The big battles get the headlines. But the seerah is honest enough to slow down for the small days too, the dozen or so minor skirmishes that filled the eighteen months between the Trench and the treaty of Hudaybiyyah, when nothing world-changing happened on the battlefield and everything quietly changed off it.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi picks four or five of them, not for the politics, which were minor, but for the people: a captured king who hated the Prophet's ﷺ face and left loving it, an assassin who walked into the mosque and walked out a believer, a son-in-law ransomed by a dead woman's necklace, and a starving army that found a gift the size of a hill washed up on the shore. Small expeditions. Enormous hearts.
The king tied to a pillar
A small detachment, about thirty companions, was sent against a rebellious tribe in central Arabia and came home victorious. On the road back they crossed a small convoy, and something about it did not sit right: the bearing of nobility, the signs of wealth, no obvious reason for any of it out in the middle of nowhere. They took the travelers captive and brought them to the Prophet ﷺ without the faintest idea whom they had caught.
It was Thumama ibn Uthal, chieftain of Banu Hanifah, one of the largest tribes in all of Arabia. An Abdul Muttalib-sized figure, a man of the rank of empires, who had once publicly threatened to kill the Prophet ﷺ if he ever got the chance. The companions had not recognized him. The Prophet ﷺ recognized him at once, because Allah had answered a du'a he had already made: that he might one day have Thumama in his power. There was no prison in Madinah, so they tied him to a pillar of the mosque itself, and the Prophet ﷺ ordered that he be treated well, sending him a share of his own family's food, a quiet message: this comes from Muhammad ﷺ.
Each morning the Prophet ﷺ came and asked, what do you have to say, Thumama? And each morning the chieftain answered like a king, not a beggar: if you kill me, you kill a man whose blood is heavy and you will have a war on your hands; if you forgive me, you forgive a man who repays a favor; if you want money, name your price. Three days he stayed bound in that mosque, and the reports do not spell out what he saw there, but you can picture it: the prayers, the Qur'an, the manners, the sheer difference of the place. On the third day the Prophet ﷺ simply said, release him.
Three days to change a life
Thumama walked out, went to a grove of palm trees, bathed, and walked back in. Then he said it, still calling the Prophet ﷺ by his first name because he had not yet learned the etiquette of the believers: by Allah, Muhammad, there was no face on this earth more hateful to me than yours, and now there is none more beloved. There was no religion I despised more than yours, and now there is none dearer to me. There was no city I hated more than your city, and now it is the most beloved of cities to me. Three days, and the truth of Islam had simply overtaken him.
The Prophet ﷺ had asked him for no ransom and made no threat. He had given a man who promised to kill him his life and his freedom back, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi lingers here on the lesson the whole story was built to teach: gentleness wins what harshness never will. That night the companions brought Thumama the lavish meals he had been eating for days, and he ate only a little. When they marveled, the Prophet ﷺ explained: a man who ate this morning with the stomach of a disbeliever now eats at night with the stomach of a believer, for the disbeliever eats with seven stomachs and the believer with one. Islam had reached even into how he sat at a meal.
Then Thumama did something that turned a single conversion into a strategy. He went on to Makkah, the first man, it is said, to enter the city openly proclaiming the talbiyah purified of idols, and when the Quraysh nearly drew their swords on him, he was so enraged that he swore not a single grain of wheat would reach them from the north until the Prophet ﷺ himself permitted it. Thumama held the highways. Weeks passed, supplies dwindled, and Makkah was reduced to eating a famine food of camel's blood and hair. At last Abu Sufyan had to swallow his pride and write to the Prophet ﷺ, half-pleading, half-scolding: you preach kindness to kin, and here you are letting us waste away. And the Prophet ﷺ, who was at open war with these same people, wrote to Thumama to let the wheat through. He would face Quraysh in battle; he would not starve their women and children. Strictness tempered with mercy, the Sheikh calls it, and it is the texture of the whole religion.
The assassin who read as treachery
Abu Sufyan, now the de facto leader of Quraysh, put a bounty on the Prophet's ﷺ life, and a bedouin came forward to claim it. He was given a camel, supplies, weapons, and a cover story, and in six hard days of riding he reached Madinah, entered the mosque, and began his rehearsed tale. The Prophet ﷺ looked at him and said: this is a man with treachery written on him. The companions tackled him on the spot, and as they did, a hidden dagger fell from his belt.
The Prophet ﷺ gave him a choice: tell me the truth and I will let you go. The man confessed everything, the bounty, the plot, the lie. And the Prophet ﷺ kept his word and freed him, and the would-be assassin embraced Islam. We do not even know his name; he is one of those footnotes the seerah keeps. But the pattern is unmistakable, and it sits right beside the assassination attempts the other direction: in those days this was a two-way street, and the man who came to kill left as a brother.
