Banu Hashim

In the early Makkan period, Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah (a first cousin of the Prophet ﷺ) publicly challenged him before the Nadi (the assembly of Quraysh), demanding that he climb a ladder to the skies in front of him and bring down a book or covenant from Allah, and show him the angels, declaring that even then he would not believe. The exact wording of his demand is echoed in Qur'an 17:90-93.

Amr ibn Luhay al-Khuza'i, chieftain of Khuza'a, was the first to change the religion of Ismail AS and introduce idol-worship and superstition to the Arabs. He traveled to Syria, where he found the Amaliq (Amalekites) (a tall, powerful, undefeated civilization) worshiping idols they credited with ending droughts and defeating enemies. Impressed and overawed by their strength, he asked for one of their idols and was given Hubal, which he brought back and set up in front of the Ka'bah; it became the chief idol of the Quraysh. Decades later, at the Battle of Uhud, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb would shout "U'lu Hubal! (Hubal has won!)" over this same idol, and the Prophet ﷺ told Umar ibn al-Khattab RA to answer him. Amr ibn Luhay also altered the talbiyah recited for hajj, changing the original declaration that Allah has no partner into a formula that grants Him a partner He supposedly controls, introducing a new theology of a chief god with lesser gods beneath Him, similar to the Greek pantheon (though some say it was later generations, not Amr himself, who made this specific change). Three factors let one man overturn his forefathers' religion: an inferiority complex before the Amaliq's advanced civilization, which made Amr assume they must also be right in their theology; his own standing as a generous, battle-tested, and widely respected chieftain of Khuza'a, who at the time held custodianship of Makkah; and the sheer distance in time, at least 2,000 years, between Ibrahim AS and Amr, during which guidance had faded. Amr is dated only roughly, since the pre-Islamic Arabs kept no calendar and marked time by occasion rather than year; he is placed in the generation of Fihr, the founder of Quraysh, so roughly the 1st century of the Christian era; around 500 years before the Prophet ﷺ. It is also narrated that shaytan inspired Amr, through a dream, with the names of the first idols ever worshiped: Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr, idols already named in the Qur'an from the time of Nuh AS. Ibn Abbas RA related that these were originally five righteous men who lived before Nuh AS; after their deaths, their people built statues to remember their piety, and over later generations veneration of the statues turned into worship of them. Amr resurrected these forgotten names and, according to this account, they were again worshiped in pre-Islamic Arabia, a different tribe possessing each idol.

Years after Shayba's birth, his uncle al-Muttalib (Hashim's brother) came to Madinah and saw the boy in the streets. Recognizing Hashim's features in his face, he asked who his father was; Shayba answered that his father was Hashim. Al-Muttalib then took him back to Makkah. When the Quraysh saw the boy, they assumed he was al-Muttalib's new slave and called him Abdul Muttalib ("Muttalib's Slave"); the name by which he became known, though his true name was Shayba.

The well of Zamzam had been buried and lost since the Khuza'a-Jurhum wars generations earlier, forcing the people of Makkah to fetch water from outside the valley. Abdul Muttalib saw a dream, repeated several times, instructing him to dig between two idols by the Ka'bah to find it. With only his eldest son Harith to help him (his other sons were not yet born), he took a shovel and axe and dug until he struck water, to the mockery of the Quraysh who did not believe he would succeed. When the water appeared, his relatives claimed a share of the rights, and the dispute nearly came to blows. Abdul Muttalib refused, and it was in this dispute that he vowed to Allah that if he were given ten sons to defend him, he would sacrifice one of them. The two sides agreed to consult a priestess, but on the journey the party nearly died of thirst; as Abdul Muttalib dug his own grave (as they all did, being too weak to bury one another), water sprang up again, which the Quraysh took as a sign from Allah confirming Zamzam belonged to Abdul Muttalib, and they turned back without going to the priestess.

During the dispute over Zamzam, Abdul Muttalib vowed that if Allah gave him ten sons to grow up and defend him, he would sacrifice one of them. Once his sons reached adulthood, he gathered them to fulfill the vow, and the lot fell upon his most beloved son, Abdullah, who was about 17 at the time. He brought Abdullah before the Ka'bah to carry out the sacrifice, but the Quraysh intervened, insisting he could not do this. They urged him instead to consult one of their priestesses to find a way out. She advised that lots be drawn between Abdullah and camels, ten at a time, until Allah was satisfied; the lot kept falling on Abdullah until the camels reached one hundred, at which point the lot fell on the camels instead, and Abdullah was ransomed.

Shortly after his father Abdul Muttalib's vow concerning him was resolved, Abdul Muttalib chose Aminah bint Wahab, daughter of the chief of Banu Zuhrah, as a bride for his son Abdullah. Her father Wahab, chieftain of another Qurashi tribe, agreed to the proposal shortly before the caravan season, and Abdullah married Aminah. A report (not authentically narrated, but mentioned by the lecturer as harmless to relate) says Abdullah had a distinctive brightness (nadarah) on his face before the marriage that left him afterward, said to have passed to his progeny.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born in Makkah in the Year of the Elephant, on a Monday. A report attributes the moment to high noon, relayed by the later tabi'i Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib without a clear chain back to a direct witness. Others of his generation later dated their own births by it: Qays ibn Makhramah said he and the Prophet ﷺ were both born in the Year of the Elephant, and Qubath ibn Ashyam RA said he was born before him (al-Tirmidhi); one report has Suwayd ibn Ghafala say the same of himself, though another has him say he was two years younger. On the seventh day, by a report that al-Bayhaqi relates without a sound chain, his grandfather Abdul Muttalib slaughtered for him, held a feast and named him Muhammad ﷺ, a name the Quraysh asked about because it was not among the names of his family. His uncle Abu Lahab freed his slave girl Thuwaybah, who later nursed him; a popular account, not found in the sources checked, says he freed her for joy at the news of the birth.

Abraha, the Abyssinian Najashi's governor over Yemen, built a great cathedral in Sana'a and tried to redirect the Arabs' pilgrimage there instead of the Ka'bah. When a Bedouin defiled the cathedral in protest, Abraha marched on Makkah with an army that included several elephants (the lead elephant named Mahmud), guided by an Arab named Abu Rughal, intending to destroy the Ka'bah. His forces first seized the livestock of Abdul Muttalib, chieftain of Makkah, including over 200 camels. Abdul Muttalib met with Abraha and, famously, asked only for the return of his camels, telling Abraha that the House had its own Lord who would defend it. The Quraysh then withdrew to the surrounding mountains, and Abdul Muttalib prayed at the Ka'bah for Allah to defend it. When Abraha's army advanced, the lead elephant Mahmud refused to move toward Makkah, though it would move readily in any other direction. As the two sides stood at a standstill, Allah sent flights of birds (the Ababil) that bombarded the army with stones of baked clay (sijjil); in front of the Quraysh's eyes, every stone struck a man or beast, and his flesh dissolved. Abraha himself suffered the worst of it; his men carried him back toward Yemen with his skin dissolving the entire way, and he died just before reaching home. The traces of the elephants' droppings, withered and turned yellow, were still visible in Makkah decades later, remembered by companions who had seen them as children in the Year of the Elephant; the same year the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born, while his mother Aminah was pregnant with him in the very sanctuary Allah had just defended.

A few days after marrying Aminah bint Wahab, Abdullah departed with a trade caravan for Syria. He fell seriously ill on the return journey, and when the caravan reached Yathrib he chose to stay behind with relatives there (his grandmother, Abdul Muttalib's mother, lived in Yathrib) rather than delay the rest of the group. He died there while Aminah was pregnant with their son; his burial place is unknown to this day.

It was a custom of the Quraysh nobility to send their newborns away from Makkah to be raised by desert wet-nurses: to protect them from the diseases of crowded settlements, to harden them to a difficult life, to spare them the pampering of relatives, and, above all, because certain desert tribes were famed for speaking the purest, most fluent Arabic, uncorrupted by the loan-words of the city. The most famous such tribe was Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, and it was they who fostered the Prophet ﷺ. Every year the women of Banu Sa'd would come to Makkah to take in the infants of the Quraysh in exchange for payment. Halimah al-Sa'diyah and her husband were suffering great poverty; her own newborn son had just caused her milk to flow again, so she came to Makkah that year to find a child to nurse for two or three years. Everyone else in her group found an infant to foster except her: the only child left unclaimed was the orphan whose father had died, since the other women expected little payment from a fatherless child's family. With every other woman already provided for, Halimah agreed to take him, and the household experienced immediate blessings: an old goat that had stopped giving milk began producing again, and an aging mount became the fastest of the group. The blessings Halimah witnessed convinced her to extend the arrangement beyond the usual two years, and Aminah bint Wahab agreed even though she would receive no additional payment.

While the Prophet ﷺ, then four years old, was playing with the other children of the household, Jibril came to him. The other children fled in fear, but he stood his ground. Jibril overpowered him, laid him down, and opened his chest; he took out his heart, removed a black portion from it ("shaytan's portion") and discarded it, then washed the heart in a golden vessel of Zamzam water and sealed the chest back up. Halimah al-Sa'diyah's son and her daughter Shayma ran back to her screaming that their brother had been killed; when Halimah reached him she found him sitting quietly with a pale face, showing fear but not crying out. A visible line remained on his chest ﷺ for the rest of his life. Shaken by the incident, Halimah decided to return him to his mother, Aminah.

When the Prophet ﷺ was around six years old, his mother Aminah took him to Yathrib, accompanied only by her servant Ummi Ayman. It was the only city he ever visited as a child, and the only one where he had relatives before the Hijrah. They stayed a few months, and on the return journey, at the small settlement of al-Abwa', Aminah fell ill and died. Ummi Ayman had her buried there by the people of the village.

Abdul Muttalib kept a raised platform beside the Ka'bah, reserved for himself alone; each afternoon, when the Ka'bah's shadow reached it, he would sit there to discuss the affairs of the Quraysh, and no one else, not even his own sons, was permitted to sit with him. One day the young Prophet ﷺ ran up and climbed onto the platform beside his grandfather. His uncles, including al-Zubayr, pulled him back down, but Abdul Muttalib stopped them.

His uncles sent the young Prophet ﷺ, then a boy of seven or eight chosen because none of his errands ever failed, alone into the desert to find some camels that had gone missing. He was delayed in returning. When Abdul Muttalib learned his uncles had sent him out alone, he was furious with them, and paced anxiously until the boy came back safely.

At age eight, the Prophet ﷺ became an orphan for the third time when his grandfather Abdul Muttalib, by then old and blind, passed away. On his deathbed, Abdul Muttalib entrusted the Prophet ﷺ to his son Abu Talib, the full brother of Abdullah, the Prophet ﷺ's father.

The first recorded job of the Prophet ﷺ: tending flocks belonging to the people of Makkah in the valley of Ajyad, in return for a small wage (qararit). This period of his boyhood, from roughly age 9 to 15, is otherwise almost entirely undocumented.

Before reaching puberty, at about eleven or twelve years old, the Prophet ﷺ was taken by his uncle Abu Talib on a trade caravan to Syria, accompanied (in this account) by Abu Bakr and Bilal ibn Rabah. Along the way they passed a monastery where a monk named Buhayra lived, who had never before shown the caravans any interest, but this time came out to greet them and invited them to a feast. He said he recognized the Prophet ﷺ by signs he had observed and told Abu Talib to protect him, and reported seeing Roman soldiers said to be searching for the boy, sending the caravan back to Makkah at once.

A series of battles between the tribe of Kinana (of which Quraysh is a branch) and the tribes of Qays Aylan (Ghatafan and Hawazin). A man from Kinana killed a man from Hawazin; when the Hawazin retaliated, the Kinanite tribes, including Quraysh, fled back into Makkah, relying on the law that whoever enters the Haram is safe. But the Hawazin, in their anger, followed and attacked the Kinana even within the sanctuary, violating the sanctity of the Haram. In response, Quraysh declared all-out war against Hawazin and Qays Aylan.

Quss ibn Sa'ida of Banu Iyad was one of the hunafa', an old man of 80-90 by the time the Prophet ﷺ, then a young man in his twenties, saw him. He would come to Makkah for the hajj and preach against idolatry, and was renowned as one of the most eloquent poets of his time, his language said to resemble that of the Qur'an itself.

A merchant of the tribe of Zubayd (from Yemen) sold goods to al-As ibn Wa'il, a rich Qurashi chieftain, before hajj, on the promise of payment afterward. Al-As repeatedly delayed paying him until the man realized he would not be paid. Having appealed unsuccessfully to several Quraysh subtribes for help, he made his grievance public by reciting a poem at the Ka'bah, appealing to the "family of Fihr" (Quraysh) for justice. Al-Zubayr ibn Abdul Muttalib, on hearing this, convened the senior members of the Quraysh at the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an, where they agreed to a pact to side with the oppressed against the oppressor, regardless of tribe. Being unable to write, they sealed the pact by dipping their hands in perfume and touching them to the Ka'bah, hence its other name, Hilf al-Mutayyabin ("the Pact of the Perfumed Ones").

While working as a shepherd for wages, Muhammad ﷺ and another young man were hired by Khadija RA's older sister to tend her flock of camels outside Makkah. When the two came to collect their wages, Muhammad ﷺ, too shy to ask himself, sent his companion in his place. Khadija RA, who happened to be at her sister's house, asked after him, and her sister praised his shyness, honor, nobility, and chaste conduct. This was the first Khadija RA heard of him, and something entered her heart.

Khadija RA was the richest woman in Makkah, a twice-widowed businesswoman who could not travel herself and so hired men on a mudarabah (profit-sharing) basis to run her trading caravans. Having heard Muhammad ﷺ praised by her sister, she sent him an offer through her servant to take charge of her caravan, despite his inexperience in business. Muhammad ﷺ went to his uncle Abu Talib for advice before accepting, and Khadija RA offered him 50% of the profits as an incentive. She sent her servant Maysara along with him, and the caravan traveled to the market town of Bosra, outside Damascus.

After the success of the trading journey to Bosra, Khadija RA was the one who instigated the marriage proposal. In one version, she confided in her elderly servant Nafisa, who approached Muhammad ﷺ directly asking why he did not marry; when told Khadija RA might want him, he did not say no, only wondering why she would want him, signaling his interest. The reports differ on who gave her in marriage. Ibn Ishaq says the Prophet ﷺ's uncle Hamzah RA went with him to her father Khuwaylid ibn Asad, who married her to him; other reports name her uncle Amr ibn Asad as her guardian. In the account given by Ibn Faris, Abu Talib came with Muhammad ﷺ and delivered the khutbah, praising Allah and the lineage of Quraysh as caretakers of the Ka'bah, before proposing on his nephew's behalf with a mahr of 12 uqiyyah and a nash, and Amr ibn Asad accepted on the spot; Ibn Hisham instead gives the dowry as twenty young she-camels. One narration with a weak chain claims Khadija RA's father opposed the match and was made drunk so the marriage could proceed without his awareness. Khadija RA had been married twice before, first to Atiq ibn Abid al-Makhzumi and then to Abu Hala al-Tamimi, and had children by both (Ibn Hisham names Hind and Zaynab as her children by Abu Hala); some reports also name a son, Hala ibn Abi Hala.

Of the four hunafa', Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl alone accepted neither Christianity nor Judaism, telling the rabbis and priests he met on his search that theirs was not the true religion of Ibrahim AS either. He returned to Makkah and, once mature and respected among his people, openly declared that no one in the whole city remained upon the religion of Ibrahim AS besides himself. Asma bint Abi Bakr RA, the older sister of Aisha RA, recalled as a young child seeing Zayd ibn Amr rebuke the Quraysh for worshiping idols, for offering meat to them, and for burying their infant daughters alive. Whenever a man of Quraysh wanted to kill his daughter, Zayd would intervene and ask to raise the girl himself as his own, showing his generosity and refusal to take any part in their idolatry. The Prophet ﷺ, still a young man before his own mission began, once asked Zayd ibn Amr what was the matter between him and his people, and why there was such animosity, an early sign of the Prophet ﷺ's own inquisitive mind. Zayd answered simply that he could not worship idols, and the Prophet ﷺ, who himself had never worshiped an idol, found in him a kindred spirit. Zayd ibn Amr continued upon his tawhid until he died, about five years before the Prophet ﷺ began preaching Islam.

The Ka'bah was damaged first by fire, when a woman cooking nearby set its cloth ablaze, and then by a flood that destroyed its roof and part of its walls. Around this time, a Roman ship carrying fine wood, marble, and craftsmen (sent by Caesar to rebuild a church in Yemen destroyed by the Persians) was blown off course by a wind Allah sent, and wrecked at Juddah. The Quraysh traveled there, bought the cargo, and hired the Byzantine-trained craftsmen to rebuild the Ka'bah in Makkah. Fearful of demolishing the House of Allah, the Quraysh hesitated; according to one report in Ibn Ishaq, a snake that had guarded the Well of Zamzam was carried off by a bird, which they took as a sign to proceed. Still hesitant, they waited to see if al-Walid ibn al-Mughira would come to harm after volunteering to break the first wall; when he was unharmed by morning, the rest joined in. The Quraysh divided the four walls among their subtribes, with Banu Abd Manaf (which included Banu Hashim) taking the most prestigious wall and Banu Makhzum the second. When work reached the corner holding the Black Stone, a dispute broke out between Banu Abd Manaf and Banu Makhzum over who would have the honor of placing it, escalating until construction halted for five days and Banu Makhzum secretly pledged in camel blood to fight over it. On the fifth day, Abu Umayya ibn al-Mughira, the oldest man in Makkah, proposed giving the decision to whoever next entered from the main gate, and that person was Muhammad ﷺ, whom every tribe was glad to see, believing he favored them most.

Zayd ibn Harithah, kidnapped as a boy and sold into slavery, had become Khadija bint Khuwaylid RA's servant and was later gifted to Muhammad ﷺ upon their marriage. Years afterward, Zayd's father Harithah and uncle traveled to Makkah and asked Muhammad ﷺ to let them ransom Zayd back. Muhammad ﷺ left the choice to Zayd himself, and Zayd chose to remain with him rather than return with his own father and uncle. Muhammad ﷺ then took Zayd by the hand to the Hijr Ismail and publicly declared him a free man and his adopted son, so that Zayd became known as Zayd ibn Muhammad ﷺ.

In the months before the revelation, Muhammad ﷺ was given a love of solitude. He would climb to the Cave of Hira on the mountain now called Jabal al-Nur, a crevice with room for one man that faces the Ka'bah, with food and water for several nights, and worship there until his provisions ran out, then come down to Khadija to replenish them and go back up. In those months he began to see dreams that came true as surely as the dawn, for six months by one report, and he told Khadija, who said it was a good sign; and he heard stones and rocks greet him with salam as he walked, one rock in particular that he said he could still recognise. He was being prepared. On a Saturday in Ramadan, some reports say, he saw a light and heard a sound and found nothing; on Sunday the same; and on a Monday, in the last ten nights of Ramadan, the night of Qadr, Jibril came to him in the cave and said: read. I cannot read, he answered, and the angel seized him and pressed him until he could bear no more, released him, and said it again; a second time, and a third; and then recited to him the first five verses of Surah al-Alaq: read, in the name of your Lord who created, created man from a clinging clot; read, and your Lord is the most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know. Why the angel squeezed him no one knows; some say to show him this was no dream, some that it was the weight of what was coming, some that it foretold three great trials. And why read, twice, to an unlettered man among an unlettered people: because from that night there would be a Book, to be recited from memory and read from the page, and preserved in both. He came down the mountain with his heart pounding and went in to Khadija: cover me, cover me. She wrapped him until the fear passed, and he told her what had happened and that he feared for himself, for his life or his mind. Never, she said, by Allah; Allah would never disgrace him: he kept the ties of kinship, spoke the truth, carried the burdens of others, earned for the destitute, honoured the guest, and helped in every good cause. Then she took him to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, an old blind man who had left idols long before, read the scriptures and written the Gospel in Hebrew letters. Listen to your nephew, she said. Waraqa heard him and said: this is the Namus, the keeper of secrets, who came to Musa. Would that I were young, would that I were alive when your people drive you out. Will they drive me out? Yes: no man ever brought what you bring but was met with enmity; and if I live to that day I will help you with all my strength. He died a few days later, and the revelation paused. Khadija later asked the Prophet ﷺ what had become of Waraqa, who had believed in him and died before his mission began, and he said he had seen him in a dream in white garments, which no one of the Fire would wear; on the strength of this report, which al-Tirmidhi himself calls weak, Waraqa, who never said a shahada because there was none yet to say, is counted by some as the first to believe and the first to die a believer. Around this time, though no fully authentic report fixes the moment, Jibril came down and taught him to make wudu and to pray, two rak'ahs at each prayer, as Aisha reports; prayer was not yet obligatory, and when the five prayers were made so he did not need to be taught again. Of the dreams that had come first he said in later years that nothing of prophethood remained after him but true dreams, one part in forty-six; and some have noticed that six months of dreams set against twenty-three years of prophethood is exactly that fraction.

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.

While shepherding a flock for Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt, Abdullah ibn Mas'ud was approached by Muhammad ﷺ and Abu Bakr, who were thirsty and asked him for milk. Ibn Mas'ud explained the flock was not his to give from. Muhammad ﷺ then asked to be shown an old she-goat that had stopped producing milk, made du'a, and rubbed its udder, and it produced milk in front of Ibn Mas'ud's eyes. Astonished at the miracle, Ibn Mas'ud asked who they were, and upon learning it was Muhammad ﷺ and Abu Bakr, he converted to Islam on the spot, becoming the sixth convert.

Amr ibn Abasah al-Sulami, a Yemeni who had already rejected idol worship before Islam, heard that someone in Makkah was preaching against idolatry and traveled there to find him. He found Muhammad ﷺ hiding from his own people, and asked him what he was; Muhammad ﷺ told him he was a prophet, sent to fulfill the ties of kinship, break idols, and worship only Allah, and that so far only one free man (Abu Bakr) and one slave (Bilal) had followed him. Amr asked to join, but Muhammad ﷺ told him this was not yet possible given his situation of hiding from his own people, and told him to return to Yemen and come back once he heard Muhammad ﷺ had prevailed. Years later, after the Hijrah, Amr heard Muhammad ﷺ had emigrated to Madinah, traveled there, and was recognized by Muhammad ﷺ; at which point he accepted Islam and became one of the Muhajirun.

After the death of his infant son Abdullah, al-As ibn Wa'il mocked Muhammad ﷺ, celebrating in the streets of Makkah that the Prophet ﷺ's progeny had been cut off. In response, Allah revealed Surah al-Kawthar [Quran, 108:1-3].

After the first revelation, the revelation paused for a while. Muhammad ﷺ's life resumed as normal until, while walking, he again heard a sound and looked up to see the same angel he had seen in the Cave of Hira, seated on a throne between the heavens and the earth. Trembling again, he rushed back to Khadija RA asking to be wrapped up. It was only once he was in her house (Jibril having followed him home rather than speaking to him on the mountain itself) that Jibril revealed the opening verses of Surah al-Muddaththir [74:1-7]. Accounts differ on how long this pause (fatrat al-wahy) lasted: some say two or three years, though this is considered far too long; a narration from Ibn Abbas puts it at 40 days, and Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri described it as around a month, together suggesting roughly a month and ten days. Throughout this period Muhammad ﷺ was troubled and afraid he was hallucinating (he later said, "I was worried for myself") and he would go every day to Jabal al-Nour hoping to see Jibril again, only to find nothing there. Scholars have suggested the pause served to prepare Muhammad ﷺ for what was coming, to let him recover and feel ready for the mission, yet even so, he still trembled with fear when Jibril finally appeared to him again. This very human reaction, rather than any grandiose account of himself as a hero, is held up as evidence against the idea that he was inventing his prophethood: a fraud inventing such a claim would not portray himself this way.

During the early years of peaceful dawah in Makkah, Suwayd ibn al-Samit, a poet of Banu Amr ibn Awf of the Aws, came for hajj and sought out the Prophet ﷺ, having heard of his eloquent speech. Suwayd recited some of his own poetry; the Prophet ﷺ then recited the Qur'an to him. Suwayd was struck by it and said he needed to think it over. He returned to Yathrib and was killed shortly after in the Battle of Bu'ath.

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.

After roughly three years of private dawah, Allah revealed verses commanding the Prophet ﷺ to preach openly. He first went public to his own immediate tribe, the Banu Hashim, inviting over 40 of his uncles and aunts to his own house, where Ali ibn Abi Talib prepared food and soup. The Prophet ﷺ ate first and blessed the food, and the narrator reports all 40 ate and drank their fill as if from a single plate and cup. Sensing that the Prophet ﷺ was about to make something public, Abu Lahab left with an excuse before the meal ended, and others left with him, dispersing the gathering. A few days later the Prophet ﷺ repeated the invitation; this time, before they could finish, he stood and addressed them directly.

A few days or weeks after the private feast to Banu Hashim, the Prophet ﷺ climbed the mountain of Safa, the closest mountain to the Ka'bah, and began calling out to the people. Makkah had only around 1,000 people, so his voice from atop Safa drew all the tribes to gather. He asked them, "What do you know from me: how do you trust me?" They answered that they knew nothing but good from him, and that he was al-Amin, the Trusted One, who had never lied to them. He asked if they would believe him if he warned them an army was about to attack; they said yes, since they had never heard him lie.

During the early days of dawah, the Prophet ﷺ approached a young man of the Khazraj who came close to converting, but was dissuaded by his chieftain, who told him to mind his own business. The young man was later killed in the Battle of Bu'ath, reportedly reciting the tasbih, tahmid, and takbir as he died.

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.

Unable to counter the Qur'an itself, the Quraysh resorted to slander, accusing the Prophet ﷺ variously of being mad [Quran, 68:51], a soothsayer [Quran, 69:42], a magician or one bewitched [Quran, 15:15; 51:52; 17:47], and a poet [Quran, 36:69]. The Qur'an responded to each: to the charge of madness, that he had lived a whole lifetime among them and they knew him well [Quran, 10:16]; and to the charge of poetry, that he had not been taught poetry nor was it fitting for him, attested by how rarely, if ever, he ﷺ recited so much as a full couplet of verse in his life.

As more people began converting to Islam and visitors to Makkah carried word of the Prophet ﷺ's preaching, fellow tribesmen of the Banu Hashim went to Abu Talib, the leader of the Banu Hashim, and accused the Prophet ﷺ of cursing their idols and opposing the ways of their forefathers. Abu Talib gave them gentle words and let the matter go. Weeks later they returned, pressuring him harder, and demanded he either stop the Prophet ﷺ from preaching or hand him over to them to do as they pleased, since by the custom of the Arabs, no tribesman could be harmed without his chief's consent.

Abu Jahal had purchased something from a man but refused to pay him, stalling repeatedly. As a cruel joke, Abu Jahal eventually told the man to go collect the money from Muhammad ﷺ instead, assuming he would never actually go. Not realizing it was a joke, the man went to the Prophet ﷺ and explained that Abu Jahal had told him to collect the debt from him. The Prophet ﷺ walked with him to Abu Jahal's door and demanded the money be returned at once. Abu Jahal, terrified, paid the man without even counting it. Abu Jahal later said he had seen, behind the Prophet ﷺ, a herd of angry camels ready to pounce on him, and this was what frightened him into paying.

