils of Hunayn, of which he kept nothing, though the law allowed a ruler his share. This was a choice. An angel who had never before descended had once offered him, from his Lord, to be a king and messenger or a slave and messenger, and at Jibril's sign to humble himself he had chosen to be a slave; after that day, the narrator says, he was never seen eating with his back against a wall. His wives watched the standard of living rise around them in Madinah as it did not rise in their own rooms, and at some point, most likely in the eighth or ninth year, they asked him together for more. What exactly they asked no book records, and rightly; it was a matter of the household. What is clear is that it was a joint effort, led by Aisha and Hafsa, and that what they wanted was lawful. He answered with an ila', an oath before Allah to stay away from his wives, which the law permits for up to four months when a marriage needs time to cool. He swore for one month, and withdrew to a small loft reached by a ladder, close by the mosque. Umar told the story to Ibn Abbas, who had waited more than a year for the chance to ask him about the two wives Surah al-Tahrim addresses, and began it with the affair of Maria. The men of the Quraysh, he said, had ruled their women; in Madinah they found a people whose women ruled them, and their own wives learned it. One day at his house in al-Awali his wife answered him back, and when he rebuked her she told him that the Prophet ﷺ's wives answered him back, and left him for a whole day when angry. He went straight to Hafsa and asked whether it was true, and it was. He told her that whoever did that had lost everything, warned her never to answer the Prophet ﷺ again or trouble him for anything but to bring her needs to her father, and told her not to be deceived by what her companion could do: Aisha was more graceful than she, and dearer to the Prophet ﷺ, and would be forgiven what Hafsa would not. Umar and an Ansari neighbour used to take turns, one working the land while the other spent the day with the Prophet ﷺ and brought back what he had heard, and in those days their talk was of a Ghassanid army said to be shoeing its horses to march on them. One night after Isha the neighbour hammered on his door. Have the Ghassanids come? No, something worse: the Prophet ﷺ has divorced his wives. Umar went at first light and found the mosque full of men sitting silent, turning pebbles in their hands. In one telling he went first to Aisha and asked whether the daughter of Abu Bakr had gone so far in troubling the Prophet ﷺ that he had left them all, and was told to see to his own vessel; then to Hafsa, whom he found weeping, and said he had warned her, and that she knew the Prophet ﷺ did not love her, and that were she not his daughter he would have divorced her long ago. She did not know whether they were divorced; he had gone up to the loft. At the foot of the ladder stood a servant, Bilal in one version, and Umar asked him to seek leave for him to enter. The servant came back: he had mentioned him and the Prophet ﷺ had said nothing. Umar went and sat by the minbar, came back, and was refused again. The third time he called up loudly that he thought the Prophet ﷺ supposed he had come on Hafsa's account, and that by Allah, had he been told to strike off her head he would have done it; and he was let in. He found a room with some barley, a half-tanned water-skin, a chamber pot and a few hides, and the Prophet ﷺ lying on a mat of palm fibre that had printed its weave on his side. Had he divorced his wives? He had not. Umar said the takbir, and then, seeing the tension, told him the whole story of the women of Madinah and the warning he had given Hafsa not to measure herself against Aisha, and the Prophet ﷺ smiled, and smiled again, and gave him leave to sit. He looked round the room and could see nothing else in it. He asked why the Prophet ﷺ did not pray for his people to be given wealth as Persia and Rome had been given it, when they did not even worship Allah, and began to cry; and when asked why, said it was because the mat had marked the side of Allah's chosen one while Kisra and Caesar lay in silk. The Prophet ﷺ sat up. Are you in doubt, son of al-Khattab? Are you not content that they should have this world and we the next? Umar asked him to seek forgiveness for him. In another version Umar added that if the Prophet ﷺ wished to divorce any of them, Allah, Jibril and Mika'il, Abu Bakr, he himself and all the believers were with him; and he used to say he hoped Allah would confirm what he had said, and He did, in the fourth verse of Surah al-Tahrim, one of the three times the Qur'an came down in agreement with Umar. After twenty-nine days the Prophet ﷺ came back down. Aisha reminded him that he had sworn a month and it was only twenty-nine days; a month, he told her, may be twenty-nine. He went first to her room and told her he was going to put something to her, that she was not to answer in haste, and that she should consult her parents before she replied. Then he recited the verses Allah had sent down: O Prophet ﷺ, say to your wives, if you desire the life of this world and its adornment, come and I will provide for you and release you graciously; but if you desire Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Home of the Hereafter, then Allah has prepared for those of you who do good a great reward. She understood that he had told her to consult her parents because he knew they would never tell her to leave; and she asked what there was to consult about, for she chose Allah and His Messenger ﷺ and the Hereafter. Then she asked him not to tell the others what she had chosen, and he refused: Allah had sent him to convey, not to make things hard. He put the same choice to each of his wives in turn, and every one of them chose as she had. The whole city had known of the quarrel, and Allah put it in the Qur'an; the fault line it exposed was not in the wives but in a standard of living that a messenger-slave could not share. It is the source of the law of ila' and of the husband's right to hand his wife the choice of divorce, and of the plainest picture the Companions left of how the Prophet ﷺ chose to live.

