Banu al-Nadir

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.

When the commandment for zakat was revealed, Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf went to his friends among the newly-converted Ansar and urged them not to give away their money, warning them they might become poor and that they did not know what would become of "this man" (the Prophet ﷺ).

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.

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.

After the Muslim victory at Badr, Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf led a secret delegation of Banu Nadir to Makkah and formed an alliance with Abu Sufyan against the Prophet ﷺ; the exact terms are not recorded in the seerah sources. During the visit, Abu Sufyan asked Ka'b which religion (the Quraysh's or Muhammad's ﷺ) was more rightly guided; Ka'b answered that the Quraysh were more rightly guided.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The 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.