The Quraysh demanded to see a miracle with their own eyes before they would believe; that he break open a spring from the ground, produce a garden of gushing rivers, bring down the sky in fragments or Allah and the angels before them, build a house of gold, or ascend into the sky and bring back a book they could read [Quran, 17:90-93]. Allah instructed the Prophet ﷺ to answer only that he was but a human messenger. Allah did show them major miracles (above all the splitting of the moon [Quran, 54:1]) yet they dismissed even that as mere bewitchment of their eyes [Quran, 54:2], for even seeing the angels and the dead speaking to them would not have made them believe [Quran, 6:111]. The Qur'an itself, Allah's greatest miracle, was miracle enough; and Allah does not answer a rejected sign except with a decisive, final punishment for whoever still refuses after seeing it [Quran, 17:59; 6:109].

While the Prophet ﷺ prayed at the Ka'bah, Abu Jahal asked who would bring the entrails of a recently slaughtered camel and throw them on the Prophet ﷺ while he prostrated. Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt did so, and the weight kept the Prophet ﷺ pinned in sajdah while the onlookers laughed. Ibn Mas'ud, who was present but had no one to support him, watched until someone told Fatima, who ran and removed the entrails from her father's back.

Abu Jahal swore by al-Lat and al-Uzza that the next time he saw the Prophet ﷺ prostrating at the Ka'bah, he would put his foot on his neck and throw dust upon him. As the Prophet ﷺ prostrated in public prayer, Abu Jahal came forward to carry this out, but before reaching him he began retreating and pushing away with his hands. When asked what happened, he said he had seen a pit of fire between himself and the Prophet ﷺ, with wings hovering above it.

The Quraysh once begged the Prophet ﷺ to turn the Mountain of Safa into gold. Believing their request sincere, he made du'a to Allah for it. Jibril came to him and said that Safa could be turned to gold, but that if the Quraysh still refused to believe afterward, they would face instant punishment with no second chance. Understanding the implication, the Prophet ﷺ chose not to pursue it.

While the Prophet ﷺ was praying by the Ka'bah, Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt came from behind, removed his own garment, threw it around the Prophet ﷺ's neck, and began to choke him. The onlookers did not intervene until Abu Bakr was told his companion was being tortured; he rushed over and pulled Uqba away.

As tribal protection did not extend to slaves and the mawali, the Quraysh turned from social pressure to outright torture of the weak. Abu Jahal, whom the Prophet ﷺ called the fir'awn (Pharaoh) of this ummah, led the campaign and graded his cruelty by class: converts among the Quraysh nobility faced verbal abuse, those who did business with the Quraysh were boycotted, and slaves and mawali, who had no tribe to protect them, were tortured outright. Ibn Abbas later recounted to his student Sa'id ibn Jubayr that the believers were tortured, starved, and deprived of water so severely that they could not even sit up from the pain. It reached the point that when asked, "Is al-Lat and al-Uzza your god?" they would answer, "Yes", and even that if an insect passed by them and they were told to call it their god, they would do so. This is permissible in Islam when said under torture, so long as the heart remains firm in faith. The first seven to publicly declare Islam (the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, Ammar ibn Yasir, Sumayyah, Suhayb al-Rumi, Bilal ibn Rabah, and al-Miqdad) were rounded up by the Quraysh. Only the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr were shielded, through Abu Talib and Abu Bakr's own tribe respectively, while the rest were tortured with irons and left in the desert sand.

Al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, chief of Banu Makhzum and regarded as the greatest poet in Makkah, managed to listen to the Prophet ﷺ recite the Qur'an uninterrupted for the first time. He was mesmerized, and walked away afterward a changed man, muttering to himself a description of the Qur'an's beauty.

Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Abu Jahal ibn Hisham, and al-Akhnas ibn Shurayq each went out alone, on three separate nights, to secretly listen outside the Prophet ﷺ's house as he prayed and recited the Qur'an at night; each unaware the others were doing the same. Each morning they would meet on the road and privately reproach one another for it, until on the third morning they agreed among themselves never to return. The next morning, al-Akhnas went first to Abu Sufyan and then to Abu Jahal to ask, in confidence, what each made of what they had heard.

After the Prophet ﷺ went weeks or months without receiving new revelation, a woman of the Quraysh, said by some to be the wife of Abu Jahal, told him she saw that his 'shaytan' (Jibril) had abandoned him, since he had nothing new to recite. The Prophet ﷺ was grieved greatly by this, and Allah then revealed Surah al-Duha [Quran, 93:3-5], reassuring him that his Lord had not abandoned nor detested him.

The Quraysh tried to ban the public recitation of the Qur'an: whenever the Prophet ﷺ recited it in front of the Ka'bah, they would shout, make noise, and curse the One who revealed it and the one upon whom it was revealed, so that anyone wishing to listen had to pretend not to be listening. Because of this, the Prophet ﷺ would try to raise his own voice above theirs, until Allah revealed [Quran, 17:110] instructing him to recite in a moderate voice between the two extremes. Some time later, the Companions gathered in Dar al-Arqam and asked who among them would step forward to recite the Qur'an publicly for the first time. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud volunteered, though the others objected that (being of Yemeni origin and without a protecting tribe in Makkah) he had no one to shield him from the Quraysh. He went anyway, stood at the Maqam of Ibrahim, and began reciting Surah al-Rahman in a loud, beautiful voice. People gathered to listen, mesmerized, until one of them realized it was what Muhammad ﷺ claimed had been revealed to him: at which point the crowd set upon Ibn Mas'ud and beat him until he could not finish reciting, having managed barely two pages.

Dimad al-Azdi, a leader among the tribes of Yemen and a medicine man, came to Makkah during the Prophet ﷺ's dawah there. Warned by the Quraysh that the Prophet ﷺ was a magician and a madman, he put cotton in his ears, but reconsidering, decided as an intelligent man to hear him out and, if need be, cure or correct him. He removed the cotton and asked to listen. The Prophet ﷺ recited khutbat al-hajah; its eloquence startled Dimad so much that he asked for it to be repeated, and upon hearing it again declared he had never heard anything so eloquent despite having memorized the poetry of every people, and accepted Islam on the spot.

Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt sarcastically invited the Prophet ﷺ to a meal. The Prophet ﷺ told him he would not eat with him until he testified the shahadah. In his anger, Uqba spat on the Prophet ﷺ's face; the Prophet ﷺ calmly wiped it away.

On returning to Makkah, Abu Salama RA (husband of Umm Salama RA, and a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ through his mother, a sister of Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib) sought protection from his maternal uncle Abu Talib, a Makhzumi. Abu Jahal, also of Banu Makhzum, objected, but Abu Lahab intervened in defense of his brother Abu Talib, forcing Abu Jahal to back down.

As the Quraysh sat cursing and mocking the Prophet ﷺ, Utbah ibn Rabi'ah proposed that someone actually try to negotiate with him, and volunteered himself as their representative. He went to the Prophet ﷺ, who was sitting in front of the Ka'bah, and opened by asking whether he considered himself better than his father Abdullah and grandfather Abdul Muttalib, a loaded question the Prophet ﷺ met with silence. Utbah then laid out the harm his message had caused Makkan society and offered him wealth, kingship, marriage to any woman he chose, or treatment if he believed himself unwell, in exchange for abandoning his call. When Utbah finished, the Prophet ﷺ recited the opening of Surah Fussilat to him. As the recitation reached the warning of a thunderbolt like that which struck Ad and Thamud [Quran, 41:13], Utbah, trembling, put his hand over the Prophet ﷺ's mouth and begged him, by their kinship, to stop. He returned to the Quraysh visibly shaken, urging them to leave the Prophet ﷺ alone, saying he had heard a speech unlike anything before and that Muhammad ﷺ would have a great matter ahead of him, and that if the Arabs dealt with him instead of the Quraysh having to, or if he prevailed, either way the Quraysh's hands would be clean or share in his victory. The Quraysh dismissed this, telling Utbah that Muhammad ﷺ had bewitched him as he had bewitched everyone else.

Having heard Abu Jahal and Abu Lahab warning that Muhammad ﷺ had gone mad, a physician resolved to go and cure him of his affliction. He told the Prophet ﷺ he had heard he was afflicted with madness or possession and offered to treat him. The Prophet ﷺ told him he was not mad, and asked him to listen to his message, reciting the khutbat al-hajah. The man, struck by its beauty, asked him to repeat it, then (similar to the later encounter of Amr ibn Abasah al-Sulami) asked a series of questions, and upon receiving convincing answers, embraced Islam.

Abu Jahal would stand at the edges of Makkah warning arriving pilgrims of a madman in town, and Abu Lahab did the same regarding his own nephew, warning visitors that Muhammad ﷺ had gone mad and was a magician who would captivate anyone who listened to him, and urging them to cover their ears and turn away if they saw him.

As conversions increased and Makkan society grew visibly divided, the Quraysh proposed a compromise to the Prophet ﷺ: that one day all of them would worship as Muslims, and the next day all of them would worship the idols together. Allah revealed Surah al-Kafirun [Quran, 109:1-6] in response, rejecting any compromise in tawhid.

Wanting to expose the Prophet ﷺ as a false prophet, the Quraysh sent emissaries to the Jews of Yathrib (Madinah) asking for a question only a true prophet could answer. The Jews told them to ask about what happened to the family of Ya'qub (Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph). When the Quraysh put the question to the Prophet ﷺ, Allah revealed the whole of Surah Yusuf in response, detailing the story of Ya'qub's family in a way the Arabs had no prior knowledge of.

The Quraysh again sent a delegation to the Jews of Yathrib for tougher trick questions with which to test the Prophet ﷺ: the story of young men who slept for a long time in a cave, the account of a great traveler who journeyed from the east to the west, and the nature of the ruh (spirit/soul), a deliberate trick question. The Prophet ﷺ promised an answer the next day without saying insha'Allah, and revelation was delayed two weeks while the Quraysh mocked him, until Allah revealed Surah al-Kahf answering all three: the Companions of the Cave, Dhu al-Qarnayn, and the declaration that knowledge of the ruh belongs to Allah alone.

Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, an Arab slave and swordsmith owned by Ummi Anmar, was set upon by a gang of Quraysh at his workplace when his conversion to Islam was discovered, beaten until he was bloodied and bruised. Ummi Anmar herself later burned his back with the very iron he used to forge swords. The Prophet ﷺ, seeing Khabbab tortured by fire, prayed, "O Allah, help Khabbab." Ummi Anmar soon fell gravely ill and died after her doctors' only prescribed treatment, cauterization, failed to save her.

After being tortured into uttering words of disbelief and released as the youngest of his family, Ammar ibn Yasir went to the Prophet ﷺ at Dar al-Arqam in remorse. The Prophet ﷺ reassured him that what mattered was the faith in his heart, and Allah revealed a verse in Surah al-Nahl clarifying that one who is compelled into disbelief while the heart remains firm in faith is not held responsible.

While Quraysh leaders including Abu Jahal and Umayyah ibn Khalaf were talking with the Prophet ﷺ and appeared to be softening toward Islam, Ammar, Suhayb, and Bilal passed by. Abu Jahal seized the moment to demand the Prophet ﷺ expel these poor, meager believers if he wanted the Quraysh nobility to accept his message. Allah SWT responded by revealing verses in Surah al-An'am warning that to reject them would be to join the wrongdoers.

Worn down by the severity of the torture, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt came to the Prophet ﷺ, who was sitting in the shade of the Ka'bah with his back against it, and asked how much longer the believers would have to endure such suffering. The Prophet ﷺ responded that believers before them had been tortured far worse (combed with iron until their flesh came off, sawn in half), and still did not abandon their faith, and promised that Allah would perfect this religion until a lone traveler could cross from Sana'a to Hadhramaut fearing nothing but Allah.

Ibn Mas'ud RA reported that once they heard the food the Prophet ﷺ had put into his mouth making tasbih (glorifying Allah).

During the years of revelation, Jibril would come to Muhammad ﷺ in Khadija RA's household, a privilege given to no other wife of the Prophet ﷺ. On one occasion, the Prophet ﷺ told Khadija RA that Jibril sent her Allah's salam and his own salam, along with glad tidings of a house in Jannah with no noise or struggling.

Yasir, his wife Sumayyah, and their sons Abdullah and Ammar were tortured together in front of one another. Yasir was killed first: accounts differ on the exact manner, some saying he was dragged by rope, others that he was torn apart by horses. Sumayyah, further emboldened in her faith, rebuked Abu Jahal, who then killed her with a spear thrust, making her and Yasir the first martyrs of Islam. Abdullah was thrown into a ditch, and Ammar, likely no older than fifteen, was tortured until he uttered words of disbelief and was released as the youngest of the family.

Ubay ibn Khalaf, a fellow Qurayshi, mocked and taunted the Prophet ﷺ more than most, telling him he would kill him one day and boasting that he was fattening a special horse to ride when he did it.

When the whole of Quraysh (not just the Banu Hashim) heard that Abu Talib had refused their first demand, the entire tribal delegation returned to him with a proposal: they would give him Umara ibn al-Walid, son of al-Walid ibn al-Mughira and the most noble young man among them, to raise as his own son, in exchange for Abu Talib handing over the Prophet ﷺ to them to do as they pleased.

Sa'id ibn Zayd RA, son of Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl and one of the Ashara Mubasharun, once asked the Prophet ﷺ what his father's fate would be in the akhirah, given that he had died before Islam yet had never worshiped an idol. The Prophet ﷺ told him his father would be resurrected on the Day of Judgment as his own ummah. Later, on returning from al-Isra' wal-Mi'raj, the Prophet ﷺ told Sa'id that he had seen his father in Jannah, blessed with not one but two Gardens.

In Ramadan of the 5th year of the dawah, the Prophet ﷺ recited Surah al-Najm in full before a mixed gathering of Muslims and the Quraysh in Makkah. Surah al-Najm builds toward a powerful conclusion, and its momentum affected the entire congregation; when the Prophet ﷺ reached the final verse, "So prostrate to Allah and worship [Him]" [53:62], the Muslims fell into sajdah, and the Quraysh were so moved that they fell into sajdah with them; Muslim and non-Muslim united behind the Prophet ﷺ for the first time. The only one who did not join was al-Walid ibn al-Mughira (in another narration, Umayyah ibn Khalaf), who instead took a handful of sand, put it to his head, and said it was sufficient for him. This account is narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari from Ibn Abbas RA and is the version scholars broadly accept as authentic. Later, weaker reports (found only in tertiary works such as al-Tabari's Tafsir and al-Wahidi's Asbab al-Nuzul, never in the six books of hadith or in the biographies of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham) add that shaytan interjected two verses praising the idols al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat ("these are the exalted cranes, whose intercession is to be hoped for") between verses 20 and 21 of the surah. In one such report, the interjection was heard only by the Quraysh, not the Muslims; in a further, more extreme report, the Prophet ﷺ himself is said to have mistaken shaytan's recitation for that of Jibril AS and recited the words himself, before Jibril AS returned and told him the words were not his. Western orientalists (e.g. Sir William Muir) later coined the term "satanic verses" for this story; Islamic sources call it Qissat al-Gharaniq (the Story of the Cranes/Gharaniq).

The Quraysh called a meeting with the Prophet ﷺ at Abu Talib's house and asked directly what they could do so that he would abandon his message. The Prophet ﷺ told them he wanted only one word from them. Thinking he meant a single condition, they eagerly offered to give him ten instead of one, until he told them the word he wanted was the kalimah, 'la ilaha illallah.' Taken aback, they said to one another that he had made their many objects of worship into one, calling it something unheard of [Quran, 38:5].

Makkah held no more than a few hundred people, and the second emigration had taken more than eighty of them to Abyssinia: a tenth of the city, and a humiliation for the guardians of the Haram that their own people were fleeing them. The Quraysh sent two men to bring them back, Amr ibn al-As and a companion the sources name differently, Abdullah ibn Abi Rabi'ah or Umara ibn al-Walid, loaded with gifts of fine leather. Umm Salama, who was there, tells the story. The Muslims had been received with every kindness by the Najashi, As'hama ibn Abjar, and never heard a hard word from his people. The two envoys went first to every one of his ministers with a gift and a request: there was a band of renegade youths in the country whom their elders wanted back, and when the king was asked, the ministers should remember who had given them presents. Next day they put it to the king himself, with his gifts before him: some foolish young men had abandoned the religion of their fathers without adopting his, and the leaders of their people asked that they be handed over. The ministers rose as one and said the Quraysh spoke sense. The Najashi said no: by God, he would not surrender people who had chosen his land and his protection over every other until he had heard them. He sent for the Muslims. They were afraid, and Ja'far ibn Abi Talib told them they would say only the truth, and only what the Prophet ﷺ had taught them. In the hall, before the king and his bishops, the Quraysh envoys prostrated; Ja'far walked in upright, and when a minister demanded to know why, said that the Muslims prostrated to no one but their Lord. Asked what this religion was that was neither the Christianity of the king nor the faith of their fathers, Ja'far gave the speech the Seerah has kept: they had been a people of ignorance, worshipping idols, eating carrion, committing obscenity, cutting the ties of kinship, the strong devouring the weak, until Allah sent them a Messenger ﷺ from among themselves whose lineage and truthfulness they knew, who called them to one God, to honesty, to kinship and good neighbourliness, to prayer, fasting and charity, and away from blood and orphans' wealth and slander; they had believed him, and for that their people had tortured them and tried to force them back, and so they had come to the king's land and chosen him over every other ruler, trusting they would not be wronged there. Had they anything of what this Prophet ﷺ said had been revealed to him? Ja'far recited the opening of Surah Maryam, the story of the virgin and her son, in the hall of the palace, and the bishops wept without understanding the words, and when it was translated the Najashi wept too and swore that this and what Moses and Jesus brought had sprung from one lamp. He told the envoys to go: he would never hand these people over. Amr told his companion on the way out that he had one trick left, and was told to leave it, they were kin after all; but Amr came back next morning and told the king that these people said something monstrous about Jesus. The Muslims were summoned again and were terrified, and again Ja'far said they would say what the Prophet ﷺ had said and nothing else: that Jesus was the servant of Allah and His Messenger and His Word, cast to the virgin Maryam. He did not attack the Trinity; he stated the truth and let it stand. The Najashi picked up a twig from the floor and said that what they had said did not differ from what Jesus had said by that much. It emerged in later years that the king himself did not hold the doctrine his priests held, and Ja'far's words matched what he quietly believed. He sent the envoys away a second time and this time gave them back their gifts. Umm Salama said the two of them left humbled and disgraced, and the Muslims stayed in the best of neighbourhoods until they came home to the Prophet ﷺ at Khaybar. The king's own people muttered that he had turned heretic, and he answered them with a parchment hidden in his robe.

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.

Abu Jahal cursed the Prophet ﷺ and his ancestors at length in public. When Hamzah, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle and a leading archer of Makkah, returned from an expedition, the women of Banu Hashim taunted him for not defending his nephew's honor. Enraged on learning it had happened publicly, Hamzah struck Abu Jahal across the face with his bow at the Ka'bah and declared himself a follower of the Prophet ﷺ's religion, though he had not planned to say so. After a night of anguished du'a, he went to the Prophet ﷺ the next morning, was convinced by him, and testified to the truth.

The culmination of a civil war between the Aws and the Khazraj of Yathrib that had lasted over a decade, fought over land, watering, and grazing rights. The battle killed the bulk of the senior leaders of both tribes, leaving mostly a younger generation weary of a decade of bloodshed. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul was the one senior leader left standing after the battle.

In the 7th year of the dawah, the Qurayshi tribes agreed to kill the Prophet ﷺ but could not overcome Banu Hashim's protection. They offered Abu Talib blood money and pressure to hand the Prophet ﷺ over, threatening to cut off all trade, marriage, and social relations with Banu Hashim & Banu al-Muttalib if he refused. Abu Talib refused, and the two cousin tribes withdrew to the Valley of Abu Talib outside Makkah, enduring severe hardship, eating leaves and shrubbery, for about 2-3 years, sustained in secret by sympathizers such as Mut'im ibn Adi and Hakim ibn Hizam. The Quraysh wrote and hung a boycott treaty inside the Ka'bah. The Prophet ﷺ continued to give dawah during the hajj seasons throughout. The boycott ended after the Prophet ﷺ made du'a for a famine on the Quraysh, a group of sympathetic Quraysh led by Hisham ibn Amr and Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayya publicly turned opinion against Abu Jahal at a gathering, and finally the Prophet ﷺ informed Abu Talib that the treaty's text had been eaten away by termites except for the phrase "In the name of Allah", which proved true when the Quraysh opened it, nullifying the pact.

Tufayl ibn Amr al-Dawsi, chieftain of the tribe of Daws in Yemen, came to Makkah to perform umrah while the Prophet ﷺ was still being persecuted. The Quraysh warned arriving pilgrims that "a magician" had arisen among them who could break the bonds between father and son, so Tufayl stuffed his ears with cotton whenever he went near the Ka'bah to avoid hearing him ﷺ. One day he still heard the Prophet ﷺ reciting Qur'an in prayer despite the cotton, and it moved him so much that he reproached himself for refusing even to listen, removed the cotton, and asked the Prophet ﷺ to let him hear what he had to say. The Prophet ﷺ sat him down, invited him to Islam and recited Qur'an to him, by some accounts just the last three surahs, and Tufayl embraced Islam on the spot, asking the Prophet ﷺ to make du'a for him and his people. The Prophet ﷺ made du'a for the guidance of Daws and told Tufayl to be gentle with them. Tufayl returned home and, being beloved by his tribe, saw his father, mother and wife accept Islam the same day; over time more than 80 families of Daws embraced Islam at his hands. While still in Makkah, Tufayl offered the Prophet ﷺ refuge in his tribe's fortress in Yemen, but the Prophet ﷺ declined, since Allah had willed his emigration to Yathrib (Madinah) instead.

In the 8th-9th year of the dawah, a lady neighbor warned Fatima of a Quraysh plan to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ. Told of the plot, the Prophet ﷺ reassured Fatima that Allah would protect him, performed wudu, made du'a, and walked into the Ka'bah area where the armed Quraysh were gathered. None of them could move; they became paralyzed. The Prophet ﷺ threw sand toward their faces and cursed them.

While presenting himself to the tribes at Mina, the Prophet ﷺ approached the tent of Rabi'ah ibn Abbad's father, inviting him to worship Allah alone, abandon idolatry, and accept him into his tribe. Abu Lahab followed behind and, at each tent the Prophet ﷺ left, spoke against him, urging the people to keep to the religion of their forefathers.

The Prophet ﷺ approached a chieftain of Kindah, once a prestigious tribal kingdom, at Mina. The chieftain listened attentively and brought the Prophet ﷺ before the other chiefs, but wanted assurance that Kindah would be given rule after the Prophet ﷺ, revealing that his interest was political rather than a matter of genuine faith.

After the death of Khadija bint Khuwaylid RA, the Prophet ﷺ was not seen smiling for many months. Khawlah bint Hakim RA suggested he remarry, offering Sawda bint Zam'a RA (an elderly widow, recently disowned by her family after her conversion and left with no one to care for her following the death of her husband al-Sukran ibn Amr) or Aisha bint Abi Bakr RA (a young girl). The Prophet ﷺ married both within a month of each other, marrying Sawda RA out of compassion for her circumstances, probably in Shawwal of the 10th year of the dawah, about six months after Khadija RA's death. She was the eldest of all his wives.

Khadija RA passed away on the 10th of Ramadan, less than 40 days after the death of Abu Talib, in the same Year of Sorrow (Aam al-Huzn). The command to pray janazah had not yet been revealed, so no funeral prayer was performed over her; the Prophet ﷺ himself placed her in the grave.

After Abu Talib's death removed the Prophet ﷺ's protection and Mut'im ibn Adi's guardianship proved precarious, the Prophet ﷺ realized he needed to leave Makkah. Having already failed at Ta'if, he began presenting himself to the tribes gathered for hajj at Mina, asking them to take him in and transfer their allegiance to him, a known but rare practice among the Arabs. He approached numerous tribes, including Kindah, Banu Kalb, Banu Hanifa, and Banu Amir ibn Sa'sa'a, most of whom rejected the message, some more harshly than others.

Ten men of the Khazraj and two of the Aws (twelve pilgrims in all, the largest group of converts yet from outside Makkah) met the Prophet ﷺ in the Plains of Aqaba and formally accepted Islam, giving their oath by placing their hands in his. It was later called the Oath of the Women (Bay'at al-Nisa) because, as with women converts, the Prophet ﷺ asked of them only theology and morality: to worship Allah alone, avoid immorality and theft, not kill their children, and obey him ﷺ in good matters, with no political or military conditions. There was no need for secrecy, since it was simply pilgrims conversing with the Prophet ﷺ. It was also the first time the historically hostile Aws and Khazraj came together on common ground.

The mob of Ta'if drove the Prophet ﷺ and Zayd ibn Harithah out of the city with stones as far as Qarn al-Manazil, his sandals soaked in blood and Zayd cut from head to foot shielding him; he said later that he did not come to himself until he reached that place. There he found shade under a tree by a garden wall and, not knowing whose garden it was, made the prayer that Ibn Ishaq preserved and that scholars accept without a chain because no heart but a prophet's could have made it: O Allah, to You I complain of my weakness, my lack of means and my lowness before men; You are the most merciful of the merciful, the Lord of the weak and my Lord; to whom do You leave me, to a stranger who scowls at me, or to an enemy You have given power over me? If You are not angry with me I do not care, though Your protection is easier for me; I seek refuge in the light of Your face, by which the darkness is lit and the affairs of this world and the next set right, from Your anger descending on me or Your displeasure falling on me; Yours is the right to reproach until You are content; and there is no power or might but through You. It is a complaint to Allah, not against Him, and its fear is not of the stones but of having earned His anger. The garden belonged to Utbah and Shaybah, the sons of Rabi'ah, distant cousins on his father's side, who had watched him stoned out of the city and felt for him, and felt too the old tribal shame that Ta'if should do this to a man of Quraysh. They sent Addas, their servant, a Christian from Nineveh, to him with a bowl of grapes: as though the answer to the prayer came before it was finished. The Prophet ﷺ said bismillah and began to eat, and Addas asked what that phrase was, for no Arab of those parts said it. Something my Lord taught me, the Prophet ﷺ said; and where are you from, Addas? From Nineveh. The city of Yunus ibn Matta? Addas was astonished that anyone in that land had heard of Yunus. How could I not know him, the Prophet ﷺ said; he is my brother, he was a prophet and I am a prophet. Addas fell to kissing his head and hands and feet, as Christians did their priests, and believed. His masters, watching, told him he was a fool: the man had turned him from his religion, and their religion was better than his. There is no one on earth better than he, Addas answered; he has told me things only a prophet could know. Five years later they tried to drag him to Badr to fight against the Prophet ﷺ and he refused them, saying that the mountains themselves could not harm that man; and both his masters died there. Then, as al-Bukhari has it from the Prophet ﷺ's own account, he looked up at Qarn al-Manazil and saw a cloud shading him, and in it Jibril, who said: Muhammad ﷺ, your Lord has heard what your people said to you and how they answered you, and He has sent you the angel of the mountains to command as you please. And the angel of the mountains greeted him and said: if you wish, I will bring the two mountains together on them. No, he said; I hope rather that Allah will bring out of their loins people who worship Him alone and associate nothing with Him. He rested there, and on the road home camped at Nakhla, where the jinn heard him recite.