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had permitted either side to form alliances with outside tribes, with Hudaybiyyah's own terms extending automatically to any tribe that joined. The Khuza'a (kin to the Prophet ﷺ through his great-great-great-grandmother and bound to Banu Hashim by an old alliance of Abdul Muttalib's) took the side of the Muslims; the Banu Bakr took the side of the Quraysh. In the 8th year of the Hijrah, the Banu Bakr (with old blood-scores to settle, helped with weapons by the Quraysh, some of whom fought beside them secretly by night; Hassan ibn Thabit's verses lay the blame on Suhayl ibn Amr and Safwan ibn Umayyah) raided the Khuza'a by night at the pond of al-Watir, just outside the Haram boundary. Men of Khuza'a were killed and the rest driven into the sacred area, and when his own men reminded the Bakri leader Nawfal ibn Mu'awiyah that they were inside the Haram, he answered that he had no god that day. The Khuza'a chieftain Amr ibn Salim al-Khuza'i went to Madinah and recited a poem invoking the old treaty and the massacre in the same breath; moved, the Prophet ﷺ promised, "You shall be helped, O Amr ibn Salim." Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, sent to renegotiate on the Quraysh's behalf, found every door in Madinah closed to him (Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA both refused to intercede, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and his infant son Hasan could offer him nothing, and even his own daughter Umm Habiba RA would not let him sit on the Prophet ﷺ's bedding) and he returned to Makkah having secured nothing. The Prophet ﷺ called for a full mobilization without naming its destination, telling no one (not even Abu Bakr RA or Aisha RA) where the army was headed, and, by some reports, sending a small decoy party of eight men north toward Batn Idam to suggest Syria was the target. Then he told the people he was going to Makkah, and prayed, "O Allah, take eyes and ears from the Quraysh so that we may take them by surprise in their land." It was then that Hatib ibn Abi Balta'ah RA (a Badr veteran, by the strongest opinion a mawla from Yemen whose family had no protecting tribe in Makkah) paid a mawla-lady of Banu Hashim to smuggle a warning letter to the Quraysh, hidden in her hair braids. News of it came to the Prophet ﷺ from heaven, and he told them where to find her; Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA overtook her caravan at Rawdatu Khakh outside Madinah. She denied carrying anything until Ali swore neither the Prophet ﷺ nor Jibril AS could have been mistaken and threatened to search her by force: at which point, asking them first to turn around out of modesty, she untied her hair and handed over the letter. Confronted, Hatib confessed and explained that his loyalty to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ had never wavered; he had acted only out of fear for his unprotected family, not love of the Quraysh. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA twice asked to execute him as a traitor; the Prophet ﷺ pardoned him both times, telling Umar that Allah may have already forgiven every participant of Badr, reducing Umar to tears, and declared, "Hatib has spoken the truth. Nobody should say anything about Hatib anymore except good." Allah then revealed the opening of Surah al-Mumtahanah (Qur'an 60:1), instructing the believers not to take His enemies as allies. The army moved with remarkable speed: it left Madinah on the 10th of Ramadan and reached the outskirts of Makkah on the 19th, nine days for a force that had swollen past 10,000 as the Muhajirun and Ansar marched to a man and allied tribes such as the Muzayna and Banu Sulaym joined along the way; barely six years after only 300 Muslims had fought at Badr. On reaching al-Kadid, between Usfan and Qudaid, the Prophet ﷺ broke his Ramadan fast and the army with him. At the valley of Juhfa the army encountered al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle, riding out from Makkah to make his own Hijrah with his family, unaware the Conquest was already underway; by a weak report the Prophet ﷺ called him the last of the Muhajirun. At Niq al-Uqab, between Makkah and Madinah, two of the Prophet ﷺ's first cousins who had long mocked and opposed him (the poet Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abdul Muttalib RA and Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah RA, brother of Umm Salama RA) came out to seek an audience; the Prophet ﷺ at first refused to see them, saying that one had wounded his pride and the other had insulted him in Makkah, and only relented, moved, when Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith threatened with his young son at his side to go and die in the desert rather than be turned away. Both accepted Islam. At the final camping station of Marr al-Zahran, later known as Wadi Fatima, the army's camp fires lit up the plain. Al-Abbas RA, newly reunited with the army and anxious to spare his people needless bloodshed, went out that night to persuade the Quraysh to submit peacefully, and encountered three Quraysh and Khuza'a leaders out looking for news: Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Hakim ibn Hizam and Budayl ibn Warqa'. Al-Abbas brought Abu Sufyan into the camp on the Prophet ﷺ's own white mule, past Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, who wanted him executed on the spot; the Prophet ﷺ had Abu Sufyan spend the night in al-Abbas's tent, and the next morning, pressed by both men, Abu Sufyan reluctantly testified to the shahada. The Prophet ﷺ then declared that whoever entered the Haram, stayed in their own home, or entered the house of Abu Sufyan would be safe, and had al-Abbas show him the army marching past tribe by tribe. Abu Sufyan marveled at its scale and remarked to al-Abbas, "The kingdom of your nephew has become great"; al-Abbas corrected him, "It is not a kingdom. It is prophethood." The final entry came on the morning of the 20th of Ramadan, with the people of Makkah still unaware of what was upon them, a secrecy so complete over a force of more than 10,000 that it was remembered as nothing short of miraculous. The Prophet ﷺ divided the army at Dhu Tuwa: Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA on the left, Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA with the Ansar, Khalid ibn al-Walid RA on the right with Aslam, Sulaym, Ghifar, Muzayna, Juhayna and other Arab tribes, and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah RA leading the troops ahead of the Prophet ﷺ (Ibn Ishaq). As Sa'd ibn Ubadah passed Abu Sufyan he called out, "Today is the day of a great battle, and today the Ka'bah will be made lawful!" Abu Sufyan reported it to the Prophet ﷺ, who said that Sa'd was wrong: today Allah would honour the Ka'bah, and today it would be covered (al-Bukhari). By Ibn Ishaq's account the Prophet ﷺ had the banner taken from Sa'd and given to Ali RA; in al-Bukhari, Zubayr RA carried the Prophet ﷺ's own flag. Al-Abbas RA then sent Abu Sufyan back into the city to warn the Quraysh not to fight; Abu Sufyan ran through the streets calling, "Come to my house and you will be safe!": to the fury of his still-pagan wife Hind bint Utbah, who seized him by the moustache and called for him to be killed as a wretched protector of his people, but Abu Sufyan held his ground and, pressed on what one house could do for the whole city, spelled out the fuller terms of safety: the Haram, one's own home, or his own house. Entering Makkah from east and west, the Prophet ﷺ ordered that no one be killed unless attacked, naming only a small number of individuals excepted from this general amnesty. A handful of Quraysh under Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal, Safwan ibn Umayyah, and Suhayl ibn Amr made a brief, doomed stand in the alleys of the city; about twelve or thirteen of the Quraysh were killed, and two or three men of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA's cavalry, and resistance collapsed. The Prophet ﷺ then entered the city on his camel in armor, his head bowed so low it nearly touched the camel's back, reciting Surah al-Fath (Qur'an 48:1); he rode to the Ka'bah and performed tawaf on his camel, striking with his stick at the 360 idols around it, which fell, while reciting, "Truth has come, and falsehood has departed" (Qur'an 17:81). He then had Uthman ibn Talha bring the key, and cleared the Ka'bah of the idols and images inside, including one of Ibrahim AS with divination arrows, saying, "May Allah curse them! By Allah, neither Ibrahim nor Isma'il practised divination by arrows." (Al-Azraqi, quoting Ibn Ishaq, also reports pictures of Jesus and Mary.) He is also reported to have prayed inside the Ka'bah, with Bilal RA beside him; Bilal RA said he prayed two rak'ahs between the pillars, while Ibn Abbas RA reported that he did not pray inside. He once told Aisha RA that were it not for the Quraysh being new to Islam, he would have rebuilt the Ka'bah on Ibrahim AS's original foundation and lowered its door to the ground, a renovation he chose, even now, not to force through. Speaking from the door of the Ka'bah, the Prophet ﷺ declared, "There is no God but Allah alone. He has fulfilled His promise, and He has aided His servant, and He has destroyed all the enemies by Himself," abolished every claim of Jahiliyyah except the custodianship of the Ka'bah and the feeding of pilgrims, and recited Qur'an 49:13 on the equality of mankind before Allah. Asked what he intended to do with them, the assembled Quraysh answered, "Good. You are a noble brother, son of a noble brother," and the Prophet ﷺ said, "Go your way, for you are the freed ones" (Ibn Ishaq); some tellings add Yusuf AS's words, "No blame on you today" (Qur'an 12:92). Ali ibn Abi Talib RA asked whether the Ka'bah's custodianship (sadana) and the pilgrims' feeding (siqaya) might both be given to Banu Hashim; the Prophet ﷺ instead called for Uthman ibn Talha and said, "Here is your key; today is a day of good faith" (Ibn Ishaq; other reports link it to Qur'an 4:58), a custodianship that has remained with his clan, the Banu Abd al-Dar, ever since. In the conquest's immediate aftermath, the Prophet ﷺ by one report permitted the Khuza'a until Asr to retaliate against the Banu Bakr, then forbade any further bloodshed in the Haram; when men of Khuza'a killed Ibn al-Athwa' of Hudhayl the next day, the Prophet ﷺ told them to stop, paid the blood money himself, ruled that after that a victim's family could choose retaliation or blood money, and stressed that Allah alone had permitted him, and only briefly, to fight within the sanctuary. Unusually among conquests in human history, no war booty, prisoners, or land were taken, and almost no fighting occurred at all. Of the whole city, only a small number of individuals were denied amnesty by name, and the lists differ: Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal, who fled to Yemen meaning to sail for Abyssinia, turned to Islam at the sea (in Ibn Ishaq because the ship's master demanded belief in one God, in other tellings during a storm), came back under the protection his wife Umm Hakim obtained for him, and later died a martyr fighting the Romans; Abdullah ibn Khatal, executed after clinging to the Ka'bah's curtain for protection, having killed the Muslim freedman who served him and turned murtad; Miqyas ibn Subaba, executed for assassinating a sahabi in revenge for his brother's accidental death at al-Muraysi'; Abdullah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi al-Sarh, the Prophet ﷺ's former scribe who had turned murtad and slandered the Qur'an's revelation, pardoned after his foster brother Uthman ibn Affan RA interceded; Ibn Khatal's two singing girls, Fartanah and her companion, of whom one was killed and the other fled and was later pardoned; Sarah, who had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah and was later pardoned; Habbar ibn al-Aswad, who had caused Zaynab bint Muhammad ﷺ's miscarriage, later repented and was forgiven; al-Huwayrith ibn Nuqaydh, executed by Ali ibn Abi Talib RA one of those who had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah (by another report, he had attacked Fatima and Umm Kulthum RA on their journey to Madinah); and Wahshi, the killer of Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, who fled to Ta'if and converted about a year later. In the end, four of them were killed: Ibn Khatal, Miqyas, al-Huwayrith and one of the singing girls. After the khutbah, the Prophet ﷺ had Bilal ibn Rabah RA climb the Ka'bah and give Makkah's first-ever adhan, an Abyssinian former slave raised, literally and symbolically, above the Quraysh who had once tortured him. By a note of Ibn Hisham, sitting in the courtyard with al-Harith ibn Hisham and Itab ibn Asid, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb privately weighed in with remarks of Jahiliyyah about Bilal's honor; when the Prophet ﷺ later recounted each man's private words to him word for word as he left the Haram, al-Harith and Itab both accepted Islam on the spot. Al-Harith is the Companion who asked the Prophet ﷺ how revelation came to him (al-Bukhari, with no occasion given), and by one report he died a martyr at the Battle of Yarmouk (15 AH) after giving up water meant for himself twice over (to Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal RA, who passed it to Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah RA) all three dying before it could be drunk. The Prophet ﷺ then sat at Mount Safa, where the public dawah had begun two decades earlier, and took the bay'ah from the men of Quraysh in fulfillment of Qur'an 110:2. When Mujashi' ibn Mas'ud RA brought his brother to pledge for Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ said there was no migration after the Conquest, but he would take his pledge for Islam; in Ibn Abbas RA's report he said, "There is no emigration after the Conquest, but jihad and intention." He then took the oath of the women of Quraysh per Qur'an 60:12, with Umar ibn al-Khattab RA physically administering it since the Prophet ﷺ never touched the hand of a woman not related to him. Hind bint Utbah, veiled and unrecognized, sparred with each condition in turn (objecting that women were asked more than men, admitting she had skimmed from Abu Sufyan's wealth (which he forgave on the spot), protesting that a free woman would never commit zina, and retorting over the ban on killing children that the Muslims had killed the Quraysh's sons as adults at Badr, a reply at which Umar laughed immoderately); the Prophet ﷺ had recognized her when Abu Sufyan spoke, asked, "Then you are Hind bint Utbah?", and went on with the pledge when she asked him to forgive what was past. Some of the Ansar, meanwhile, worried among themselves that the Prophet ﷺ's return to his own people meant he had grown soft toward them; revelation came to him, and he told them, "I migrated towards Allah and towards you. I will live with you and will die with you," and they wept (Muslim). Over the 19 days the Prophet ﷺ remained in Makkah, several notable figures held out before eventually accepting Islam. By a weak report, a young Fudala ibn Umayr, enraged at the defeat, hid a dagger meaning to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ during tawaf; confronted by name, he lied about his intent, and the Prophet ﷺ laughed, sought Allah's forgiveness, and placed a hand on his chest, after which, by his own account, no one was more beloved to him, and he accepted Islam on the spot. Safwan ibn Umayyah, who had joined the doomed resistance, fled to Jeddah intending to drown himself; Umayr ibn Wahb RA begged the Prophet ﷺ for his protection and caught up with him bearing the Prophet ﷺ's own turban as proof, talking him down from the ship and back toward Makkah. Safwan asked for two months to decide and was given four; his Islam came later, after Hunayn, by some reports after he lent the Muslims armour and was given a great share of its spoils. By a report not found in Ibn Ishaq, Suhayl ibn Amr, the Hudaybiyyah negotiator, locked himself in his house in terror and sent his Muslim son Abdullah ibn Suhayl RA to beg protection on his behalf, which the Prophet ﷺ granted at once, instructing the sahaba to receive him with respect since "he is too intelligent to be ignorant of Islam"; Suhayl accepted Islam about a month later, after Hunayn and the Siege of Ta'if. And Abu Quhafa, Abu Bakr RA's blind and elderly father who had long opposed Islam, was brought to the mosque by Abu Bakr, as his granddaughter Asma bint Abi Bakr RA narrated; the Prophet ﷺ asked why he had not left the old man at home so that he could come to him there, Abu Bakr answered that it was more fitting for him to come, and the Prophet ﷺ stroked his chest, invited him to Islam, and told them to change the whiteness of his hair but avoid black. Umm Hani' bint Abi Talib RA (a daughter of Abu Talib, full sister of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, and cousin of the Prophet ﷺ) embraced Islam in this same stretch, having remained on her earlier faith until the Conquest itself. When two of her in-laws of Banu Makhzum fled to her and Ali RA swore to kill them, she bolted her door on them and went to the Prophet ﷺ. She found him bathing, screened by his daughter Fatima RA; he welcomed her and said, "O Umm Hani', we grant protection to whomever you have granted protection"; the right to grant protection belongs to any Muslim, man or woman. Umm Hani' RA also narrated that she saw the Prophet ﷺ pray eight rak'ahs of Salat al-Duha that morning, the only surviving report of how many rak'ahs he himself prayed of that prayer. Among the last holdouts was Abdullah ibn al-Zab'ari of Banu Sahm, the official poet of the Quraysh, who had traded barbed verses with Hassan ibn Thabit RA for years and fled to Najran at the Conquest rather than face the Muslims. Stung by a single verse Hassan RA directed at him, he resolved to return and embrace Islam in some tellings despite his cousin's objections, telling him, "Why should I not convert? ... Should I not go back to my own kith and kin, my own cousin? He is the best of all mankind." By reports not found in Ibn Ishaq, seeing him approach the Ka'bah from a distance, the Prophet ﷺ remarked to the sahaba, "That is Ibn al-Zab'ari; and I see from him the nur of Iman." Ibn al-Zab'ari then gave the shahada and a moving declaration of repentance for his years of poetic hostility, and the Prophet ﷺ told him, "Islam wipes away all that you have done in the past." He spent the rest of his life composing poetry in praise of Islam, for which, by one report, the Prophet ﷺ gave him his cloak. With no house of his own left in Makkah (Abu Talib had died a mushrik, and by the ruling that a Muslim does not inherit from a disbeliever, his house passed instead to his non-Muslim sons Talib and Aqil, and Aqil later sold it) the Prophet ﷺ set up a tent at al-Hujun for his 19 days in the city, telling Usama ibn Zayd RA, who asked where they would stay, "Has Aqil left for us any house to lodge in?" He shortened his prayers throughout the stay, which Ibn Abbas RA put at nineteen days and Ibn Ishaq at fifteen nights. During these 19 days the Prophet ﷺ delivered short sermons teaching the new Muslims the basics of the religion. He reaffirmed the enduring sanctity of Makkah, declaring, "Allah has made Makkah sacred the day that He created the heavens and the earth, and it shall remain sacred until the Day of Judgment ... Makkah was never halal before me, nor shall it be halal after me. And even for me, it was made halal just for an hour of the day." He forbade the sale of alcohol, carcasses, pigs and idols, ending the Makkans' lucrative trade in idol-carving, establishing the fiqh principle that whatever is unlawful to use is also unlawful to sell. Scholars differ on when zawaj al-mut'ah was prohibited, but the Conquest is where most place its final prohibition. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, ill in Makkah (in al-Bukhari's main report, in the year of the Farewell Hajj), asked the Prophet ﷺ whether he could will away two-thirds, then half, of his wealth having only one daughter as heir; the Prophet ﷺ said "No, too much" to each until Sa'd proposed a third, prompting the ruling still followed in Islamic inheritance law that a bequest outside the Qur'anic heirs may not exceed one-third. When Usama ibn Zayd RA, beloved of the Prophet ﷺ, interceded for a noblewoman of Banu Makhzum caught stealing, the Prophet ﷺ became angry and answered, "Do you intercede in a case connected with Allah's prescribed punishments?", and in a sermon said that if Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad ﷺ, stole, he would cut off her hand; the woman later regularly visited Aisha RA, who relayed her requests to the Prophet ﷺ, showing that punishment does not brand a person a criminal for life. A dispute between Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, claiming for his brother Utbah a boy born to the slave-girl of Zam'ah, and Abd ibn Zam'ah RA, who claimed the boy as his brother born on his father's bed, was settled by the Prophet ﷺ's verdict, "The boy is for the bed, and the stone is for the adulterer" (al-Bukhari). The Prophet ﷺ also sent mini-expeditions to destroy the remaining centers of idolatry: he commanded every household to destroy its own idols, and dispatched Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to destroy the great idol al-Uzza (mentioned in Qur'an 53:19) and by other reports another party to destroy Manat (Qur'an 53:20). At Nakhla, al-Uzza's Sulami guardian hung his sword on her and climbed the mountain, calling on her to strike Khalid down; Khalid destroyed her and returned (Ibn Ishaq). This achievement was marred by a mistake of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA, a very recent convert still unfamiliar with fiqh. Sent to invite the Banu Jadhimah to Islam, he met a tribe that had killed his uncle in the Jahiliyyah; they took up their weapons, and he told them to lay them down, since everyone had accepted Islam. When they did, saying "Saba'na, saba'na" because they could not say "Aslamna", he had them bound and killed a number of them (Ibn Ishaq; al-Bukhari). Abdullah ibn Umar RA and his companions refused his order to kill their captives, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA told Khalid he had done a pagan act in Islam; the two quarrelled and Khalid reviled him. On hearing the news, the Prophet ﷺ stood facing the Ka'bah, raised his hands, and declared, "O Allah, I am free from what Khalid has done," then sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA with wealth to pay blood money and apologize to the bereaved families on his behalf. Hearing of the quarrel, the Prophet ﷺ said, "None should revile my Companions, for if one among you were to spend as much gold as Uhud, it would not amount to one mudd of one of them, or half of it" (Muslim). The 19 days consolidated only Makkah's immediate vicinity; Ta'if, the fortified plateau city that had once expelled and stoned the Prophet ﷺ, remained beyond reach of the army and would be addressed in the campaigns that followed.

