After a short pause, the series picks back up with a breath and a backward glance. We are in the eighth year of the Hijrah now, and the Prophet ﷺ is sixty-one. Before the next great event, Dr. Yasir Qadhi gathers the whole story so far into one line: from the day they expelled him from the city he loved, everything has been moving toward one thing. Makkah is the prize. Badr, the Confederates, Hudaybiyyah, Khaybar, Mu'tah: each is another step toward the morning he ﷺ rides home.
And the steps continue. In the months between Mu'tah and the conquest there are small expeditions, easy to skip in a history book and impossible to skip here, because the lessons live in them. Today's is the expedition of Dhat as-Salasil, where a man who had been Muslim for three months was handed command of an army, and one of the ten promised Paradise quietly stepped down so the army could stay one.
The whole road, in one glance
For forty years the people of Makkah loved him ﷺ and trusted him, certain he would be among their leaders. Then he preached one God and the equality of all people, and they turned. They could not touch him, the grandson of Abd al-Muttalib, so they took their cruelty out on the weak, boycotted his clan into starvation, and drove the believers to flee. When his uncle's protection finally lifted, they resolved on the thing the Arabs held unthinkable: to kill one of their own. And so came the Hijrah, and his farewell to the city: you are the most beloved of all lands to me, and had my people not expelled me, I would never have left you.
Even in Madinah they would not let him be. Badr broke the Quraysh and they never truly recovered. The Confederates taught them that even all of Arabia, united for the first time around an idea rather than a tribe, could not take the city Allah was guarding. Hudaybiyyah, which looked like a setback, turned every clause against them and bought two years of peace in which more people entered Islam than in the previous decade. In that peace the Prophet ﷺ cleared the board: Khaybar fell, and with it came wealth, weapons, and security. Then Mu'tah, where a small force stood against the Roman superpower itself and came home all but untouched, a victory not of the sword but of morale. By now Makkah was half-empty, its noblemen dead or departed, and every domino was tipping toward home.
Not the famous battle, and not the point
A few weeks after Mu'tah, in the cold of that same winter, came the expedition the books call Dhat as-Salasil. Sheikh Yasir pauses to clear up a confusion the advanced students will feel: this is not the great Battle of Dhat as-Salasil from the time of Umar, the one that helped bring down the Persian empire. They share a name for two unrelated reasons, his named for a watering hole called Salasil that lay nearby. The later battle is the famous one; ours is small. Do not mix them up.
And for us, he says, the size is exactly the point. We are not here for which tribe was subdued or where its territory sat. We are here for the small human moments inside the expedition, the ones that carry a benefit you can hold. The target this time was the tribe of Quda'a, far up in the north toward the edge of what is now Jordan, a large clan that had helped the enemy at Mu'tah. This march was the answer to that help.
A commander of three months
لَا يَسْتَوِي مِنكُم مَّنْ أَنفَقَ مِن قَبْلِ الْفَتْحِ وَقَاتَلَ ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ أَعْظَمُ دَرَجَةً مِّنَ الَّذِينَ أَنفَقُوا مِن بَعْدُ وَقَاتَلُوا
“Not equal among you are those who spent before the conquest [of Makkah] and fought [and those who did so after it]. Those are greater in degree than they who spent afterwards and fought.”
Surah al-Hadid 57:10 Read 57:10 with tafsir
The Prophet ﷺ sent for Amr ibn al-As, told him to put on his garments and his armor and come. When Amr arrived, he ﷺ looked him up and down, taking his measure, and said: I want to appoint you over an army, and Allah will keep you safe and give you much. I am hopeful you will come back with a great deal of wealth.
Now Amr was the freshest of new Muslims, barely two or three months into Islam, one of the very last to convert before the conquest. He was also of the nobility of Quraysh, raised in luxury, the son of a man against whom the Qur'an itself had spoken. So when the Prophet ﷺ spoke of wealth, something in him flinched. O Messenger of Allah, he said, I did not accept Islam to become rich. I accepted Islam to be a Muslim, and to be with you. It is the kind of line that tells you a man is sincere, and the same Amr who once said that whenever the Prophet ﷺ looked at him, he felt he must be the most beloved person to him, such was the warmth he ﷺ made every companion feel.
The reply Sheikh Yasir lingers on, because it is a gift to anyone who has ever felt uneasy about chasing a living: how excellent is pure wealth for a righteous man. There is nothing wrong with wanting money, the Prophet ﷺ was teaching, nothing wrong with having it, on two conditions: that the wealth is clean, and that the man is good. Money is one of the great tests of this ummah, but a test is something the believer asks to pass, not something he runs from. O Allah, grant me wealth that is pure, and let me spend it for Your sake. And the man entrusted with this command was deliberately one of the early ones, of whom Allah would later say their rank is higher than those who came after the conquest.
No fires in the dark
Amr was given three hundred men and told to take the tribe by surprise. He was young and new to Islam, but he was no new soldier, raised since boyhood in the household of a chieftain. He marched only at night and forbade anyone, in that bone-deep desert cold, to light a single fire. When the men grumbled, he told them flatly that anyone who lit a fire he would throw into it. Later, when they complained of this to the Prophet ﷺ, Amr explained himself: our numbers were small, three hundred against a great tribe, and I would not let them see how few we were. We moved in the dark and we hid.