Having left Makkah for Ta'if, the Prophet ﷺ found himself unable to freely re-enter the city. Zayd ibn Harithah RA asked him how they would do so; the Prophet ﷺ replied that Allah would make a way. He ﷺ then sent requests for protection (jiwar) to several Quraysh notables. Al-Akhnas ibn Shurayq declined, citing his tribe's weak position; Suhayl ibn Amr declined on behalf of Banu Amir ibn Lu'ayy, saying they had never given protection to anyone of Banu Ka'b ibn Lu'ayy. Mut'im ibn Adi, chief of Banu Nawfal ibn Abd Manaf, agreed, and sent his four armed sons to escort the Prophet ﷺ back into Makkah. Mut'im then received him ﷺ at the Ka'bah and, after the Prophet ﷺ performed tawaf under armed guard, stood and publicly announced before the Quraysh, including Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, that he had given Muhammad ﷺ his protection, as a civic grant, not as a follower of the message.

Accompanied by Abu Bakr, who was known for his knowledge of tribal genealogy, the Prophet ﷺ approached the Banu Shayban ibn Tha'laba at Mina, inviting them to worship Allah alone and to take him into their tribe. Their elder Hani' ibn Qabisah praised the message but counseled patience before committing, and their military chief al-Muthanna ibn Harithah explained that the tribe's treaty of neutrality with the Persian emperor Kisra prevented them from committing fully, though they had no such constraint regarding the Arabs.

While making his rounds at Mina, the Prophet ﷺ came across a small group of six men from the Khazraj tribe of Yathrib, a city of three main groups, the Arab tribes of al-Aws and al-Khazraj, and the Jewish tribes of al-Nadir, Qaynuqa, and Qurayza. The Khazraj and Aws were the only Arabs in the region with exposure to a monotheistic religion, through their Jewish neighbors, who had long boasted of an awaited prophet and taunted the Arabs that they would be crushed once he came. The Prophet ﷺ asked the six who they were; on learning they were of the Khazraj, neighbors of the Jews, he sat with them and explained tawhid, warned against shirk, and recited the Qur'an, giving them the same full attention and zeal he gave the largest tribes even though they were only six people without a tent. All six accepted Islam and returned to Yathrib, spreading word of the message, among them Uqba ibn Amir al-Juhani, Jabir ibn Abdillah, and As'ad ibn Zurarah.

A few weeks after the deaths of Khadijah RA and Abu Talib, and after Abu Lahab retracted the protection he had briefly offered, the Prophet ﷺ and Zayd ibn Harithah RA walked on foot to Ta'if, the nearest major city to Makkah, to seek support and a new base for the message. The Prophet ﷺ presented Islam privately to the three chieftains of Thaqif who jointly led the city (Abd Yalil, Mas'ud, and Habib, the sons of Amr) and each mocked him ﷺ in turn. He ﷺ then spent about a week preaching to the common people in Ta'if's marketplace; no one responded except one person who showed interest. When this reached the Thaqif leaders, they grew alarmed and sent a mob to stone the Prophet ﷺ and Zayd out of the city, pelting them until his ﷺ sandals were soaked in blood and Zayd was injured head to toe, finally letting them go at Qarn al-Manazil / Qarn al-Tha'alib outside the city.

On the way back to Makkah after the Incident of Ta'if, the Prophet ﷺ camped in the Valley of Nakhla and, as was his habit, prayed tahajjud despite his unhealed wounds. A group of jinn passed by, listened quietly to his Qur'an recitation, believed, and returned to their people as warners (Qur'an 46:29-31). Abdullah ibn Mas'ud RA later recounted, in answer to his student Alqama ibn Qays's question, how the Prophet ﷺ went missing one night, was searched for in fear, and returned after Fajr having gone out to meet a delegation of jinn, reciting Qur'an to them and afterward giving them bones and animal droppings as provisions for themselves and their animals.

On his deathbed, the Prophet ﷺ begged his uncle Abu Talib to say "la ilaha illallah" so that he could argue on his behalf before Allah. Abu Talib, who knew in his heart the Message was true, was about to say it, but Abu Jahal, who was present, challenged him: "Are you going to leave the religion of your father?" Abu Talib fell silent, and died without having said the kalimah.

While giving da'wah to a leader of Banu Amir ibn Sa'sa'ah, the Prophet ﷺ offered to show him a miracle. At his invitation, the chieftain called out to a small date palm in a nearby grove to come to him, and the sahabi narrating the account says the tree crawled all the way until it stood before him. The Prophet ﷺ then told it to go back, and it returned to its place. The chieftain accepted Islam on the spot.

After Abu Talib's death, the Quraysh escalated their persecution of the Prophet ﷺ far beyond what they had dared while he was alive; hostility that had long been held back out of respect for Abu Talib was now openly displayed. Abu Lahab, as the seniormost pagan Hashimi still living, took over leadership of the Banu Hashim and, surprisingly, extended his own protection to the Prophet ﷺ, not out of love for him, but from a chieftain's sense of duty to guard his own clan.

After the Second Covenant of Aqaba, the Prophet ﷺ announced to the Muslims that Allah had shown him, in a dream, the land they would emigrate to: a land of date palms between two volcanic plains. He was at first uncertain which city was meant, and speculated it might be Khaybar, or a land in Yemen, since both had large numbers of date palms, but neither has volcanic mountains around it as Yathrib does. He was then told clearly that it was Yathrib, and gave the Muslims permission to emigrate. They began emigrating in secret, by ones and twos, since the Quraysh would not have allowed it openly.

The Prophet ﷺ rode al-Buraq back from Jerusalem, passing three Quraysh caravans on the road, in one of which he recognised a man he knew, from another of which he drank from the public water-skin, and in the third of which he saw men searching for a strayed camel; then he slept, and woke in the Haram of Makkah where the night had begun. He told the rest himself. He woke anxious about how he was going to tell his people what had happened to him, and while he sat there, worried and downcast, Allah willed that Abu Jahl should pass and see him so. Abu Jahl asked, with his usual edge, whether anything had happened. Something had: he had been taken last night from there to Jerusalem. And you are here among us now? Abu Jahl did not know, the Prophet ﷺ said afterwards, whether to mock him on the spot or to wait, in case he took it back once others were listening, so he asked whether the Prophet ﷺ would repeat it in front of the Quraysh. He would. Abu Jahl shouted the city together, and Makkah being small and Abu Jahl a chief, everyone came. Tell them what you told me. Last night I went to Bayt al-Maqdis and prayed in the farthest mosque. He said nothing of the ascent to the heavens; that was for the Muslims, later. The crowd did not know what to do with it. Some clapped, some put their hands to their heads, some laughed; the man had never been known to lie. Then one of them who had been to Jerusalem asked him to describe it, for everyone knew he had never been there. He began, and as they pressed him on details he could not recall he was, in his own words, more distressed than he had ever been, until he saw Bayt al-Maqdis raised up before his eyes above the house of Aqil ibn Abi Talib, the house he had grown up in, and there was no question they asked that he did not see the answer to; and the man who knew the city said that in every detail he was right. Then, Ibn Hisham says, he gave them signs of his own: one caravan would be back soon, being nearest; a second had lost a camel they could ask about; from the third he had drunk from a large water-skin. Abu Jahl said that if he had seen the first where he claimed, it should be entering Makkah about now, and while they argued word came that it was; he went to look, found it as described, and came back to say it was plain sorcery. Ibn Hisham also has a line, without a chain of narration, that some Muslims left the religion when they heard, which the scholars set aside, since no one is known to have left Islam in the Makkan years, and Abu Sufyan told Heraclius as much. Before the Prophet ﷺ could reach him, a Qurashi ran to Abu Bakr with the news: his companion claimed to have gone to Jerusalem and back, two months' journey, in a night. If he said it, Abu Bakr answered, then it is true; and pressed on whether he really believed such a thing, said that he believed him in something stranger still, that revelation came to him from above the seven heavens in a moment. From that day he was called al-Siddiq, the one who believes the truth without pause.

Al-Isra wal-Mi'raj is a single night in two legs: al-isra, the night journey from al-Masjid al-Haram in Makkah to al-Masjid al-Aqsa in Bayt al-Maqdis, and al-mi'raj, the ascent from there through the seven heavens. It came after the Year of Sorrow and the stoning at Ta'if, the lowest point of the Prophet ﷺ's life, and the scholars read it as the ease Allah promises after every hardship: a gift given to him alone, which the rest of us are asked only to believe. Allah refers to it twice, in the opening verse of Surah al-Isra, where He calls the Prophet ﷺ "His servant", the highest title in the Qur'an, and in Surah al-Najm, which says the heart did not lie about what it saw. Ibn Ishaq and most early writers place it a year before the Hijrah; a report that Khadija RA died before the prayer was made obligatory would rule out anything earlier than the last years in Makkah. No month is known from any Companion, which the Companions themselves treated as unimportant. More of them narrate this one night than the rest of the Makkan period put together, which is also why storytellers padded it with legends the scholars had to sift out, and why the exact order of some scenes cannot be recovered. The Prophet ﷺ said that while he lay in the Hijr beside the Ka'bah (another authentic report has the roof of his house open, and Ibn Hajar joins the two: Jibril AS came to the house and led him first to the Hijr) Jibril opened his chest, washed his heart in a golden basin filled with Zamzam, or with faith, and closed it again, the second such opening after the one in his childhood, this time to strengthen him for what no one else could have seen and kept his mind. Then Jibril brought al-Buraq, a white beast between a mule and a donkey in size whose every stride reached as far as its eye could see; when it shied, Jibril rebuked it, for no rider more honoured before Allah had ever mounted it. On the way the Prophet ﷺ passed the grave of Musa AS and saw him standing in prayer. At Bayt al-Maqdis, where in that age the site of the Temple lay in ruins and was used as a refuse tip under Roman rule, he found the sanctuary standing as it had been, tied al-Buraq to the ring the prophets used, went in and prayed two rak'at, and found the prophets gathered with him: Musa, tall and dark like a man of Shanu'ah; Isa AS, of middle height and reddish in complexion, as if he had just come out of a bath; and Ibrahim AS, of whom he said that no one resembled him more than the Prophet ﷺ himself. When the prayer was called he was set before them all as imam, the leader of the leaders of every nation, as he later said of himself without boasting, the master of the children of Adam on the Day of Judgment. Then, either here or in the heavens, since the reports differ, Jibril held out two vessels, milk and wine, and told him to choose for his community. He chose the milk, and Jibril told him he had chosen the fitrah: the pure thing that nourishes over the corrupted thing that corrupts. Jibril then rose with him and asked leave at the gate of the lowest heaven. Who is it? Jibril. Is anyone with you? Muhammad ﷺ. Has he been sent for? Yes. The gate opened, and the same exchange was repeated at each of the seven. In the first heaven stood Adam AS, who greeted him as a righteous son and a righteous prophet, the souls of his descendants on his right and his left, and he smiled at the one and wept at the other. In the second, Yahya AS and Isa; in the third Yusuf AS, who had been given half of all beauty; in the fourth Idris AS; in the fifth Harun AS; in the sixth Musa; in the seventh Ibrahim, sitting with his back against al-Bayt al-Ma'mur, the House in the heavens, which later reports place directly above the Ka'bah, into which seventy thousand angels enter every day never to return. Each greeted him as a brother and a prophet; only Adam and Ibrahim called him son. When he had passed, Musa wept, and explained that he wept because a young man sent after him would bring more of his people into Paradise than Musa had. Somewhere on this night the Prophet ﷺ sat with Ibrahim, Musa and Isa as they spoke of the Hour, and only Isa knew anything of it: that he would return, kill the Dajjal, and see Gog and Magog break out and die at his prayer, after which the Hour would be as near as a woman in labour. Ibrahim sent his greeting to this community and told them that Paradise is fertile soil waiting to be planted with subhan Allah, alhamdulillah, la ilaha illa Allah and Allahu akbar. He met Malik, the keeper of Hell, who greeted him first; a report not found in the main collections adds that Malik never smiled, and that had he smiled for anyone, it would have been for him. Above the seventh heaven stood Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary, its fruits like the great jars of Hajar and its leaves like elephants' ears, its trunk in the sixth heaven and its crown at the end of the seventh, where everything that rises from the earth ends and everything that descends begins. It was covered, as the Qur'an says, with what covered it: colours he could not name, changing as he looked, and golden moths. At its foot ran four rivers, two hidden, the rivers of Paradise, and two seen, the Nile and the Euphrates. Here he saw Jibril in the form Allah created him, with six hundred wings as Ibn Mas'ud RA reports, one of only two times he saw him so; a later report adds pearls and coral falling from his feathers. Some scholars count these three, the Tree, the House and the angel, among the greatest signs of his Lord that the Qur'an says he saw. Then, alone, he was raised higher, to a place where he could hear the scratching of the Pen that writes what is to be, and Allah spoke to him. What passed between them is not recorded, and the scholars take the silence as deliberate; three things came out of it: the closing verses of Surah al-Baqarah, which Ali RA described as from a treasure beneath the Throne, a promise that whoever of his people died without associating anything with Allah would be forgiven, and the command to pray fifty times a day. Whether he saw Allah was argued from the first generation: Ibn Abbas RA said he did, Aisha RA said that whoever claims it has lied against Allah, since eyes cannot grasp Him, and when Abu Dharr RA asked the Prophet ﷺ himself, he answered: "Light; how could I see Him?" Elsewhere he described Allah's veil as light which, were it lifted, would burn away everything His face reached. On the way down Musa asked what his Lord had enjoined on his people, and told him to go back and ask for less, for he had tried the Children of Israel and they could not bear it; the Prophet ﷺ glanced at Jibril, who nodded, and went back. Up and down he went, five or ten prayers fewer each time, until he came down with five and could not bring himself to ask again. "I have gone back to my Lord until I am ashamed; I am content." And a voice called: My command is settled and I have lightened the burden on My servants; five, and they shall be counted as fifty. He then saw Paradise, tents of hollowed pearl on soil of musk, and the punishments of the Fire, most of them in a report Ibn Ishaq gives from Abu Sa'id al-Khudri RA: men with camels' lips swallowing coals for devouring orphans' wealth, others tearing their own faces with copper nails for backbiting, others leaving good meat to eat rotten for adultery, others swollen and trampled for usury, others cutting their tongues with shears of fire for preaching what they did not practise; and the Dajjal, one-eyed, his eye like a swollen grape. In a report whose fuller form was not found in the collections checked, he caught a beautiful fragrance and asked what it was, and Jibril told him of the hairdresser of Pharaoh's daughter, who let slip "bismillah" over a dropped comb, refused to call Pharaoh her lord, and went into the cauldron with her children after her nursing infant spoke to tell her that the pain of this world was nothing beside the next. He rode al-Buraq back to Makkah, passing three Quraysh caravans on the road, from one of which he drank, and lay down again in the Haram before dawn. He woke, in his own words, anxious about how he would tell his people, and by one report it was Abu Jahl who found him first and called the Quraysh together to hear it. They asked him to describe a city he had never seen; Bayt al-Maqdis rose up before his eyes above the house of Aqil so that he answered every question (al-Bukhari), and the caravans arrived when he said they would (Ibn Ishaq). Abu Jahl is said to have called it sorcery, and Abu Bakr RA, told of it before the Prophet ﷺ could tell him, said that if he had said it then it was true, and that he believed him in something stranger still, that revelation came to him from the heavens; he was called al-Siddiq from that day. Most scholars hold that the journey was made awake and in the body, arguing that a dream of Jerusalem would have been no miracle, nor would the Quraysh have jeered at one, nor would he have needed a mount, nor drunk on the way; Ibn Ishaq, however, reports Aisha RA as saying that his body remained where it was, and Mu'awiyah RA as calling it a true vision, and holds that it was true either way. Some scholars see in a journey that begins and ends in Makkah the first hint of the qibla turning back from Jerusalem to the Ka'bah after the Hijrah.

Around 75 Muslims from Yathrib (the great majority of a much larger group who had performed hajj) came in secret, one by one in the last third of the night, to a valley behind Aqaba and met the Prophet ﷺ, who came together with his still-pagan uncle al-Abbas. Al-Abbas spoke first on the Prophet ﷺ's behalf, cautious of these unfamiliar young men, emphasizing the Prophet ﷺ's honor and protection among his own people. The Prophet ﷺ then set out his condition: bay'ah in return for protection, that they defend him like their own family. Al-Bara ibn Ma'rur RA accepted at once; Abu al-Haytham ibn al-Tayhan RA asked whether the Prophet ﷺ would abandon them for Makkah once their treaties with the Jews were broken by this new allegiance, and the Prophet ﷺ replied, "No. My blood is your blood, and my destruction is your destruction." The Prophet ﷺ then set out the full terms: hearing and obeying in ease and hardship, spending in Allah's way, commanding good and forbidding evil, speaking the truth, and defending him as they would their own, in exchange for Paradise. Before anyone could take his hand, As'ad ibn Zurarah held it back and warned the people plainly of the cost: that accepting the Prophet ﷺ meant war with Quraysh and the loss of their own sons and fathers. All the same, all 72 men present gave the bay'ah, and two women gave their oath verbally (the Prophet ﷺ never took the hand of a woman not related to him); each was promised Jannah in return.

Abu Bakr RA, whom the Prophet ﷺ visited daily, prepared a camel and sought the Prophet ﷺ's permission to make Hijrah once the Muslims generally had been told to emigrate. The Prophet ﷺ asked him to wait, hoping Allah would grant permission for them to go together. Abu Bakr RA then prepared two camels, feeding and conditioning them for what he later recalled (rounding up) as about four months.

In the heat of midday, the Prophet ﷺ came to Abu Bakr RA's house with his turban wrapped around his face, unrecognizable until close, alarming the household who feared some grave emergency. He confirmed that Allah had given him permission to emigrate and that Abu Bakr RA would accompany him. Abu Bakr RA wept for joy, gave the Prophet ﷺ one of his two prepared camels (only after the Prophet ﷺ insisted on paying for it), and the household hurried to ready provisions and money for the journey.

When Suhayb al-Rumi sought to emigrate to Madinah, a band of Quraysh intercepted him on the outskirts of Makkah. He faced them with his bow and sword, vowing that none would touch him until he had exhausted his arrows and broken his blade upon their bones, until they instead demanded his wealth in exchange for letting him pass. Suhayb surrendered all his money, his camel, and even revealed where the rest of his wealth was buried, and completed the journey to Madinah on foot, arriving at Quba destitute and crawling with exhaustion. The Prophet ﷺ wiped the dust from him, fed him, and told him, "O Abu Yahya, your business transaction has been the most successful," referencing a verse revealed about him in Surah al-Baqarah.

The Prophet ﷺ lived at the two-storey house of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari RA for about six months while his own house and Masjid al-Nabawi were built. Abu Ayyub and his wife moved upstairs, giving the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA the ground floor, though out of respect the couple later insisted the Prophet ﷺ take the upper floor instead, spending only the first few weeks below him.

One night, Aisha RA awoke to find the Prophet ﷺ was not in bed. When he returned, he told her that Jibril AS had come to him in the night and instructed him to go and pray for the people buried in Baqi' al-Gharqad.

Abdullah ibn Salam, a learned Jewish rabbi of Madinah, rushed to Quba among the first to see the Prophet ﷺ as soon as he heard of his arrival. Looking at his face, he recognized through firasa (spiritual insight) that this was not the face of a liar. He would later narrate that the first words he heard the Prophet ﷺ say were an instruction to spread salam, feed people, be good to relatives, and pray at night.

Sirma was the only hanif known to have lived in Madinah, a man who, from his youth, openly rejected the idolatry of his people just as the hanifs of Makkah did. He briefly considered Christianity but rejected it as unconvincing, and settled instead on the way of Ibrahim AS, observing practices such as ghusl after intercourse and after menses, and composing poetry that praised monotheism and denounced idolatry. He spent years living among the Quraysh in Makkah searching for the truth, without finding it, before returning to Madinah. By the time the Prophet ﷺ emigrated to Madinah, Sirma was over 100 years old and in the final weeks or months of his life.

Anas ibn Malik RA was introduced to the Prophet ﷺ at seven years old and served him for the next ten years. His mother gave him into the Prophet ﷺ's service hoping the Prophet ﷺ would pray for her son's well-being, and the Prophet ﷺ made du'a for Allah to bless Anas RA in his life, wealth, and progeny. Anas RA lived for over 110 years, an extraordinary lifespan at a time when the typical age of death was around 30, and went on to become a wealthy, successful businessman who saw his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, which he and others attributed to the Prophet ﷺ's prayer for him.

The city was called Yathrib when the Prophet ﷺ arrived, and he renamed it. He had been shown it two years before the Hijrah in a dream of a land of date palms he took for Yamamah or Hajar, and he said that he had been commanded to a town that would devour all towns, which people called Yathrib but which was al-Madinah. Yathrib comes from a root meaning blame, or corruption, and the Qur'an puts the old name only in the mouths of the hypocrites; he called it Madinah, Tabah and Taybah, the pure, and said that whoever called it Yathrib should ask forgiveness. It was the Muhajirun who found it hardest to love. Aisha visited Abu Bakr and Bilal in the fever that struck the newcomers and found both of them moaning: her father saying that a man woke among his family with death nearer than his sandal-strap, and Bilal longing in verse for a night in a valley of Makkan grass, and cursing by name the Quraysh who had driven them out. She went back and told the Prophet ﷺ, and he prayed: O Allah, make Madinah as beloved to us as Makkah, or more; bless us in its measures; take its fever away to Juhfah. Slowly the love came, until the Companions away from the city counted the days until they saw it again, and Ibn Abbas said that whenever the Prophet ﷺ came home from an expedition and saw the silhouette of Madinah he would spur his mount to reach it sooner. Over the years he taught its people what their city was. Uhud was a mountain that loved them and that they loved, one of the mountains of Paradise. The Dajjal would never enter Madinah; two angels would stand at its approaches. No plague would ever come into it, and none has. Faith would return to Madinah as a snake returns to its hole when Islam was in danger; it would be the refuge. Whoever plotted against it would be dissolved as salt dissolves in water. Whoever did wrong in it, or sheltered a wrongdoer, would bear the curse of Allah, the angels and all mankind, and have neither obligatory nor voluntary deed accepted. Madinah was better for them, if they knew it; no one left it in disdain but Allah replaced him with someone better, and whoever bore its hardships would have him as intercessor. And whoever could die in Madinah should, for he would intercede for whoever died there; Baqi' al-Gharqad, where Jibril once sent him at night to pray for the dead, holds ten thousand Companions and all of his wives but Khadija. Above all he made it a sanctuary. Your servant Ibrahim declared Makkah a Haram, he prayed, and I am Your servant, and I declare Madinah a Haram; and he asked that Madinah be given twice the blessing of Makkah, a hadith on which Imam Malik, a Madani, built his view that his city was the holier, while most scholars declined to rank the two. Makkah had been sacred since the heavens and the earth were made, and held the first house built for the worship of Allah; Madinah became sacred by his prayer. In a Haram what is lawful elsewhere becomes forbidden: no weapons are carried, no army enters, no game is hunted, no green thing is cut, and even a lost object must be left where it lies. Ibn Umar said that in the days of ignorance a man would see his father's killer circling the Ka'bah and not touch him, so well did the Arabs know what the Haram of Makkah meant. There are only two such places in the world. Jerusalem is blessed and its prayer is multiplied, but no scholar has ever called it a Haram in law; every Haram is blessed, but not every blessed land is a Haram.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA arrived at Quba, the outermost settlement of Madinah facing Makkah, entering on a Monday in the 14th year of the dawah (the 1st year of the Hijrah). Each day beforehand, the Ansar had gone out toward Quba to await him, staying until the midday heat forced them back, until word spread that he was near and they rushed out in throngs, hundreds of them, to receive him; a Jewish man of Yathrib, sighting the two travelers from atop a palm tree, was first to call out, "O Arabs, your king has arrived!" Al-Bara' ibn Azib RA, an Ansari eyewitness, recalled that over 500 armed and dressed Ansar came out, with women climbing onto rooftops and children thronging around to see. The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA then waited about a week at Quba for Ali RA, Aisha RA, and Asma RA to arrive, before entering central Madinah together, reportedly on a Friday. The Prophet ﷺ let his camel walk freely, saying it should be left alone because Allah had taken charge of it; wherever it sat down would be the site of his masjid and house. It sat on an open plantation-drying ground. He asked whose relatives among his family were closest by, and Khalid ibn Zayd (Abu Ayyub al-Ansari), of the Banu al-Najjar, came forward (the Prophet ﷺ's great-grandmother was of that same clan, making Abu Ayyub roughly his sixth cousin), so the Prophet ﷺ chose to stay with him until his own house was built. The poem Tala'al-badru alayna is popularly said to have greeted him on this arrival; scholars differ over whether it belongs here or to his return from Tabuk.

Soon after arriving in Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ visited the souqs (marketplaces) of the city, which were controlled by the Jewish tribes outside the center of Madinah, since the Ansar were mostly cultivators rather than traders. He disapproved of the deceptive practices he found there and said to the Muslims, "This is not a souq for you." He then returned to his masjid and, with his own feet, marked out lines in the sand for a new souq to the west of the masjid, saying, "This shall be your souq. So let it not be diminished, and let no one tax the people in it." Two rules governed it: all business had to stay within the demarcated lines, and no taxes or fees were charged. He also banned interest, praised honesty in trade, forbade cheating, lying, false oaths, and hiding defects, and forbade anyone in Madinah from acting as a paid agent for a Bedouin trader coming to sell his goods, since a local agent could exploit the outsider's unfamiliarity with prices.

Not long after the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, built the first mosques, and paired the Muhajirun with the Ansar through the muakha, he ﷺ promulgated a written constitution governing the whole of Yathrib. It named around 40 Muslim subtribes of the Quraysh (Muhajirun) and Yathrib (the Aws, the Khazraj, and their sub-clans) as well as roughly a dozen Jewish tribes, and set out terms for the pagans of Yathrib who remained at this stage. Notably the document still calls the city "Yathrib," not yet "Madinah," and does not yet use the later terms "Muhajirun"/"Ansar" as fixed titles, a sign, along with its archaic language and its listing of many now-obscure subtribe names, that it is an early and authentic document. It is preserved in full by Ibn Ishaq, though without a complete chain of narrators (isnad); Musnad Imam Ahmad separately preserves one phrase of it with an isnad. The constitution can be grouped into clauses for the Muslims, for the Jews, for the pagans, and for the community as a whole.

Guided by Abdullah ibn Urayqit along a backroad unknown to the Quraysh (circling toward what is now Jeddah before turning to Madinah), the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA avoided the main highway where the Quraysh, who had placed a 100-camel bounty on the Prophet ﷺ dead or alive, were searching for them. Suraqa ibn Malik of the Banu Mudlij spotted and pursued them for the bounty, but his horse threw him three times, after which he gave up the chase and instead asked for, and received, written protection from the Prophet ﷺ, promising not to reveal their whereabouts.

Madinah was originally called Yathrib. Two years before the Hijrah, while still in Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ told the Muslims of a dream that he would emigrate to a land of many date palms; he first thought it might be al-Yamamah or Hajar, but it turned out to be Madinah. He also taught that he had been commanded to emigrate to a city that would devour all other cities ("they call it Yathrib, but it is Madinah") and that whoever calls the city Yathrib should seek istighfar, because it is al-Tabah/Taybah ("the Pure"). After this, the Qur'an and the Prophet ﷺ only ever call the city Madinah; the name Yathrib appears in the Qur'an only on the tongues of the munafiqun.