After the Siege of Ta'if, the Prophet ﷺ returned to Ji'ranah, where the ghanima and prisoners of war of Hunayn had been kept under guard, and camped there for over a week, waiting for the tribe of Hawazin to come and accept Islam so that their families and property could be returned to them, as had happened before with the Banu al-Mustaliq. Nearly a month after Hunayn, the Hawazin still had not come, so the Prophet ﷺ began distributing the ghanima. Ghanima left behind by a fleeing enemy (rather than taken from the slain) is left to the ruler's discretion to distribute, so the soldiers had no guaranteed share of it. The Prophet ﷺ gave the largest gifts ever seen in Islam up to that point, one by one, mostly to leading men of the Quraysh who were new or not-yet Muslims: the muallafati qulubuhum, those whose hearts needed reconciling to Islam. He gave 100 camels each to Abu Sufyan ibn Harb RA, to Safwan ibn Umayyah RA (who was still not Muslim and was moved to accept Islam by this generosity), to Uyaynah ibn Hisn of Ghatafan, and to al-Aqra' ibn Habis of Tamim, besides large gifts to Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan and to al-Harith ibn Hisham RA, the full brother of Abu Jahal, perhaps 60-70 people in total, with smaller shares also given to the Muhajirun. The Ansar received nothing from this particular large share, and some of the younger Ansar began to murmur that swords still dripping with the enemy's blood earned them nothing while the Quraysh went home with fortunes. Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA, chief of the Ansar, brought this to the Prophet ﷺ, who gathered the Ansar alone in a tent and delivered one of the most moving speeches of his life in praise of them, explaining that he gave to the new converts out of concern for their weaker hearts while trusting that what Allah had placed in the Ansar's hearts was worth more than any gift, and asking them whether they were not content to return with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself while others returned with sheep and camels; the Ansar wept and declared themselves content with Islam and with him. As word of the Prophet ﷺ's generosity spread, Bedouins flocked in seeking money: one chieftain grabbed the Prophet ﷺ's collar demanding a share, and on another occasion Bedouins crowded so close begging that his garment caught on a thorn bush; when the money was gone he told them that if he had as many camels as the surrounding shrubs he would give them all away rather than be found miserly. It was also here that a man with a straggly beard accused the Prophet ﷺ of injustice in the distribution (the beginning of what would become the Khawarij mentality), and when Umar ibn al-Khattab RA asked to execute him for it, the Prophet ﷺ refused for the sake of the community's wellbeing and foretold that people like him would recite the Qur'an fluently while leaving Islam as an arrow leaves its target. Eventually the Hawazin came and accepted Islam, hoping their property could still be returned; the Prophet ﷺ told them it was too late for their property but let them choose between it and their families, and they chose their families. The next day, after Zuhr, the Prophet ﷺ gave up his own tribe's share of the prisoners first, prompting the other Quraysh leaders to follow suit and return their captives freely; a few newly Muslim Bedouin tribes asked to be paid instead, and the Prophet ﷺ promised to compensate them from future revenue. In this way all of the Hawazin's families, though not their property, were restored to them. Before leaving Ji'ranah for Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ entered ihram there and performed his third of four Umrahs in his lifetime. Among the Hawazin who came to Ji'ranah, the Prophet ﷺ specifically asked after their chieftain Malik ibn Awf al-Nasri, who had fled into Ta'if with Thaqif rather than surrender. The Prophet ﷺ sent word that if Malik came to him as a Muslim, his family, property, and a hundred camels besides would be restored to him; unwilling to live on without his tribe, family, and wealth, Malik accepted, came to the Prophet ﷺ, embraced Islam, and was reinstated as chieftain over his own people. Malik then composed verses declaring the Prophet ﷺ a true prophet, and the Tamimi chieftain al-Aqra' ibn Habis, reflecting on the scale of the Prophet ﷺ's generosity, remarked, "I have just come from a man who doesn't care about poverty! Wallahi, this man is a prophet, for no king would do what he has done!"