At the tribe's edge he saw that three hundred would not do, withdrew, and sent for more. The Prophet ﷺ dispatched two hundred reinforcements, and among them were Abu Bakr and Umar and other senior companions, with Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah, one of the ten promised Paradise, in command. And to Abu Ubaydah he ﷺ gave one instruction for when the two forces met: agree, and do not disagree. Whatever you do, stay united.
One of the ten steps down
When the reinforcements arrived it was time to pray, and Abu Ubaydah stepped forward to lead, for in those days the one who led the prayer led the army. Amr stopped him: you came as reinforcements; I am the commander here. Some of the companions bristled, Abu Ubaydah is our leader, they said, you may lead your three hundred. By every measure Abu Ubaydah was the senior man, in Islam, in Qur'an, in standing, against a boy of three months. The tension was real.
And then Abu Ubaydah remembered the last thing the Prophet ﷺ had told him. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ commanded me to agree with you and not differ, he said, so even if you disobey me, I will obey you. He stepped down. He let Amr lead the prayer and lead the army, and swallowed his own pride for the sake of one thing: unity.
Sheikh Yasir stops the march here to break an image we carry wrongly. The companions were not superhuman; they were human, and the very best of humans, which is a different thing. They felt what we feel. Abu Ubaydah knew he was more qualified, and he was right; Amr knew the Prophet ﷺ had put him in charge, and he was right too. The lesson is not that they had no egos. It is what they did with them. The greater of the two, in knowledge and in faith, was the one who let go. That is leadership: to step on your own pride so the community stays whole. And there is a second benefit folded inside the first, that Abu Bakr and Umar themselves, greater than Amr by consensus, prayed behind him without complaint, the plainest proof that the one in charge need not be the single best person present.
The cold and the verse
وَلَا تَقْتُلُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ بِكُمْ رَحِيمًا
“And do not kill yourselves [or one another]. Indeed, Allāh is to you ever Merciful.”
Surah an-Nisa 4:29 Read 4:29 with tafsir
Amr himself tells the next story, and he is not ashamed to tell it on himself, because there is too much in it to keep quiet. On one of the freezing nights of that expedition he woke in a state of major impurity. To take a full bath in that cold, in the open desert, he feared, might kill him. So he made tayammum, the dry purification with clean earth, and led his companions in the dawn prayer. When the army returned, this too went onto their list of complaints: he led us while in janabah.
The Prophet ﷺ called him, and notice, says Sheikh Yasir, that he asked before he judged: did you lead them in prayer while in a state of impurity? Amr answered with the Qur'an. I heard Allah say, do not kill yourselves, for indeed Allah is Merciful to you, and I feared that bathing in that cold would be the death of me. So he made tayammum instead. And the Prophet ﷺ laughed, and said nothing against him.
Small as it looks, this moment teaches a great deal. Tayammum, by the agreement of the scholars, is valid even when water is present, if using it would genuinely harm you, in deadly cold, or over a wound the water must not touch. And there is something deeper: a companion read a clear command, understood that it could not be meant to destroy him, and found in another verse the room to apply it wisely. Between the one who says the text means only its surface and the one who reads it in the light of his situation, there has always been a tension, even among the companions, and our religion asks us to be faithful to the text and alive to the circumstance at once. It is a delicate balance with no easy formula, and Amr, on a freezing night, walked it well.
He greeted them, and they killed him
وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَنْ أَلْقَىٰ إِلَيْكُمُ السَّلَامَ لَسْتَ مُؤْمِنًا تَبْتَغُونَ عَرَضَ الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا
“And do not say to one who gives you [a greeting of] peace, "You are not a believer," aspiring for the goods of worldly life.”
Surah an-Nisa 4:94 Read 4:94 with tafsir
The expedition itself was no battle. When Quda'a saw five hundred riders bearing down they dropped everything and fled, and the Muslims came home safe and rich, exactly as the Prophet ﷺ had promised: you will be kept safe, and Allah will give you much. From that day the north was no threat. But there is one more incident the books attach near here, and it is the heaviest thing in the episode.
On a small expedition before the conquest, a party of believers passed a man who lit up with joy at the sight of them and called out the greeting of peace, the sign of a Muslim. Among them was a man, Muhallim ibn Jaththama, who carried an old grudge against him from the days before Islam. The others lowered their weapons; Muhallim did not. He decided the man was only pretending, attacked him alone, killed him, and took his belongings as spoils. When the news reached the Prophet ﷺ, Allah sent down the verse: when you go forth in the cause of Allah, make certain, and do not say to one who offers you peace, you are not a believer, chasing the goods of this world. The verdict came from the heavens: it was not faith that moved your hand, it was a vendetta and a greed for what he owned.
Sheikh Yasir does not soften the ending. The Prophet ﷺ, in one of the very few refusals of his life, would not pray for Muhallim's forgiveness. It is said that within days Muhallim died, and three mornings running the earth would not hold him, casting his body back to the surface until his people gave up and covered him with stones in a ravine. And the Prophet ﷺ said something that turns the whole story toward us: the earth swallows up people worse than him. His crime was not the worst ever committed. But Allah wished to warn you through him, to show you the sanctity of a human life. You looked at a man saying peace and decided his heart for him, and Allah alone knew what was in it. Lead devotional, and land here: a soul is not yours to weigh.