Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Abu Jahal ibn Hisham, and al-Akhnas ibn Shurayq each went out alone, on three separate nights, to secretly listen outside the Prophet ﷺ's house as he prayed and recited the Qur'an at night; each unaware the others were doing the same. Each morning they would meet on the road and privately reproach one another for it, until on the third morning they agreed among themselves never to return. The next morning, al-Akhnas went first to Abu Sufyan and then to Abu Jahal to ask, in confidence, what each made of what they had heard.
Having left Makkah for Ta'if, the Prophet ﷺ found himself unable to freely re-enter the city. Zayd ibn Harithah RA asked him how they would do so; the Prophet ﷺ replied that Allah would make a way. He ﷺ then sent requests for protection (jiwar) to several Quraysh notables. Al-Akhnas ibn Shurayq declined, citing his tribe's weak position; Suhayl ibn Amr declined on behalf of Banu Amir ibn Lu'ayy, saying they had never given protection to anyone of Banu Ka'b ibn Lu'ayy. Mut'im ibn Adi, chief of Banu Nawfal ibn Abd Manaf, agreed, and sent his four armed sons to escort the Prophet ﷺ back into Makkah. Mut'im then received him ﷺ at the Ka'bah and, after the Prophet ﷺ performed tawaf under armed guard, stood and publicly announced before the Quraysh, including Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, that he had given Muhammad ﷺ his protection, as a civic grant, not as a follower of the message.
A few weeks after the deaths of Khadijah RA and Abu Talib, and after Abu Lahab retracted the protection he had briefly offered, the Prophet ﷺ and Zayd ibn Harithah RA walked on foot to Ta'if, the nearest major city to Makkah, to seek support and a new base for the message. The Prophet ﷺ presented Islam privately to the three chieftains of Thaqif who jointly led the city (Abd Yalil, Mas'ud, and Habib, the sons of Amr) and each mocked him ﷺ in turn. He ﷺ then spent about a week preaching to the common people in Ta'if's marketplace; no one responded except one person who showed interest. When this reached the Thaqif leaders, they grew alarmed and sent a mob to stone the Prophet ﷺ and Zayd out of the city, pelting them until his ﷺ sandals were soaked in blood and Zayd was injured head to toe, finally letting them go at Qarn al-Manazil / Qarn al-Tha'alib outside the city.
Al-Isra wal-Mi'raj is a single night in two legs: al-isra, the night journey from al-Masjid al-Haram in Makkah to al-Masjid al-Aqsa in Bayt al-Maqdis, and al-mi'raj, the ascent from there through the seven heavens. It came after the Year of Sorrow and the stoning at Ta'if, the lowest point of the Prophet ﷺ's life, and the scholars read it as the ease Allah promises after every hardship: a gift given to him alone, which the rest of us are asked only to believe. Allah refers to it twice, in the opening verse of Surah al-Isra, where He calls the Prophet ﷺ "His servant", the highest title in the Qur'an, and in Surah al-Najm, which says the heart did not lie about what it saw. Ibn Ishaq and most early writers place it a year before the Hijrah; a report that Khadija RA died before the prayer was made obligatory would rule out anything earlier than the last years in Makkah. No month is known from any Companion, which the Companions themselves treated as unimportant. More of them narrate this one night than the rest of the Makkan period put together, which is also why storytellers padded it with legends the scholars had to sift out, and why the exact order of some scenes cannot be recovered. The Prophet ﷺ said that while he lay in the Hijr beside the Ka'bah (another authentic report has the roof of his house open, and Ibn Hajar joins the two: Jibril AS came to the house and led him first to the Hijr) Jibril opened his chest, washed his heart in a golden basin filled with Zamzam, or with faith, and closed it again, the second such opening after the one in his childhood, this time to strengthen him for what no one else could have seen and kept his mind. Then Jibril brought al-Buraq, a