Amr ibn al-As RA found the Prophet ﷺ so gentle and kind toward him that he believed he was the Prophet ﷺ's favorite. He asked the Prophet ﷺ directly who he loved most.

After the Conquest of Makkah, the tribe of Thaqif (custodians of Ta'if and its idol al-Lat) resolved to fight rather than accept the end of paganism in Arabia and the loss of the Ka'bah's custodianship to the now-defeated Quraysh. Thaqif sent emissaries to every pagan tribe in the region, and over 20,000 pagan fighters gathered under their banner, the largest gathering of pagan Arabs in Arabian history. Thaqif and the Bedouin tribe of Hawazin were the two largest contingents, together forming around 10,000. The Prophet ﷺ sent the new convert Abdullah ibn Abi Hadrat RA to scout Ta'if's forces; he returned reporting he had never seen so large a gathering, prompting Umar ibn al-Khattab RA to doubt the report and Abdullah to rebuke him for once having disbelieved the Prophet ﷺ himself. The Prophet ﷺ then mobilized roughly 12,000 men (10,000 who had come from Madinah and 2,000 new Makkan converts, some of whom, like Safwan ibn Umayyah RA, were not yet even Muslim) and borrowed a hundred coats of mail with their weapons from Safwan as a loan to be returned. The Muslims left Makkah on the 6th of Shawwal, 8 AH (after roughly 19 days there, per Sahih al-Bukhari, though other reports give shorter periods), and reached the valley of Hunayn on the 10th, camping there rather than at Ta'if itself since Thaqif had already massed in that region. Among the pagan coalition, the elderly and blind nobleman Durayd ibn al-Sima urged the newly elected young chieftain Malik ibn Awf al-Nasri to send the tribe's women, children, and livestock back to safety rather than bring them onto the battlefield, warning that their presence would not help the men fight; Malik refused, even threatening to kill himself rather than be overruled, and the people's families and flocks stayed on the field. Thaqif and Hawazin had laid a trap: a small decoy contingent was stationed at the mouth of the valley the Muslims had to cross, while the bulk of their army and hundreds of archers hid in the mountains on either side. As the Muslims advanced, the decoy fled, drawing the Muslim army deep into the pass, at which point volleys of arrows fell from the unseen archers above and the main pagan force charged. The Muslim army, many of them raw new converts without proper armor, panicked and fled in every direction, leaving the Prophet ﷺ almost alone on his mule; among the small group who stayed near him was the Ansariyyah Umm Sulaym, who leapt from her mount and drew a hand dagger, telling the Companions that she would use it on anyone who reached her. He ﷺ called out, "Come to me! I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ! I am Muhammad ﷺ, the son of Abdullah!" and declared, "I am the Prophet ﷺ, there is no lie about this! I am the son of Abdul Muttalib," invoking both his prophethood and his tribal lineage. He ﷺ called on his uncle al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, known for his powerful voice, to call the fleeing Muhajirun and Ansar back by name and by tribe; al-Abbas stood on his mount and rallied them to return, and as they came back fighting the Prophet ﷺ declared, "Now the real fight begins!", the first recorded use of this Arabic expression. He ﷺ then took a handful of dust, threw it toward Thaqif, and said, "May the faces be disfigured," after which the tide of the battle turned and the Muslims surged forward. As the Prophet ﷺ called out and al-Abbas rallied the Companions tribe by tribe, they slowly regathered around him. Allah then sent down His sakina (tranquility) upon the Prophet ﷺ and the believers and, as Surah al-Tawbah 9:25-26 relates, sent invisible forces to their aid; a number of Muslims and non-Muslims reported seeing these angels descend, among them Jubayr ibn Mut'im RA, who described a dense black cloud coming down from the sky and dispersing among the people like ants. Amid the chaos, Shayba ibn Uthman (a newly converted cousin of the Prophet ﷺ from the Banu Abd al-Dar whose father Uthman ibn Abi Talha had been killed at Uhud fighting the Muslims) rode at the Prophet ﷺ's unguarded back meaning to avenge his father, until a blinding light stopped him and the Prophet ﷺ, turning and sensing what was happening, made du'a for his guidance; Iman entered Shayba's heart at once and he turned to fight alongside the Muslims for the rest of the battle. Having relied entirely on the ambush, Thaqif and Hawazin had no fallback plan: once the Muslims regathered and charged, the pagan coalition fled in every direction. The Prophet ﷺ ordered the Companions to pursue them into the surrounding valleys and mountains before the scattered tribesmen could regroup, and a long series of mini-expeditions followed, in which several of the sahaba were wounded or killed, among them Abu Amir RA, the uncle of Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA, mortally struck by a javelin. Walking the battlefield afterward, the Prophet ﷺ came upon the body of a woman who had been killed and said it was not right that she had been killed; learning it was Khalid ibn al-Walid RA who had killed her, he sent word forbidding him from killing any more women, children, or other noncombatants. A second large body of the fleeing coalition regrouped at a place called Awtas, where a further skirmish took place with some Muslim casualties before the Muslims prevailed. In total, only four Muslims were killed in the Battle of Hunayn itself, though many were wounded, famously including all four of the future Khulafa al-Rashidun, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali RA, who all stood with the Prophet ﷺ and were all wounded that day.