The 5 daily salahs were given during al-Isra wal-Mi'raj as two rak'ahs each. At some point in the early Madani period, the Prophet ﷺ and the sahaba began praying the familiar pattern of 2-4-4-3-4, with the two-rak'ah form kept for the traveler; the sunan and nawafil were added afterward.

When the Prophet ﷺ emigrated to Madinah, his daughters Fatima and Ummi Kulthum RA had remained behind in Makkah; he entrusted his uncle Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA with bringing them safely to Madinah. Al-Huwayrith ibn Nuqaydh, a Qurashi, refused to let them go and threatened them, and both girls fell from their horses and were hurt, though, unlike the earlier attack on their sister Zaynab, there was no miscarriage.

After spending 2-3 weeks building the masjid, the Prophet ﷺ began building his own houses. At the time he had two wives, Sawda RA and Aisha RA, and both of their houses were built adjoining the masjid; the only two of his wives' houses ever directly connected to it (his later wives were married years afterward, by which point other houses filled that block). Sawda RA, an elderly lady senior to the Prophet ﷺ in age, gifted her night with him to Aisha RA out of her desire to please him; so while the Prophet ﷺ would visit and spend time with Sawda RA by day, Aisha RA's house was the only one he actually lived and spent the night in.

After arriving at Quba around high noon on a Monday, the Prophet ﷺ stayed at the house of Kulthum ibn al-Hidm RA, an elderly man of Banu Amr ibn Awf; the first sahabi to die in Madinah after the Prophet ﷺ's arrival. It is also said he stayed at the house of Sa'd ibn Khaythama RA, a bachelor; some reports reconcile this by saying he spent the night at Kulthum RA's house (a married man with children) and the day at Sa'd RA's house (a bachelor, so guests could visit without difficulty). Abu Bakr RA stayed at the house of another of the Ansar.

During the Hijrah journey, a caravan passed the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA and, as was customary, turned aside to greet them. One traveler recognized Abu Bakr RA and asked who his companion was. Abu Bakr RA replied that he was his guide, guiding him to the path, a tawriya (a statement with a true double meaning, not a lie): the caravan understood an ordinary travel guide, while Abu Bakr RA meant the Prophet ﷺ was guiding him to the path to Jannah. The exchange also shows that their guide Abdullah ibn Urayqit had already parted from them by this point in the journey.

As the tribesmen sent to kill him surrounded the house, the Prophet ﷺ left Ali RA behind in his own bed as a decoy and walked out reciting from Surah Ya-Sin, throwing dust on the assassins, who were unable to see him. A hadith in al-Tirmidhi records him standing at al-Hazwarah in Makkah and addressing the city he would not enter again for years, though it does not say that this was on the night he left. Ibn Kathir additionally reports that the Prophet ﷺ made a long supplication asking Allah for protection, ease, and mercy on the journey, a detail not found in earlier sources.

The Quraysh held a secret night meeting at Dar al-Nadwa, with representatives from every tribe except Banu Hashim, even Abu Lahab was excluded, since the plot targeted his own nephew, and Mut'im ibn Adi was excluded as the Prophet ﷺ's protector. In a weakly-narrated report, an uninvited old man claiming to be from Najd asked to join and offered counsel; Ibn Abbas said this old man was Iblis. Suggestions to imprison or exile the Prophet ﷺ were raised and rejected before Abu Jahal proposed having every tribe send one man to strike him together, so his blood would be on all their swords and no single tribe could be blamed or fought in revenge. Jibril AS then came to the Prophet ﷺ and told him he must make Hijrah immediately; the Prophet ﷺ spoke to Abu Bakr RA that same evening and left that same night.

The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA hid in the Cave of Thawr, south of Makkah (the opposite direction from Madinah) for three nights before meeting their guide. Abu Bakr RA arranged three helpers: his son Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr brought food each morning and eavesdropped in the marketplace on the Quraysh's search efforts; the freedman Amir ibn Fuhayra drove his flock behind Abdullah to erase his footprints; and the Bedouin guide Abdullah ibn Urayqit prepared to lead them to Madinah by an unfamiliar backroad. Al-Baladhuri reports that the Quraysh hired an expert tracker who followed the camel tracks from Abu Bakr RA's house to the foot of the cave's mountain before losing the trail, drawing search parties including Abu Jahal and al-Walid ibn al-Mughira. It is said a spider spun a web over the cave's entrance (reported in Musnad Imam Ahmad, comparatively the strongest of these accounts) and, in weaker reports from later generations, that a tree grew over the mouth of the cave and pigeons nested there.

Salman al-Farisi RA related his own story in his own words. He was born in Isfahan, in a place called Jai, the beloved son of a Zoroastrian priest of high standing among his people, and was raised as custodian of the sacred fire his people worshiped and never allowed to go out. Sent one day to his father's estate, he passed a church and was captivated by the Christians' prayer, staying until sunset and telling his father their religion seemed better than his own. His father, alarmed, put him in fetters and locked him up, but Salman sent word to the Christians to alert him when a caravan left for Syria, broke free of his chains, and fled with it. In Syria he attached himself to the bishop of the church, only to discover after the bishop's death that the man had been secretly hoarding for himself the charity he claimed to distribute to the poor; when Salman exposed him, the people crucified the bishop's body and stoned it, and appointed a far more sincere man in his place. When that bishop died, Salman was passed in succession to a righteous man in Mawsil (Mosul), then to one in Nisibin, and finally to one in Amuriah (Amorium) in Byzantium, working as a herdsman to support himself. This last teacher, dying, told Salman he knew of no one else still upon the true way, but that the time had come for a prophet bearing the pure religion of Ibrahim AS to appear, who would migrate to a land of palm trees; he described three signs by which Salman could know him: he would not eat of charity, he would accept gifts, and he would bear the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulders. Salman paid a passing caravan with his herd of cattle and sheep to take him to Arabia, but they betrayed him at Wadi al-Qura and sold him into slavery to a Jew, who was later bought out by a man of Banu Qurayza; through him Salman came to Yathrib, working its date-palm plantations. When word reached him at the top of a palm tree that a man at Quba was claiming prophethood, he was so overcome that he nearly fell from the tree. That night Salman went to the Prophet ﷺ at Quba and tested him against the three signs: he brought food as charity, which the Prophet ﷺ did not eat but had his Companions eat; he then brought food as a gift, which the Prophet ﷺ did eat; and finally, seeing the Prophet ﷺ at a funeral in Baqi' al-Gharqad, he looked upon his back and saw the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulders exactly as described. Salman then embraced Islam, weeping. Slavery kept him from Badr and Uhud, but the Prophet ﷺ helped negotiate his manumission [see the Freeing of Salman al-Farisi], after which he was free to fight alongside the Prophet ﷺ at the Battle of al-Khandaq and every major event thereafter.

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.

Among the earliest things the Prophet ﷺ did after arriving in Madinah, some scholars say even before the masjid was built, was to institute the muakha: pairing each Muhajir with an Ansari as a brother. Over 100 such pairs were made, and the Prophet ﷺ chose each pairing himself, matching people who shared much in common, e.g. Abu Bakr RA (a nobleman of the Muhajirun) with Kharijah ibn Zayd RA (a nobleman of the Ansar). Anas ibn Malik RA recalled that the Prophet ﷺ literally sat down and carried out the muakha in his household's area of Madinah. In this early stage the pairing was so complete that the brothers even inherited from one another, until Allah abrogated this after the Battle of Badr in Surah al-Anfal [8:75]. The Ansar had already been so generous that they offered to split their land, wealth, and even their households with the Muhajirun; the Prophet ﷺ made du'a for them but declined the offer, so that the Muhajirun would work for their own livelihood rather than depend on free gifts that could later sow resentment between the two groups' descendants. The practice of muakha continued throughout the Madani period, not only at its outset: the Prophet ﷺ paired Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA with Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA when Ja'far arrived in Madinah in the 7th year of the Hijrah, and reportedly paired Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan with an Ansari after his conversion following the Conquest of Makkah [8 AH].

As a reward for his steadfastness under torture, Bilal ibn Rabah, whose torment began with the cry "Ahadun Ahad", was chosen by the Prophet ﷺ to be his official muezzin because he had the best voice among the believers, becoming the voice that called the adhan reciting the same declaration of Allah's Oneness. He later gave the adhan in the Haram itself when the Prophet ﷺ reconquered Makkah.

After a few days in Quba helping build the masjid, the Prophet ﷺ announced on Thursday night that he would enter central Madinah the next morning. Leaving Quba that Friday morning, he stopped in the area of Banu Salama and delivered his own first Jumu'ah khutbah, even though the Ansar, through Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, had already been holding Jumu'ah before his arrival. He then continued into central Madinah, where the camel-kneeling episode and his stay with Abu Ayyub al-Ansari RA followed.

During the Hijrah journey, the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA came to the tent of an elderly Bedouin woman, Umm Ma'bad, near Qadid, and asked to purchase food. She had none to offer, and her husband was away searching for food. Seeing an old, barren goat in the corner, the Prophet ﷺ asked permission to milk it; when she agreed, he invoked the name of Allah and moved his hand under its udder, and it filled with milk. Abu Bakr RA and the Prophet ﷺ drank their fill and left the rest for her and her husband. When her husband returned and heard what had happened, and heard Umm Ma'bad's description of their guests, he realized they must have been the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr RA, and the couple accepted Islam.

The Prophet ﷺ began building the first masjid in Madinah, Masjid Quba, once Ali RA arrived in Quba (2-3 days after the Prophet ﷺ's own arrival). The first stone was laid by the Prophet ﷺ himself, then Ali RA and Abu Bakr RA continued, and the Ansar took over from there. The Prophet ﷺ left for central Madinah on the Friday morning before its completion, so although Masjid Quba was the first masjid begun, Masjid al-Nabawi was the first he completed and prayed in himself. (There was already a makeshift masjid the Ansar used for Jumu'ah, most likely the house of As'ad ibn Zurarah RA.) In one hadith in Abu Dawud, the people of Quba, asked why Allah praised them uniquely in the Qur'an, explained that (unlike most people at the time, who only wiped themselves) they had a practice of washing with water after using the restroom.

After the Prophet ﷺ had himself emigrated to Madinah, he repeatedly asked the Muslims who would volunteer to rescue Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah and Hisham ibn al-As from their imprisonment in Makkah, a mission few were willing to risk. Al-Walid ibn al-Walid, the older brother of Khalid ibn al-Walid, volunteered, travelled to Makkah, entered the city at night, located the dungeon, broke in, cut their bonds, and brought both men safely back to Madinah.

The first military expedition of the Muslims. Hearing of a Qurayshi caravan, the Prophet ﷺ led the Muslims out to intercept it, but they could not reach it in time and no battle took place. During this expedition the Prophet ﷺ formed the first of many tribal alliances, with the Banu Damra, extending the reach of the young Islamic state roughly another 100 miles outside Madinah.

After thirteen years in Makkah during which the Muslims were commanded only to be patient in the face of persecution, Allah revealed the first verses permitting military jihad: "Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory" and "[They are] those who have been evicted from their homes without right, only because they say, 'Our Lord is Allah.'" The permission was framed entirely around defending those who had been wronged and expelled from their homes for their faith, not as unconditional license. This began the first of four stages of jihad in the seerah: (1) the Makkan-era prohibition on any military response, (2) permission granted but not yet obligatory, immediately after the Hijrah, (3) jihad made obligatory against the Quraysh specifically for most of the Madani period, and (4) jihad eventually extended against the polytheists of Arabia generally.

Zaynab bint Jahsh (born Barrah) (a Qurashi through her mother Umayma bint Abdul Muttalib, first cousin of Muhammad ﷺ, of Banu Khuzayma through her father) had been married and widowed in Makkah, then migrated to Madinah with her brother Abdullah ibn Jahsh RA and was available for remarriage. The Prophet ﷺ sent a proposal on her behalf on behalf of his adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah RA (then known as Zayd ibn Muhammad ﷺ, before Qur'an [33:5] restored him to his father's name). Zaynab and her brother initially objected that Zayd, a freed slave, was not her equal, but after Allah revealed Qur'an [33:36], that believers have no choice once Allah and His Messenger ﷺ have decided a matter, both consented and the marriage went ahead.

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.

Within the first two years of the Hijrah, the core rituals of Islamic worship were legislated. On the 10th of Muharram, 2 AH, the Prophet ﷺ made the fast of Ashura wajib (obligatory) as a single day's fast, a stepping stone before the obligation of fasting Ramadan was later revealed that same year's Ramadan (Surah al-Baqarah), after which the 10th of Muharram reverted to sunnah status. In that same Ramadan, Zakat al-Fitr was made wajib, and within months Zakat al-Mal (2.5% of wealth) followed. The rulings of salah were also perfected in this period (Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha lengthened beyond the two-rak'ah Makkan pattern to four, four, three, and four rak'ahs respectively), along with the laws of taharah, wudu, janabah, and ghusl.

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.

After allies of the Quraysh snuck into Madinah, stole a number of camels, and killed one or two herders, the Prophet ﷺ gathered 70 of the Muhajirun and pursued them, reaching the Plain of Badr for the first time. The 4-5 raiders, being faster, managed to flee, and the Prophet ﷺ was unable to capture them. As a direct consequence, the Prophet ﷺ decided he needed reconnaissance/spies to monitor the movements of the Quraysh and their allies, including toward Yemen; this led directly to the Sariyya Nakhla.

Of the 70 prisoners taken from Badr back toward Madinah, two were executed on the way: al-Nadr ibn al-Harith and Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt, both counted among the shayatin of the Quraysh. When Uqba was brought out, he asked why he alone was singled out; Ali ibn Abi Talib RA answered that it was for his animosity to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and it is said Ali RA carried out the execution.

Seven days after the Battle of Badr, the Banu Salim and Ghatafan detached a raiding party of about 200 men to attack Madinah, seeking revenge for their trade being cut off as an indirect result of Badr. When the Prophet ﷺ heard of it, he launched an offensive; the pagans fled despite outnumbering the Muslims, abandoning their tents, belongings, and animals, so much so that every Muslim who took part is said to have received two camels. As was his practice after a battle, the Prophet ﷺ camped there for three days afterward. An Abyssinian slave named Yasar, the first captured, later converted to Islam and remained a servant of the Prophet ﷺ after being freed.

The Prophet ﷺ saw in a dream an angel carrying a lady covered up to him, told that she would be his wife; when he uncovered her face it was Aisha bint Abi Bakr RA. He said that if the dream was from Allah it would come to pass, and it did. The nikah was conducted in Makkah, but the marriage was not consummated until later in Madinah, in the 2nd year of the Hijrah.

Salman al-Farisi, then enslaved in Madinah to a man of Banu Qurayza, agreed with his master to be freed in exchange for planting more than 100 date-palm seedlings and waiting for them to bear fruit, ordinarily a wait of 15 years or more. Salman told the Prophet ﷺ of the arrangement, and the Prophet ﷺ told him, "Call me when the season comes." When the season arrived, the Prophet ﷺ personally planted every single seedling himself, and by his barakah they all grew to fruit within a few years, and Salman was freed.

When the Quraysh directed poetry against the Prophet ﷺ, he ﷺ told Hassan ibn Thabit, his official poet, to stand and answer them, promising him the help of the angel Jibril, who would whisper the words to him through ilham. Hassan was afterward given his own minbar in the masjid from which to recite, the only sahabi known to have had one.

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.

The Banu Qaynuqa were the largest of the three Jewish tribes of Madinah, some seven hundred men, goldsmiths with the biggest market in the city, and the first to break with the Prophet ﷺ. Ibn Ishaq gives the affair less than a page, as the early historians did with every falling-out, and records only that after Badr they grew openly hostile and were grieved by the Muslim victory. The Prophet ﷺ went to their market, gathered them, and reminded them of the Constitution they had signed, each to protect the other against outsiders. One of their leaders answered him to his face: he should not be fooled by beating a handful of nobodies; had he fought men, men like them, he would have seen a different result. Then a crude incident lit the fuse. An Ansari woman sold her goods in the market and sat down at a goldsmith's to buy. He pestered her to uncover herself and she refused; he signalled to a man behind her, who pinned her garment so that when she stood it fell away, and she was left uncovered while the men of the market laughed. She screamed for help. A Muslim who was there drew his sword and killed the goldsmith, and the Banu Qaynuqa, on their own ground, closed round him and killed him. The Prophet ﷺ sent them word that the treaty was at an end, for Islam does not break a treaty in secret; the Qur'an says that if you fear betrayal from a people, throw their treaty back to them openly. They did not expect him to do more, trusting their numbers and their walls, but he marched at once, and they shut themselves in their fortress. The Muslims had no means of breaching it, so they cut off its supplies, and after fifteen days the Banu Qaynuqa surrendered. The Prophet ﷺ had the men bound while their fate was decided. In the days before Islam the tribe had two allies among the Khazraj, and they appealed to both. Ubadah ibn al-Samit went straight to the Prophet ﷺ and renounced them: his protector now was Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and he had cut his ties with the Banu Qaynuqa. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul went to the camp where they were held and told the Companion guarding them to release them or he would, and was told that if he tried he would be killed. So he found the Prophet ﷺ and called him by his bare name, Muhammad ﷺ, as he always did, and asked him to be generous to his allies. The Prophet ﷺ said nothing. He asked again and the Prophet ﷺ turned away, and then Ibn Ubayy thrust his hand into the neck of his armour and held him. Let go of me, the Prophet ﷺ said, and Ibn Ishaq says the anger showed in his face; woe to you, let go. Ibn Ubayy swore he would not until the Prophet ﷺ promised to treat them well: seven hundred men, three hundred in mail, who had shielded him from every enemy, red and black, and was he to cut them down in a morning? He was afraid, he said, of a turn of fortune. The Prophet ﷺ said: they are yours. He had never said he would kill them; but he gave Ibn Ubayy their lives in public, and there was wisdom in it, for the man was still the most respected chief of old Yathrib, and there was still hope of him. The verdict was three days to leave Madinah. They begged for more, tried Ubadah, who told them he would not have given them three, and Ibn Ubayy tried again to have the sentence lifted and failed. Ubadah saw them out. They took their gold and what they could carry and left the rest, which came to the Muslims. Allah sent down the verses of Surah al-Ma'idah on not taking Jews and Christians as protectors, quoting Ibn Ubayy's fear of a turn of fortune from the mouths of those with sickness in their hearts, and praising the choice Ubadah had made: your only protectors are Allah, His Messenger ﷺ and the believers. It was the lightest of the three punishments the Jewish tribes of Madinah brought on themselves, and the true colours of the hypocrites had begun to show.

On the day the qibla changed, the Prophet ﷺ prayed Fajr in his own masjid facing Jerusalem, then announced the change and prayed Zuhr facing Makkah: the change was announced between prayers, not mid-salah. Those who had prayed Zuhr with him were then meant to carry the news to their own people. The companion tasked with informing the masjid of Banu Salama arrived late; by the time he reached them, they were already praying Asr, so he called out from the back of the mosque, "O people of the masjid! I have just come from the Prophet's ﷺ Masjid, and I prayed with him Zuhr, and he was praying facing Makkah! The command has come to change direction!" The entire congregation turned together, mid-prayer, with the imam walking straight through the rows to the new front.

When the Quraysh survivors began returning to Makkah with news of the crushing defeat at Badr, Abu Lahab refused to believe it and awaited Abu Sufyan ibn Harb's own account. The two met at the house of al-Abbas, whose wife Umm al-Fadl and household were there (al-Abbas himself was a prisoner of war in Madinah). Abu Sufyan described how the Muslims overpowered the Quraysh, taking prisoners and killing as they pleased, and how he saw riders with white faces on black-and-white horses, hovering between heaven and earth, whom no one could overpower. Al-Abbas's slave, overhearing, cried out with joy that these had been angels helping the Muslims. Abu Lahab, enraged at the slave's open joy over the Quraysh's defeat, threw him to the ground and beat him near to death; when Umm al-Fadl intervened, he beat her too, until she rebuked him for how he was treating her husband's household in al-Abbas's absence, shaming him into fleeing.

The Prophet ﷺ handpicked 8 of the Muhajirun, placed his cousin Abdullah ibn Jahsh in charge, and gave him a sealed letter with instructions to travel two days northeast before opening it, for secrecy and misdirection. The letter directed the group to proceed instead to Nakhla to watch the movements of the Quraysh, with permission for any companion to turn back. On the way, the shared camel of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas and Utbah ibn Ghazwan went missing; the pair stayed behind to search for it while the remaining 6 continued to Nakhla, arriving on the 30th of Rajab, the last day of the sacred month. There they sighted a small, undefended Qurayshi trade caravan. After debating the dilemma of the closing sacred month, they attacked: one caravaneer was killed and two were taken prisoner, among them al-Hakam ibn Kaisan. When the party returned to Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ told them, "I didn't command you to fight," and initially refused any share of the booty. The Quraysh publicized the bloodshed in the sacred month across Arabia, and the Prophet ﷺ, per Ibn Ishaq, felt great stress over the valid criticism. Allah then revealed Qur'an 2:217, acknowledging the gravity of fighting in the sacred month while affirming that the Quraysh's persecution, disbelief, and expulsion of the Muslims from Makkah were graver sins still. The Prophet ﷺ then accepted the booty and the prisoners, and stipulated that they would not be released until Sa'd and Utbah reached Madinah safely, which they eventually did after finding their camel.

After Hijrah was made obligatory on all Muslims still in Makkah, Junda' ibn Damura (elderly, blind, and unable to walk) refused to accept his weakness as an excuse. He had his servants carry him out of Makkah on his chair, trusting Allah to guide him to Madinah, but he died just outside the city, at Tan'im. As he was dying, he placed his right hand on his left as a gesture of allegiance to the Prophet ﷺ. When news of his death reached Madinah, the sahaba remarked on how close he had come without completing the journey.

Allah revealed the first of three verses addressing alcohol and gambling, indicating there was harm in both while not yet issuing an explicit prohibition.

Initially the Prophet ﷺ was commanded to pray facing Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem), and did so throughout his time in Makkah, reportedly positioning himself so the Ka'bah was also in line, a kind of "double qibla." When he emigrated to Madinah, due north of Makkah with Bayt al-Maqdis further north still, he had to turn his back to the Ka'bah to face Jerusalem. As tensions grew with the Jews of Madinah, who had at first given the Prophet ﷺ real hope, believing in the same God, the same line of prophets, Paradise, Hell, and Judgment Day, and having a chief rabbi, Abdullah ibn Salam RA, who converted, the Prophet ﷺ began wishing to face Makkah instead. He could not change it by his own will: it is narrated that he once told Jibril AS, "O Jibril, I wish to pray facing Makkah," and Jibril AS replied that he was only a slave commanded by Allah, and that the Prophet ﷺ should make du'a. The Prophet ﷺ then began making du'a earnestly, by night and by day, looking up to the sky, something he did only at times of extreme distress. Allah then revealed the command in Qur'an 2:144 to turn towards Masjid al-Haram, followed by further verses in the opening of the second juz. The Jews and even some Muslims and mushrikun were confused, since abrogation (naskh) itself was a new concept; some Jews openly mocked the change, and Allah responded that piety is not about which direction one faces (2:177) and that no amount of proof would make the People of the Book follow the Muslims' qibla, or vice versa (2:145). The sahaba also asked whether those who had died praying towards Bayt al-Maqdis would have their prayers accepted, prompting the revelation that Allah would never let their faith go to waste (2:143), a verse later used by scholars such as Imam Bukhari as evidence that salah is inseparable from iman.

Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf was the son of an Arab of the Banu Nabhan who had fled a killing among his own people and been taken in by the Banu Nadir of Yathrib, and of a Nadiri mother, which in Jewish reckoning made him a Jew. He had an Arab's lineage and a Nadiri's learning, and grew into one of the tribe's leaders, rich enough to own a fortress of his own, famous for his looks and for his poetry. His hostility began early. When the qibla was changed it was he who asked what had turned them from the direction they had prayed to, and the Qur'an answers him. When zakat was commanded he went to his friends among the Ansar and told them not to give their money away, since no one knew what would become of this man; the verse on those who are stingy and urge stinginess on others came down about it. When the criers came into Madinah with the news of Badr he said that if Muhammad ﷺ had really killed those men, the noblest of the Arabs, it were better to be under the earth than on it: a verdict, as it turned out, on himself. Then he went to Makkah with some of the Banu Nadir and made a pact with Abu Sufyan against the Prophet ﷺ, of which no book records the terms; the sources keep only Abu Sufyan's question, whether the Quraysh or Muhammad ﷺ were the better guided, and Ka'b's answer that the Quraysh were, which Surah al-Nisa quotes back at him. He came home believing the alliance secret; Allah had told the Prophet ﷺ of it. He had long written verse against the Muslims, and the last straw was satirical love-poetry about Muslim women, naming them. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham and al-Waqidi place what follows between Badr and Uhud; Muqatil, al-Baghawi and al-Salihi place it after Uhud and add that Ka'b was the mind behind the Banu Nadir's plot to poison the Prophet ﷺ and died the night before it was to be carried out. The Prophet ﷺ stood and asked who would deal with Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, who had injured Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. Muhammad ibn Maslamah rose. He was of the Aws, who had been the Nadir's allies before Islam and had no old feud with them, so that the killing would not reopen the Jahili quarrel between the Nadir and the Khazraj. For three days he neither ate nor drank, until the Prophet ﷺ was told and came to ask what was wrong: he had promised something he was not sure he could do. Only try, the Prophet ﷺ said; and when Ibn Maslamah asked leave to say things he did not mean, he was told to say what he liked. He went to Ka'b at his hours of business, drew him aside, and complained that this man had brought nothing but trouble on them, set the Arabs against them, and was now asking for their money. Ka'b was delighted and promised worse to come. Ibn Maslamah said that having followed him they could not desert him until things changed, and asked for a loan to pay what was demanded of him. Ka'b lent money for a living and wanted security: the women of his house, he suggested, or his sons. Ibn Maslamah answered that no one would trust a woman near the handsomest man in Yathrib, and that his sons would carry the taunt of having been their father's pledge all their lives. He offered his weapons instead, which Ka'b accepted gladly; and Silkan ibn Salama, called Abu Na'ila, Ka'b's foster-brother, and one or two others took loans on the same terms. Now they could come to his fortress armed and be expected. Abu Na'ila fixed a night, the 14th of Rabi' al-Awwal of the third year by al-Waqidi's reckoning, cloudless and under a full moon. The Prophet ﷺ walked with them as far as Baqi' al-Gharqad and sent them on with a prayer for their success. At the fortress on the edge of the city they called Ka'b down. He had lately taken a new wife, and she held him back: why were they coming at such an hour, when he was a man at war? He answered that Abu Na'ila was his foster-brother and Ibn Maslamah an old friend, and went down. They walked and talked in the moonlight until Abu Na'ila remarked on the perfume he wore, was told it came from the most scented woman in Arabia, and asked to smell his hair. Ka'b bent his head; Ibn Maslamah seized it, and the others struck. The armour he wore made it slow work, and in the dark al-Harith ibn Aws was badly cut by his own companions' swords and limped back bleeding. When they reached the Prophet ﷺ he put his saliva on the wound and it closed. The other tribes complained, and the Prophet ﷺ did nothing about it, for he had ordered it; Ibn Ishaq says that after that night no enemy of the Muslims felt safe. This was a political act by the ruler and judge of Madinah, taken against a man who had broken the Constitution by treating with the Quraysh and had crossed every line in his verse; Ka'b's own wife understood the terms he was living under, and it is not to be measured against the customs of a later age.