white beast between a mule and a donkey in size whose every stride reached as far as its eye could see; when it shied, Jibril rebuked it, for no rider more honoured before Allah had ever mounted it. On the way the Prophet ﷺ passed the grave of Musa AS and saw him standing in prayer. At Bayt al-Maqdis, where in that age the site of the Temple lay in ruins and was used as a refuse tip under Roman rule, he found the sanctuary standing as it had been, tied al-Buraq to the ring the prophets used, went in and prayed two rak'at, and found the prophets gathered with him: Musa, tall and dark like a man of Shanu'ah; Isa AS, of middle height and reddish in complexion, as if he had just come out of a bath; and Ibrahim AS, of whom he said that no one resembled him more than the Prophet ﷺ himself. When the prayer was called he was set before them all as imam, the leader of the leaders of every nation, as he later said of himself without boasting, the master of the children of Adam on the Day of Judgment. Then, either here or in the heavens, since the reports differ, Jibril held out two vessels, milk and wine, and told him to choose for his community. He chose the milk, and Jibril told him he had chosen the fitrah: the pure thing that nourishes over the corrupted thing that corrupts. Jibril then rose with him and asked leave at the gate of the lowest heaven. Who is it? Jibril. Is anyone with you? Muhammad ﷺ. Has he been sent for? Yes. The gate opened, and the same exchange was repeated at each of the seven. In the first heaven stood Adam AS, who greeted him as a righteous son and a righteous prophet, the souls of his descendants on his right and his left, and he smiled at the one and wept at the other. In the second, Yahya AS and Isa; in the third Yusuf AS, who had been given half of all beauty; in the fourth Idris AS; in the fifth Harun AS; in the sixth Musa; in the seventh Ibrahim, sitting with his back against al-Bayt al-Ma'mur, the House in the heavens, which later reports place directly above the Ka'bah, into which seventy thousand angels enter every day never to return. Each greeted him as a brother and a prophet; only Adam and Ibrahim called him son. When he had passed, Musa wept, and explained that he wept because a young man sent after him would bring more of his people into Paradise than Musa had. Somewhere on this night the Prophet ﷺ sat with Ibrahim, Musa and Isa as they spoke of the Hour, and only Isa knew anything of it: that he would return, kill the Dajjal, and see Gog and Magog break out and die at his prayer, after which the Hour would be as near as a woman in labour. Ibrahim sent his greeting to this community and told them that Paradise is fertile soil waiting to be planted with subhan Allah, alhamdulillah, la ilaha illa Allah and Allahu akbar. He met Malik, the keeper of Hell, who greeted him first; a report not found in the main collections adds that Malik never smiled, and that had he smiled for anyone, it would have been for him. Above the seventh heaven stood Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary, its fruits like the great jars of Hajar and its leaves like elephants' ears, its trunk in the sixth heaven and its crown at the end of the seventh, where everything that rises from the earth ends and everything that descends begins. It was covered, as the Qur'an says, with what covered it: colours he could not name, changing as he looked, and golden moths. At its foot ran four rivers, two hidden, the rivers of Paradise, and two seen, the Nile and the Euphrates. Here he saw Jibril in the form Allah created him, with six hundred wings as Ibn Mas'ud RA reports, one of only two times he saw him so; a later report adds pearls and coral falling from his feathers. Some scholars count these three, the Tree, the House and the angel, among the greatest signs of his Lord that the Qur'an says he saw. Then, alone, he was raised higher, to a place where he could hear the scratching of the Pen that writes what is to be, and Allah spoke to him. What passed between them is not recorded, and the