Quraysh

Long before Qusayy, custodianship of Makkah and the Ka'bah had belonged to the tribe of Jurhum, in-laws of Ismail AS through marriage. Jurhum grew corrupt, overtaxing and mistreating the pilgrims, so the tribe of Khuza'a (another branch of Ismail's descendants, though not of Fihr's line) overthrew them and expelled them from Makkah, including the descendants of Fihr (the future Quraysh), who were pushed out into small encampments a traveling distance outside the city. Before their defeat, Jurhum spitefully buried the well of Zamzam so thoroughly that, despite generations of searching, Khuza'a could never find it again, leaving Makkah without its own water source. Qusayy ibn Kilab, of the line of Fihr, changed this. In a story related at length by Ibn Ishaq, Qusayy married the daughter of the Khuza'a chieftain and outshone the chieftain's own sons in ability. When the chieftain died, the tribe favored Qusayy as their new son-in-law over his sons. Qusayy then gathered the scattered tribes of Banu Fihr and went to war with Khuza'a, his own distant cousins through Ismail, and expelled them, reclaiming Makkah for the Quraysh. Once in power, Qusayy took custody of the Ka'bah and organized its care into distinct responsibilities (water, hospitality for pilgrims, guest-care, and the keys of the Ka'bah) which he held together in his own lifetime and which later passed down among the sub-tribes of Quraysh (the Banu Abd al-Dar, for instance, held the keys in the time of the Prophet ﷺ). He founded Dar al-Nadwa, the meeting-house where the elders of Quraysh gathered to deliberate, on the same site later used in the Prophet ﷺ's own era. He instituted free food and water for the hujjaj at the tribe's expense, appealing each hajj season for donations, and he lit a guiding fire for pilgrims at Muzdalifah and dug wells to supply them, since Zamzam itself remained lost throughout his lifetime. Qusayy was buried at Hujun, becoming the first person interred there; it remains one of Makkah's most famous graveyards to this day.

A severe drought and famine once struck Makkah, so severe that families would prepare their own graves and wait for death, having no food left. Hashim, Qusayy's grandson through Abd Manaf, judged that something had to change, and hit on the idea of Rihlat al-Shita' wa al-Sayf (the Winter and Summer Journey): two annual caravans, one south to Yemen in winter, tapping goods that arrived there by ship from India and Africa, and one north to Bosra, near Damascus, in summer, connecting Makkah to the Silk Road passing through Syria and onward to Rome and Persia. The Quraysh's standing as caretakers of Makkah's sanctuary meant these caravans traveled largely unmolested even in a lawless land; other Arabs regarded the guardians of the Ka'bah as too sacred to rob. Hashim is also said to have struck agreements with the rulers of Rome and Yemen securing safe conduct and favorable terms for the Quraysh's trade there. Makkah, sitting in the middle of this new lifeline between Yemen and Syria, prospered, and Hashim grew extremely wealthy. He used his wealth to feed the pilgrims (the origin of his name "Hashim," from the root meaning "to grind" (he would grind grain and provide bread)) and he was never known to eat a meal without inviting others to share it.

On one of his trading journeys between Makkah and Syria, Hashim passed through Yathrib and met Salma bint Amr, an energetic and dynamic businesswoman of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar (Khazraj). He proposed through her father, and she set conditions: that she would remain in Madinah, keep all her children, and continue her work as a businesswoman. Hashim agreed, and they married, though the couple were only able to be together for a short time before he continued his travels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As open persecution, intimidation, and torture continued, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba that Makkah had become too constricted for them, and suggested those who wished emigrate to the neighboring Christian land of Abyssinia, ruled by a just king (the Najashi, As'hama ibn Abjar) who would allow them to worship without interference. Fifteen people emigrated, 11 men and 4 women, traveling roughly a day and a half to Juddah and then by ship to Abyssinia. Among them were Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Uthman ibn Maz'un, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, Mus'ab ibn Umayr, Abu Salama and his wife Umm Salama, and Amir ibn Rabi'ah and his wife Layla. Only the higher-status Qureshi Muslims, who had the political means to leave, emigrated; enslaved converts such as Bilal, Khabbab, Ibn Mas'ud, and Ammar could not.

Word reached the roughly fifteen Muslims who had emigrated to Abyssinia in Rajab that the Quraysh had accepted Islam, an exaggeration of the news that the Quraysh had joined the Muslims in prostration at the recitation of Surah al-Najm in Makkah. Although the emigrants had not faced persecution in Abyssinia, adjusting to an unfamiliar land, language, and culture had been difficult, and they were eager to return. Yearning for home, they packed their belongings and set out for Makkah without waiting to confirm the rumor.

