Ghatafan

"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.