scholars take the silence as deliberate; three things came out of it: the closing verses of Surah al-Baqarah, which Ali RA described as from a treasure beneath the Throne, a promise that whoever of his people died without associating anything with Allah would be forgiven, and the command to pray fifty times a day. Whether he saw Allah was argued from the first generation: Ibn Abbas RA said he did, Aisha RA said that whoever claims it has lied against Allah, since eyes cannot grasp Him, and when Abu Dharr RA asked the Prophet ﷺ himself, he answered: "Light; how could I see Him?" Elsewhere he described Allah's veil as light which, were it lifted, would burn away everything His face reached. On the way down Musa asked what his Lord had enjoined on his people, and told him to go back and ask for less, for he had tried the Children of Israel and they could not bear it; the Prophet ﷺ glanced at Jibril, who nodded, and went back. Up and down he went, five or ten prayers fewer each time, until he came down with five and could not bring himself to ask again. "I have gone back to my Lord until I am ashamed; I am content." And a voice called: My command is settled and I have lightened the burden on My servants; five, and they shall be counted as fifty. He then saw Paradise, tents of hollowed pearl on soil of musk, and the punishments of the Fire, most of them in a report Ibn Ishaq gives from Abu Sa'id al-Khudri RA: men with camels' lips swallowing coals for devouring orphans' wealth, others tearing their own faces with copper nails for backbiting, others leaving good meat to eat rotten for adultery, others swollen and trampled for usury, others cutting their tongues with shears of fire for preaching what they did not practise; and the Dajjal, one-eyed, his eye like a swollen grape. In a report whose fuller form was not found in the collections checked, he caught a beautiful fragrance and asked what it was, and Jibril told him of the hairdresser of Pharaoh's daughter, who let slip "bismillah" over a dropped comb, refused to call Pharaoh her lord, and went into the cauldron with her children after her nursing infant spoke to tell her that the pain of this world was nothing beside the next. He rode al-Buraq back to Makkah, passing three Quraysh caravans on the road, from one of which he drank, and lay down again in the Haram before dawn. He woke, in his own words, anxious about how he would tell his people, and by one report it was Abu Jahl who found him first and called the Quraysh together to hear it. They asked him to describe a city he had never seen; Bayt al-Maqdis rose up before his eyes above the house of Aqil so that he answered every question (al-Bukhari), and the caravans arrived when he said they would (Ibn Ishaq). Abu Jahl is said to have called it sorcery, and Abu Bakr RA, told of it before the Prophet ﷺ could tell him, said that if he had said it then it was true, and that he believed him in something stranger still, that revelation came to him from the heavens; he was called al-Siddiq from that day. Most scholars hold that the journey was made awake and in the body, arguing that a dream of Jerusalem would have been no miracle, nor would the Quraysh have jeered at one, nor would he have needed a mount, nor drunk on the way; Ibn Ishaq, however, reports Aisha RA as saying that his body remained where it was, and Mu'awiyah RA as calling it a true vision, and holds that it was true either way. Some scholars see in a journey that begins and ends in Makkah the first hint of the qibla turning back from Jerusalem to the Ka'bah after the Hijrah.
In his youth, al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba was a highway bandit of Thaqif who, with a band of comrades, robbed and killed a group of travelers. The victims' tribe declared war on Thaqif, who had to pay heavy blood money to end the conflict; Mughira and his comrades broke up and fled, unable to return to Thaqif. Mughira eventually heard of Islam, embraced it, and made his way to Madinah.
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.