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

Three days after Hamzah became a Muslim, most likely in Dhu al-Hijjah of the sixth year of the dawah, the Muslims of Makkah were given a second man the Quraysh had thought beyond reach. Umar ibn al-Khattab was, with Abu Jahl, the strongest man of his generation in body and in lineage, and one of the two fiercest enemies the new faith had. When Layla was loading her camel for the second emigration to Abyssinia and told him that his cruelty was driving them from their homes to worship Allah, he had softened for a moment and wished her blessing wherever she went; her husband Amir ibn Rabi'ah, hearing of it, said that his father's donkey would accept Islam before Umar did. What neither of them knew was that the Prophet ﷺ had asked Allah to strengthen Islam through whichever of the two men, Abu Jahl or Umar, was dearer to Him. His son Abdullah later said it was Umar who was the dearer. More than one story is told of how it happened, and they are best read as strands of one rope. One night Umar went looking for drink and found none of his companions at home, nor even the wine-seller, and went to the Ka'bah to walk off the craving. He found the Prophet ﷺ alone in the dark, praying, and crept up behind him meaning to beat him, and instead, for the first time, listened. The surah was al-Haqqah. As he told himself this was a poet's verse, the recitation answered that it was not the word of a poet; as he thought it the word of a soothsayer, it answered that too; as he wondered whether the man had invented it, the verses said that had he invented any of it, Allah would have seized him by the right hand and cut his aorta. He stood until the surah was finished and went home. Islam, he said afterwards, entered his heart that night, though he did not yet accept it. Then one day Abu Jahl, holding forth among the Quraysh about the man who had insulted their gods and their fathers, offered a hundred red and black camels and a hundred measures of silver to whoever would rid them of him. Umar went home, took his sword and set out. On the road he met Nu'aym ibn Abdillah al-Nahham, a secret Muslim, who asked where he was going and was told: to kill Muhammad ﷺ. Nu'aym, frightened, asked whether he thought the Banu Abd Manaf would let him walk the earth after killing one of their own, and told him, to turn him aside, that he had better put his own house in order first: his sister Fatima and her husband Sa'id ibn Zayd had accepted Islam. It did not calm him. He went to their house and heard, through the door, the recitation of the Qur'an: Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, whom the Prophet ﷺ had assigned as their teacher, was inside with them. Khabbab hid, Fatima sat on the page, and Umar pounded on the door demanding to know what the murmuring had been. They denied it; he struck at Sa'id and the blow landed on his sister; and she and her husband, bleeding and past fear, told him that yes, they were Muslims, and he could do as he pleased. The sight of that steadiness turned him, as Layla's words had. He asked to see what they had been reading, and Fatima, after he swore not to harm it, told him a mushrik might not touch it until he had washed. He did ghusl, read from Surah Taha, and asked to be taken to the Prophet ﷺ. Sa'id led him, sword still in hand, to the house of al-Arqam, where the Muslims met in secret. Someone inside cried that Umar was at the door with a sword, and Hamzah said to let him in: if Allah meant good by him he would accept Islam, and if not, his own sword would be the end of him. The Prophet ﷺ took hold of his collar and asked what had brought him, and whether he would go on until Allah sent down a punishment on him. Umar said he had come to believe in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The takbir the Prophet ﷺ raised was heard by everyone in the house. That day the Muslims, some forty of them, walked to the Ka'bah in two ranks, Umar at the head of one and Hamzah of the other, and prayed there in public for the first time; no one dared touch them. The Prophet ﷺ named him al-Faruq, the one who divides truth from falsehood, and it is from that day, Ibn Mas'ud said at his deathbed, that the Muslims had never ceased to be in honour. Umar was not a man to hide what he had done. He went to Abu Jahl's door to tell him in person that he now believed in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and had the door slammed in his face with a curse. Then he asked who the worst gossip in Makkah was, was pointed to Jamil ibn Ma'mar al-Jumahi, and confided in him that he had become a Muslim; Jamil ran into the streets barely dressed, shouting that Ibn al-Khattab had become a Sabian, with Umar behind him correcting the word: aslamtu, I have accepted Islam. He was fought by the crowd at the Ka'bah until al-As ibn Wa'il gave him protection. Of him the Prophet ﷺ later said that if there was anyone in his community who was spoken to from the heavens without being a prophet, it was Umar; and under him, as caliph, the faith that had been forty people walking to the Ka'bah spread over most of the known world.

After the failed rumor-driven return, and as persecution continued unabated, news of the safety and hospitality of Abyssinia spread among the Muslims. More than 80 Muslims (a huge proportion of Makkah's population) emigrated a second time, headed by Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA, a direct cousin of the Prophet ﷺ. Uthman ibn Affan RA chose to remain in Makkah (later emigrating to Madinah instead), and Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, who had gone the first time, also did not return to Abyssinia.

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

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

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

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.

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

About a month after Badr, Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi' was freed from captivity on condition that he send his wife Zaynab bint Muhammad ﷺ back to her father. Hind bint Utbah visited Zaynab under the guise of offering to help her pack, hoping she would betray her plans and remain in Makkah as a hostage; Zaynab, sensing something was wrong, did not confide in her. Zaynab's brother-in-law Kinana openly led her out of Makkah by camel in daylight, and a Qurashi party led by Habbar ibn al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib caught up with them; Habbar thrust a spear at the camel, which reared and threw Zaynab 15 feet to the ground, and she miscarried. Kinana stood over her and drove the party back at swordpoint until Abu Sufyan ibn Harb arrived and calmed the situation, promising Zaynab would leave quietly at a later, less public time. Some days later, Kinana took her out again by night and handed her to two Companions sent by the Prophet ﷺ, who brought her safely to Madinah.

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

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

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

"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.