A few months before Uhud, the Quraysh, no longer able to use their standard caravan route after Badr, sent their annual Syria-bound trade caravan under Safwan ibn Umayyah along a northern route through Iraq, on the advice of the elder al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib, since most tribes along the coastal route had by then given their allegiance to the Prophet ﷺ. A secret Muslim in Makkah, Salit ibn al-Nu'man, overheard one of the Quraysh elite boasting of the secret plan while drinking wine and informed the Prophet ﷺ, who sent Zayd ibn Harithah to intercept it.

The Prophet ﷺ led around 150-200 sahaba to intercept the Quraysh's major annual caravan to Syria, laden with 70-80 camels and some 70-80% of Makkah's wealth, led by Abu Sufyan ibn Harb. By the qadar of Allah, one of the caravan's party strayed and spotted the Muslims in the distance, prompting Abu Sufyan to divert the caravan's route, so the two sides never crossed paths. The caravan reached Syria safely and the Muslims returned to Madinah.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ once sent the young Anas ibn Malik RA on a chore, but on the way Anas RA saw some children playing in the street and joined them, forgetting the errand entirely. The Prophet ﷺ came out looking for him and found him playing with the other children.

Aisha RA, though she never met Khadija RA, said she was never more jealous of any woman than of her, knowing how much the Prophet ﷺ loved her. Whenever the Prophet ﷺ received gifts, money, or meat, he would send part of it to Khadija RA's friends. On one occasion, Aisha RA's frustration led her to remark to the Prophet ﷺ about mentioning an old woman when Allah had given him a young one instead; his firm reply, affirming Khadija RA's unmatched place in his heart, is recorded on this page. Aisha RA said she never mentioned Khadija RA again.

Several months after Badr, the elderly Ansari Sa'd ibn al-Nu'man traveled to Makkah to trade and perform Umrah. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, still refusing to ransom his captured son Amr ibn Abi Sufyan, kidnapped Sa'd in broad daylight inside the Haram and declared he would not release him until his son was freed. Sa'd's tribe brought the matter to the Prophet ﷺ, who released Amr without ransom to secure Sa'd's freedom.

Wounded in the neck at Uhud by a spear thrust from the Prophet ﷺ himself, Ubay ibn Khalaf was carried off by his companions who tried to reassure him the wound would heal. He insisted it was fatal, and died before reaching Makkah, in the valley of Sarif.

Hearing that Khalid ibn Sufyan al-Hudhali, chieftain of Hudhayl, was gathering an army to surprise-attack Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ sent Abdullah ibn Unays al-Juhani alone to pre-emptively kill him. The Prophet ﷺ described the chieftain's location and terrifying appearance in advance though he had never seen him. Abdullah found him in the Valley of Arana, prayed a form of Salat al-Khawf while approaching so as not to miss Zuhr, posed as a would-be recruit, and killed him.

In revenge for the killing of their chieftain Khalid ibn Sufyan, the tribe of Hudhayl paid Udal and al-Qara to pretend to accept Islam, travel to Madinah, and beg the Prophet ﷺ to send teachers of the Quran and religion. Ten sahaba under Asim ibn Thabit volunteered. At the Well of al-Raji, 100 warriors ambushed them. The sahaba took a hilltop position and fought until Asim and most of the others were killed. The last three, Khubayb ibn Adi, Zayd ibn al-Dathinah, and Abdullah ibn Tariq, surrendered on a promise of safety that was immediately broken; Abdullah ibn Tariq was killed on the spot for refusing captivity, while Khubayb and Zayd were taken to Makkah and sold to be executed in revenge for men they had killed at Badr and Uhud.

After the chieftain Abu Bara Amir ibn Malik guaranteed protection for Muslim preachers in Najd, the Prophet ﷺ sent 70 of the best reciters and worshippers, mostly of the Ahl al-Suffa. Their messenger Haram ibn Milhan was treacherously killed by the arrogant chieftain Amir ibn al-Tufayl, who then rallied the tribes of Asiya, Ra'l, and Dhakwan (roughly 400-500 men) and massacred the 70 at the Well of Bir Ma'una. Only Ka'b ibn Zayd (left for dead beneath the bodies of the shuhada), Amr ibn Umayyah, and al-Mundhir ibn Muhammad were not killed outright in the initial attack; al-Mundhir chose to go back in and was killed, while Amr was freed and, on his way home, unknowingly killed two men under the Prophet ﷺ's protection before bringing the news to Madinah. According to one report the Prophet ﷺ learned of this and of al-Raji on the same night, and grieved so greatly that he prayed qunut against the four tribes responsible (Asiya, Ra'l, Dhakwan, and Banu Lahyan) in every prayer for a month.

Amid a number of small skirmishes following the apparent loss at Uhud, the Prophet ﷺ sent 150 Muslims to attack and conquer the small tribe of Banu Asad, led by their chieftain Tulayha al-Asadi.

Abu Salama Abdullah ibn Abd al-Asad RA, cousin of the Prophet ﷺ through his mother and husband of Umm Salama RA, was severely wounded at the Battle of Uhud and died of his wounds a few months later. On his deathbed, Umm Salama RA proposed they promise not to remarry after the other's death so as to be reunited in Jannah; he asked whether she would obey him, and when she agreed, instructed her instead to remarry after his death, and made du'a that Allah grant her a husband better than himself. Before this, Abu Salama RA had come home joyfully relating a hadith he had heard from the Prophet ﷺ: that anyone afflicted by a calamity who is patient and recites the du'a "Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un..." will be rewarded and given something better in its place. After his death, Umm Salama RA recited this du'a herself.

Zaynab bint Khuzayma al-Hilaliyah, known before Islam as Umm al-Masakin for her care of the poor and orphans, was widowed when her husband Ubaydah ibn al-Harith died of wounds sustained in the mubaraza duel at Badr. The Prophet ﷺ married her, probably around the 3rd year of the Hijrah.

When the qibla changed the front of the Prophet ﷺ's mosque became its back, and he had the old front roofed over with palm branches, not yet against rain, for a purpose. The first emigrants had each been taken into an Ansari household until they could stand on their own feet, but the Muhajirun and the converts kept coming until the households were full, and around Ramadan of the second year, after Badr, the overflow was given the shaded platform at the back of the mosque: the Suffa, and its people, Ahl al-Suffa. Sometimes there were five or ten of them and sometimes seventy, and they were among the elite of the Companions in Qur'an, in night prayer and in learning, men who had given up everything and lived in a public shelter in the mosque. Abu Hurairah, of Daws, was the most famous; Abu Dharr, Suhayb, Bilal and Ibn Mas'ud lived there, and Ansar like Hanzala and Ka'b ibn Malik left their own homes to join them. They were desperately poor. Some had so little to wear that the Prophet ﷺ told the women of the congregation not to lift their heads from prostration until the men had risen. Most of them went two days at a time without food, and would fall from weakness when he came in to lead the prayer. Whatever was given to him in charity went to them, and whatever was given to him as a gift he shared with them; he would ask one Companion or another to take some of them home for supper, and Sa'd ibn Ubadah sometimes fed eighty at once. When Hasan was born he told Fatima to give charity to the People of the Suffa, and years later, when she came asking for one servant from a batch of prisoners to help with the housework, he answered that he could not give her a servant while the bellies of the People of the Suffa were caved in for hunger; by Allah, he would sell every prisoner and spend it on them. They were never off his mind. Abu Hurairah admitted that he would stop a Companion leaving the mosque with a question he knew the answer to better than the man did, only to keep him talking as far as his door in the hope of being asked in to eat. Once the Prophet ﷺ found him faint with hunger and took him home, and asked Aisha whether there was anything; a neighbour had sent a cup of milk. Abu Hurairah's heart lifted, and then the Prophet ﷺ told him to go and call the People of the Suffa, thirty or forty of them, and he obeyed with a sinking heart, and was handed the cup and told to take it round. Each man drank his fill, and Abu Hurairah wondered what would be left, until only he and the Prophet ﷺ remained; sit, the Prophet ﷺ said, and drink; and he drank, and was told to drink again, and again, the cup as full as when it started, until he swore there was no room left in him, and the Prophet ﷺ took the cup and drank last. A rope was later strung between two of the Suffa's pillars so that dates could be hung on it and taken without anyone having to ask, a custom that survived in the mosque for thirteen centuries. Abu Hurairah said that the people complained he narrated too much, but that he had been a poor man who stayed at the Prophet ﷺ's side for the sake of a full stomach while the Muhajirun were busy in the market and the Ansar with their land; and it was the Suffa that made him, in the end, the most prolific narrator of the Prophet ﷺ's words.

In his youth, al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba was a highway bandit of Thaqif who, with a band of comrades, robbed and killed a group of travelers. The victims' tribe declared war on Thaqif, who had to pay heavy blood money to end the conflict; Mughira and his comrades broke up and fled, unable to return to Thaqif. Mughira eventually heard of Islam, embraced it, and made his way to Madinah.

Shortly after the Battle of Uhud, a drunk sahabi led the prayer and made serious mistakes while reciting. Allah then revealed Surah al-Nisa, verse 43, prohibiting believers from approaching the salah while drunk.

In the early Madani period, the Prophet ﷺ gave his khutbah standing on a tree stump, stepping down for sajdah; the stump stood toward one side of the Masjid, since one cannot choose exactly where a tree grows. As money came in, a sahabi recommended a custom pulpit be built, and one of the ladies of the Ansar had a servant trained in carpentry construct a three-step minbar, which was placed in the middle of the Masjid. During the first khutbah given from the new minbar (witnessed by a Masjid packed with over 1,000 people) the sahaba heard a wailing like that of a baby camel coming from the abandoned stump. The Prophet ﷺ stopped the khutbah, came down from the minbar, hugged the stump, and patted it until it stopped. He then had the stump buried beneath his new minbar.

A group of Jews came to the Prophet ﷺ and sought an audience, which he granted. Once inside, they greeted him with a play on words, "as-sam-u-alaykum" ("death be upon you"), in mockery of the Muslim greeting "as-salamu alaykum" ("peace be upon you"). Aisha RA, overhearing this, responded sharply on the Prophet ﷺ's behalf. After they left, the Prophet ﷺ explained that his own reply had simply been "wa alaykum" ("and upon you"): he had not adopted their word "sam" at all.

As a young child, Abdullah ibn Busr RA was present when the Prophet ﷺ visited his parents' house; his father gave the Prophet ﷺ a worn-out rug to sit on, and his mother sent hais (a dried date-and-flour cake) with young Abdullah to serve him. The Prophet ﷺ turned to the boy, rubbed his head, and told him, "This child shall live for a century." Abdullah ibn Busr later narrated this hadith as an old man of 95 in Damascus, one of the last of the sahaba still alive, and died exactly five years later, at the age of 100, while performing wudu.

The day after Uhud, worried the retreating Quraysh might turn back to finish off the Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ called for volunteers to form a pursuing contingent, restricting it to those who had fought at Uhud (excluding the 300 who had withdrawn with Abdullah ibn Ubayy). About 70 sahaba, at their head Ali ibn Abi Talib, marched out and camped at Hamra al-Asad; the Prophet ﷺ joined them the next day and they remained three days to make sure the Quraysh did not return, before returning to Madinah.

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.

Around the time of the Banu Nadir affair, if not slightly before, the Prophet ﷺ commanded Zayd ibn Thabit RA to learn Hebrew, wanting someone trustworthy to know the language. Zayd was chosen because he was young and sharp-minded, and because he had grown up around Jewish neighbors and already had some background in the language, having reportedly attended their schools.

One night in Madinah, people heard a loud commotion outside and, unsure what it was, came out cautiously to see. They found that the Prophet ﷺ had already gone alone toward the sound. He had taken the horse of Abu Talha RA, ridden it back bareback with his sword slung around his neck, and was returning to reassure the people of Madinah.

At the end of the Battle of Uhud, Abu Sufyan had called out that the two sides would meet again one year later at Badr. In Sha'ban of the 4th year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ marched out with around 1,500 sahaba, with Ali ibn Abi Talib RA as flag bearer, and camped at Badr for over a week awaiting the Quraysh. The Quraysh had gathered an army of about 2,000 but marched out half-heartedly; citing a year of drought and hardship, they turned back without engaging.

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

Ibn Ishaq places Dhat al-Riqa in Sha'ban of the fourth year, straight after the appointment at Badr that the Quraysh failed to keep; al-Bukhari places it after Khaybar. The strongest evidence for the earlier date is Jabir's own story, told below, in which he has just married after his father's death at Uhud and the Prophet ﷺ does not yet know it. Word had come that Ghatafan, a large Bedouin tribe to the north with a name for raiding, meant to strike first. The Prophet ﷺ marched with seven hundred men, and for a week or two the two sides camped within sight of each other. Ghatafan never came on, and no blow was struck. What the expedition is remembered for is four things that happened around it. The first is the prayer of fear. It was here that Allah sent down the procedure of Salat al-Khawf in Surah al-Nisa: the imam prays the whole prayer while the army prays in two shifts, one rank standing guard with its weapons while the other prostrates, then changing places, so that the enemy never finds them all with their backs turned. The second was on the way home. It was high summer, and when the sun grew unbearable in the late morning the army scattered for whatever shade the valley offered and slept. The Prophet ﷺ slept under a tree with his sword hung from a branch. A Bedouin of Ghatafan, Ghawrath ibn al-Harith, had been shadowing the column, walked through the sleeping camp, took the sword down, drew it, and woke him with the blade in his face. Are you afraid of me? No. Are you not afraid, when I hold the sword? No. In another telling the question was who would protect him now, and the answer was Allah; and at that word the man began to shake, and the sword fell from his hand. The Prophet ﷺ picked it up, turned it on him, and asked who would protect him. Be the better of the two who held it, the man said. Asked to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger ﷺ, he would not, but he swore never again to fight him or help anyone who did. Only then did the Prophet ﷺ call out for the Companions, who woke, in Jabir's words, to his voice, and found him with his sword at the Bedouin's neck. He let him go, and Ghawrath went back to his people saying he had come from the best of men. The third was that night. Ammar ibn Yasir and Abbad ibn Bishr were posted to watch for Ghatafan, and Abbad took the first watch and stood to pray. A Ghatafani archer put an arrow into him; he drew it out and went on praying, and a second, and drew that out too, and only when he felt he would faint did he wake Ammar, who saw the blood and asked why he had not broken off. He had been reciting Surah Yusuf, he said, and had not wanted to leave it; and but for the duty the Prophet ﷺ had given him he would rather have died than stop. The fourth is Jabir's. On the road back his camel, the oldest and weakest in the army, dropped him to the rear, and he rode alone with his troubles: his father Abdullah ibn Amr ibn Haram dead at Uhud, his debts unpaid, seven sisters to feed and no brother. A voice asked who was there at the back, and it was the Prophet ﷺ. He asked why Jabir was downcast and heard it all, then asked whether he had married. He had. A girl or a widow? A widow, said Jabir; and to the question why he had not taken a girl he could play with and laugh with, he answered that he had wanted someone to look after his sisters, not one more to look after, and was told he had done right. Then the Prophet ﷺ had him dismount, mounted the old camel himself, struck it with a bismillah, and Jabir watched it become the fastest camel he had ever seen, racing ahead until he caught up with the Prophet ﷺ; who at once asked to buy it. Jabir refused, then offered it as a gift, then was told again to sell it, and the bargaining ran from one dirham to forty, with Jabir's condition that he ride it home first. The Prophet ﷺ told him not to burst in on his wife at night but to let the crier announce the army so that she could make herself ready for him. Next morning in the mosque he was asked whether he had prayed two rak'at, told Bilal to weigh out the forty and add more, and, as Jabir turned to leave, called him back: he had forgotten his camel. He had sold it. Did you think I would take your camel from you? Take the money, and take the camel. Ibn Hajar said a hundred lessons could be drawn from the story, and the jurists cite it for bargaining and conditions in sale; what it shows first is the care that noticed one grieving boy at the tail of an army of seven hundred.

Zahir ibn Haram RA was a simple, sincere companion whom the Prophet ﷺ loved dearly, though little else is recorded of him. Once, the Prophet ﷺ saw him selling goods in the marketplace, calling out for buyers. The Prophet ﷺ came up quietly from behind and gave him a bear-hug, and, as a joke, called out that he was selling this "abd" (slave), meaning, in truth, "abd Allah," a slave of Allah, so that even in jest his words remained true.

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.

Umm Salama Hind bint Abi Umayya al-Makhzumiyah RA was widowed when her husband Abu Salama RA died of wounds from Uhud. Abu Bakr RA proposed to her first and was turned down. When the Prophet ﷺ proposed, she raised three concerns: her jealousy (ghayra), her age, and her four children, to which he replied that he would pray for her jealousy to ease, that he was afflicted with the same "calamity" of age, and that her family was now his family.

Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, the first grandson of the Prophet ﷺ, was born to Ali RA and Fatima RA. When he was born, the Prophet ﷺ asked Ali RA to see his son and what he had named him; Ali RA said "Harb" (War), and the Prophet ﷺ renamed him Hasan (Beauty). The Prophet ﷺ gave the adhan in Hasan's right ear, instructed Fatima RA to shave his hair and give its weight in silver in charity, and performed the aqiqah himself, sacrificing two sheep and making the invitation, out of his happiness and pride.

Returning home from a journey, the Prophet ﷺ diverted alone into the wilderness with his companions, who followed without asking why. He found a grave and sat down, weeping until his beard was wet, something many of the companions had never seen before. Though none of them asked a question, the whole gathering wept alongside him.

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

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.

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

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

Before the verses of hijab were revealed, Uyaynah ibn Hisn (chieftain of the Banu Fizara, later a leader of the Ahzab at Khandaq) came to Madinah and barged into the Prophet ﷺ's house without knocking, seeking a treaty rather than Islam. Seeing Aisha RA, he asked who she was, then offered the Prophet ﷺ one of his own wives in exchange, which the Prophet ﷺ refused as forbidden by Allah.

The Prophet ﷺ sent Zayd ibn Harithah RA with 170 men to al-'Is, north of Madinah, in Jumada al-Awwal of 6 AH to intercept a Qurayshi caravan returning from Syria. The caravan, its wealth, and its prisoners were captured in full. Among the prisoners was Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi', the Prophet ﷺ's son-in-law and husband of Zaynab bint Muhammad ﷺ, who had already been taken prisoner once before at Badr. At Fajr prayer, Zaynab publicly declared she had granted Abu al-As her protection; the Prophet ﷺ affirmed that any Muslim's protection binds the whole community. The Prophet ﷺ then offered, if the captors wished, to have Abu al-As's share of the caravan returned to him; they offered to do so if he accepted Islam, but he refused, unwilling to appear to convert for gain, and they returned the wealth regardless. Abu al-As returned every portion of the caravan to its Makkan owners, then publicly declared his shahada before the Quraysh in Makkah, before returning to Madinah as a Muslim and being reunited with Zaynab.

The Prophet ﷺ sent 300 men under Abu Ubaydah Amir ibn al-Jarrah RA to intercept a Qurayshi caravan, most likely on its way to Syria, but the Quraysh eluded them. As the pursuit continued, supplies ran critically low; Abu Ubaydah collected and rationed all remaining food until it fell to a single date per person per day, and eventually the sahaba resorted to eating khabat, the dried withered leaves of thorn bushes. They reached the shore at Yanbu and found an enormous whale washed ashore. Thirteen or fourteen of the sahaba sat together in the socket of its eye, and Abu Ubaydah rode his largest camel underneath a raised rib bone without lowering his head. The army camped for a month living off the whale and returned to Madinah with the leftover meat. When they asked the Prophet ﷺ whether eating it had been permissible, he asked for a piece and ate from it himself.

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

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.

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

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

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

"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.

Decades after Muhammad ﷺ adopted Zayd ibn Harithah RA and he became known as Zayd ibn Muhammad ﷺ, Allah revealed Surah al-Ahzab, verse 5: "Call children by their fathers. That is more just in the Sight of Allah." Abdullah ibn Umar RA later remarked that they had never known Zayd by any name other than Zayd ibn Muhammad ﷺ until this verse came down.

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

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.

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

Jabir ibn Abdillah RA, accompanying the Prophet ﷺ on a military expedition to help guard him, reported that when the Prophet ﷺ needed privacy but could find nothing to shield himself with, he went to one of two shrubs standing apart in a valley, held it, and said, "Follow me by the permission of Allah", and it dragged itself along the ground behind him. He then did the same with the second shrub, and when both had followed him, he joined them together, saying, "Stick together by the permission of Allah," and screened himself behind them. When he was finished and began walking back to Jabir, the two shrubs returned to their original places.

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

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.

The Prophet ﷺ visited Juwayriyya RA on a Friday and found her fasting. He asked whether she had fasted the day before or intended to fast the day after; when she said no, he taught her not to single out Friday alone for fasting.

A man came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked him when the Day of Judgment would be. The Prophet ﷺ asked him in turn what he had prepared for it. The man admitted he had little to show in prayer, fasting, or charity, but said he had genuine love for Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ told him that a person will be with whoever he loves. Anas ibn Malik RA, narrating the hadith, recalled that the Sahaba were never as joyful as they were on hearing this, since they loved the Prophet ﷺ and had feared their own standing would be too far beneath his for them to be with him in Jannah.

Fearing the Prophet ﷺ might one day divorce her, Sawda bint Zam'a RA negotiated with him of her own will, telling him she had no jealousy of his other wives and wished only to be resurrected among them, and asked him to give her night with him to Aisha RA. It is said Allah revealed Surah al-Nisa 4:128 regarding this.

The Prophet ﷺ was once wearing a garment with holes in it when a companion gifted him a fine new garment, which he wore. Another companion then asked the Prophet ﷺ to give him this very garment as a gift, and the Prophet ﷺ agreed at once and returned home wearing his old, tattered garment instead. When the other companions criticized the man for asking, certain the Prophet ﷺ would never refuse a request, he explained that he had not asked to wear it, but to keep as his own kafan (burial shroud), so that the Prophet ﷺ's generosity would stand as a witness for him before Allah.

The Prophet ﷺ told Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA that he would not wish to have gold equal to Mount Uhud unless he spent nearly all of it among Allah's slaves within a day or three, keeping back only what was needed to repay debts, warning that those with much wealth in this world will be the least rewarded in the Hereafter except those who spend it generously in charity, as narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari. Abu Dharr took this teaching to heart so firmly that, after the Prophet ﷺ's death, he openly confronted other companions over what he saw as excessive personal building and wealth, leading to friction that eventually caused Khalifa Uthman ibn Affan RA to ask him to leave Madinah for the desert.

The Prophet ﷺ went to pray Fajr from Juwayriyya RA's house and found her in her musalla doing dhikr. Returning later in the day, he found her still sitting in the same place. When she confirmed she had remained there since Fajr, he taught her a short dhikr equal in reward to all the dhikr she had done that morning.

A sariyya of 30 sahaba under Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA was sent to al-Qurta' against the tribe of Banu Bakr ibn Kilab in Shawwal of 6 AH. On the return journey the sahaba captured, without realizing it, Thumamah ibn Uthal, the chieftain of the Banu Hanifa and a public enemy of the Prophet ﷺ who had vowed to kill him. The Prophet ﷺ, who had earlier prayed for control over Thumamah, recognized him and ordered he be treated with honor. Thumamah was held for three days in the Prophet ﷺ's masjid, given the Prophet ﷺ's own food, and questioned each morning. On the third day he was released, and he returned shortly after to declare his shahada. He then performed umrah in Makkah, openly proclaiming his new faith, and afterward cut off the grain supply from the Najd to the Quraysh until the Prophet ﷺ, moved by Abu Sufyan's appeal, wrote to Thumamah asking that the supply resume.

The Prophet ﷺ led 300 sahaba out from Madinah, initially concealing their destination, to move against the Banu Lahyan, the tribe responsible for the massacre at al-Raji. Warned in advance, the Banu Lahyan fled before the Muslims arrived, so no battle took place. The Banu Lahyan had sent to the Quraysh for help, and a small Qurayshi force under Khalid ibn al-Walid camped facing the Muslims. When the Muslims prayed Zuhr in congregation, laying aside their weapons, a man in Khalid's camp urged an attack, but Khalid noted they would have another such opportunity at Asr. Before that could happen, Allah revealed the verse of Surah al-Nisa legislating Salat al-Khawf (the prayer of fear), instructing the Muslims to pray in rotating groups, armed, when facing the enemy.

Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, then the de facto leader of the Quraysh, put up a bounty for anyone who killed the Prophet ﷺ. He supplied a Bedouin with a camel, food, and weapons and sent him to Madinah under the pretense of wanting to accept Islam. When the man entered the masjid, the Prophet ﷺ recognized treachery in his face; the sahaba tackled him and found a dagger on his belt. He confessed when confronted, and the Prophet ﷺ, honoring his word, let him go free, after which the Bedouin embraced Islam.

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

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

According to al-Tabari, the Najashi sent his own son, Arha ibn As'hama, with 60 other delegates to Madinah to give the Prophet ﷺ gifts and announce his Islam, saying he would come to Madinah himself if the Prophet ﷺ wished. But the two boats carrying the delegation drowned and it never arrived.

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

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

Some time after the Hijrah to Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ wrote a letter to the Najashi. The Najashi wrote back declaring, "I am a Muslim: I believe in you and all that you say. And if you command me, O Prophet of God, I will come to Madinah and serve you." The letter itself (as reported by Ibn al-Qayyim) opened, "From Muhammad ﷺ the Messenger of God to Negus, King of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Peace be upon him who follows true guidance..." and set out Islamic belief about Isa (Jesus): "I bear witness that Jesus, the son of Mary, is the spirit of God and His Word which He cast into Mary, the virgin, the good, the pure, so that she conceived Jesus. God created him from His spirit and His breathing as He created Adam by His Hand." It called the Najashi to Islam with "Aslim taslam (submit and you will get salvation)" and closed with the verse "O People of the Book! Let us come to common terms: that we will worship none but God, associate none with Him, nor take one another as lords instead of God" [Quran, 3:64]. This letter is not to be confused with Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA's dawah to the Najashi over a decade earlier during the first Hijrah to Abyssinia; by this point Ja'far had already left. Unlike the letters to Heraclius and Khosrow, this letter carried no warning that the Najashi would bear the sins of his people if he refused; the Prophet ﷺ apparently already knew he was close to Islam.

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.

Sensing after the Battle of Khandaq that Muhammad ﷺ would eventually prevail, Amr ibn al-As led a group of Quraysh notables to Abyssinia to place themselves under the protection of the Najashi rather than face either outcome of the conflict at home. There he found Amr ibn Umayyah al-Damri, an envoy sent by the Prophet ﷺ to the Najashi to summon Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA back to Madinah. Not knowing the Najashi was secretly a Muslim, Amr ibn al-As sought permission to kill the envoy in revenge for Quraysh dead. The Najashi, enraged, refused and instead gave Amr dawah, comparing the Prophet ﷺ's coming victory to that of Musa AS over Pharaoh. Amr, overwhelmed, accepted Islam there and then and gave his bay'ah to the Najashi on the Prophet ﷺ's behalf.

