Daws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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