In the 6th year of the Hijrah the Prophet ﷺ saw himself in a dream doing tawaf around the Ka'bah in ihram, having shaved his head, the full rites of an Umrah, and understood it as Allah's command to go to Makkah. He announced his intention to the Muhajirun, the Ansar, and the tribes around Madinah, and around 1,400 set out with him, most of them Muhajirun who had not seen Makkah in six years; the Bedouin tribes around Madinah largely refused to join, preferring to stay with their wealth and families, a hesitation the Qur'an later exposed as an excuse rather than a genuine one (Qur'an 48:11-12). He set out in Dhu al-Qa'dah, one of the sacred months in which fighting was traditionally forbidden even in the Jahiliyyah, a deliberate signal that he came in peace. At the miqat of Dhu al-Hulayfah he prayed two rak'ahs, entered ihram, and consecrated seventy garlanded sacrificial camels, a mark of piety even pagan Arabs respected, as it would prove. From there he sent a single scout, Busr ibn Sufyan al-Khuza'i, from the neutral tribe of Khuza'a and unknown to the Quraysh, ahead to gauge their reaction. At Asfan, roughly midway to Makkah, Busr reported back: the Quraysh had armed for war, brought their women as they had at Uhud, and sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to block the road at Ghumaym. The Prophet ﷺ, grieved that his own people would rather fight than simply let him pass, said, "Woe to the Quraysh, war has consumed them," and vowed he would keep fighting with whatever Allah had sent him "until Allah grants victory or this neck of mine is cut off", while making clear he had no wish for either war or bloodshed. He put the matter to the sahaba; Abu Bakr RA advised sticking to the original purpose (to visit the House of Allah, not to fight anyone unless attacked) and the Prophet ﷺ agreed, setting aside his own initial inclination to strike first at the tribes backing the Quraysh. With Khalid blocking the direct road, a sahabi guided the army along an alternate route through a valley of thorns and volcanic rock that left their feet bleeding; the Prophet ﷺ likened the passage to the gate the Israelites were commanded to enter humbly in exchange for forgiveness (Qur'an 2:58), promising that Allah would forgive everyone who passed through it except one man distracted the whole way by a lost camel, whose reply, that finding his camel mattered more to him than forgiveness, revealed a hypocrite marching in the ranks of a caravan otherwise entirely sincere. Exiting the valley as night fell, the army reached the plain of Hudaybiyyah, and there the Prophet ﷺ's camel, Qaswa', suddenly knelt and would not rise. When the sahaba complained she had turned stubborn, the Prophet ﷺ told them this was not in her nature ("the One who stopped the Elephant has also stopped her") and made camp where she had stopped. The camp's well had all but run dry; the Prophet ﷺ rinsed his mouth with its water, returned it to the well, and after a while the well gave enough for the whole camp and their animals to drink their fill (al-Bara' RA in al-Bukhari; another report in al-Bukhari has him send an arrow down into the well). Anticipating hard terms, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba in advance that he would accept any condition the Quraysh proposed short of compromising the sanctity of Allah's symbols. Quraysh scouts soon located the camp and Khalid's force withdrew toward Makkah; at one point eighty armed men of Makkah (forty or fifty in Ibn Ishaq's report) attempted a surprise raid on the camp from the hills of Tan'im, but Muslim scouts spotted them first, and they were surrounded and captured without a drop of blood spilled on either side (Allah restraining both sides' hands, according to Qur'an 48:24) after which the Prophet ﷺ forgave them all and sent them home. Negotiations opened with Budayl ibn Warqa' of Khuza'a, a neutral tribe sympathetic to the Muslims, who carried the Prophet ﷺ's message (that he had come only to honor the House of Allah, and was willing to agree a truce with the Quraysh, or else to fight) back to the Quraysh; the more hot-headed among them refused to even hear it, and the Quraysh still would not budge, unwilling to let the Arabs say Muhammad ﷺ had gotten the better of them. Urwah ibn Mas'ud al-Thaqafi, a Thaqif leader with close Qurashi ties, volunteered next and met the Prophet ﷺ directly, accusing him of breaking family ties and threatening the Haram's sanctity; when Urwah repeatedly took hold of the Prophet ﷺ's beard in a customary gesture between equals, his own grand-nephew al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, guarding the Prophet ﷺ, struck his hand away each time with a sword hilt. When Urwah mocked the loyalty of the Prophet ﷺ's followers as a rootless "hodgepodge," Abu Bakr RA answered him with a curse so sharp Urwah remarked he would have returned it in kind had he not owed Abu Bakr a personal favor. Urwah returned to the Quraysh visibly shaken, having watched the sahaba compete to catch the Prophet ﷺ's spit and washing-water and lower their voices in his presence (he told them he had visited the courts of Caesar, Kisra, and the Najashi and never seen a king honored the way this man was honored by his own people) and urged the Quraysh to accept the Prophet ﷺ's offer. The Prophet ﷺ next sent Khirash ibn Umayyah of Khuza'a on one of his own recognizable camels as a gesture of goodwill; the Quraysh instead hamstrung the camel and were about to kill Khirash before the Ahabish protected him and let him go (Ibn Ishaq). The Quraysh's own next emissary, al-Hulays ibn Alqama al-Kinani, came from a tribe that held sacrificial animals sacred; the Prophet ﷺ, recognizing this, had the sahaba parade their garlanded camels and sheep before him. Al-Hulays never even entered the Muslim camp, the sight alone was enough, and he returned to the Quraysh declaring it forbidden to keep pilgrims and their offerings from the House of Allah, only to be mocked by the Quraysh as an ignorant Bedouin and to swear in response that his own tribal confederation, the Ahabish, would no longer support them. With neutral emissaries exhausted, the Prophet ﷺ turned to sending a Muslim of standing. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, though famous for his fearlessness, asked to be excused (not from fear for himself, but because his well-known hostility toward the Quraysh and lack of protecting kin in Makkah made him likely to be killed before any negotiation could happen) and suggested Uthman ibn Affan RA instead, whose Umayyad kinship with Abu Sufyan gave him standing the Quraysh would respect. Uthman entered Makkah under the protection of his cousin Aban ibn Sa'id, met with Abu Sufyan and the Quraysh leadership, and delivered his message; they told Uthman he might go round the Ka'bah himself, and when he refused to do so before the Prophet ﷺ, they held him (Ibn Ishaq). When Uthman was delayed longer than expected, a rumor spread through the camp that he had been killed. The Prophet ﷺ, unwilling to leave the matter unanswered, called the sahaba to a fresh pledge of allegiance beneath a tree at Hudaybiyyah, committing them to fight the Quraysh rather than retreat, an oath the Qur'an would later commemorate as the moment "Allah's Hand was over their hands" (Qur'an 48:10) and record His pleasure with those who gave it (Qur'an 48:18). Every man present gave the pledge except one hypocrite who hid behind his camel; for Uthman, absent in Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ raised his right hand, saying "This is the hand of Uthman", and struck it on his other hand, saying "This is for Uthman" (al-Bukhari). Word of the pledge reached Makkah and appears to have pushed the Quraysh to finally negotiate in earnest: Uthman returned to camp, and it is related that when the sahaba asked whether he had managed to perform tawaf while inside the city, he told them he would never do so ahead of the Prophet ﷺ even if he had stayed in Makkah a year. The Quraysh first sent Mikraz ibn Hafs, who offered nothing workable, and then their most capable negotiator, Suhayl ibn Amr, a senior Qurashi orator once held as a Badr prisoner