Since Khalid ibn al-Walid's force blocked the direct road, the Prophet ﷺ asked whether anyone could guide the caravan by another route to Makkah; a sahabi came forward who knew the way. The alternate path passed through a valley thick with thorns and volcanic rock that cut the sahaba's feet as they walked. The Prophet ﷺ encouraged them, likening the valley to the gate the Children of Israel were commanded to enter humbly, and announced that everyone who passed through it would have all his sins forgiven, except for "the man with the red camel." The sahaba searched and found a Bedouin at the back of the caravan calling out that he had lost his red camel; when they urged him to come to the Prophet ﷺ so he might be included in the forgiveness, he replied that finding his camel mattered more to him than having his sins forgiven, revealing the hypocrisy in his heart. The caravan crossed the valley and, as night fell, reached the plain of Hudaybiyyah.

After the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, Ummi Kulthum bint Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt converted to Islam and fled persecution in Makkah, reaching Madinah as an Emigrant. The treaty's return clause read, in Suhayl ibn Amr's own words, that no MAN who came to the Muslims would be kept without being handed back; it did not literally name women. The Prophet ﷺ was uncertain what to do, since returning a woman to be handed back to the disbelievers was far more painful a prospect than returning a man, and Allah revealed [Quran, 60:10], which permitted believing women migrants to be examined and, if found sincere, to remain, settling that the clause did not apply to them.

An elderly woman came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked him to make du'a that Allah would allow her to enter Jannah. The Prophet ﷺ told her, gently teasing, that old women do not enter Jannah, which made her weep, until he explained that Allah would first remake her as a young woman before she entered, and recited the verse describing the believing women of Jannah being brought forth anew.

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.

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

Khosrow ordered his governor Badhan to send spies to Madinah to gather information on the Prophet ﷺ, and to bring him back if possible. Badhan sent two emissaries, Babawayh and Khur Khasra, with a letter as a pretext. The Prophet ﷺ made them wait a day, then told them to report to Badhan that Allah had killed his lord Khosrow and that Khosrow's son had taken over, without even opening their letter. By the time the two returned, they found that Khosrow had indeed fled Ctesiphon and been killed in a coup led by his son, Kavad II, around 28 Feb 628 CE (Jumada al-Awwal 7 AH). Badhan and his two emissaries subsequently embraced Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ later wrote to them about the rules of jizya.

The Prophet ﷺ sent a letter to the Muqawqis of Egypt, Jurayj ibn Mina (identified with Cyrus of Alexandria, a Melkite Christian patriarch and the final Byzantine prefect of Egypt, appointed by Rome rather than an independent king). No authentic narration preserves the letter's exact text. The Muqawqis responded politely with a mini-fortune: about 1,000 mithqal (4.25 kg) of gold, fine garments, the mule/donkey Duldul, the servant Ma'boor, honey, and the two Coptic Christian sisters Maria and Sirin, but did not himself embrace Islam. Because the Prophet ﷺ could not keep two sisters at once, he gifted Sirin to the poet Hassan ibn Thabit (with whom she had a son, Abd al-Rahman) and kept Maria for himself.

In the 6th year of Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ saw a dream in which he was performing tawaf around the Ka'bah in a state of ihram, with his head shaved: the rites of Umrah. He announced his intention to perform Umrah to the Muhajirun, the Ansar, and the surrounding Muslim tribes, inviting all who were able to join. The Muhajirun, who had not seen Makkah in six years, prepared eagerly; the Bedouin tribes around Madinah largely refused to participate, fearing a confrontation with the Quraysh. In the end roughly 1,400 Muslims set out with the Prophet ﷺ, some reports saying they carried arms in their baggage (though not worn, since this is not permitted in ihram) as a precaution. The Prophet ﷺ deliberately delayed departure until the 1st of Dhu al-Qa'dah, the start of the Sacred Months, to signal that he came in peace. At the miqat of Dhu al-Hulayfah he prayed two rak'at, entered ihram, and consecrated 70 sacrificial camels, a practice instituted by Ibrahim AS. From there he sent the sahabi Busr ibn Sufyan al-Khuza'i ahead to Makkah to learn how the Quraysh would react.

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

A group of the Ansar came to the Prophet ﷺ saying their camel had gone as mad as a rabid dog and begging him not to approach it, but the Prophet ﷺ entered its pen alone. On seeing him, the camel lowered its head as if in sajdah; the Prophet ﷺ rubbed its head, calmed it, and returned it to its owners. The sahaba then asked whether, if even a speechless animal prostrated to him, it would not be more fitting for them to prostrate to him too, and the Prophet ﷺ forbade it, saying it is not permitted for any human to prostrate to another human.

A camel that had grown too old and worn for work or even for carrying water, and which its owners had decided to slaughter, ran into the Prophet ﷺ's Masjid, placed its head in his lap, and cried. The Prophet ﷺ asked the sahaba to find its owner, saying it had a story to tell; when the owner explained the animal was to be slaughtered that night, the Prophet ﷺ asked him to either gift him the camel or sell it to him, and the owner agreed.

A boy who had lived deaf and mute for seven or eight years since birth was brought to the Prophet ﷺ, who made du'a over him; the boy was healed on the spot and became normal.

Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA once asked the Prophet ﷺ, "O Messenger of Allah ﷺ, will you not appoint me to a public office?" The Prophet ﷺ stroked his shoulder and told him he was too weak for it, warning that authority is a trust which becomes a source of humiliation and remorse on the Day of Judgment for all but those who fulfill its obligations properly, narrated in Sahih Muslim.

On the way back from the mini-expedition sent to verify the riders near Ghayqah, the sahaba (travelling with the caravan in ihram for Umrah) came across a herd of zebras (himar al-wahshi). Abu Qatada al-Ansari, who was in charge of the sacrificial animals, was not in ihram for reasons the sources do not give. None of the sahaba pointed out the zebras to him or helped him, out of caution, but Abu Qatada retrieved his own bow and arrow, rode after the herd, and caught and slaughtered one. When he offered the meat to the sahaba they declined to touch it, uncertain whether it was lawful for them to eat while in ihram. On reaching camp they asked the Prophet ﷺ, who ruled that since none of them had pointed out the game or helped in the hunt, the meat was permissible for them.

Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq was a wealthy chieftain of Khaybar and the principal financier of the tribe of Ghatafan's mercenaries at the Battle of Khandaq. To answer the assassination of Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf carried out earlier by men of the Aws, a party of five from the Khazraj, led by Abdullah ibn Atik RA, sought and received the Prophet ﷺ's permission to eliminate him, on condition that no women or children be harmed. Abdullah ibn Atik slipped into the fortress of Khaybar at the closing of the gates, let the rest of the party in after nightfall, and the group made their way to Sallam's house and killed him. His wife raised the alarm but was spared. The party escaped without casualty other than Abdullah ibn Atik spraining or breaking his foot, which the Prophet ﷺ healed with his hand on their return.

After Hudaybiyyah, when the truce freed the Prophet ﷺ to look beyond Arabia, he wrote to the rulers of the world, and the most famous of the letters went to Caesar. The emperor was Heraclius, who reigned from 610 to 641 and whom Muslim and non-Muslim historians alike remember kindly: a scholar of Christianity who tried and failed to reconcile its two great factions with a theology of his own, and a soldier who had just won back everything the Persians had taken, as Surah al-Rum had foretold when Rome seemed finished. Dihyah al-Kalbi carried the letter to the governor of Busra, where the Quraysh went to trade, to be sent on; and it happened that Heraclius was in Jerusalem, so it reached him at once. Abu Sufyan was trading in Busra, still a pagan, when a crier summoned him and his companions to Jerusalem, and he found himself standing in the palace of the emperor. Heraclius asked, through an interpreter, which of them was nearest in blood to the man who claimed to be a prophet. Abu Sufyan was, and was seated in front, his companions behind him with orders to signal if he lied. He said afterwards that only the fear of being called a liar by his own people made him tell the truth. The questions came one after another. His family? Noble. Had anyone among them claimed this before him? No. Had any of his ancestors been a king? No. Did the nobles follow him or the poor? The poor. Were they growing or shrinking? Growing. Did any leave his religion in disgust once they had entered it? No. Had he ever been accused of lying before he began? No. Did he break his word? No, though there was a truce between them now and no one knew what he would do, the one thing, Abu Sufyan admitted later, he could find to say against him. Had they fought him? Yes, and sometimes he won and sometimes they did. What did he command? To worship God alone and abandon the gods of their fathers, to pray, to speak the truth, to be chaste, and to keep the ties of kinship. Then Heraclius explained his questions. Prophets come from noble families. Had another made the claim before, this man might be imitating him; had his fathers been kings, he might be after his inheritance. A man who does not lie about money does not lie about God. The poor follow the prophets first, the truth always gains followers, and faith that has entered a heart and mingled with it is not thrown off. Prophets do not betray. And what he commanded was what the prophets had commanded. If all this was true, he said, the man would soon rule the ground beneath his feet; he had known from his scriptures that someone was coming, but had not expected him from the Arabs; and could he reach him, he would wash his feet. Then he called for the letter and had it read: in the name of Allah, from Muhammad ﷺ the servant of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ to Heraclius the great one of the Romans; peace on whoever follows guidance; submit and you will be safe and Allah will give you a double reward, and if you turn away you carry the sin of the Arisiyin; and the verse of Ali Imran calling the People of the Book to a word held in common, that none be worshipped but Allah. There was uproar in the court and the Arabs were put out. Abu Sufyan said to his companions on the way out that the affair of Ibn Abi Kabsha, the Quraysh's sneer for the Prophet ﷺ, had grown so great that the king of the Romans feared him; and it was there, he said, in the palace of Caesar, that Islam first entered his heart, three years before he embraced it. Sahih al-Bukhari keeps a second story of Heraclius, told apart from the first. He woke one morning troubled by a dream in which the king of the circumcised had appeared; his courtiers told him that only the Jews were circumcised and that he need only bear down on them. Then Dihyah arrived with the Prophet ﷺ's letter and, on examination, was found to be circumcised, and the emperor understood whom the dream meant. He wrote to a learned friend, a bishop, who wrote back that this was indeed the one; and it is likely, though the sources do not say it, that it was this friend who supplied the three tests Heraclius later sent the Tanukhi to make. At last he gathered his senators and asked what they thought of his following Muhammad ﷺ, and when they bolted for the doors he told them he had only been testing their faith. He died a Christian, in the confusion of a coup, having lived to see Jerusalem taken by the people of his dream.

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

As the Muslims proceeded toward Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ sent a small party to investigate a report of riders near Ghayqah; it proved to be a false alarm. When the caravan reached Asfan, roughly midway between Madinah and Makkah, the scout Busr ibn Sufyan al-Khuza'i returned and reported that the Quraysh had armed themselves, worn their leopard-skin war garb, brought their women as they had at Uhud, and sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to camp at Ghumaym, a plain outside Makkah, to block the Muslims' path. The Prophet ﷺ halted the caravan, camped in the shade, and addressed the sahaba, first suggesting they attack the tribes allied with the Quraysh, then asking their opinion. Abu Bakr RA counselled that they had left Madinah intending only the House of Allah and should continue toward Makkah, fighting only if attacked; the Prophet ﷺ accepted this and the caravan moved on.

During a months-long drought in Madinah, a man interrupted the Prophet ﷺ's Friday khutbah, describing crops withering, animals dying, and children starving, and asked him to pray for rain. Anas ibn Malik RA narrated that although there had not been a wisp of cloud in the sky for months, as soon as the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands a dense cloud appeared from behind the mountain of Madinah, and rain began falling before he had even lowered his hands; it did not stop for a week. The following Friday, the same man (or another, the sources differ) returned, this time describing crops flooded and children and animals struggling in the water, and asked the Prophet ﷺ to pray for the rain to be diverted. The Prophet ﷺ prayed, "O Allah, send the rain around and not on us," and pointed to the sky; wherever he pointed, the clouds parted and the sun broke through.

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

The Prophet ﷺ sent Abdullah ibn Hudhafah al-Sahmi with a letter to the ruler of Bahrain, to be passed on to Khosrow (Kisra), Emperor of Persia, inviting him to Islam. Khosrow mocked the messenger and tore up the letter in front of him.

Among the replies to the Prophet ﷺ's letters to kings and rulers, the ruler of the province of Bahrain wrote back sympathetically and gifted the Prophet ﷺ one of the finest robes he had ever worn, decorated with gold. The sahaba gathered around the Prophet ﷺ, amazed at its quality.

On an undated occasion, Hafsa bint Umar RA called Safiyyah bint Huyayy RA "bint al-Yahudi" (daughter of a Jew) as an insult, leaving Safiyyah in tears. The Prophet ﷺ visited her and, on learning why she was crying, taught her how to answer the taunt.

Khalid ibn al-Walid, son of the Banu Makhzum chieftain al-Walid ibn al-Mughira and the Quraysh's most effective battlefield commander, had grown increasingly convinced of the Prophet ﷺ's truth since sensing he was being repeatedly turned away in battle; at Uhud, at Khandaq, and finally when the Prophet ﷺ outmaneuvered his attempted ambush at Asfan during Hudaybiyyah. When the Prophet ﷺ came to Makkah for Umrah al-Qada and asked after him, Khalid's brother al-Walid ibn al-Walid RA (himself a Muslim since Badr) sent him a letter urging him to embrace Islam and relaying the Prophet ﷺ's praise of him in absentia. Reading it, Khalid resolved to convert. He first asked Safwan ibn Umayyah, who flatly refused. He then asked his childhood friend Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal to join him, but Ikrimah panicked and summoned Abu Sufyan ibn Harb and other Quraysh elders; according to one report it came to unsheathed swords before Ikrimah himself defused the confrontation. That same night, Khalid left Makkah for Madinah together with Uthman ibn Talha. On the road, Khalid and Uthman ibn Talha met Amr ibn al-As by chance, and the three traveled on to Madinah together, becoming the last major batch of Quraysh leaders to accept Islam before the Conquest of Makkah. When it was Amr's turn, he held back from the Prophet ﷺ's outstretched hand and set a condition, that his past sins be forgiven, before the Prophet ﷺ reminded him that embracing Islam, migration (hijrah), and Hajj each wipe away all sins that came before them.

Banu Amir ibn Sa'sa'ah, the tribe responsible for the Massacre of Bir Ma'una [see episode 51], sent a delegation to Madinah probably in the 7th or 8th year of the Hijrah, before the Conquest of Makkah. Among them came Amir ibn al-Tufayl, one of the massacre's chief instigators, with no intention of embracing Islam. He arranged with his henchman Arbad ibn Qays to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ with a poisoned dagger during a private audience, on a secret signal. The Prophet ﷺ refused Amir a private audience unless he embraced Islam. Amir tried repeatedly and gave the signal three times, but Arbad never acted; he later explained he could only ever see Amir, never the Prophet ﷺ, whenever the signal was given. When it became clear the plot had failed, Amir offered the Prophet ﷺ three options: split leadership of the towns and the Bedouins between them, be named his successor, or face an army of a thousand camels. The Prophet ﷺ refused all three and prayed against him. Amir fell fatally ill on the journey home while lodging at a prostitute's house; realizing he was dying, he fled on his horse into the darkness rather than die there, and was never seen again. Arbad returned to his own tribe and spoke impiously of Allah; the next day he and his camel were struck dead by lightning in front of his people. It is said Qur'an 13:11-13 refers to his fate.

After the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, Abu Basir of Thaqif, an ally of Banu Zuhrah, was the first person to make hijrah from Makkah to Madinah. Bound by the treaty's clause that any man who came to the Muslims must be returned, the Prophet ﷺ handed him over to two Quraysh emissaries sent to collect him, telling him he was following the letter of the agreement and would not be treacherous. On the road back, Abu Basir killed one of his two escorts with the man's own sword and escaped; the other fled on foot back to Madinah. Barred by the treaty from staying in Madinah yet unable to return to Makkah, Abu Basir set up a small settlement near what is now Jeddah. When Abu Jandal ibn Suhayl RA heard of it, he escaped his father's custody a second time and joined him there, and word spread among the Muslim converts still trapped in Makkah until 10, then 15, 60, and eventually about 80 people had gathered at the settlement.

After Abu Hurairah RA migrated to Madinah and arranged for his mother to join him, she remained bitter that he had left the religion of their forefathers, and would speak ill of Islam and of the Prophet ﷺ in front of him. Abu Hurairah went in tears to the Prophet ﷺ and asked him to make du'a that Allah guide her; the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands and prayed, "O Allah, guide the mother of Abu Hurairah." Abu Hurairah returned home to find his mother had heard the sound of him approaching and asked him to wait, as she was bathing: the ghusl of her acceptance of Islam. As soon as he entered, she recited the shahada.

After Maria al-Qibtiyya RA was brought to Madinah, before she had embraced Islam, rumors spread that the servant sent with her, Ma'boor, said by some reports to be a distant relative of hers, was 'visiting' her. The Prophet ﷺ instructed Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, as the one entrusted with matters of his household (Ahl al-Bayt), to take his sword and find Ma'boor. Ali found him in a date grove; on seeing Ali, Ma'boor was terrified and his awrah was exposed (accounts differ on whether he fell while climbing a tree or exposed himself intentionally). It was then plain that he had been mutilated (castrated, as was sometimes done to slaves before Islam prohibited mutilating any slave or human being) proving the rumors false. Ali returned and informed the Prophet ﷺ.

News of the massacre at al-Watir reached the Khuza'a's chieftain, Amr ibn Salim al-Khuza'i, who led a delegation of 40 men to Madinah to seek the Prophet ﷺ's help. He recited a one-page poem before the Prophet ﷺ, recorded in Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham, invoking the ancient covenant (Hilf) his own father had made with the Prophet ﷺ's grandfather Abdul Muttalib, that the two tribes would stand as one against anyone who caused the other distress, "as long as the generations proceed"; he also invoked the shared ancestress the two tribes had through Qusayy ibn Kilab, and the Khuza'a's standing as allies of the Muslims under the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, before describing how the Banu Bakr had fallen on his people while they were bowing and prostrating in prayer. Moved by the poem, the Prophet ﷺ promised to help, and later, seeing a cloud on the horizon, took it as a good omen of victory for the Khuza'a (also called Banu Ka'b). Most scholars hold that the Prophet ﷺ then took the Banu Bakr's attack as an automatic breach of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah and began marching on Makkah without any further negotiation with the Quraysh; well within his rights, since the Quraysh had knowingly broken the treaty. A report graded mursal sahih by Ibn Hajar and others instead holds that the Prophet ﷺ first sent the Quraysh an ultimatum: sever ties with the Banu Bakr and pay the blood money for the twenty dead (2,000 camels), or face war. On this account, the Quraysh refused both conditions outright: the blood money alone would have ruined them, and they argued the Banu Bakr were the only tribe left in the region still on their own religion.

On the way out of Makkah after Umrah al-Qada, al-Abbas suggested the Prophet ﷺ marry Maymunah bint al-Harith, his sister-in-law (Umm al-Fadl's sister), who had been widowed after her first husband Abu Rahm ibn Abd al-Uzza died and did not wish to remain among the Quraysh. Al-Abbas, acting as her wali, arranged the marriage and the Prophet ﷺ agreed, having known of her from his days in Makkah. The nikah took place on the third day of the Umrah. When the Quraysh insisted the agreed three days were up, the Prophet ﷺ asked to stay a little longer to hold a wedding feast for them, but they refused and he honored the treaty and departed. The marriage was consummated afterward outside Makkah at Sarif, where Maymunah RA later passed away in 51 AH and is buried to this day; the last of the Prophet ﷺ's wives to die, as she was the last he married.

At an unspecified point in his life, the Prophet ﷺ was sitting with Jibril AS when an angel came down; Jibril told him Allah had permitted this angel to descend for the first time since the beginning of creation. The angel greeted the Prophet ﷺ and said Allah had sent him to ask a question: did he wish to be a malikan-rasula (a messenger-king) or an abdan-rasula (a messenger-slave)? Jibril AS motioned for him to humble himself, and the Prophet ﷺ chose to be a messenger-slave. The narrator of the hadith adds that after this, the Prophet ﷺ was never again seen eating while reclining against a wall, the simplest sign of a life of ease, because he had chosen servitude before Allah. A separate, more weakly-chained telling has the Prophet ﷺ recounting the same encounter directly to Aisha RA, describing the angel's belt as bigger than the Ka'bah itself and the choice as being between a nabiyan-malika (a king-prophet) and a nabiyan-abda (a slave-prophet).

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.

As the Muslims left Makkah after Umrah al-Qada, Umara, the young daughter of Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, ran after them calling out to the Prophet ﷺ not to leave her in Makkah. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, Zayd ibn Harithah RA, and Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA each claimed the right to take care of her; Ali and Ja'far as her first cousins, and Zayd as the sworn brother of her father Hamzah RA through the Prophet ﷺ's pact of brotherhood. The Prophet ﷺ praised each of the three men in turn, then ruled that Ja'far should take her, because his wife Asma bint Umays RA was Umara's khala (maternal aunt), and "the khala is like the mother."

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

For roughly a century the Khuza'a and the Banu Bakr had fought on and off, much like the pre-Islamic feud between the Aws and the Khazraj. When the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah permitted each side (the Quraysh and the Muslims) to form alliances with other tribes under the treaty's protections, the Khuza'a (most of whom were by then Muslim) joined the Muslims' side, while the Banu Bakr, the only pagan tribe remaining in the vicinity of Makkah, joined the Quraysh. In the 8th year of the Hijrah, the Banu Bakr sought Quraysh permission for one raid to settle old scores of revenge and take plunder; the Quraysh not only agreed but some of them (including Suhayl ibn Amr and Safwan ibn Umayyah) supplied weapons, reportedly for a share of the spoils, reasoning that a night attack would never be traced back to them. The Banu Bakr surprised the Khuza'a encampment at al-Watir, a pond outside the Haram boundary, expecting to slip away with camels and a little plunder; instead the alarm was raised and a fight broke out, leaving more than twenty Khuza'a dead, including women and children. One man of the Khuza'a fled into the sanctuary of the Haram and called out for his pursuer to fear Allah, but the man from the Banu Bakr answered, "There is no God today," and killed him there regardless.

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.

In one of the small sariyyas the Prophet ﷺ sent out before the Conquest of Makkah (against a tribe seen as a threat to the Muslims, though the lecture does not name it) the sahaba passed by Amir ibn al-Adbat al-Ashja'i, a secret Muslim whose own tribe had not accepted Islam. Happy to see them, Amir greeted them with the Islamic salam. Among the contingent was Muhallim ibn Juthama, who bore Amir a personal vendetta from the days of Jahiliyyah. While the rest of the sahaba accepted Amir's salam, Muhallim refused, insisting Amir was only pretending to be Muslim, and single-handedly killed him, taking his belongings as war booty. When news reached the Prophet ﷺ, Allah revealed Surah al-Nisa 4:94, rebuking believers who refuse someone's offered peace out of a desire for worldly gain. A bitter dispute broke out between the tribe of Muhallim and the tribe of Amir; both later accepted Islam, and after the Battle of Hunayn their chieftains came to the Prophet ﷺ, angry, to demand the killing be resolved. The Prophet ﷺ calmed them and paid 100 camels in blood money himself, as the one who had sent Muhallim. When Muhallim's tribe asked him to seek Allah's forgiveness for Muhallim, the Prophet ﷺ refused, one of the very few times in his life he declined to do so, because of Muhallim's character and what was in his heart. Ibn Ishaq reports that Muhallim died a few days later; his tribe buried him, but each morning found his body surfaced face-down, and after burying him a third time with the same result, they finally left him uncovered in a valley under a pile of stones. The Prophet ﷺ then said that the earth covers up people worse than Muhallim, but that Allah wished to warn the believers, through him, of the sanctity of human life.

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.

The Prophet ﷺ overstayed at Zaynab bint Jahsh RA's house, where he had eaten a type of honey. Aisha RA and Hafsa RA RA agreed between themselves to tell him, when he next entered upon either of them, that they smelled something bad on him, meaning the honey. When he did, the Prophet ﷺ said he would not eat at Zaynab's house again.

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.

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

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.

In the lead-up to the Conquest of Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ kept the army's true destination secret even from Abu Bakr RA and Aisha RA. To reinforce the deception, he sent a small scouting party of eight men north to Batn Idam, giving the impression that the massive army being mustered would march toward Syria rather than south toward Makkah. Only the night before the army actually departed did the Prophet ﷺ announce that they were marching on Makkah.

Barely two days out from Madinah on the march to the Conquest of Makkah, at the valley of Juhfa, the Muslim army encountered al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle, who had set out from Makkah to make hijrah with his family, unaware the Conquest was already underway.

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!"

At the Conquest of Makkah, Safwan ibn Umayyah (who had never spoken to his cousin Umayr ibn Wahab since Umayr's conversion years earlier) fled the city, assuming the Prophet ﷺ would never forgive his role in the earlier plot against him. Umayr asked the Prophet ﷺ for a guarantee of protection (aman) for Safwan, which was granted; Umayr then found Safwan and convinced him to return, where he pronounced the shahada before the Prophet ﷺ.

Umm Salama RA had a daughter named Barrah, meaning "the righteous one" (a self-praising name the Prophet ﷺ disliked). He changed her name to Zaynab.

While the Prophet ﷺ was in sajdah during prayer, Hasan RA crawled onto his back to play. The Prophet ﷺ did not get up, allowing the child to stay.

While the Prophet ﷺ was giving a khutbah, Hasan and Husayn RA came in from Fatima RA's house wearing long red thobes, tripped over the garments and each other, and fell in the masjid. The Prophet ﷺ stopped the khutbah, went to them, and carried them both.

The Prophet ﷺ intentionally held Hasan RA throughout a khutbah and said of him, "This son of mine is a sayyid, and a day will come when he shall cause reconciliation between two large groups of Muslims."

An old woman came to the Prophet ﷺ and gave her name, which meant something unpleasant. As was his sunnah of changing bad names to good ones, he renamed her Hasanah (Beautiful).

After the Conquest of Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ sent Amr ibn al-As to Oman calling its people to Islam, including instructions that jizya be taken even from the Majus (Zoroastrians) there.

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.

On an occasion when someone irritated al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the Prophet ﷺ gave a khutbah in his defense, declaring before the Muhajirun and the Ansar that the uncle of a man holds the same standing as a father, and instructing them not to irritate his uncle.

After the Conquest of Makkah, Khalid ibn al-Walid RA (a very recent convert) was sent, among several expeditions, to invite the tribe of Banu Jadhimah to Islam. Khalid had a personal grievance against this tribe from the Jahiliyyah era, since they had killed his uncle. When Khalid arrived with an armed party, some of the Banu Jadhimah assumed he had come for revenge and drew their swords; Khalid's men fought back. Other members of the tribe realized what was happening and announced their submission, but rather than saying the expected "Aslamna" (we have submitted), they used the unfamiliar phrase "Saba'na" (we have become Sabians), the term Arabs sometimes used, incorrectly, for those entering Islam. Khalid, not recognizing the phrase, did not understand they were professing Islam and continued the attack, killing a number of them. Abdullah ibn Umar RA and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, among other Companions present, refused Khalid's order to join the killing; when Khalid rebuked Abd al-Rahman for disobeying his commander, he cursed him.