The Battle of Tabuk carries two names, both used by the sahaba. It is called Ghazwa Tabuk because the Muslim army was saved there: after the sahaba had run out of water on the march, the Prophet ﷺ told Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA they would reach the spring of Tabuk the next day at the hottest part of the day, and warned them not to touch its water until he arrived. Two men touched it before he came and were rebuked; the Prophet ﷺ then washed his hands and face in what remained, and the water gushed out until the whole army (traditionally reported as 20,000 men, though such figures in the sources were often inflated) drank from it. It is also called Jaysh al-Usrah, the Army of Difficulty (a name Imam al-Bukhari records alongside Ghazwa Tabuk in his own chapter heading), because it was harsher than any other campaign: managing so large an army strained food, water, and logistics; it took place in the hottest part of the year, with temperatures around 110°F; it covered the furthest distance any army led by the Prophet ﷺ ever marched, roughly 650 km northwest of Madinah; and it fell during Madinah's August harvest season, when leaving meant forgoing the year's main income for an agrarian society with no concept of a steady salary. It took place in the month of Rajab, 9 AH, exactly six months after the Siege of Ta'if, and it was the Prophet ﷺ's final ghazwa; after it he undertook his Farewell Hajj, fell ill, and the seerah moves toward his death and the khilafa. No actual clash of swords took place; the difficulty was the march itself. Attendance was called for every able-bodied man, even from as far as Makkah. The most famous story of the expedition, however, is not the march itself but what happened to those who missed it. Ka'b ibn Malik RA (one of the earliest Ansari converts, of Banu Salama, who had taken part in the Bay'at al-Aqaba) owned two camels and was healthier and wealthier than ever before, yet kept postponing his preparations day after day until the army had gone too far to catch. He was not alone: of the whole city, only the hypocrites and those genuinely excused failed to march, and even among these, more than eighty men came forward on the Prophet ﷺ's return to swear oaths and offer excuses, which he accepted at face value (later mildly rebuked for this in Qur'an 9:43), leaving their true intentions to Allah. Only three men (Ka'b, Murara ibn al-Rabi' al-Amri RA and Hilal ibn Umayyah al-Waqifi RA, the latter two both veterans of Badr) refused to lie, and told the Prophet ﷺ the plain truth. He forbade the whole community from speaking to the three of them. For fifty nights they were shunned by everyone, including, in Ka'b's case, his own cousin Abu Qatada RA; the King of Ghassan even tried to lure Ka'b away with a letter, which he burned as a test. Forty days in, the three were also ordered to separate from their wives. On the fiftieth morning, as Ka'b prayed Fajr on his rooftop, a man of Aslam climbed Jabal Sal' (the mountain visible on exiting the Masjid al-Nabawi) and cried out that Allah had accepted their repentance; his voice reaching Ka'b before a horseman sent to convey the news in person, whom Ka'b gifted the only clothes he owned; he then had to borrow a garment from a neighbor to go to the Prophet ﷺ. Ka'b's repentance, and that of his two companions, was announced across Madinah, prompting Qur'an 9:117-119 on Allah turning in mercy to "the three who were left behind." Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA alone among the Muhajirun stood to congratulate Ka'b, who resolved from that day to never knowingly lie again. Before the army departed, the Prophet ﷺ called for donations from the minbar, and the sahaba raced to give. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, thinking he could finally outdo Abu Bakr RA, brought half his wealth, telling the Prophet ﷺ he had left an equal amount for his family (narrated in Sunan al-Tirmidhi); Abu Bakr RA then brought everything he owned, saying he had left his family only "Allah and His Messenger ﷺ", prompting Umar to concede he could never compete with him again. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, who had arrived in Madinah with nothing but the clothes on his back, gave 200 uqiyas of grain. Uthman ibn Affan RA gave in two remembered moments: during the Prophet ﷺ's khutbah he pledged, in escalating stages, a hundred camels, then two hundred, then finally three hundred with all they carried, at which the Prophet ﷺ came down from the minbar to declare "Uthman has no sin after what he has done today"; separately, when one of his trading caravans returned from Syria around the same time, he sold it entire for roughly a thousand gold coins and poured them before the Prophet ﷺ, who said, "Whatever Uthman does after today, it will not harm him", a promise Uthman himself would invoke decades later against the neo-Kharijites besieging his house. The hypocrites, by contrast, gave nothing and mocked those who did: when a poor Ansari man brought one of only two handfuls of dates he had earned by drawing water all night, two hypocrites jeered that Allah had no need of so little and that he needed it more than anyone, prompting Qur'an 9:79. Others made excuses to avoid marching at all: al-Jad ibn Qays begged off, claiming he feared losing self-control around Roman women, and the Prophet ﷺ simply turned away from him (Qur'an 9:49 is tied to this); Qur'an 9:81-82 and 9:42 rebuke the wider hypocrite camp for rejoicing at staying behind and for finding the journey too far. Set against them were the Bakka'un ("the Criers"), roughly seven men including relatives of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari and Irbad ibn Sariya RA, who wanted to march but had no mount and wept when the Prophet ﷺ told them so (Qur'an 9:92); the Prophet ﷺ later told the sahaba at Tabuk that such sincere companions back in Madinah shared fully in the army's reward. Ulba ibn Zayd RA, having no wealth to give, pledged instead to defend the Prophet ﷺ with his honor against the hypocrites' taunts, and the Prophet ﷺ accepted it as charity. Wathila ibn al-Asqa' RA, also without money or a mount, went daily to the marketplace offering his future share of the ghanima to whoever would take him, until an elder of the Ansar agreed to share a camel and meals with him, and later refused to accept the very booty-camels Wathila tried to hand over in payment. Two companions nearly missed the expedition through sheer procrastination before recovering themselves at the last moment, alongside Ka'b ibn Malik RA. Abu Khaythama al-Ansari RA delayed like Ka'b, but on returning home and finding his wife had prepared a shaded, watered rug and food for him, he rebuked himself for enjoying comfort while the Prophet ﷺ endured the heat, and rushed out alone to catch up; the Prophet ﷺ, spotting a lone rider in the distance, said "Let it be Abu Khaythama," and on arrival asked why he had been delayed, gently rebuking him afterward with "Woe to you, Abu Khaythama!" once he heard the story. Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA fell behind when his camel proved unfit to travel, so he loaded its burden onto his own back and walked the whole distance alone; the Prophet ﷺ, seeing a solitary walking figure approach, said "Let it be Abu Dharr!" and then remarked, "May Allah have mercy upon Abu Dharr. He is walking by himself, he will die by himself, and he will be resurrected by himself", a statement later fulfilled almost exactly at his death in exile, years afterward, in the khilafa of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA (see the separate event on his exile and death). The hypocrites' organized opposition, including their construction of Masjid al-Dirar during this same period as a rival headquarters, is treated as its own event (see Masjid al-Dirar) since it unfolded on a separate, simultaneous track from the march itself. Before departing Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ left Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA in charge of the city's affairs, as he did whenever he left on campaign, and told Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to stay behind and take charge of his household, the Mother of the Believers and the Ahl al-Bayt, since the journey would take more than a month. The munafiqun mocked Ali RA for staying behind, calling him unfit to fight; stung despite his well-known bravery, Ali RA armed himself and caught up with the army to protest. The Prophet ﷺ reassured him with the hadith of manzila: "Are you not content to be with me like Harun was with Musa, except that there is no prophet after me?" Ali RA was left in charge only of the Prophet ﷺ's family, not of Madinah itself (that was Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA's post), a detail Sunni scholars point to against the Shia reading of this hadith as evidence of a designated political succession. The army departed by way of Thaniyat al-Wada', the hill north of the Haram where Madinan families traditionally gathered to bid travelers farewell. There the Prophet ﷺ paused to organize the army (the largest ever assembled under him) into battalions by tribe, each with its own leader and flag, a mark of his organizational skill though he had no military training. On the march, when the sahaba began falling asleep on their mounts after Fajr and their camels scattered, Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA found himself riding close enough to the Prophet ﷺ, alone, to ask him privately what deed would gain him Jannah, a conversation preserved at length in Musnad Imam Ahmad (see the Sayings & Actions below). The Prophet ﷺ prayed qasr throughout the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, a practice later cited in fiqh discussions on how long a qasr-praying traveler (musafir) may remain at one place. The morning after arrival, he ﷺ also delivered a khutbah preserved by Uqba ibn Amir al-Juhani RA (see the separate Khutbah at Tabuk event). Separately, during the twenty days at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to Dawmat al-Jandal, where he captured the Kindah chieftain Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik and sealed the whole northern frontier against Rome through treaties (see the separate Dawmat al-Jandal expedition). Over the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ gave many short khutbahs and khatirahs, several of which are preserved in the books of hadith and seerah. In one, he ﷺ said Allah had given him five things granted to no prophet before him: he ﷺ was sent to all of mankind rather than to one people alone; Allah made him victorious through awe felt by his enemies a month's journey away; ghanima was made lawful for him ﷺ where it had not been for earlier nations; the whole earth was made a place of purification and prayer, so his ﷺ ummah could pray anywhere rather than only in a house of worship; and he ﷺ had saved his own personal request to Allah for the Day of Judgment, promising it to whoever testifies la ilaha illallah; understood as the Great Intercession. In another, narrated by Awf ibn Malik RA, he ﷺ foretold six signs before the Day of Judgment, ending in a truce and then a betrayal by the Bani al-Asfar (the Romans). The stay also saw repeated miracles of increasing food and water when supplies ran low, reported four or five times just in this expedition, and a karamah in which a companion lost in the dark found his way back to camp by the light of his own glowing fingers. One Fajr, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA led the salah after the Prophet ﷺ was delayed performing wudu (assisted and narrated by al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, including the Prophet ﷺ's instruction to leave his khuff on rather than remove them for washing); the Prophet ﷺ then prayed the missed rak'ah behind him, the only time in his life ﷺ he prayed a full rak'ah led by a companion. During these days the companion Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA also died and was buried by the Prophet ﷺ's own hands (see the separate event on his death and burial). Several fiqh rulings are also dated to Tabuk in the hadith literature: that washing each limb once in wudu suffices when water is scarce; that the Prophet ﷺ prayed with a sutrah roughly the size of a camel's saddle; that he ﷺ combined salahs only while actually traveling and not once settled even briefly (as at Tabuk and later at the Conquest of Makkah), while still praying qasr for the whole twenty days; and that the skin of a dead animal becomes pure, and so usable, once tanned. On the return march, the army passed through al-Hijr, the rock-carved dwellings of the ancient people of Thamud and Prophet Saleh AS (see the separate event on passing by al-Hijr). Their animals were also strengthened by a du'a the Prophet ﷺ made over them when they grew too weak to carry the army, a du'a the companion Fudala RA recognized fulfilled decades later at the Muslim conquest of Cyprus (28 AH). When water ran short, the Prophet ﷺ prayed for rain, and after a night of rain gave a khutbah on believers who credited the rain to Allah against hypocrites who credited it to a star. When the Prophet ﷺ's own camel went missing, a hypocrite mocked him ﷺ for claiming revelation from heaven yet not knowing where his camel was; the Prophet ﷺ then announced, by revelation, exactly where the camel was found, and a companion who learned who had mocked him expelled the man from his unit. Elsewhere on the march, hypocrites mocking the Prophet ﷺ's prophecies of conquering Rome and Persia were exposed as the Qur'an (9:64-66) was revealed quoting the mocker's excuse before he could finish giving it (see the separate event on the munafiqun's mockery). Separately, a group of some fourteen or fifteen hypocrites made a spur-of-the-moment attempt to throw the Prophet ﷺ off a cliff at night, foiled by his own evasive action while Ammar ibn Yasir RA and Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA looked on without realizing what was happening (see the separate event on the assassination attempt). The army finally returned to Madinah after some fifty to sixty days away, greeted at Thaniyat al-Wada' by the city's women and children (among them the companion al-Sa'ib RA, then a child) traditionally, though incorrectly, associated instead with the Hijrah (see the separate event on the return to Madinah). On the return march, one of the munafiqs was reported to have said that if Islam were true, it would mean believers were more misguided than donkeys, then swore under oath he had never said it, until Allah exposed the lie in Surat al-Tawba [Quran, 9:74]. Other hypocrites who stayed behind told one another, "Do not march forth in the heat," prompting the reply in the same surah that the Fire of Hell is far hotter [Quran, 9:81-82]. A separate, popular story (that a named sahabi begged the Prophet ﷺ for wealth, promised to become generous, then turned stingy once Allah granted him riches, with his later repentance and charity refused) is widely repeated as the occasion for [Quran, 9:75-77], but Sh. Yasir Qadhi rejects it as unreliable: besides a weak chain, it has the Prophet ﷺ refusing a repentant man's charity, which contradicts the Quran's own teaching that Allah accepts repentance. The verses instead describe the hypocrites in general, some of whom vowed to give charity if made wealthy and then grew stingy once Allah provided for them.