in a sahabi's own home, whom the Prophet ﷺ had refused to let Umar RA silence years earlier, telling him a day might come when Suhayl would say something to please him. Seeing him approach, the Prophet ﷺ remarked to the sahaba, "Suhayl has come; things have been made easy for you," reading a good omen in the meaning of his name. Suhayl arrived carrying a grievance of his own: one of his sons, Abdullah, had already defected to Madinah years earlier by slipping away from the Quraysh's own ranks at Badr, and his younger son, Abu Jandal RA, a convert Suhayl had kept in chains and tortured, was still a prisoner back in Makkah. The Prophet ﷺ called for Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to write. When he began, "In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful," Suhayl objected that he did not recognize "al-Rahman" and insisted on the pagan formula "Bismika Allahumma" instead; the Prophet ﷺ agreed rather than let the wording block the treaty. When Ali then wrote "This is what Muhammad ﷺ, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, has agreed with Suhayl ibn Amr," Suhayl objected again (had the Quraysh believed that title, he said, they would never have opposed him in the first place) and demanded "Muhammad ibn Abdillah" instead. The Prophet ﷺ told him, "I am the Messenger of Allah ﷺ even if you deny it," but agreed to the wording anyway; when Ali RA refused to be the one to strike out "Messenger of Allah ﷺ" with his own hand, the Prophet ﷺ, unable to write, had Ali RA point to the word and erased it himself. Suhayl then set his central condition: any man of the Quraysh who came over to the Muslims, even as a Muslim, would be returned; no Muslim would ever be handed the other way. The sahaba objected loudly (most of them had themselves fled Makkah for exactly this protection, and reversing it now would have cut off every future refugee) but before the clause was even finished being written, Abu Jandal RA broke free of his chains and stumbled into camp crying out for help, torture marks visible on his body. Suhayl pointed him out as the first person the clause would apply to. The Prophet ﷺ pointed out that the treaty had not yet been written and asked Suhayl to let him keep Abu Jandal; Suhayl refused outright. Mikraz ibn Hafs said, "We allow you to keep him", but Suhayl would not yield (al-Bukhari); other reports say Mikraz took him under his protection so that he would not be tortured again. The Prophet ﷺ told Abu Jandal to be patient, that Allah would make a way out for him; Umar RA, standing near him, gestured toward his own sword rather than see him returned, but Abu Jandal, Suhayl still being his father, did not take it, and was led back to Makkah in chains. With that, the remaining terms were set: no Umrah that year, only the next; a ten-year truce with no fighting on either side; freedom for both sides to ally with outside tribes, binding those tribes to the same terms; and any Muslim who defected back to the Quraysh, unlike the reverse, would not be returned. Ibn Ishaq names the witnesses as Abu Bakr RA, Umar RA, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, Abdullah ibn Suhayl RA, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, Mahmud ibn Maslamah RA and Mikraz, then a polytheist, with Ali RA as the writer of the document. As Suhayl left satisfied, Umar RA, voicing what many of the sahaba were feeling, confronted the Prophet ﷺ directly: was he not the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, were the Muslims not upon the truth and their enemies upon falsehood, so how could they accept terms this humiliating? The Prophet ﷺ answered simply that he was Allah's Messenger and would not disobey Him, and that Allah would help him; when Umar RA pressed him on the unfulfilled promise of tawaf, the Prophet ﷺ pointed out he had never said it would be this year. Still unsatisfied, Umar RA put the same questions to Abu Bakr RA, who rebuked him sharply and told him to hold fast to the Prophet ﷺ's stirrup rather than question him. Umar RA later said he did not cease giving charity, fasting, praying and freeing slaves because of what he had said that day (Ibn Ishaq), and he is reported to have admitted as khalifa that no other leader could have made him accept such a condition. When the treaty was written, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba to rise, slaughter their sacrifices and shave their heads, and though he said it three times, not a single person moved, too crushed by what had just happened (al-Bukhari). Retreating to his tent, the Prophet ﷺ told Umm Salama RA that he had commanded them and no one had responded; she advised him to go out and shave his own head first without saying another word, and once they saw this, they would follow. He did exactly that, and the sahaba, released from their paralysis, rushed to shave each other's heads; he made du'a for those who shaved rather than merely trimmed, repeating it three times before finally extending the same mercy to those who had only trimmed on the fourth. The sacrificial animals were slaughtered there, among them a camel that had belonged to Abu Jahal, captured at Badr, with a silver ring in its nose, which enraged the polytheists (Ibn Ishaq). On the return march, Umar RA, still troubled by what had passed between him and the Prophet ﷺ, rode up hoping to make peace; when his greetings went unanswered and he feared the worst, a rider summoned him back; only for him to find the Prophet ﷺ's face lit with joy as he recited Surah al-Fath, revealed on the way back: "Indeed, We have granted you a clear triumph" (Qur'an 48:1). Umar RA asked in disbelief whether this really counted as a triumph; the Prophet ﷺ affirmed it did, and Umar RA is said to have ridden the length of the column announcing the victory. The Prophet ﷺ said the surah was dearer to him than all that the sun shines upon (al-Bukhari). Not long after the return to Madinah, Abu Basir, a convert of Thaqif allied to Banu Zuhrah, became the treaty's first real test: he fled to Madinah, and though the Prophet ﷺ did not turn him away on arrival, when two Quraysh came to invoke the treaty's return clause the Prophet ﷺ honored it and sent him back with them. Along the road, Abu Basir killed one of his two escorts with the man's own sword and let the other flee back to Madinah in terror; when Abu Basir then returned himself, insisting the Prophet ﷺ had fulfilled his obligation and it was Allah who had freed him, the Prophet ﷺ, without directly helping him further, remarked to those nearby, "What a firebrand of war, if only he had others with him", a hint clear enough that Abu Basir took his leave and set up camp at al-'Is, by the sea on the road the Quraysh took to Syria (Ibn Ishaq). Abu Jandal RA, hearing where he had gone, escaped Makkah a second time and joined him, and word spread among the still-persecuted Muslims of Makkah until some seventy to eighty had gathered there, supporting themselves by raiding Quraysh caravans the treaty gave the Muslims no authority, and no obligation, to stop. In time the raids grew costly enough that the Quraysh themselves petitioned the Prophet ﷺ, invoking ties of kinship, to take the whole band into Madinah and end them, which he did, though a later report says Abu Basir died before he reached the city. A further test came when Umm Kulthum bint Uqbah, daughter of the Uqbah ibn Abi Mu'ayt who had once thrown animal entrails on the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah, fled to Madinah as a convert; since the treaty's return clause spoke only of men, Allah revealed Qur'an 60:10 exempting believing women from it outright, and she remained in Madinah, and is reported to have later married Zayd ibn Harithah RA. On one exhausted night during the return march, the Prophet ﷺ asked Bilal RA to stay awake and wake the camp for Fajr; Bilal too fell asleep, and the entire camp, including the Prophet ﷺ, slept past sunrise (Sahih Muslim sets such a night on the return from Khaybar). Rather than pray on the spot, the Prophet ﷺ moved the camp on before leading the delayed prayer at a new location, saying Shaytan had a hand in that particular ground.