About two weeks after the Prophet ﷺ returned to Madinah from the Conquest of Makkah, Ka'b ibn Zuhayr, the most renowned poet in the Arabian Peninsula, who had written vulgar satirical poetry against the Muslims, came secretly to Madinah to seek forgiveness. He entered unrecognized by face, stayed the night at the house of a relative, and after Fajr approached the Prophet ﷺ in disguise, put his hand in the Prophet ﷺ's hand, and asked whether protection would be granted to Ka'b ibn Zuhayr if he repented. When the Prophet ﷺ agreed, Ka'b revealed himself. An Ansari rose to strike him down, but the Prophet ﷺ stopped him. Ka'b then recited his praise-poem for the Prophet ﷺ, known as the Qasidat al-Burda (Banat Su'ad), the original poem of this name, distinct from the later, more famous Qasidat al-Burda of al-Busiri (a 7th-century-Hijrah poet who claimed to have seen the Prophet ﷺ in a dream).

While traveling at night on the return from Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ separated from the rest of the army and rode up onto the top of a cliff, with only his camel and two or three companions (among them Ammar ibn Yasir RA and Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA) nearby. In the middle of the night, around fourteen or fifteen men with their faces covered charged toward the Prophet ﷺ's camel. He took evasive action and went quickly down into the valley, and the men fled. He then told Ammar RA that they were hypocrites who had wanted to throw him off the edge of the cliff, but that Allah had protected him. Most of the sahaba never heard of the incident at the time, and the Prophet ﷺ simply moved on.

This is the second letter to pass between the Prophet ﷺ and Heraclius, and unlike the first it is not in al-Bukhari but in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, told by the Tanukhi himself, a Christian Arab of the tribe of Tanukh whose name no one recorded, to a young man of Hims who found him in his old age, nearly a hundred, and asked him about the letters. When the Prophet ﷺ was at Tabuk he sent Dihyah al-Kalbi to Heraclius again. The emperor, who had watched what this man had done since the first letter, locked himself in with his patriarchs and priests and put the invitation to them, and then, needing an Arabic speaker with a good memory, was brought the Tanukhi. He gave him a letter and three things to check: whether the Prophet ﷺ spoke of the letters he had sent to the kings, whether he answered a question in the letter with the word night, and whether he had a mark on his back. The Tanukhi found him sitting with his Companions by the well at Tabuk, walked up and handed him the letter. The Prophet ﷺ set it aside and asked where he was from, and invited him to Islam, the hanifiyyah, the religion of his father Ibrahim. The Tanukhi answered that he was an ambassador and would not change his people's religion while he carried their message; he would go home and think. The Prophet ﷺ laughed and recited that you do not guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He wills; and then said that he had written to Kisra of Persia, who tore his letter, so Allah would tear his kingdom, to the Najashi, who tore it, so Allah would tear his, and to the Tanukhi's master, who had kept it safe, so that men would go on fearing his power as long as there was good in life. That was the first sign, and the envoy took an arrow from his quiver and scratched a mark on his parchment. He asked who read for the Prophet ﷺ, and Mu'awiyah was called and read Caesar's question: you invite me to a Garden as wide as the heavens and the earth, so where is the Fire? Subhan Allah, the Prophet ﷺ answered, where does the night go when the day comes? The second mark went on the parchment. Then the Prophet ﷺ said that the envoy had a right to a gift and there was nothing to give him on campaign; Uthman stood and presented a yellow robe, and an Ansari took him home for the night. He waited a day or two for a chance at the third sign and gave up, and went to take his leave. The Prophet ﷺ told him to wait, turned, let his shirt down from his shoulders and said: go and tell your master what you have seen. The Tanukhi described the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulder blades as like a large cupping mark. He went home with all three signs checked, and some say he later became a Muslim and some that he died a Christian. What Heraclius did with the answer is told in Bukhari's second story of him: he put the question to his senators and, when they recoiled, said he had only been testing them.

While the Prophet ﷺ was raising funds for the Jaysh al-Usrah and had just been mildly rebuked by Allah for accepting the hypocrites' excuses at face value [Qur'an 9:43], the hypocrites of Madinah built their own masjid within walking distance of Masjid Quba. Classical tafsir (Ibn Kathir, al-Tabari) traces its true origin to Abu Amir al-Rahib ("the Monk"), an elder of the Aws who had rejected Islam, fled to Makkah after Badr, tried and failed to rally the Aws against the Prophet ﷺ before Uhud, and finally made his way into the circle of the Roman Caesar. From there he wrote to his old ally Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul asking him to build a base in Madinah so that, with Roman backing, they might retake the city; Ibn Ubayy responded by constructing this masjid as its headquarters. Publicly, the hypocrites gave a different reason, that it served their weak and elderly on rainy nights, even though Masjid Quba stood nearby. Ibn Ubayy invited the Prophet ﷺ to pray two rak'at there as a token gesture; the Prophet ﷺ, uncomfortable at a masjid being raised while the community needed funds for Tabuk, questioned them about its purpose and declined to commit, saying only that he would consider it after returning from the expedition. The masjid operated for about a month, and the Prophet ﷺ never once prayed in it. On the march back from Tabuk, Allah revealed Qur'an 9:107-109 exposing it as a masjid built for harm, disbelief, division among the believers, and as a base for whoever had warred against Allah and His Messenger ﷺ (a reference to Abu Amir), and forbidding the Prophet ﷺ from ever standing in it. The Prophet ﷺ then commanded that it be destroyed and burned to the ground. Abu Amir himself never returned; the Prophet ﷺ had prayed against him, "May you die a stranger," and he died in Rome without family or friends. Verse 9:108's praise of "a masjid founded on taqwa from the first day" prompted a companion debate over whether it meant Masjid Quba or the Prophet ﷺ's own masjid in Madinah; the correct view, encompassing both, is that it is a general description of any masjid built with sincere taqwa.

The Prophet ﷺ sent a letter to Musaylimah al-Kadhdhab of Banu Hanifa calling him to Islam. Musaylimah replied that he would only accept if he were given a share of power.

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 Prophet ﷺ said, "Hasan and Husayn are the leaders of the young men of Jannah, and their father is better than them."

On the march to Hunayn, the Muslims passed by a magnificent, lush tree called Dhat Anwat, at which the pagan Quraysh had held an annual festival: sacrificing animals and hanging their weapons on it for good luck before battle. Abu Waqid al-Laythi RA, who had accepted Islam only about a week earlier, asked the Prophet ﷺ, "O Messenger of Allah ﷺ! Why don't you make for us a hanging tree just as they have the Hanging Tree?" The Prophet ﷺ, swearing by Allah, told him he had asked exactly what the Children of Israel asked of Musa AS when they said, "O Moses, make for us a god just as they have gods" [Quran, 7:138], and said, "This is the custom that you will follow the pathways of those before you."

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.

After roughly fifty to sixty days away, some accounts say closer to three months, the Prophet ﷺ returned to Madinah from Tabuk. The companion al-Sa'ib RA, then a child, later narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari that he was among the children who ran out to Thaniyat al-Wada', the hill north of Madinah where families traditionally gathered to see travelers off and welcome them home, to greet the Prophet ﷺ on his return. A report from Ibn Aisha, which has a broken chain, adds that the women and children went out singing the poem Tala'al-badru alayna (The full moon rose over us, from Thaniyat al-Wada'). Al-Bayhaqi records it in his Dala'il al-Nubuwwah under this return as well as under the Hijrah, noting that the scholars usually mention it at the Hijrah; Ibn al-Qayyim holds that it belongs here, since Thaniyat al-Wada' lies on the Syrian side of Madinah. The Prophet ﷺ went to his masjid, prayed two rak'at, and almost immediately began receiving the delegations of those who had stayed behind, including Ka'b ibn Malik RA.

On the return march from Tabuk, the army passed by al-Hijr, the ruins of the ancient people of Thamud and Prophet Saleh AS, whose homes were carved directly into the mountain and still stand along with the well once used by their she-camel. Some of the sahaba began rushing in to see inside the dwellings, so the Prophet ﷺ called out al-salatu jami'ah to gather the army back. He then asked them why they would want to enter upon a people whom Allah's wrath had come down upon, told them their own Prophet ﷺ informing them of the future was more amazing than the ruins of Thamud, and instructed them to hurry through crying rather than curiously, lest the same punishment overtake them. He covered his face with his turban and rushed through the valley without pausing. Some of the army nonetheless drew water from Thamud's wells and mixed it with dough; on hearing of it, the Prophet ﷺ ordered that all such water and bread be given to the animals rather than consumed. He also told them not to ask Allah for miracles, recalling how the people of Saleh AS had asked for a miracle, a she-camel brought forth from solid rock, and then hamstrung her in defiance of the warning never to harm her, bringing swift punishment. That night, after leaving the valley, he ﷺ warned the army not to leave their tents unless accompanied, and two who disobeyed were afflicted: one is said to have lost his mind before the Prophet ﷺ prayed for his cure, and the other was carried off by winds to a distant mountain and had to make his own way back to Madinah.

On the return march from Tabuk, a group of hypocrites began joking inappropriately, with one mocking the Prophet ﷺ's prophecy that the Muslims would inherit the treasures of Rome and Persia (prophecies that, unknown to them at the time, would come to pass within years of his death ﷺ) and disparaging the Qur'an-reciting Muslims around them as cowardly and gluttonous. A companion overheard this, confronted the speaker, and galloped ahead to inform the Prophet ﷺ, but by the time he arrived the Prophet ﷺ was already receiving revelation. As the hypocrite ran up behind, jumping off his camel in a show of remorse to offer an excuse before he thought he could be reported, the Prophet ﷺ began reciting the Qur'an, which quoted the hypocrite's excuse simultaneously as he was about to give it. The Prophet ﷺ recited on without even looking at him, repeating that he had committed kufr after his Iman, while the man ran alongside holding the camel's stirrup, being dragged.

As part of the same campaign to rid Arabia of idolatry, the Prophet ﷺ sent Jarir ibn Abdillah al-Bajali RA to destroy another idol worshipped in Yemen, Dhi al-Khalasa, asking him, "Will you not get rid of Dhi al-Khalasa for me?" The Prophet ﷺ was not at peace knowing idols were still being worshipped in the Peninsula. This period is connected to the early verses of Surah al-Tawba, revealed a few months later, which established that no mushrikin should remain in the Arabian Peninsula.

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.

Hatim al-Ta'i was the byword for generosity among the Arabs, and his son Adi, chief of Tayy after him, was a Christian with friends at the Roman court and none of his father's nerve. When he heard that the Muslims were conquering tribe after tribe he kept camels ready, and when his lookouts told him Ali was coming he abandoned his people and fled with his wife, children and wealth to the north, near Roman territory. Ali's expedition broke the idol of Tayy and brought back prisoners, and among them a woman demanded to see the Prophet ﷺ: she was the daughter of Hatim, and asked him to be generous to her as Allah would be generous to him. He freed her, gave her a camel and provision, and let her go where she liked. She found her brother in the north, rebuked him for running, and told him to go down to Muhammad ﷺ: either he was a prophet, in which case Adi should follow him, or he was a king, in which case Adi should win his favour. That she allowed the first possibility shows what she already thought. Adi told the story himself, to a student in Kufa, where he died at a hundred and twenty. No one on earth, he said, had been more hateful to him than the Prophet ﷺ; but he decided that if the man spoke the truth he would hear it from him, and if not it would do him no harm. He walked into Madinah at the end of the eighth year or the start of the ninth without protection and without fear, for who would harm the son of Hatim, and men who recognised him shouted his name and took him to the Prophet ﷺ. Adi, accept Islam and you will be safe. He had a religion already, he said, and a better one than the pagans'. The invitation was repeated and refused, and repeated again. Then the Prophet ﷺ said that he knew Adi's religion better than Adi did. Was he not the chief of his people? He was. Did he not take a quarter of their income? He did. And did he not know that his own religion forbade it? Adi said he was ashamed, and knew then that this was a prophet. The Prophet ﷺ took him by the hand and walked him to his house, and on the way an old woman with a small child stopped him about some need of hers, and he stood and talked with her until it was settled, with the chief of Tayy waiting beside him. This, Adi said to himself, is not a king. In the house there was one worn mat. The Prophet ﷺ spread it and told Adi to sit on it, and when Adi protested that there would be nothing left for his host, insisted, and sat on the ground. Then he asked: do you know of any god but Allah? No. Any mightier than Allah? No. The Jews, he said, had earned Allah's anger, and the Christians had gone astray. And then he named the thing that was holding Adi back: perhaps it was the state of the people around him, their poverty and their weakness, seen by a man who lived well among a great civilisation. Had he heard of al-Hirah? A woman would soon ride from al-Hirah to circle the Ka'bah alone, fearing nothing but Allah. The treasures of Kisra ibn Hormuz would be divided among them. Kisra ibn Hormuz? Adi asked. Kisra ibn Hormuz. And a day would come when a man would walk the streets of Madinah with alms in his hand and find no one to take them. Adi became a Muslim there in the house. When he told the story in later life he would say that he had seen two of the three with his own eyes: the woman rode safe, and he had been among those who opened the treasury of Kisra; as for the third, he knew it would come, and it came in the reign of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz. Later he asked the Prophet ﷺ whether his father, so generous to kin and stranger, would be rewarded, and was told that his father had wanted something and had got what he wanted.

The Prophet ﷺ sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to the tribe of Tayy (in the area of present-day Ha'il, Saudi Arabia), the tribe of the legendary pre-Islamic figure of generosity, Hatim al-Ta'i. Hatim's son Adi ibn Hatim, chieftain of Tayy after him, had already converted to Christianity and fled north toward Roman territory with his family and wealth rather than face the advancing Muslims. Ali ibn Abi Talib RA conquered the tribe, destroyed its great idol, and brought back prisoners of war, among them one of Hatim al-Ta'i's daughters. She requested an audience with the Prophet ﷺ in Madinah and asked to be freed, appealing to her father's famed generosity.

In the 8th year of the Hijrah, a son, Ibrahim RA, was born to the Prophet ﷺ.

Zaynab RA, the eldest daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, born about ten years before the start of the dawah, died in the 8th year of the Hijrah at around 31 years of age. Years earlier, while emigrating from Makkah to Madinah, she had fallen from her camel and suffered internal bleeding from which she never fully recovered, remaining in pain for the following eight years until her death. Her husband, Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi', had remained outside Islam for years after her own emigration; at Fajr during the raid on his caravan she had famously declared, "I have given him protection!", and he was later returned to her under safe conduct before eventually accepting Islam himself.

Abdullah ibn Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA reported that while riding with the Prophet ﷺ into one of the gardens of the Ansar, a camel approached the Prophet ﷺ, making noises with tears in its eyes. The Prophet ﷺ asked for its owner, and when a young Ansari came forward, the Prophet ﷺ told him the camel had complained to him that he was not feeding it properly and was overworking and beating it, and asked him to fear Allah regarding it.

On the morning after the army arrived at Tabuk, following Salat al-Fajr, the Prophet ﷺ stood and delivered a khutbah preserved by Uqba ibn Amir al-Juhani RA. He praised Allah, said "O people, amma ba'd," and then spoke in short, dense, aphoristic phrases: on the Book of Allah, the path of Ibrahim AS, the Sunnah, sincerity in deeds, the guidance of the prophets, martyrdom, charity, taqwa, and the dangers of a lying tongue, riba, and a hard heart. He closed by asking Allah's forgiveness for himself and his ummah three times, then the customary "Astaghfirullaha li wa lakum."

After the Conquest of Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ sent expeditions to destroy the smaller idols still worshipped by tribes across Arabia (the larger idols having already been destroyed). He sent Tufayl ibn Amr RA with 400 men to a tribe in Yemen belonging to Daws (the tribe of Abu Hurairah RA) who worshipped a massive idol called Dhi al-Kaffayn and had even built their own structure in imitation of the Ka'bah to rival it in Makkah. Before setting out, Tufayl told the Prophet ﷺ that he had trouble staying mounted on a horse; the Prophet ﷺ made du'a, "Ya Allah, make him firm," and Tufayl never fell from a horse again.

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.

After the tribes had entered Islam, Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr was fought and defeated at the Battle of Hunayn. A woman of the tribe caused a commotion, claiming to be the Prophet ﷺ's sister, and the companions brought her before him. This took place among the prisoners of war being led in to Ji'ranah after the battle. Shayma cried out that she was the Prophet ﷺ's own foster sister, daughter of his wet-nurse Halimah al-Sa'diyah, and the astonished Companions brought her to him.

After Hunayn, the Prophet ﷺ left the ghanima and prisoners of war under guard at Ji'ranah and marched on Ta'if, where the defeated Thaqif had taken refuge behind the city's massive walls. Scholars of seerah generally treat the Battle of Hunayn and the Siege of Ta'if together, since they occurred back to back against a common enemy, though they were two separate incidents: Hunayn was a battle, Ta'if was a siege. The Muslims arrived in the last week of Shawwal, 8 AH. Ta'if was a green, well-watered city in the mountains, unlike the barren valley of Makkah; it had no Ka'bah, but the Thaqif had fortified it with massive walls, devices to hurl burning oil and arrows down on attackers, and supplies stocked for nearly a year, expecting a long siege. Even before Hunayn, while still in Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ had foreseen the need to besiege Ta'if and sent Companions, including Urwah ibn Mas'ud and Ghaylan ibn Salama, to the tribe of Jurash to learn siege engineering the Muslims had never used before: the catapult, the battering ram, and the testudo (a shield-wall formation used to approach a wall). By the time the Muslims reached Ta'if these Companions had returned with this knowledge, and for the first time a catapult was built and used by Muslims. The Companions first camped near the city but were showered with arrows, so the Prophet ﷺ moved them to another site, later the location of the city's first mosque. Using the testudo to approach the walls, the Muslims were burned by oil poured from above and had to retreat under a fresh volley of arrows, with a number killed; the battering rams made little progress and the catapults caused only limited damage. The Prophet ﷺ suggested withdrawing and returning another time, but when some of the Companions, still riding the momentum of Makkah and Hunayn, were reluctant to leave so close to what looked like victory, he let them stay.

Halimah al-Sa'diyah and her husband had not been present at Hunayn, and only came to visit afterward. When the Prophet ﷺ saw her, he recognized her instantly, stood to greet her, and took off his own shawl to spread on the ground for her to sit on.

The Prophet ﷺ proposed to and married Fatima bint al-Dahhak of the tribe of Kulab. On the night he entered upon her, she said, "I seek Allah's refuge from you." The Prophet ﷺ replied, "You have sought refuge in One who is very great. Go back to your family," using indirect language (kinaya) rather than the word "divorce" itself, and the marriage was never consummated. Why she said what she did is not recorded; theories include that she was mentally unwell (per Ibn Hajar) or that jealous relatives had told her to say it without her understanding the consequence.

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 wives of the Prophet ﷺ once discussed among themselves who would be the first of them to pass away after him. The Prophet ﷺ told them the one with the longest hand would be the first to meet him again. For years afterward they would measure their hands against each other, until Zaynab bint Jahsh RA, who gave the most in charity, was the first to die, and they understood he had meant generosity, not literal hand length.

While reciting the Qur'an, the Prophet ﷺ came across Ibrahim AS's du'a for those who would follow him, and Isa AS's du'a asking Allah's forgiveness for his people. Reflecting on his own ummah, the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands and wept, repeating, "O Allah, my ummah! O Allah, my ummah!" Allah sent Jibril AS to ask him why he was weeping, though Allah already knew; the Prophet ﷺ explained he was thinking of what would become of his ummah. Jibril AS returned to Allah with this answer, and came back with Allah's reply: that He would please the Prophet ﷺ, not displease him, regarding his ummah.

While the Prophet ﷺ was encamped at Tabuk, he sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA with a few hundred sahaba on a mini-expedition to Dawmat al-Jandal, home of the Christian Arab tribe of Kindah, whose chieftain Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik was called a king (malik). The Prophet ﷺ told Khalid he would find Ukaydir away from his entourage, in the midst of some cows, and that is exactly how it happened: Ukaydir's herd kept barging against his palace door one night, and his wife, fed up, told him to go deal with it himself. Khalid found him in the middle of nowhere with a few servants and captured him. Brought before the Prophet ﷺ, Ukaydir did not embrace Islam at the time, but agreed to break off his relationship with the Romans, pay the jizya, and not attack the Muslims. To show his loyalty, Ukaydir later sent the Muslim camp gifts, including a hulla (a gold-threaded, coordinated two-piece garment) finer than any the sahaba had seen: they gathered around the Prophet ﷺ in awe of it.

At a time when not a single Muslim knew shipbuilding, the Prophet ﷺ prophesied that a Muslim naval force would exist within the lifetime of the sahaba. Ummi Haram bint Milhan RA, the aunt of Anas ibn Malik RA, asked him to make du'a that she be among that force and die in it; he told her she would be. Decades later, under the reign of Muawiyah RA, a Muslim naval expedition was launched, and Ummi Haram took part in it; on one of the far islands they reached she fell from her mount, cracked her skull, and died, and the sahaba buried her there. A masjid was later built beside her grave, which still stands in Cyprus and bears her name to this day.

Imran ibn Husayn RA narrated that while he sat in the Masjid, a delegation of Banu Tamim (crude, harsh Bedouins of Najd, from whom much of the Confederate army at the Battle of the Trench had come) arrived announcing their Islam. The Prophet ﷺ told them, "I give you good news, O people of Tamim" (meaning of Jannah), but they misunderstood this as an offer of wealth and asked him for money instead; the Prophet ﷺ, showing his adab, said nothing. The Himyarites of Yemen then arrived and announced their own Islam. The Prophet ﷺ said, "O people of Himyar, accept the good news, since the people of Banu Tamim did not accept it." They replied, "We accept the good news! And we have come all the way from Yemen asking you about the creation: how did Allah create it, and how did it all begin?" The Prophet ﷺ answered, "There was Allah, and there was nothing before Him. And He then created the heavens and the earth while His Throne was on the water." Imran ibn Husayn RA then recounted that, right at that point, someone called out that his camel had fled; he ran after it into the desert and, catching neither the camel nor the rest of the hadith, later wished he had let the camel go so he could have heard the whole thing, and since the Himyar delegates themselves went home without becoming narrators of hadith, this account was never completed for later generations.

On one of his later visits to the Prophet ﷺ after his conversion, Adi ibn Hatim RA asked whether his father Hatim al-Ta'i (famed for his generosity and kindness to his relatives and people despite dying outside Islam) would be rewarded for it in the Hereafter.

Wa'il ibn Hujr, a nobleman of Hadhramaut in Yemen descended from one of the region's pre-Islamic kings, came to Madinah in the 9th year of the Hijrah to embrace Islam without any pressure. Three days before his arrival the Prophet ﷺ had already told the Companions he was coming. The Prophet ﷺ honored him more than almost anyone else: seating him beside himself on the minbar and on his own cloak (rida'), and making du'a for him and his children. When Wa'il complained that his family had taken away his right to the throne, the Prophet ﷺ told him Islam would give him something better. The Prophet ﷺ then gave Wa'il the governorship of a small area of Yemen and sent the young Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan RA with him as an escort; Wa'il, still new to Islam and not yet purified of his old regal manners, twice refused to let Muawiyah ride his camel or wear his shoes on the hot stones, telling him only to take shelter in the camel's shadow.

Towards the end of the Prophet ﷺ's life, the sahabi Fudayk came to Madinah, concerned that people were saying whoever did not perform Hijrah would be destroyed, even though his own people were upon shirk.

Toward the end of the 9th year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ sent a wave of sahaba out as governors and teachers of Islam, especially to the north and south of Arabia, among them Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA, sent to Yemen, and Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA, sent to another Yemeni province. At the start of the 10th year, the Prophet ﷺ sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to the province of Najran, instructing him not to attack until he had given the people three days and the choice of (i) accepting Islam, (ii) paying jizya if they were Christian or Jewish, or (iii) leaving. Khalid RA sent out criers with this message, and the entire province of Najran accepted Islam without any fighting. Uncertain what to do next, Khalid RA wrote to the Prophet ﷺ reporting that the people had all become Muslim and asking for instructions; the Prophet ﷺ told him to send a delegation up to Madinah so that he could test them himself. When the delegation arrived, the Prophet ﷺ did not recognize them and remarked on their resemblance to the people of Hind. They identified themselves as being from Najran, and the Prophet ﷺ questioned them further (at times sharply, to test the genuineness of their faith) before asking what secret lay behind their being always victorious over those who attacked them; they answered that they never fought among themselves once a decision was made, and that they never wronged other people.

A year after the siege of Ta'if was lifted with the Prophet ﷺ's words that the Thaqif would come to him of their own accord, they came. They were by then the last pagan tribe in the Hejaz, and what brought them was fear as much as faith. When Urwah ibn Mas'ud, the greatest of their chiefs, whom the Qur'an couples with al-Walid ibn al-Mughira as one of the two great men of the two cities, had embraced Islam on the road home from the siege and gone back to call them to it, they had shot him from the dark as he gave the adhan from his roof. The blood was on their hands and they knew what it meant. Ibn Ishaq records the long argument in which no chief would go to Madinah alone to answer for it, until they agreed that all six or seven of them would go together, with their retinue, in Ramadan of the ninth year. Their kinsman al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba met them outside the city and ran for the mosque to tell the Prophet ﷺ, and Abu Bakr stopped him on the way and begged, by Allah, to be the one to carry the good news; every Companion wanted to be the man who made the Prophet ﷺ glad. Mughira went back and taught them how to greet him and what to call him, and they ignored it all, greeting him in the manner of the days of ignorance and calling him by his name. There was no faith in them yet, and the Prophet ﷺ overlooked every discourtesy, had a tent pitched for them inside the mosque, and treated them as honoured guests. They were so afraid of what they had done that they would not touch the food until the go-between had eaten first. The go-between, as Arab custom required at that level, was Khalid ibn Sa'id ibn al-As, a distant cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, and through him the bargaining ran for ten days. Could they have a treaty at all? If they became Muslims. They had heard that riba was forbidden, and all their wealth was riba; they would keep their principal. Could they keep zina, being merchants often away from home? Allah had forbidden it. Could they at least keep wine, in Ta'if, a city of vineyards and cold nights? Allah had forbidden it. They conferred: no one could go home and tell Ta'if that riba, zina and wine were gone; but if they went home without terms and another army came, they would be finished in a month; and after all, said one of them, had not the people around this man given up all three? If they could, so could the Thaqif. Then al-Lat, the second idol of Arabia after Hubal. It would be destroyed. Three years, they asked; two; one; down through the months, and every time no. Then they could not be the ones to do it. They need not be, the Prophet ﷺ said; the Muslims would see to it. Then the prayer: could they be excused bowing, in that cold? There is no good in a religion without prayer. Wudu, then? No. Zakat and jihad? Yes, he said, they were excused; and after they had gone he told the Companions that they would pay zakat and they would fight, for Allah would put faith in their hearts, and they did. Whether that was a prophecy peculiar to him or a precedent for leniency with new Muslims the scholars still argue. Around the tenth day they became Muslims and fasted the last five days of Ramadan with him, so anxious to get it right that when Bilal brought their suhur they said the sun had risen and he told them the Prophet ﷺ was still eating, and when he brought their iftar they said the sun had not set and he told them he had come only after the Prophet ﷺ had broken his fast. The youngest of them, Uthman ibn Abi al-As, had believed before the rest and spent the fortnight out of the elders' tent, learning Qur'an from the Prophet ﷺ and religion from Abu Bakr; when they left, Abu Bakr proposed him as their leader and the Prophet ﷺ made him so. They went home and told Ta'if it must accept Islam, and Mughira and Abu Sufyan were sent to break al-Lat, Mughira first pretending to drop dead at the first blow to show them how foolish they were, and a mosque was raised where it had stood. Wahshi, Hamzah's killer, who had fled to Ta'if before the conquest, became a Muslim about the same time.