During the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, the companion Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA died. Ibn Mas'ud RA reports that he woke one night to see a fire in the distance with the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr RA, and Umar RA around it, and found that Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA had died and the three of them were preparing to bury him. The Prophet ﷺ himself descended into the grave and had the body handed to him, then filled the grave while saying, O Allah, I am pleased with this servant of Yours, so You as well be pleased with him. Ibn Mas'ud RA remarked afterward how much he wished he had been the one in that grave.

At Marr al-Zahran (later known as Wadi Fatima), the final camping station of the Muslim army before the Conquest of Makkah, the army lit ten thousand fires. Al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, newly reunited with the army, went out that night to persuade the Quraysh to submit peacefully and encountered three Quraysh and Khuza'a leaders keeping watch, among them Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the last senior chief left in Makkah. Al-Abbas RA brought Abu Sufyan into the camp on the Prophet ﷺ's own mule, Duldul, past Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, who wanted him executed on the spot; the Prophet ﷺ had Abu Sufyan spend the night in al-Abbas RA's tent, and the next morning Abu Sufyan reluctantly accepted Islam. The Prophet ﷺ then declared that whoever entered the Haram, stayed in their own home, or entered the house of Abu Sufyan would be safe, and had al-Abbas RA show Abu Sufyan the army marching past tribe by tribe, at which Abu Sufyan marveled at its scale.