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

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

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had permitted either side to form alliances with outside tribes, with Hudaybiyyah's own terms extending automatically to any tribe that joined. The Khuza'a (kin to the Prophet ﷺ through his great-great-great-grandmother and bound to Banu Hashim by an old alliance of Abdul Muttalib's) took the side of the Muslims; the Banu Bakr took the side of the Quraysh. In the 8th year of the Hijrah, the Banu Bakr (with old blood-scores to settle, helped with weapons by the Quraysh, some of whom fought beside them secretly by night; Hassan ibn Thabit's verses lay the blame on Suhayl ibn Amr and Safwan ibn Umayyah) raided the Khuza'a by night at the pond of al-Watir, just outside the Haram boundary. Men of Khuza'a were killed and the rest driven into the sacred area, and when his own men reminded the Bakri leader Nawfal ibn Mu'awiyah that they were inside the Haram, he answered that he had no god that day. The Khuza'a chieftain Amr ibn Salim al-Khuza'i went to Madinah and recited a poem invoking the old treaty and the massacre in the same breath; moved, the Prophet ﷺ promised, "You shall be helped, O Amr ibn Salim." Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, sent to renegotiate on the Quraysh's behalf, found every door in Madinah closed to him (Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab RA both refused to intercede, Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and his infant son Hasan could offer him nothing, and even his own daughter Umm Habiba RA would not let him sit on the Prophet ﷺ's bedding) and he returned to Makkah having secured nothing. The Prophet ﷺ called for a full mobilization without naming its destination, telling no one (not even Abu Bakr RA or Aisha RA) where the army was headed, and, by some reports, sending a small decoy party of eight men north toward Batn Idam to suggest Syria was the target. Then he told the people he was going to Makkah, and prayed, "O Allah, take eyes and ears from the Quraysh so that we may take them by surprise in their land." It was then that Hatib ibn Abi Balta'ah RA (a Badr veteran, by the strongest opinion a mawla from Yemen whose family had no protecting tribe in Makkah) paid a mawla-lady of Banu Hashim to smuggle a warning letter to the Quraysh, hidden in her hair braids. News of it came to the Prophet ﷺ from heaven, and he told them where to find her; Ali ibn Abi Talib RA and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA overtook her caravan at Rawdatu Khakh outside Madinah. She denied carrying anything until Ali swore neither the Prophet ﷺ nor Jibril AS could have been mistaken and threatened to search her by force: at which point, asking them first to turn around out of modesty, she untied her hair and handed over the letter. Confronted, Hatib confessed and explained that his loyalty to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ had never wavered; he had acted only out of fear for his unprotected family, not love of the Quraysh. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA twice asked to execute him as a traitor; the Prophet ﷺ pardoned him both times, telling Umar that Allah may have already forgiven every participant of Badr, reducing Umar to tears, and declared, "Hatib has spoken the truth. Nobody should say anything about Hatib anymore except good." Allah then revealed the opening of Surah al-Mumtahanah (Qur'an 60:1), instructing the believers not to take His enemies as allies. The army moved with remarkable speed: it left Madinah on the 10th of Ramadan and reached the outskirts of Makkah on the 19th, nine days for a force that had swollen past 10,000 as the Muhajirun and Ansar marched to a man and allied tribes such as the Muzayna and Banu Sulaym joined along the way; barely six years after only 300 Muslims had fought at Badr. On reaching al-Kadid, between Usfan and Qudaid, the Prophet ﷺ broke his Ramadan fast and the army with him. At the valley of Juhfa the army encountered al-Abbas ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle, riding out from Makkah to make his own Hijrah with his family, unaware the Conquest was already underway; by a weak report the Prophet ﷺ called him the last of the Muhajirun. At Niq al-Uqab, between Makkah and Madinah, two of the Prophet ﷺ's first cousins who had long mocked and opposed him (the poet Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abdul Muttalib RA and Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah RA, brother of Umm Salama RA) came out to seek an audience; the Prophet ﷺ at first refused to see them, saying that one had wounded his pride and the other had insulted him in Makkah, and only relented, moved, when Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith threatened with his young son at his side to go and die in the desert rather than be turned away. Both accepted Islam. At the final camping station of Marr al-Zahran, later known as Wadi Fatima, the army's camp fires lit up the plain. Al-Abbas RA, newly reunited with the army and anxious to spare his people needless bloodshed, went out that night to persuade the Quraysh to submit peacefully, and encountered three Quraysh and Khuza'a leaders out looking for news: Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Hakim ibn Hizam and Budayl ibn Warqa'. Al-Abbas brought Abu Sufyan into the camp on the Prophet ﷺ's own white mule, past Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, who wanted him executed on the spot; the Prophet ﷺ had Abu Sufyan spend the night in al-Abbas's tent, and the next morning, pressed by both men, Abu Sufyan reluctantly testified to the shahada. The Prophet ﷺ then declared that whoever entered the Haram, stayed in their own home, or entered the house of Abu Sufyan would be safe, and had al-Abbas show him the army marching past tribe by tribe. Abu Sufyan marveled at its scale and remarked to al-Abbas, "The kingdom of your nephew has become great"; al-Abbas corrected him, "It is not a kingdom. It is prophethood." The final entry came on the morning of the 20th of Ramadan, with the people of