Banu al-Khazraj

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.

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.

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.

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.

Within a few weeks of Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA arriving in Yathrib to teach, around 40 people had converted. The Prophet ﷺ then permitted them to establish Salat al-Jumu'ah. The first Friday sermon in the history of Islam was delivered, not by the Prophet ﷺ himself, since the Muslims of Makkah could not yet pray publicly, but by Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, at the house of As'ad ibn Zurarah, who was hosting him.

Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, unwilling to confront his own cousin As'ad ibn Zurarah (who was hosting Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA), sent his close friend Usayd ibn Hudayr to expel Mus'ab from Yathrib. Usayd went armed with a spear, but agreed to sit and listen to Mus'ab's preaching, and converted to Islam on the spot. Usayd then sent Sa'd to Mus'ab; Sa'd, alarmed by a report that his own cousin As'ad was in danger, likewise went to confront Mus'ab, but agreed to listen, and upon hearing Mus'ab recite Surah al-Zukhruf, converted as well. With their conversion, nearly the whole of their subtribe, Banu Abd al-Ashhal, embraced Islam.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.