The Battle of Tabuk carries two names, both used by the sahaba. It is called Ghazwa Tabuk because the Muslim army was saved there: after the sahaba had run out of water on the march, the Prophet ﷺ told Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA they would reach the spring of Tabuk the next day at the hottest part of the day, and warned them not to touch its water until he arrived. Two men touched it before he came and were rebuked; the Prophet ﷺ then washed his hands and face in what remained, and the water gushed out until the whole army (traditionally reported as 20,000 men, though such figures in the sources were often inflated) drank from it. It is also called Jaysh al-Usrah, the Army of Difficulty (a name Imam al-Bukhari records alongside Ghazwa Tabuk in his own chapter heading), because it was harsher than any other campaign: managing so large an army strained food, water, and logistics; it took place in the hottest part of the year, with temperatures around 110°F; it covered the furthest distance any army led by the Prophet ﷺ ever marched, roughly 650 km northwest of Madinah; and it fell during Madinah's August harvest season, when leaving meant forgoing the year's main income for an agrarian society with no concept of a steady salary. It took place in the month of Rajab, 9 AH, exactly six months after the Siege of Ta'if, and it was the Prophet ﷺ's final ghazwa; after it he undertook his Farewell Hajj, fell ill, and the seerah moves toward his death and the khilafa. No actual clash of swords took place; the difficulty was the march itself. Attendance was called for every able-bodied man, even from as far as Makkah. The most famous story of the expedition, however, is not the march itself but what happened to those who missed it. Ka'b ibn Malik RA (one of the earliest Ansari converts, of Banu Salama, who had taken part in the Bay'at al-Aqaba) owned two camels and was healthier and wealthier than ever before, yet kept postponing his preparations day after day until the army had gone too far to catch. He was not alone: of the whole city, only the hypocrites and those genuinely excused failed to march, and even among these, more than eighty men came forward on the Prophet ﷺ's return to swear oaths and offer excuses, which he accepted at face value (later mildly rebuked for this in Qur'an 9:43), leaving their true intentions to Allah. Only three men (Ka'b, Murara ibn al-Rabi' al-Amri RA and Hilal ibn Umayyah al-Waqifi RA, the latter two both veterans of Badr) refused to lie, and told the Prophet ﷺ the plain truth. He forbade the whole community from speaking to the three of them. For fifty nights they were shunned by everyone, including, in Ka'b's case, his own cousin Abu Qatada RA; the King of Ghassan even tried to lure Ka'b away with a letter, which he burned as a test. Forty days in, the three were also ordered to separate from their wives. On the fiftieth morning, as Ka'b prayed Fajr on his rooftop, a man of Aslam climbed Jabal Sal' (the mountain visible on exiting the Masjid al-Nabawi) and cried out that Allah had accepted their repentance; his voice reaching Ka'b before a horseman sent to convey the news in person, whom Ka'b gifted the only clothes he owned; he then had to borrow a garment from a neighbor to go to the Prophet ﷺ. Ka'b's repentance, and that of his two companions, was announced across Madinah, prompting Qur'an 9:117-119 on Allah turning in mercy to "the three who were left behind." Talha ibn Ubaydillah RA alone among the Muhajirun stood to congratulate Ka'b, who resolved from that day to never knowingly lie again. Before the army departed, the Prophet ﷺ called for donations from the minbar, and the sahaba raced to give. Umar ibn al-Khattab RA, thinking he could finally outdo Abu Bakr RA, brought half his wealth, telling the Prophet ﷺ he had left an equal amount for his family (narrated in Sunan al-Tirmidhi); Abu Bakr RA then brought everything he owned, saying he had left his family only "Allah and His Messenger ﷺ", prompting Umar to concede he could never compete with him again. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA, who had arrived in Madinah with nothing but the clothes on his back, gave 200 uqiyas of grain. Uthman ibn Affan RA gave in two remembered moments: during the Prophet ﷺ's khutbah he pledged, in escalating stages, a hundred camels, then two hundred, then finally three hundred with all they carried, at which the Prophet ﷺ came down from the minbar to declare "Uthman has no sin after what he has done today"; separately, when one of his trading caravans returned from Syria around the same time, he sold it entire for roughly a thousand gold coins and poured them before the Prophet ﷺ, who said, "Whatever Uthman does after today, it will not harm him", a promise Uthman himself would invoke decades later against the neo-Kharijites besieging his house. The hypocrites, by contrast, gave nothing and mocked those who did: when a poor Ansari man brought one of only two handfuls of dates he had earned by drawing water all night, two hypocrites jeered that Allah had no need of so little