Makkah still unaware of what was upon them, a secrecy so complete over a force of more than 10,000 that it was remembered as nothing short of miraculous. The Prophet ﷺ divided the army at Dhu Tuwa: Zubayr ibn al-Awwam RA on the left, Sa'd ibn Ubadah RA with the Ansar, Khalid ibn al-Walid RA on the right with Aslam, Sulaym, Ghifar, Muzayna, Juhayna and other Arab tribes, and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah RA leading the troops ahead of the Prophet ﷺ (Ibn Ishaq). As Sa'd ibn Ubadah passed Abu Sufyan he called out, "Today is the day of a great battle, and today the Ka'bah will be made lawful!" Abu Sufyan reported it to the Prophet ﷺ, who said that Sa'd was wrong: today Allah would honour the Ka'bah, and today it would be covered (al-Bukhari). By Ibn Ishaq's account the Prophet ﷺ had the banner taken from Sa'd and given to Ali RA; in al-Bukhari, Zubayr RA carried the Prophet ﷺ's own flag. Al-Abbas RA then sent Abu Sufyan back into the city to warn the Quraysh not to fight; Abu Sufyan ran through the streets calling, "Come to my house and you will be safe!": to the fury of his still-pagan wife Hind bint Utbah, who seized him by the moustache and called for him to be killed as a wretched protector of his people, but Abu Sufyan held his ground and, pressed on what one house could do for the whole city, spelled out the fuller terms of safety: the Haram, one's own home, or his own house. Entering Makkah from east and west, the Prophet ﷺ ordered that no one be killed unless attacked, naming only a small number of individuals excepted from this general amnesty. A handful of Quraysh under Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal, Safwan ibn Umayyah, and Suhayl ibn Amr made a brief, doomed stand in the alleys of the city; about twelve or thirteen of the Quraysh were killed, and two or three men of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA's cavalry, and resistance collapsed. The Prophet ﷺ then entered the city on his camel in armor, his head bowed so low it nearly touched the camel's back, reciting Surah al-Fath (Qur'an 48:1); he rode to the Ka'bah and performed tawaf on his camel, striking with his stick at the 360 idols around it, which fell, while reciting, "Truth has come, and falsehood has departed" (Qur'an 17:81). He then had Uthman ibn Talha bring the key, and cleared the Ka'bah of the idols and images inside, including one of Ibrahim AS with divination arrows, saying, "May Allah curse them! By Allah, neither Ibrahim nor Isma'il practised divination by arrows." (Al-Azraqi, quoting Ibn Ishaq, also reports pictures of Jesus and Mary.) He is also reported to have prayed inside the Ka'bah, with Bilal RA beside him; Bilal RA said he prayed two rak'ahs between the pillars, while Ibn Abbas RA reported that he did not pray inside. He once told Aisha RA that were it not for the Quraysh being new to Islam, he would have rebuilt the Ka'bah on Ibrahim AS's original foundation and lowered its door to the ground, a renovation he chose, even now, not to force through. Speaking from the door of the Ka'bah, the Prophet ﷺ declared, "There is no God but Allah alone. He has fulfilled His promise, and He has aided His servant, and He has destroyed all the enemies by Himself," abolished every claim of Jahiliyyah except the custodianship of the Ka'bah and the feeding of pilgrims, and recited Qur'an 49:13 on the equality of mankind before Allah. Asked what he intended to do with them, the assembled Quraysh answered, "Good. You are a noble brother, son of a noble brother," and the Prophet ﷺ said, "Go your way, for you are the freed ones" (Ibn Ishaq); some tellings add Yusuf AS's words, "No blame on you today" (Qur'an 12:92). Ali ibn Abi Talib RA asked whether the Ka'bah's custodianship (sadana) and the pilgrims' feeding (siqaya) might both be given to Banu Hashim; the Prophet ﷺ instead called for Uthman ibn Talha and said, "Here is your key; today is a day of good faith" (Ibn Ishaq; other reports link it to Qur'an 4:58), a custodianship that has remained with his clan, the Banu Abd al-Dar, ever since. In the conquest's immediate aftermath, the Prophet ﷺ by one report permitted the Khuza'a until Asr to retaliate against the Banu Bakr, then forbade any further bloodshed in the Haram; when men of Khuza'a killed Ibn al-Athwa' of Hudhayl the next day, the Prophet ﷺ told them to stop, paid the blood money himself, ruled that after that a victim's family could choose retaliation or blood money, and stressed that Allah alone had permitted him, and only briefly, to fight within the sanctuary. Unusually among conquests in human history, no war booty, prisoners, or land were taken, and almost no fighting occurred at all. Of the whole city, only a small number of individuals were denied amnesty by name, and the lists differ: Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal, who fled to Yemen meaning to sail for Abyssinia, turned to Islam at the sea (in Ibn Ishaq because the ship's master demanded belief in one God, in other tellings during a storm), came back under the protection his wife Umm Hakim obtained for him, and later died a martyr fighting the Romans; Abdullah ibn Khatal, executed after clinging to the Ka'bah's curtain for protection, having killed the Muslim freedman who served him and turned murtad; Miqyas ibn Subaba, executed for assassinating a sahabi in revenge for his brother's accidental death at al-Muraysi'; Abdullah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi al-Sarh, the Prophet ﷺ's former scribe who had turned murtad and slandered the Qur'an's revelation, pardoned after his foster brother Uthman ibn Affan RA interceded; Ibn Khatal's two singing girls, Fartanah and her companion, of whom one was killed and the other fled and was later pardoned; Sarah, who had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah and was later pardoned; Habbar ibn al-Aswad, who had caused Zaynab bint Muhammad ﷺ's miscarriage, later repented and was forgiven; al-Huwayrith ibn Nuqaydh, executed by Ali ibn Abi Talib RA one of those who had insulted the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah (by another report, he had attacked Fatima and Umm Kulthum RA on their journey