When the delegation of Banu Iyad came to Madinah to accept Islam in the 9th year of the Hijrah, about 40 years after the Prophet ﷺ had seen him as a young man, the Prophet ﷺ asked the tribesmen after Quss ibn Sa'ida, the hanif preacher of their tribe. They told him Quss had died long before. The Prophet ﷺ recalled seeing him mounted on a red camel, delivering a mesmerizing speech, and asked if anyone could remind him of it; the tribesmen related the words that had stayed with them, and the Prophet ﷺ approved of what Quss had said.

Musaylimah al-Kadhdhab, the aging and highly respected leader of Banu Hanifa in al-Yamamah, watched his tribe fracture as the nobleman Thumamah ibn Uthal RA [see episode 62] and his followers embraced Islam while others held to the old ways. Musaylimah told his people that if the Prophet ﷺ would grant him power after his death and share prophethood with him "like Musa shared it with his brother Harun," he would follow him, and traveled to Madinah to negotiate. His followers brought him into the Masjid draped in fine cloth like a king. He put his condition to the Prophet ﷺ directly, who refused him even a mere stick, let alone rule or prophethood. Returning home, Musaylimah wrote a letter proclaiming himself co-Messenger of Allah with the Prophet ﷺ, splitting "the matter" between himself and the Quraysh; the two envoys who delivered it affirmed its contents, and the Prophet ﷺ, restrained only by the immunity owed to envoys, rebuked them for their kufr. Musaylimah went on to compose mocking imitations of the Qur'an, including a parody of Surah al-Kawthar and a "Surah al-Difda'" (Chapter of the Frog), which even a passing non-Muslim Arab recognized as the words of a liar.

Najran was a Christian province with ties to the Roman emperor, and the Prophet ﷺ had written to it months before, in the name of the God of Ibrahim, Ishaq and Ya'qub, offering Islam, or the jizya, or war. Its people took counsel. One of them said that a prophet was foretold among the children of Isma'il and that this might be he; another that even if he were not, they should learn his strength. So they sent sixty men, where delegations were usually a handful, twenty-four of them nobles, three of them bishops and one a patriarch, both to impress the Muslims and to judge for themselves. They came into the mosque at Asr dressed as no delegation the Companions had seen, in the manner of Rome rather than Arabia, and when the hour of their own prayer came they asked to pray. The Companions wanted to refuse; the Prophet ﷺ said, let them pray, and they turned to the east, towards the mosque's wall rather than its qibla, and prayed there. The talks ran three or four days. On the first they asked about Isa: if you agree with us that he was born of a virgin, who was his father? The Prophet ﷺ said he had no answer for them yet; let Allah answer. The next day the first sixty verses of Surah Ali Imran came down, and among them: the likeness of Isa with Allah is as the likeness of Adam, whom He created from dust and then said to him, be, and he was. They claimed Ibrahim as a Christian, and the surah answered that Ibrahim was neither a Jew nor a Christian but a hanif who submitted to Allah, and no idolater. At the end of the second day came the verse of mubahala: whoever argues with you about him after the knowledge that has come to you, say, come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves, and pray earnestly, and lay the curse of Allah on the liars. It is how an argument is ended, not begun, and it names the children and the women first because their ruin is harder to bear than one's own. On the third morning the Prophet ﷺ came out with his family ready for it: his daughter Fatima, her husband Ali, and their sons Hasan and Husayn. The Christians had talked among themselves in the night: if the man was a prophet and they cursed each other, they would be wiped from the earth. They declined the mubahala and accepted the jizya, a reasonable yearly sum in cloth and silver, for as long as Allah willed. They asked besides for a judge to settle their own disputes, having found the Muslims honest, and the Prophet ﷺ sent them Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah. On the way home, al-Bayhaqi records, the younger brother of one of the most senior men spoke ill of the Prophet ﷺ, and the patriarch told him not to. Why? Because he is the prophet we were promised. Then why did you not follow him, when we follow you? Would you have us give up the honour, the wealth and the standing the emperor has given us? The younger man turned round, went back to Madinah, and became a Muslim. The rest followed their elders home, as most people do.

With Thaqif's submission, the Battle of Tabuk, and the province of Najran all settled by the close of the 9th year of the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ sent Abu Bakr al-Siddiq RA at the head of an official delegation of 300 Muslims from Madinah to Makkah, to lay the groundwork for what would become his ﷺ only Hajj, the following year's Hajjat al-Wada'. The Prophet ﷺ himself did not attend, explaining to Abu Bakr RA that the mushrikun still performed tawaf around the Ka'bah naked, and that he did not wish to perform Hajj until that practice was ended. This was therefore the only year in Islam's history in which pagans and an official Muslim delegation performed Hajj and tawaf side by side. Because the Prophet ﷺ had not yet personally demonstrated the correct rites of Hajj, Abu Bakr RA led the pilgrims according to the old, pre-Islamic manner. At Dhu al-Hulayfah, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA caught up with the delegation riding the Prophet ﷺ's own camel, prompting Abu Bakr RA to ask whether Ali had been sent to take command over him; Ali RA replied that Abu Bakr RA remained the amir, and that he had come only to recite Surat al-Tawba. At Mina, Ali RA, together with Abu Hurairah RA, proclaimed the opening of Surat al-Tawba to the assembled pagans and Muslims, and made four further announcements: that none but a believer would enter Jannah; that tawaf was never again to be performed unclothed; that after this year no mushrik would be permitted to perform Hajj at all; and that any existing treaty with the pagans would stand for four more months (unless it already carried its own fixed term), after which it was void.

After Fatima bint Qays RA's 'iddah ended, she heard the call "come to the prayer" and went to the Masjid, praying in the row of women closest to the men. When the Prophet ﷺ finished the prayer, he ascended the minbar, smiling, and told the congregation he had called them together not for a lecture but to relate the account of Tamim al-Dari, newly a Muslim, which agreed with what he ﷺ had already been teaching about the Dajjal. Tamim recounted that he had sailed with 30 men of Lakhm and Judham, been tossed a month by the waves, and landed on an island where they met a shaggy, faceless-seeming beast called al-Jassasah, who directed them to a monastery. There they found a giant man bound in chains, who questioned them about the date-palms of Baysan, the Lake of Tabariyyah, and the spring of Zughar, and about "the unlettered prophet" and whether the Arabs had submitted to him. He then identified himself as al-Masih al-Dajjal, said he would soon be permitted to emerge and would spare no town for 40 nights except Makkah and Taybah (Madinah), which angels guard on every route. The Prophet ﷺ struck the minbar with his staff, declaring three times "This is Taybah," and said the Dajjal is in the east.

The Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr were the people of Halimah, who had nursed the Prophet ﷺ in the desert as an infant, and a branch of the Hawazin who had fought him at Hunayn. Bedouins rather than townsmen like the Thaqif, they were rough in their manners, and the man they sent to Madinah in the ninth year to negotiate a treaty was not yet a Muslim. Dimam ibn Tha'laba, an elder of the tribe, hairy and unkempt, his hair in two plaits, rode his camel to the door of the mosque, couched it there, walked in and demanded to know which of them was the son of Abdul Muttalib. Ignorant and unlettered as he was, he knew the lineage, and that mattered to a man for whom lineage was everything. The Prophet ﷺ said that he was the son of Abdul Muttalib. You are Muhammad ﷺ? I am. I am going to ask you, Dimam said, and I am going to be hard with you, so do not be angry with me. Go on. Your envoy came to us and said that Allah has sent you. He spoke the truth. Who created the heavens? Allah. Who created the earth? Allah. Who set up the mountains? Allah. Who put everything in its place? Allah. Then I ask you by the One who created the heavens and the earth and set up the mountains: do you swear that Allah has sent you to us? I swear by Allah that Allah has sent me. Your envoy said we must pray five times a day; by the One who sent you, did Allah command you to tell us this? Yes. And so on through zakat, fasting and the pilgrimage, the last of which fixes the year, for Hajj had only just been made obligatory. Some say he is the man of the well-known hadith who then asked whether he owed anything beyond the five prayers, the zakat and the fast of Ramadan, and being told no, unless he wished, swore by the One who had sent him with the truth that he would do that much and neither add to it nor take from it. When he had gone the Prophet ﷺ said to the Companions: if he is true, he will enter Paradise. He went home and preached to his people, and Ibn Ishaq says that such was his standing that the whole tribe accepted Islam the day he returned, and that same day he broke the idol they had worshipped. No delegate, it was said, was a greater blessing to his people than Dimam.

On the day Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ﷺ died, a solar eclipse occurred within a few hours of his death. People in Madinah began to say that the sun was grieving and crying at the sorrow of the Prophet ﷺ. On hearing this, the Prophet ﷺ gathered the people and delivered a khutbah correcting the misconception.

The tribe of Abd al-Qays sent a second delegation to the Prophet ﷺ in the 9th year of the Hijrah, the Year of Delegations, following up on their first delegation of the 5th year.

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.

Ten men of Banu Asad ibn Khuzaymah arrived loudly in the Masjid proclaiming the shahada and pointing out that they had come to Madinah unbidden and unfought, unlike other Arab tribes. Allah revealed Qur'an 49:17 correcting their self-regard, instructing the Prophet ﷺ to tell them that accepting Islam is not a favor they have done him, but a favor Allah has done them by guiding them to faith.

Tamim al-Dari, a man of a Christian tribe from the north, came to Madinah as a delegate in the Year of Delegations (9 AH), swore allegiance, and became a Muslim.

Muawiyah ibn Haydah RA, a one-time delegate from Yemen who saw the Prophet ﷺ only this once in his life, asked him what of the awrah is permitted to show and what is not, producing the single explicit hadith on the subject. The Prophet ﷺ told him to cover his awrah from everyone but his spouse. When Muawiyah RA asked what to do if alone, the Prophet ﷺ replied that Allah has more right that one be shy of Him.

After Fatima bint Qays RA was widowed (her husband Ibn al-Mughira having fallen as a martyr early in jihad with the Prophet ﷺ), Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA and a group of other Companions proposed marriage to her, and the Prophet ﷺ also raised a proposal on behalf of his freed slave Usama ibn Zayd RA. She deferred entirely to the Prophet ﷺ's judgment. He first told her to stay with Ummi Sharik during her 'iddah, then reconsidered: Ummi Sharik hosted many guests, and he did not want Fatima's hijab to be compromised in front of them. He directed her instead to observe her 'iddah with her cousin, the blind Companion Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum RA, of the same clan (Banu Fihr of Quraysh). It was at the end of this 'iddah that she heard the call to prayer that led to the Prophet ﷺ's sermon on Tamim al-Dari.

Around nine people of Banu Kulf came to the Prophet ﷺ, telling him, "We have come to you so that you may pray for us for all good." The Prophet ﷺ made du'a for them, hosted and fed them, and they stayed in Madinah for a few days, praying Jumu'ah with him. Al-Hakam ibn Hazn RA, one of the group who saw the Prophet ﷺ only this once, recalled seeing him deliver the khutbah holding up a stick or bow, in which he said: "O people, do what you can, and know that you will never be able to do everything you have been commanded to do, so cover up, and come as close as you can to what you are supposed to do."

After the Conquest of Makkah, Urwah ibn Mas'ud al-Thaqafi embraced Islam at the hands of the Prophet ﷺ, who warned him, "I am scared for you," fearing how his tribe of Thaqif in Ta'if would react. Urwah, confident of his standing among his people, insisted on returning to preach Islam to them. He met vile abuse from Thaqif, and the next morning went to his rooftop at Fajr, gave the adhan, and began to pray; he was shot with an arrow and fell into the valley, dying a martyr. As he lay fatally wounded, his family asked about seeking revenge or blood money; Urwah told them not to, saying this martyrdom was a gift Allah had honored him with, and asked to be buried among the martyrs of the Battle of Hunayn rather than in his family's cemetery, which was done.

The Najashi died in Abyssinia. The Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba in Madinah, "Jibril has come and informed me that a pious brother of yours has died in a neighboring land," and led them in Salat al-Janazah ala al-Gha'ib (the funeral prayer in absentia); the only time in his life the Prophet ﷺ ever prayed a funeral prayer over someone without the body present.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Aqil RA, a one-time sahabi, recalled that his delegation had been forced by their tribe to go and meet the Prophet ﷺ, whom they despised beforehand, yet by the time they left, there was no one in the world more beloved to them than him. A youngster among them asked the Prophet ﷺ why he did not ask his Lord for a kingdom like that of Sulayman AS. The Prophet ﷺ laughed and said that perhaps his companion had been given a kingdom even better than Sulayman's: that Allah grants every prophet one request that He will never refuse, and while other prophets asked for things of this world or for punishment upon their people, the Prophet ﷺ had kept his own request between himself and his Lord; that it be his intercession (shafa'a) for his ummah on the Day of Judgment.

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.

The tribe of Azd, one of the large tribes of Yemen, came to Madinah and accepted Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ placed a sahabi, Surad ibn Abdillah al-Azdi RA, in charge of them with the task of subduing the neighboring, still-pagan tribe of Jurash. As two envoys of Jurash traveled to Madinah to gauge the Prophet ﷺ and seek a truce, the Prophet ﷺ had already ordered Surad RA to attack, and the attack began the very day the envoys arrived in the Masjid. When the Prophet ﷺ asked them their tribe and learned it was Jurash, he told them, "Verily, Allah's camel is being sacrificed at Jurash as we speak," meaning the slaughter was happening that very moment, a reference they did not understand until Abu Bakr RA (or, in another account, Uthman ibn Affan RA) explained the Prophet ﷺ was informing them of the calamity befalling their people, and urged them to beg him for du'a. The Prophet ﷺ made du'a for the people of Jurash to be guided.

Within hours of Abu Bakr RA leaving Madinah at the head of the Hajj delegation, Allah revealed the opening two-and-a-half pages of Surat al-Tawba, addressed to the pagans of Arabia. When someone suggested to the Prophet ﷺ that the verses simply be sent on to catch up with Abu Bakr, he ﷺ said no one could convey them on his behalf except a member of his own household, and so he chose Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, who had not been part of the original delegation, to ride out, catch up with Abu Bakr, and proclaim them to the people during the Hajj. Surat al-Tawba, one of the very last surahs revealed, opens without a Basmala; verse 1 declares a bara'ah (complete disassociation) from Allah and His Messenger toward the pagans with whom treaties had been made, nullifying those treaties. Verse 2 grants the pagans four months of safe passage to settle their affairs. Verse 3 sets the Day of the Greater Hajj (10 Dhul Hijjah) as the day this disassociation is publicly announced, offering repentance as the better path. Verse 4 excepts any pagan group whose treaty carries a fixed term and who had not broken faith with the Muslims: their treaty is to be honored to its end. Verse 5 (the so-called "Verse of the Sword") states that once the sacred/grace months have passed, the pagans are to be fought, captured, and besieged wherever found, unless they repent, establish prayer, and give zakat, in which case they are to be let go. Verse 6 immediately follows with the instruction that any pagan seeking protection is to be granted it, allowed to hear the Qur'an, and then escorted safely to his place of safety.

Ibrahim, the infant son of the Prophet ﷺ and Maria al-Qibtiyya RA, fell ill and died in the first quarter of the 10th year of the Hijrah, after living a year and four to six months; at the most tender, adorable age, just as he had begun walking, laughing, and recognizing people. Word came that he was dying, and the Prophet ﷺ went with some of the companions to Maria's home in al-Awali. He ﷺ held Ibrahim as he wheezed and coughed with the pangs of death, and the Prophet ﷺ's own tears began to fall.

The Prophet ﷺ's only Hajj after the Hijrah, and his last, undertaken in the 10th year of the Hijrah once word went out that he intended to go. Tens of thousands of people flocked to Madinah and swelled the caravan the whole way to Makkah, so that the sahaba said they could see nothing but riders and pedestrians in every direction; it was the largest gathering the Prophet ﷺ ever addressed, and most of those present are not known to us by name. He ﷺ left Madinah on 25 Dhu al-Qa'dah, prayed and entered ihram at Dhu al-Hulayfah, and reached Makkah ten days later on the 4th of Dhu al-Hijjah, camping outside the city overnight before entering the next morning. Asma bint Umays RA gave birth to Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr at Dhu al-Hulayfah just as the caravan set out; the Prophet ﷺ told her to bathe, bandage herself, and enter ihram regardless. After performing tawaf and the sa'i, the Prophet ﷺ announced at Marwah that anyone who had not brought a sacrificial animal should end their ihram and treat their pilgrimage as an Umrah, a new and startling instruction. The pilgrims had set out with different intentions, some for Hajj alone, some for Hajj and Umrah together, and some for Umrah, and between them they performed all three recognized forms of Hajj (Ifrad, Qiran, and Tamattu'). Ali RA arrived from Yemen with sacrificial camels for the Prophet ﷺ (with those the Prophet ﷺ had brought, they numbered one hundred), and found Fatima RA already out of ihram on the Prophet ﷺ's instruction; because Ali RA had entered ihram intending to match whatever intention the Prophet ﷺ held (Qiran), he remained in ihram until the sacrifice. On the 8th of Dhu al-Hijjah (Yawm al-Tarwiyah) the company moved to Mina; on the 9th the Prophet ﷺ went on to Namirah and then Arafah, passing by al-Mash'ar al-Haram at Muzdalifah, where the Quraysh had halted in pre-Islamic times without going out of the sanctuary, to stand instead on the open plain of Arafah itself, the essence of the Hajj. He stood there in du'a from just after Zuhr until sunset before moving on, slowly and deliberately, to Muzdalifah, where he prayed Maghrib and Isha together and rested until Fajr. Sawda bint Zam'a RA, elderly and slow-moving, asked and was given permission to leave Muzdalifah early to avoid the crowds, and the Prophet ﷺ also sent the weak of his family ahead during the night, Ibn Abbas RA among them; this is the basis for the fiqh that the elderly and weak may leave before the rest. From Muzdalifah the Prophet ﷺ went to Mina, stoned Jamrah al-Kubra, and sacrificed 63 camels with his own hand (Ibn al-Qayyim observes that the number matched the years of his life) before having Ali RA sacrifice the remaining 37 of the 100. He then returned to Makkah for tawaf al-ifadah and to drink from the Zamzam water drawn for him by the Banu Abdul Muttalib. The Prophet ﷺ stayed in Mina through the days of Tashriq, departing on the 13th after performing Tawaf al-Wada' (the Farewell Tawaf) by night. Aisha RA, whose menses had begun just before entering Makkah, was told to perform every rite except tawaf; once she had purified herself and completed Hajj, she asked to also perform an Umrah like the Prophet ﷺ's other wives, and was sent with her brother Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr RA to enter ihram at Tan'im for that purpose before rejoining the caravan back to Madinah. The name "Hajjat al-Wada'" (the Farewell Hajj) was already used in the Prophet ﷺ's own lifetime: on Yawm al-Nahr he repeatedly asked Allah to bear witness while addressing the people, and the sahaba sensed, without yet grasping it fully, that he was bidding them farewell. Later writers estimated the crowd at a round 100,000, though this figure is a guess. Every hadith of Hajj fiqh in the books ultimately traces back to this one pilgrimage, since it was the only Hajj he performed after the Hijrah. On the very last day of Hajj, the 13th, the Prophet ﷺ performed Tawaf al-Wada' and, that same evening, set out on the journey back to Madinah, returning there in Dhu al-Hijjah, 10 AH. This was his final journey: once he entered Madinah, he never left it again before his death.

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.

Toward the end of Safar in the 11th year of the Hijrah, shortly before he fell ill, the Prophet ﷺ visited the site of Uhud and made a special du'a for the Muslims who had been killed there, foremost among them his uncle Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA.

After one of the main kings of Yemen from Himyar accepted Islam, the Prophet ﷺ sent Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA to be his deputy and judge, and personally accompanied him partway on the road south of Madinah, with Mu'adh RA riding while the Prophet ﷺ walked alongside him, a great honor. The Prophet ﷺ instructed him to call the People of the Book to tawhid first, then prayer, then zakat, taken from the rich among them and given to their poor. The Prophet ﷺ also sent Abu Musa al-Ash'ari RA to another province of Yemen. As he saw Mu'adh RA off, the Prophet ﷺ gave him his final advice and told him it was possible he would not see him again, which came to pass, as the Prophet ﷺ passed away before Mu'adh RA returned from Yemen.

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."

During the Farewell Hajj, the Prophet ﷺ gave at least three sermons at Mina (on the 10th, 11th, and likely 12th of Dhu al-Hijjah) in addition to the separate Sermon of Arafah on the 9th. On Yawm al-Nahr (the Day of Sacrifice, the 10th) he declared that the calendar had returned to its rightful order as Allah had created it (a year of 12 months, four of them sacred (Dhu al-Qa'dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram consecutively, plus the Rajab of Mudar)) because that year, unlike others, the Quraysh's old habit of swapping the sacred months around to suit their wars had not thrown the calendar out of order; he told the people to keep it that way from then on. He then quizzed the people, pausing dramatically each time as if he might give a different answer, on what month, city, and day it was, before confirming Dhu al-Hijjah, Makkah, and Yawm al-Nahr himself, and used the answers to press home that their lives, wealth, and honor were exactly as sacred as that month, that city, and that day. He warned them, "Woe to you, do not return to being kuffar, killing one another," and asked those present to carry his words to those absent, since the absent might understand them even better. In one version he added that Shaytan had despaired of ever being worshipped again in Arabia, but still hoped to provoke the Muslims into fighting each other over matters they thought trivial. Related hadiths from these Mina sermons define the Muslim as the one whose hands and tongue other Muslims are safe from, the Mu'min as the one entrusted with people's wealth, the muhajir as the one who has left sin behind, and the mujahid as the one striving in Allah's path; promise Jannah to whoever fears Allah, prays, fasts Ramadan, gives zakat, and obeys the rulers; and declare that all people share one Lord and one father, Adam, with no superiority of Arab over non-Arab or of one skin color over another except by taqwa, a claim with no precedent among the thinkers of any prior society. On this same occasion, addressing the people while bidding them farewell and repeatedly asking Allah to bear witness, the Prophet ﷺ gave this pilgrimage the name by which it has been known ever since: Hajjat al-Wada', the Farewell Hajj.

After Najran accepted Islam, the Prophet ﷺ appointed Amr ibn Hazm al-Ansari RA as governor and religious teacher over the province. About a month before his own death, the Prophet ﷺ dictated to Amr RA a letter over a page long, full of wasiyyat (instructions) on how to teach the people, among the very last things he ﷺ ever dictated. One clause of the letter states that no one should touch the Qur'an except one who is tahir (in a state of purity).

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.

On the last day of Safar or the first day of Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH, the Prophet ﷺ woke in the middle of the night and knocked on the door of his mawla Abu Muwayhiba RA, telling him that Jibril had commanded him to go to Baqi' al-Gharqad, the graveyard of Madinah. They went together in the night, and he made a beautiful du'a for the people buried there. This was the last time the Prophet ﷺ ever visited Baqi'.

As the caravan returned from the Farewell Hajj, Ali RA (who had come from Yemen with the zakat and sadaqa wealth of its people, plus the 100 consecrated camels for the Prophet ﷺ) had rushed ahead to meet the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah, leaving someone else in charge of his entourage. That person distributed new clothes to the entourage out of the Yemeni sadaqa funds, which was not permissible; when Ali RA found out, he had the clothes returned, angering the entourage. They complained to the Prophet ﷺ about Ali RA once the pilgrimage was over, and the Prophet ﷺ stopped at Ghadir Khumm, outside Makkah, and addressed the people in Ali RA's defense.

In the year of delegations Musaylimah, Maslamah ibn Habib of the Banu Hanifa, an old man who had studied Christianity in Jerusalem and held the respect of all al-Yamama, came to Madinah carried into the mosque under fine cloth like a king, and offered to follow the Prophet ﷺ if he were made his successor and given a share in prophethood. The Prophet ﷺ, holding a palm branch, told him he would not give him so much as that stick, that Allah would deal with him, and that he was certain Musaylimah was what he had been shown: two gold bracelets on his arms in a dream, which he blew on and which flew away, two liars who would come after him, al-Aswad al-Ansi and Musaylimah of al-Yamama. Home again, Musaylimah wrote as one messenger of Allah to another that the matter was divided between them, half to the Quraysh and half to him, and the Prophet ﷺ told his two envoys that but for the custom that envoys are not harmed he would have had them killed. Musaylimah recited a quran of his own, of frogs and elephants; a passing Arab told him to his face that they both knew he was a liar. When the Prophet ﷺ died the Banu Hanifa, the largest of the tribes that apostatised and the worst of them, rose behind Musaylimah, and in 12 AH Abu Bakr sent Khalid ibn al-Walid against them. The battle at Yamama was the bloodiest of the Ridda wars. Among the Muslims who marched was Wahshi, who had heard of the false prophet and asked Allah to let him take Musaylimah's life in exchange for what he had done to Hamzah at Uhud; he carried the same javelin, threw it as he had thrown it that day, and an Ansari's sword struck from the other side in the same moment, so that he never knew which of them had killed Musaylimah. Among the dead were Abu Hudhayfah ibn Utbah, who had said after Badr that he would not feel safe from one sentence he had spoken there until Allah accepted him as a martyr, and Ukasha ibn Mihsan, who fell still carrying the sword that had been a stick of wood in his hand at Badr.

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.

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.

Long after the Battle of Tabuk, when the neo-Kharijites raised fabricated complaints against Uthman ibn Affan RA, Ibn Abbas RA answered them by citing the Prophet ﷺ's own words from the Tabuk fundraising: that whatever Uthman did after his enormous donation to the Jaysh al-Usrah would never harm him.

During the time of fitna in Ali RA's khilafah, Ammar ibn Yasir RA chose to fight on the side of Ali RA against the forces of Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan RA. He drank a last glass of milk, then went out and died from an arrow shot, fulfilling what the Prophet ﷺ had told him decades earlier while they built Masjid al-Nabawi: that al-Fiat al-Baghiyah (the Group That Has Gone Beyond the Bounds) would be the ones to kill him, and that his last drink in this world would be a glass of milk.

After repeatedly confronting other companions over wealth and building in the years after the Prophet ﷺ's death, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA was asked by Khalifa Uthman ibn Affan RA to leave Madinah; he agreed, and went to live in the desert alone with his wife and a young servant. Years later, in the khilafa of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, as Abu Dharr lay dying, his wife wept that she had no cloth to shroud him or the strength to bury him. He told her not to cry, recalling that the Prophet ﷺ had once told a gathering of companions, "One of you will die all alone, yet a group of believers will pray over him", and that he was the last of that gathering left alive, and the only one still in the wilderness, so he knew from the Prophet ﷺ's truthful words that someone would come. He instructed her to carry his body to the roadside after he died, though it was not Hajj season and she doubted anyone would pass. He insisted, saying he had neither lied nor been lied to. After he passed away and she did as he said, a caravan including Abdullah ibn Mas'ud RA and Ammar ibn Yasir RA appeared on the road; the servant flagged them down to help bury a Muslim. On learning it was Abu Dharr, Ibn Mas'ud wept and said, "The Prophet ﷺ has spoken the truth." The travelers gave their own garments for his kafan, prayed his janazah in the desert, and buried him, reported by Ibn Sa'd.