and that he needed it more than anyone, prompting Qur'an 9:79. Others made excuses to avoid marching at all: al-Jad ibn Qays begged off, claiming he feared losing self-control around Roman women, and the Prophet ﷺ simply turned away from him (Qur'an 9:49 is tied to this); Qur'an 9:81-82 and 9:42 rebuke the wider hypocrite camp for rejoicing at staying behind and for finding the journey too far. Set against them were the Bakka'un ("the Criers"), roughly seven men including relatives of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari and Irbad ibn Sariya RA, who wanted to march but had no mount and wept when the Prophet ﷺ told them so (Qur'an 9:92); the Prophet ﷺ later told the sahaba at Tabuk that such sincere companions back in Madinah shared fully in the army's reward. Ulba ibn Zayd RA, having no wealth to give, pledged instead to defend the Prophet ﷺ with his honor against the hypocrites' taunts, and the Prophet ﷺ accepted it as charity. Wathila ibn al-Asqa' RA, also without money or a mount, went daily to the marketplace offering his future share of the ghanima to whoever would take him, until an elder of the Ansar agreed to share a camel and meals with him, and later refused to accept the very booty-camels Wathila tried to hand over in payment. Two companions nearly missed the expedition through sheer procrastination before recovering themselves at the last moment, alongside Ka'b ibn Malik RA. Abu Khaythama al-Ansari RA delayed like Ka'b, but on returning home and finding his wife had prepared a shaded, watered rug and food for him, he rebuked himself for enjoying comfort while the Prophet ﷺ endured the heat, and rushed out alone to catch up; the Prophet ﷺ, spotting a lone rider in the distance, said "Let it be Abu Khaythama," and on arrival asked why he had been delayed, gently rebuking him afterward with "Woe to you, Abu Khaythama!" once he heard the story. Abu Dharr al-Ghifari RA fell behind when his camel proved unfit to travel, so he loaded its burden onto his own back and walked the whole distance alone; the Prophet ﷺ, seeing a solitary walking figure approach, said "Let it be Abu Dharr!" and then remarked, "May Allah have mercy upon Abu Dharr. He is walking by himself, he will die by himself, and he will be resurrected by himself", a statement later fulfilled almost exactly at his death in exile, years afterward, in the khilafa of Ali ibn Abi Talib RA (see the separate event on his exile and death). The hypocrites' organized opposition, including their construction of Masjid al-Dirar during this same period as a rival headquarters, is treated as its own event (see Masjid al-Dirar) since it unfolded on a separate, simultaneous track from the march itself. Before departing Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ left Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA in charge of the city's affairs, as he did whenever he left on campaign, and told Ali ibn Abi Talib RA to stay behind and take charge of his household, the Mother of the Believers and the Ahl al-Bayt, since the journey would take more than a month. The munafiqun mocked Ali RA for staying behind, calling him unfit to fight; stung despite his well-known bravery, Ali RA armed himself and caught up with the army to protest. The Prophet ﷺ reassured him with the hadith of manzila: "Are you not content to be with me like Harun was with Musa, except that there is no prophet after me?" Ali RA was left in charge only of the Prophet ﷺ's family, not of Madinah itself (that was Muhammad ibn Maslamah RA's post), a detail Sunni scholars point to against the Shia reading of this hadith as evidence of a designated political succession. The army departed by way of Thaniyat al-Wada', the hill north of the Haram where Madinan families traditionally gathered to bid travelers farewell. There the Prophet ﷺ paused to organize the army (the largest ever assembled under him) into battalions by tribe, each with its own leader and flag, a mark of his organizational skill though he had no military training. On the march, when the sahaba began falling asleep on their mounts after Fajr and their camels scattered, Mu'adh ibn Jabal RA found himself riding close enough to the Prophet ﷺ, alone, to ask him privately what deed would gain him Jannah, a conversation preserved at length in Musnad Imam Ahmad (see the Sayings & Actions below). The Prophet ﷺ prayed qasr throughout the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, a practice later cited in fiqh discussions on how long a qasr-praying traveler (musafir) may remain at one place. The morning after arrival, he ﷺ also delivered a khutbah preserved by Uqba ibn Amir al-Juhani RA (see the separate Khutbah at Tabuk event). Separately, during the twenty days at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ sent Khalid ibn al-Walid RA to Dawmat al-Jandal, where he captured the Kindah chieftain Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik and sealed the whole northern frontier against Rome through treaties (see the separate Dawmat al-Jandal expedition). Over the twenty days the army camped at Tabuk, the