Umar ibn al-Khattab RA entered upon the Prophet ﷺ while he was lying in his small compartment attached to the masjid in Madinah. The room held nothing but a jug of water and a small bed made from the branches of a date palm tree. By this time, the seventh or eighth year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ was the undisputed leader of a large part of Arabia. When Umar RA entered, the Prophet ﷺ sat up to greet him, and Umar RA saw that the palm branches had left a red mark dented into his side.

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

Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul was the last surviving senior leader of pre-Islamic Yathrib; the other chiefs of the Aws and Khazraj had either died in the Wars of Bu'ath or fled the city within a year or two of the Prophet ﷺ arriving. He accepted Islam only hesitantly after Badr, under social pressure, then showed his real allegiance at Uhud by withdrawing a third of the army, at the Battle of the Trench by trying to terrify the Muslims, and after the Banu al-Mustaliq expedition by slandering the Muhajirun (prompting the revelation of Surah al-Munafiqun) and instigating the Slander of Aisha RA. On more than one occasion Umar ibn al-Khattab RA sought the Prophet ﷺ permission to execute him; the Prophet ﷺ always refused, weighing the greater good of not letting it be said that Muhammad ﷺ killed his own followers. Probably around a month after the return from Tabuk, Ibn Ubayy fell fatally ill and asked the Prophet ﷺ to visit him on his deathbed, even asking him ﷺ to seek forgiveness for him. Umar RA questioned why the Prophet ﷺ would visit such an enemy of Allah; the Prophet ﷺ replied that he hoped Allah would use the visit to bring other people to Islam. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul then died during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ. There are two reports of who asked the Prophet ﷺ for a shirt to use as a kafan: one that Ibn Ubayy himself asked before he died, the more authentic report that his son, Abdullah ibn Abdullah ibn Ubayy RA, asked the Prophet ﷺ for one of his own cloaks, hoping Allah might forgive his father, and both may be true. The Prophet ﷺ gave the cloak, and the son also asked him ﷺ to lead the funeral prayer. When the body was brought to the masjid and the Prophet ﷺ stood to pray, Umar RA held onto his lower garment, reminded him of a catalogue of Ibn Ubayy's evils, and asked whether Allah had not already prohibited praying for the hypocrites. The Prophet ﷺ replied that Allah had given him a choice rather than a prohibition (quoting what would become [Quran, 9:80], that asking forgiveness for them seventy times would never secure it) and said that if seventy-one times would have forgiven him, he ﷺ would have asked seventy-one times. The Prophet ﷺ then went to the cemetery himself; Tarikh al-Tabari records that he ﷺ personally went down into the grave to help bury him, and he ﷺ prayed the funeral prayer for him.

Toward the end of Safar in the 11th year of the Hijrah, a few weeks before his death, the Prophet ﷺ ordered an expedition to the lands of the Romans (the Byzantine Empire), aiming at al-Sham and in particular Palestine. He called on the sahaba, including Abu Bakr RA, Umar RA, and many of the senior Companions, to gather their arms, and appointed Usama ibn Zayd RA (then only 17 or 18 years old, and the son of his freed slave and adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah RA, who had been killed by the Romans at Mu'tah) to lead them. Some in Madinah murmured that Usama was too young and not of Quraysh to lead senior sahaba, though none of the senior Companions themselves objected; the Prophet ﷺ rebuked the criticism, reminding the people that Zayd ibn Harithah RA's own leadership had once been doubted the same way, and declared Usama the most beloved of people to him after his father. Usama departed Madinah on the last day of Safar, but when the army was one or two days out, word reached him that the Prophet ﷺ had fallen ill, and he camped outside the city, eventually returning to visit the Prophet ﷺ on the day of his death.

On the 9th of Dhu al-Hijjah, 10 AH (a Friday, and the Day of al-Hajj al-Akbar) the Prophet ﷺ stood in the Valley of Aranah at Arafah and addressed the assembled multitude, with Abbas RA and Ali RA quieting the crowd so his words could carry (some sahaba reported hearing him even from their tents, which is counted among his miracles). He opened by telling the people he did not know whether he would meet them again after that year. It was on this occasion that Allah revealed the verse "This day, I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion" [Qur'an, 5:3], one of the last verses revealed, though not the very last. In the sermon he declared the blood, wealth, and honor of every Muslim sacred, exactly as sacred as that day, that month, and that land; abolished everything of Jahiliyyah, beginning with his own family's unpaid blood-money claim against the Hudhayl and his uncle al-Abbas RA's outstanding riba; and charged the people to fear Allah regarding women's rights, spelling out the mutual rights of spouses. He closed by telling the people they would be asked about him on the Day of Judgment, and that he had left them the Book of Allah, holding to which they would never go astray. When the people affirmed that he had conveyed the message, discharged his duty, and been sincere with them, he raised his hands and called three times, "O Allah, bear witness."

The Prophet ﷺ's final illness began in the house of Maymunah RA, around the 1st or 2nd of Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH, with a fever. In the first days he continued, as was his practice, to visit each wife's house in turn, until he grew too weak and asked his wives' permission to remain in the house of Aisha RA for the rest of his illness, which they granted. There, Aisha RA regularly recited ruqya over him and poured water on him to bring down the fever; when Aisha RA herself once complained of a headache, the Prophet ﷺ, in the midst of his own pain, gently teased her that his pain was worse, and that he would outlive her to wash her body and pray over her, to which she teased back that he would only enjoy that so he could be free for his other wives. As the illness worsened he asked for seven skins of water to be poured over him so that he could go out and advise the people, and he came out with a cloth bound around his head. As word spread that the Prophet ﷺ, who had never been this sick before, was praying only shortened prayers and withdrawing quickly afterward, Umar RA, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA and other sahaba without houses nearby began camping in the Masjid out of concern, and it grew crowded with people waiting for news. Carried to the Masjid on the shoulders of al-Abbas RA and Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, his closest Ahl al-Bayt, the Prophet ﷺ addressed the people from the minbar on what is thought to have been a Friday. He commanded that all the private doors opening from houses directly into the Masjid be closed, making a single exception for the door of Abu Bakr RA, an honor understood as marking him out above the rest of the sahaba. On a night traditionally dated to that same Thursday or Friday, when the Prophet ﷺ became too weak to rise and lead Salat al-Isha (fainting repeatedly as he tried) he instructed Aisha RA to have Abu Bakr RA lead the prayer in his place. Aisha RA, reluctant for her father to be linked with what she feared might be the Prophet ﷺ's death, twice tried to have Hafsa RA's father Umar RA lead instead, but the Prophet ﷺ saw through the scheme, comparing the two to the women around Yusuf AS, and insisted on Abu Bakr RA. From then until the Prophet ﷺ's death, Abu Bakr RA led the congregational prayers: the first time in ten years in Madinah that anyone besides the Prophet ﷺ had done so as a standing arrangement. A day or two before his death, the Prophet ﷺ found enough strength to be carried out to a Zuhr prayer already in progress; he motioned Abu Bakr RA to remain in the imam's place and led the prayer seated, with Abu Bakr RA standing beside him relaying his takbirs, a moment read by Sunni scholars as the clearest available sign of who the Prophet ﷺ wished the ummah to follow after him, delivered without ever naming a successor outright. After that Zuhr, on the minbar for the last time, he urged the people to take care of the Ansar, who had fulfilled what was due upon them. In those last days he also ordered, from his sickbed, that the polytheists be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula and that delegations be honoured with gifts as he had honoured them; three days before his death he told the people that none of them should die except while thinking well of Allah; and Ali RA reports that among his very last words were "The prayer, the prayer, and fear Allah regarding those whom your right hands possess." On the Sunday before he died, the Prophet ﷺ asked Aisha RA how much money remained in the house; she brought him the few gold dinars left in the house, and he insisted they be given away at once, asking what he could expect of Allah if he met Him with them still in his possession. He died owning nothing of gold or silver, only some barley in a small cup, his mule, an armor pledged to a Jewish creditor in Madinah for 30 sa' of barley, and a plot of land already given to the poor. At Fajr on Monday, 12 Rabi' al-Awwal, too weak to lead the prayer himself, he had Abu Bakr RA lead as usual, but asked to be sat up so he could lift the curtain between his room and the Masjid; seeing his ummah praying in rows filled him with such visible joy that the sahaba nearly broke their own prayer for happiness; it was the last time they ever saw his face. In those final days Fatimah RA, the last of his children still living, came to him; he told her privately that his time had come and that she would be the first of his family to join him and the leader of the women of Jannah, news she kept secret until after his death, when she told Aisha RA. As the pangs of death intensified, he was heard repeating "there is no god but Allah; verily, death has its pangs," while making du'a for Allah's help to bear it. Usama ibn Zayd RA, who had turned his expedition back on hearing of the illness, came to visit and received only a silent, weakly repeated gesture skyward in blessing, since the Prophet ﷺ could no longer speak. Aisha RA, cradling him against her chest, later gave him a miswak borrowed from her brother Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr RA, which he used with unusual vigor. In the heat of midday on Monday, 12 Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH, with his gaze lifted and Aisha RA leaning in to listen, he was heard asking to be joined with the prophets, the truthful, the martyrs and the righteous, and repeating, "O Allah, forgive me, have mercy on me, and let me be with al-Rafiq al-A'la" three times, his last words, before passing away in her house, on her day, in her lap. News of his death threw Madinah into shock. Umar RA, unable to accept it, threatened to strike down anyone who repeated the claim and insisted the Prophet ﷺ had merely gone to Allah as Musa AS once had for forty days. Abu Bakr RA, who had gone home to Awali after seeing the Prophet ﷺ smile that morning and assuming he was recovering, rode back at once, confirmed the death at Aisha RA's house, kissed the Prophet ﷺ's forehead, and then addressed the Masjid from the lower step of the minbar (never its top, a restraint every khalifa and khatib after him observed), declaring that whoever worshipped Muhammad ﷺ should know Muhammad ﷺ had died, but whoever worshipped Allah should know Allah is ever-living and does not die, before reciting [Qur'an, 3:144]. Hearing the verse, Umar RA collapsed, saying it was as though he had never heard it before. Elegies (ritha') were composed for the Prophet ﷺ by several sahaba, most famously his poet Hassan ibn Thabit RA. On Tuesday, his household (al-Abbas RA, his sons al-Fadl RA and Qutham RA, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, Usama ibn Zayd RA and the freed slave Shuqran, as Ibn Ishaq names them) gathered to wash his body, and are reported to have been guided by an unseen voice to wash him with his clothes still on. He was shrouded in three plain white garments from Yemen, without a shirt or turban. When the sahaba disputed where to bury him, Abu Bakr RA recalled the Prophet ﷺ having said that a prophet is buried wherever his soul is taken, so a grave was dug beneath the very spot in Aisha RA's room where he had died. No one led the funeral prayer: the people of Madinah came in to pray over him in groups, first the men, then the women, then the children, and he was buried in the middle of the night between Tuesday and Wednesday. Fatimah RA, seeing the fresh grave where his bed had been, could not contain her grief; Anas ibn Malik RA, who had served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years, recalled that on the day the Prophet ﷺ entered Madinah everything in it was lit up, and on the day he died everything in it went dark, and they had hardly dusted off their hands from burying him before they felt their hearts had changed.