to Madinah); and Wahshi, the killer of Hamzah ibn Abdul Muttalib RA, who fled to Ta'if and converted about a year later. In the end, four of them were killed: Ibn Khatal, Miqyas, al-Huwayrith and one of the singing girls. After the khutbah, the Prophet ﷺ had Bilal ibn Rabah RA climb the Ka'bah and give Makkah's first-ever adhan, an Abyssinian former slave raised, literally and symbolically, above the Quraysh who had once tortured him. By a note of Ibn Hisham, sitting in the courtyard with al-Harith ibn Hisham and Itab ibn Asid, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb privately weighed in with remarks of Jahiliyyah about Bilal's honor; when the Prophet ﷺ later recounted each man's private words to him word for word as he left the Haram, al-Harith and Itab both accepted Islam on the spot. Al-Harith is the Companion who asked the Prophet ﷺ how revelation came to him (al-Bukhari, with no occasion given), and by one report he died a martyr at the Battle of Yarmouk (15 AH) after giving up water meant for himself twice over (to Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahal RA, who passed it to Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah RA) all three dying before it could be drunk. The Prophet ﷺ then sat at Mount Safa, where the public dawah had begun two decades earlier, and took the bay'ah from the men of Quraysh in fulfillment of Qur'an 110:2. When Mujashi' ibn Mas'ud RA brought his brother to pledge for Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ said there was no migration after the Conquest, but he would take his pledge for Islam; in Ibn Abbas RA's report he said, "There is no emigration after the Conquest, but jihad and intention." He then took the oath of the women of Quraysh per Qur'an 60:12, with Umar ibn al-Khattab RA physically administering it since the Prophet ﷺ never touched the hand of a woman not related to him. Hind bint Utbah, veiled and unrecognized, sparred with each condition in turn (objecting that women were asked more than men, admitting she had skimmed from Abu Sufyan's wealth (which he forgave on the spot), protesting that a free woman would never commit zina, and retorting over the ban on killing children that the Muslims had killed the Quraysh's sons as adults at Badr, a reply at which Umar laughed immoderately); the Prophet ﷺ had recognized her when Abu Sufyan spoke, asked, "Then you are Hind bint Utbah?", and went on with the pledge when she asked him to forgive what was past. Some of the Ansar, meanwhile, worried among themselves that the Prophet ﷺ's return to his own people meant he had grown soft toward them; revelation came to him, and he told them, "I migrated towards Allah and towards you. I will live with you and will die with you," and they wept (Muslim). Over the 19 days the Prophet ﷺ remained in Makkah, several notable figures held out before eventually accepting Islam. By a weak report, a young Fudala ibn Umayr, enraged at the defeat, hid a dagger meaning to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ during tawaf; confronted by name, he lied about his intent, and the Prophet ﷺ laughed, sought Allah's forgiveness, and placed a hand on his chest, after which, by his own account, no one was more beloved to him, and he accepted Islam on the spot. Safwan ibn Umayyah, who had joined the doomed resistance, fled to Jeddah intending to drown himself; Umayr ibn Wahb RA begged the Prophet ﷺ for his protection and caught up with him bearing the Prophet ﷺ's own turban as proof, talking him down from the ship and back toward Makkah. Safwan asked for two months to decide and was given four; his Islam came later, after Hunayn, by some reports after he lent the Muslims armour and was given a great share of its spoils. By a report not found in Ibn Ishaq, Suhayl ibn Amr, the Hudaybiyyah negotiator, locked himself in his house in terror and sent his Muslim son Abdullah ibn Suhayl RA to beg protection on his behalf, which the Prophet ﷺ granted at once, instructing the sahaba to receive him with respect since "he is too intelligent to be ignorant of Islam"; Suhayl accepted Islam about a month later, after Hunayn and the Siege of Ta'if. And Abu Quhafa, Abu Bakr RA's blind and elderly father who had long opposed Islam, was brought to the mosque by Abu Bakr, as his granddaughter Asma bint Abi Bakr RA narrated; the Prophet ﷺ asked why he had not left the old man at home so that he could come to him there, Abu Bakr answered that it was more fitting for him to come, and the Prophet ﷺ stroked his chest, invited him to Islam, and told them to change the whiteness of his hair but avoid black. Umm Hani' bint Abi Talib RA (a daughter of Abu Talib, full sister of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA, and cousin of the Prophet ﷺ) embraced Islam in this same stretch, having remained on her earlier faith until the Conquest itself. When two of her in-laws of Banu Makhzum fled to her and Ali RA swore to kill them, she bolted her door on them and went to the Prophet ﷺ. She found him bathing, screened by his daughter Fatima RA; he welcomed her and said, "O Umm Hani', we grant protection to whomever you have granted protection"; the right to grant protection belongs to any Muslim, man or woman. Umm Hani' RA also narrated that she saw the Prophet ﷺ pray eight rak'ahs of Salat al-Duha that morning, the only surviving report of how many rak'ahs he himself prayed of that prayer. Among the last holdouts was Abdullah ibn al-Zab'ari of Banu Sahm, the official poet of the Quraysh, who had traded barbed verses with Hassan ibn Thabit RA for years and fled to Najran at the Conquest rather than face the Muslims. Stung by a single verse Hassan RA directed at him, he resolved to return and embrace Islam in some tellings despite his cousin's objections, telling him, "Why should I not convert? ... Should I not go back to my own kith and kin, my own cousin? He is the best of all mankind." By reports not found in Ibn Ishaq, seeing him approach the Ka'bah from a distance, the Prophet ﷺ remarked to the sahaba, "That is Ibn al-Zab'ari; and I see from him the nur of Iman." Ibn al-Zab'ari then gave the shahada and a moving declaration of repentance for his