Prophet ﷺ gave many short khutbahs and khatirahs, several of which are preserved in the books of hadith and seerah. In one, he ﷺ said Allah had given him five things granted to no prophet before him: he ﷺ was sent to all of mankind rather than to one people alone; Allah made him victorious through awe felt by his enemies a month's journey away; ghanima was made lawful for him ﷺ where it had not been for earlier nations; the whole earth was made a place of purification and prayer, so his ﷺ ummah could pray anywhere rather than only in a house of worship; and he ﷺ had saved his own personal request to Allah for the Day of Judgment, promising it to whoever testifies la ilaha illallah; understood as the Great Intercession. In another, narrated by Awf ibn Malik RA, he ﷺ foretold six signs before the Day of Judgment, ending in a truce and then a betrayal by the Bani al-Asfar (the Romans). The stay also saw repeated miracles of increasing food and water when supplies ran low, reported four or five times just in this expedition, and a karamah in which a companion lost in the dark found his way back to camp by the light of his own glowing fingers. One Fajr, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf RA led the salah after the Prophet ﷺ was delayed performing wudu (assisted and narrated by al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, including the Prophet ﷺ's instruction to leave his khuff on rather than remove them for washing); the Prophet ﷺ then prayed the missed rak'ah behind him, the only time in his life ﷺ he prayed a full rak'ah led by a companion. During these days the companion Abdullah Dhu al-Bijadayn RA also died and was buried by the Prophet ﷺ's own hands (see the separate event on his death and burial). Several fiqh rulings are also dated to Tabuk in the hadith literature: that washing each limb once in wudu suffices when water is scarce; that the Prophet ﷺ prayed with a sutrah roughly the size of a camel's saddle; that he ﷺ combined salahs only while actually traveling and not once settled even briefly (as at Tabuk and later at the Conquest of Makkah), while still praying qasr for the whole twenty days; and that the skin of a dead animal becomes pure, and so usable, once tanned. On the return march, the army passed through al-Hijr, the rock-carved dwellings of the ancient people of Thamud and Prophet Saleh AS (see the separate event on passing by al-Hijr). Their animals were also strengthened by a du'a the Prophet ﷺ made over them when they grew too weak to carry the army, a du'a the companion Fudala RA recognized fulfilled decades later at the Muslim conquest of Cyprus (28 AH). When water ran short, the Prophet ﷺ prayed for rain, and after a night of rain gave a khutbah on believers who credited the rain to Allah against hypocrites who credited it to a star. When the Prophet ﷺ's own camel went missing, a hypocrite mocked him ﷺ for claiming revelation from heaven yet not knowing where his camel was; the Prophet ﷺ then announced, by revelation, exactly where the camel was found, and a companion who learned who had mocked him expelled the man from his unit. Elsewhere on the march, hypocrites mocking the Prophet ﷺ's prophecies of conquering Rome and Persia were exposed as the Qur'an (9:64-66) was revealed quoting the mocker's excuse before he could finish giving it (see the separate event on the munafiqun's mockery). Separately, a group of some fourteen or fifteen hypocrites made a spur-of-the-moment attempt to throw the Prophet ﷺ off a cliff at night, foiled by his own evasive action while Ammar ibn Yasir RA and Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman RA looked on without realizing what was happening (see the separate event on the assassination attempt). The army finally returned to Madinah after some fifty to sixty days away, greeted at Thaniyat al-Wada' by the city's women and children (among them the companion al-Sa'ib RA, then a child) traditionally, though incorrectly, associated instead with the Hijrah (see the separate event on the return to Madinah). On the return march, one of the munafiqs was reported to have said that if Islam were true, it would mean believers were more misguided than donkeys, then swore under oath he had never said it, until Allah exposed the lie in Surat al-Tawba [Quran, 9:74]. Other hypocrites who stayed behind told one another, "Do not march forth in the heat," prompting the reply in the same surah that the Fire of Hell is far hotter [Quran, 9:81-82]. A separate, popular story (that a named sahabi begged the Prophet ﷺ for wealth, promised to become generous, then turned stingy once Allah granted him riches, with his later repentance and charity refused) is widely repeated as the occasion for [Quran, 9:75-77], but Sh. Yasir Qadhi rejects it as unreliable: besides a weak chain, it has the Prophet ﷺ refusing a repentant man's charity, which contradicts the Quran's own teaching that Allah accepts repentance. The verses instead describe the hypocrites in general, some of whom vowed to give charity if made wealthy and then grew stingy once Allah provided for them.