Abu Bakr, as caliph, gave every sahabi an equal stipend from the Bayt al-Mal, saying it was not his place to prefer one believer over another when only Allah knows who has the most taqwa. When Umar became caliph two years later, he instead graded stipends by seniority of conversion, placing himself at only the third grade. As one of the earliest converts, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt received one of the highest stipends and used it to build a modest house in Kufa, keeping an open treasury from which anyone in need could take without question.

During the Wars of Ridda against Musaylimah al-Kadhdhab, a large number of the Prophet ﷺ's former Companions of the Suffa (many of them among the foremost memorizers of the Qur'an) were killed in battle. Alarmed at the losses, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA went to the Caliph Abu Bakr RA and urged him to act before more memorizers were lost and the Qur'an itself was endangered.

During the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt visited him, and Umar asked about the mistreatment he had suffered under his former master, Ummi Anmar. Rather than answer in words, Khabbab lifted his shirt to reveal his scarred back. Umar, moved by what he saw, seated Khabbab with him in his majlis and gave him great honor.

Years after the Conquest of Makkah, during the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, Umar held a senior gathering of the elder sahaba, Ansar and Quraysh, and admitted the young Ibn Abbas RA (then about 15-16 years old and a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ) despite objections from elders who had older sons excluded from the gathering. To make his point about Ibn Abbas's knowledge, Umar asked the gathering to explain Surah al-Nasr (Qur'an 110). After other companions gave general answers, Umar turned to Ibn Abbas, who explained that the surah was informing the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that, now that Makkah had been conquered, his time on earth was drawing to a close, and that he should prepare to meet Allah through increased worship and seeking forgiveness. Umar affirmed that this was the only understanding he himself had of the surah.

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

During Umar ibn al-Khattab RA's caliphate, Suhayl ibn Amr and Abu Sufyan ibn Harb visited Umar RA in Madinah and found themselves waiting in line behind Bilal, Suhayb al-Rumi, Ibn Mas'ud, and others who had once been considered low in status. Abu Sufyan was angered at seeing them given precedence; Suhayl admonished him that the honor those men earned by racing ahead in accepting Islam far outweighs precedence at any worldly door.

Umar ibn al-Khattab, then khalifah, heard Hassan ibn Thabit reciting poetry in the Prophet ﷺ's masjid and struck him with his stick for it. When Hassan protested and reminded Umar that he had recited poetry in that very masjid in the presence of someone far better than Umar, he called on Abu Hurairah to confirm that the Prophet ﷺ himself had once commanded him, "Stand up, O Hassan, and write poetry, and the angel Jibril will help you." Abu Hurairah confirmed it.

Years after the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ had told Suraqa ibn Malik, "How will you be the day that you put on the bracelets of Kisra?" After the Sassanid Empire fell at the Battle of al-Qadissiyah and Persepolis was conquered, its treasures, including the bracelets of Kisra, were sent to Umar ibn al-Khattab RA in Madinah, who seated Suraqa ibn Malik and placed the bracelets on his hands before the congregation.

The Arabs before Islam had no unified calendar; each tribe dated events from its own local milestones, and the practice of al-Nasi (swapping the order of the four sacred months to suit the powerful tribes' convenience) had thrown the months out of their proper order [Qur'an, 9:37]. Most likely in the 17th year of the Hijrah, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA was presented with a dispute between two men over when a debt of money was due by "Sha'ban", each understood the term differently since there was no standard calendar, and around the same time received a letter, reportedly from Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA or one of his governors, asking for a way to date instructions so they were not confused between one year and the next. Umar RA gathered the sahaba to decide on a calendar; a suggestion to adopt the Roman or Persian calendars was rejected, and the sahaba differed over which milestone should mark year one (the Prophet ﷺ's birth, his death, or the Battle of Badr were all proposed) until Ali ibn Abi Talib RA suggested the year of the Hijrah, which Umar RA accepted as the wisest opinion. They then differed over which month should open the year, until Uthman ibn Affan RA settled on Muharram.

During his caliphate, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA set the stipend of Usama ibn Zayd RA higher than that of his own son, Abdullah ibn Umar RA. Abdullah complained to his father about the disparity.

During the great drought of the 18th year of the Hijrah, Umar ibn al-Khattab RA gathered the Muslims to perform Salat al-Istisqa' (the Rain Prayer). At the end of his khutbah, rather than asking anyone else, Umar RA called upon al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA (the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ) to stand and make du'a for rain on behalf of the whole community, as an act of tawassul (seeking nearness to Allah) through his closeness to the Prophet ﷺ.

Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, known as the Mother of the Orphans and the Mother of the Poor for her generosity, was the first of the Prophet ﷺ's wives to die after him. During Umar ibn al-Khattab RA's caliphate, when he instituted stipends for the Muslims and set the wives of the Prophet ﷺ at the highest rate of 12,000 dirhams annually, Zaynab gave her entire stipend away to the needy before nightfall, and did the same with an extra 1,000 dirhams Umar later sent her in praise of her generosity. She died in the 20th year of the Hijrah before her next stipend arrived.