years of poetic hostility, and the Prophet ﷺ told him, "Islam wipes away all that you have done in the past." He spent the rest of his life composing poetry in praise of Islam, for which, by one report, the Prophet ﷺ gave him his cloak. With no house of his own left in Makkah (Abu Talib had died a mushrik, and by the ruling that a Muslim does not inherit from a disbeliever, his house passed instead to his non-Muslim sons Talib and Aqil, and Aqil later sold it) the Prophet ﷺ set up a tent at al-Hujun for his 19 days in the city, telling Usama ibn Zayd RA, who asked where they would stay, "Has Aqil left for us any house to lodge in?" He shortened his prayers throughout the stay, which Ibn Abbas RA put at nineteen days and Ibn Ishaq at fifteen nights. During these 19 days the Prophet ﷺ delivered short sermons teaching the new Muslims the basics of the religion. He reaffirmed the enduring sanctity of Makkah, declaring, "Allah has made Makkah sacred the day that He created the heavens and the earth, and it shall remain sacred until the Day of Judgment ... Makkah was never halal before me, nor shall it be halal after me. And even for me, it was made halal just for an hour of the day." He forbade the sale of alcohol, carcasses, pigs and idols, ending the Makkans' lucrative trade in idol-carving, establishing the fiqh principle that whatever is unlawful to use is also unlawful to sell. Scholars differ on when zawaj al-mut'ah was prohibited, but the Conquest is where most place its final prohibition. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, ill in Makkah (in al-Bukhari's main report, in the year of the Farewell Hajj), asked the Prophet ﷺ whether he could will away two-thirds, then half, of his wealth having only one daughter as heir; the Prophet ﷺ said "No, too much" to each until Sa'd proposed a third, prompting the ruling still followed in Islamic inheritance law that a bequest outside the Qur'anic heirs may not exceed one-third. When Usama ibn Zayd RA, beloved of the Prophet ﷺ, interceded for a noblewoman of Banu Makhzum caught stealing, the Prophet ﷺ became angry and answered, "Do you intercede in a case connected with Allah's prescribed punishments?", and in a sermon said that if Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad ﷺ, stole, he would cut off her hand; the woman later regularly visited Aisha RA, who relayed her requests to the Prophet ﷺ, showing that punishment does not brand a person a criminal for life. A dispute between Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas RA, claiming for his brother Utbah a boy born to the slave-girl of Zam'ah, and Abd ibn Zam'ah RA, who claimed the boy as his brother born on his father's bed, was settled by the Prophet ﷺ's verdict, "The boy is for the bed, and the stone is for the adulterer" (al-Bukhari). The Prophet ﷺ also sent mini-expeditions to destroy the remaining centers of idolatry: he commanded every household to destroy its own idols, and dispatched Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to destroy the great idol al-Uzza (mentioned in Qur'an 53:19) and by other reports another party to destroy Manat (Qur'an 53:20). At Nakhla, al-Uzza's Sulami guardian hung his sword on her and climbed the mountain, calling on her to strike Khalid down; Khalid destroyed her and returned (Ibn Ishaq). This achievement was marred by a mistake of Khalid ibn al-Walid RA, a very recent convert still unfamiliar with fiqh. Sent to invite the Banu Jadhimah to Islam, he met a tribe that had killed his uncle in the Jahiliyyah; they took up their weapons, and he told them to lay them down, since everyone had accepted Islam. When they did, saying "Saba'na, saba'na" because they could not say "Aslamna", he had them bound and killed a number of them (Ibn Ishaq; al-Bukhari). Abdullah ibn Umar RA and his companions refused his order to kill their captives, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA told Khalid he had done a pagan act in Islam; the two quarrelled and Khalid reviled him. On hearing the news, the Prophet ﷺ stood facing the Ka'bah, raised his hands, and declared, "O Allah, I am free from what Khalid has done," then sent Ali ibn Abi Talib RA with wealth to pay blood money and apologize to the bereaved families on his behalf. Hearing of the quarrel, the Prophet ﷺ said, "None should revile my Companions, for if one among you were to spend as much gold as Uhud, it would not amount to one mudd of one of them, or half of it" (Muslim). The 19 days consolidated only Makkah's immediate vicinity; Ta'if, the fortified plateau city that had once expelled and stoned the Prophet ﷺ, remained beyond reach of the army and would be addressed in the campaigns that followed.

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

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

On the 9th of Dhu al-Hijjah, 10 AH (a Friday, and the Day of al-Hajj al-Akbar) the Prophet ﷺ stood in the Valley of Aranah at Arafah and addressed the assembled multitude, with Abbas RA and Ali RA quieting the crowd so his words could carry (some sahaba reported hearing him even from their tents, which is counted among his miracles). He opened by telling the people he did not know whether he would meet them again after that year. It was on this occasion that Allah revealed the verse "This day, I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion" [Qur'an, 5:3], one of the last verses revealed, though not the very last. In the sermon he declared the blood, wealth, and honor of every Muslim sacred, exactly as sacred as that day, that month, and that land; abolished everything of Jahiliyyah, beginning with his own family's unpaid blood-money claim against the Hudhayl and his uncle al-Abbas RA's outstanding riba; and charged the people to fear Allah regarding women's rights, spelling out the mutual rights of spouses. He closed by telling the people they would be asked about him on the Day of Judgment, and that he had left them the Book of Allah, holding to which they would never go astray. When the people affirmed that he had conveyed the message, discharged his duty, and been sincere with them, he raised his hands and called three times, "O Allah, bear witness."