After Hunayn, the Prophet ﷺ left the ghanima and prisoners of war under guard at Ji'ranah and marched on Ta'if, where the defeated Thaqif had taken refuge behind the city's massive walls. Scholars of seerah generally treat the Battle of Hunayn and the Siege of Ta'if together, since they occurred back to back against a common enemy, though they were two separate incidents: Hunayn was a battle, Ta'if was a siege. The Muslims arrived in the last week of Shawwal, 8 AH. Ta'if was a green, well-watered city in the mountains, unlike the barren valley of Makkah; it had no Ka'bah, but the Thaqif had fortified it with massive walls, devices to hurl burning oil and arrows down on attackers, and supplies stocked for nearly a year, expecting a long siege. Even before Hunayn, while still in Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ had foreseen the need to besiege Ta'if and sent Companions, including Urwah ibn Mas'ud and Ghaylan ibn Salama, to the tribe of Jurash to learn siege engineering the Muslims had never used before: the catapult, the battering ram, and the testudo (a shield-wall formation used to approach a wall). By the time the Muslims reached Ta'if these Companions had returned with this knowledge, and for the first time a catapult was built and used by Muslims. The Companions first camped near the city but were showered with arrows, so the Prophet ﷺ moved them to another site, later the location of the city's first mosque. Using the testudo to approach the walls, the Muslims were burned by oil poured from above and had to retreat under a fresh volley of arrows, with a number killed; the battering rams made little progress and the catapults caused only limited damage. The Prophet ﷺ suggested withdrawing and returning another time, but when some of the Companions, still riding the momentum of Makkah and Hunayn, were reluctant to leave so close to what looked like victory, he let them stay.
As part of Thaqif's agreement with the Prophet ﷺ, the tribe would not have to destroy their idol al-Lat, the second most prestigious idol of the pagan Arabs after Hubal, themselves. The Prophet ﷺ sent al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba RA, Thaqif's own nephew, together with Abu Sufyan ibn Harb RA, to carry it out. As the whole tribe gathered anxiously, women crying and elders wailing, Mughira first played a prank on them (striking the idol, crying out, and collapsing as if struck down, so that the crowd rejoiced thinking al-Lat had defended itself) before jumping back up and mocking them for believing it. The idol's caretaker warned that the earth would swallow anyone who reached its base, but Mughira pressed on and demolished al-Lat completely, down to the ground. The Prophet ﷺ then had Uthman ibn Abi al-As RA build a mosque on the site, and the treasures kept in the idol's sanctuary were taken to the Bayt al-Mal and distributed to the poor and needy.
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 the Conquest of Makkah, Urwah ibn Mas'ud al-Thaqafi embraced Islam at the hands of the Prophet ﷺ, who warned him, "I am scared for you," fearing how his tribe of Thaqif in Ta'if would react. Urwah, confident of his standing among his people, insisted on returning to preach Islam to them. He met vile abuse from Thaqif, and the next morning went to his rooftop at Fajr, gave the adhan, and began to pray; he was shot with an arrow and fell into the valley, dying a martyr. As he lay fatally wounded, his family asked about seeking revenge or blood money; Urwah told them not to, saying this martyrdom was a gift Allah had honored him with, and asked to be buried among the martyrs of the Battle of Hunayn rather than in his family's cemetery, which was done.