A targeted killing, told honestly
وَإِذَا كُنتَ فِيهِمْ فَأَقَمْتَ لَهُمُ الصَّلَاةَ فَلْتَقُمْ طَائِفَةٌ مِّنْهُم مَّعَكَ وَلْيَأْخُذُوا أَسْلِحَتَهُمْ فَإِذَا سَجَدُوا فَلْيَكُونُوا مِن وَرَائِكُمْ وَلْتَأْتِ طَائِفَةٌ أُخْرَىٰ لَمْ يُصَلُّوا فَلْيُصَلُّوا مَعَكَ وَلْيَأْخُذُوا حِذْرَهُمْ وَأَسْلِحَتَهُمْ ۗ وَدَّ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا لَوْ تَغْفُلُونَ عَنْ أَسْلِحَتِكُمْ وَأَمْتِعَتِكُمْ فَيَمِيلُونَ عَلَيْكُم مَّيْلَةً وَاحِدَةً ۚ وَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْكُمْ إِن كَانَ بِكُمْ أَذًى مِّن مَّطَرٍ أَوْ كُنتُم مَّرْضَىٰ أَن تَضَعُوا أَسْلِحَتَكُمْ ۖ وَخُذُوا حِذْرَكُمْ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ أَعَدَّ لِلْكَافِرِينَ عَذَابًا مُّهِينًا
“And when you [i.e., the commander of an army] are among them and lead them in prayer, let a group of them stand [in prayer] with you and let them carry their arms. And when they have prostrated, let them be [in position] behind you and have the other group come forward which has not [yet] prayed and let them pray with you, taking precaution and carrying their arms. Those who disbelieve wish that you would neglect your weapons and your baggage so they could come down upon you in one [single] attack. But there is no blame upon you, if you are troubled by rain or are ill, for putting down your arms, but take precaution. Indeed, Allah has prepared for the disbelievers a humiliating punishment.”
Surah an-Nisa 4:102 Read 4:102 with tafsir
Among these months falls a story the Sheikh calls one of the favorites of those who want to attack the Prophet ﷺ, and one he frankly does not find troubling at all: the killing of Abu Rafi', Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq, one of the wealthy chiefs of Khaybar. Sallam had been a chief financier of the very coalition that had just besieged Madinah at the Trench; he had paid for the mercenaries, and a man who had done it once would do it again. A small party of the Ansar themselves proposed to deal with him, eager to match what the Aws had done before, and the Prophet ﷺ permitted it on one condition: harm no woman, no child.
Five men, led by Abdullah ibn Atik, who spoke the language of Khaybar like a native, slipped into the fortress at the hour the gates were closing and made their way to Sallam's chamber. They killed him. His wife cried out, and one of the men raised his sword to silence her, then remembered the order and sheathed it. On the way out their leader, weak-eyed, missed a step and broke his foot, and the others carried him through the night with the alarm screaming behind them. They reached Madinah without a single casualty of their own, and the Prophet ﷺ wiped his hand over the broken foot and it healed.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi will not sensationalize it and he will not apologize for it either. These were different times with different norms, a declared state of war, a tactic that ran in both directions, the same Quraysh having just tried to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ in his own mosque. No scholar in the history of Islam ever licensed an individual to take such matters into his own hands, and the modern world, with its own drones and surgical strikes, has lost any standing to be scandalized by something fourteen centuries old. It is, he says, what it is: the way warfare worked. And it was on a related, larger expedition against Banu Lihyan, the tribe behind the massacre of those companions at ar-Raji', that Allah legislated the prayer of fear, salat al-khawf: when the enemy is near, half the army prays while half stands guard, then they trade, so that the believers are never both unarmed and prostrate at once. It is the only place in the Qur'an where the choreography of a single prayer is written down.
The son-in-law and the necklace
Then comes a story that is straightforward in its events and unforgettable in its heart. Zayd ibn Harithah was sent with a force to intercept a returning Quraysh caravan, and he took the whole of it: the wealth, the camels, the captives. Among the prisoners was Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi', the husband of Zaynab, the eldest daughter of the Prophet ﷺ. He was no hater of Islam; back at Badr he had fought on the Makkan side under compulsion, and when Quraysh had pressured him to divorce Zaynab in exchange for any woman he wanted, he had refused. Nobody, he said, could ever take her place.
This was not the first time. After Badr, when Abu al-As was a prisoner, Zaynab had sent her ransom: a necklace that had once belonged to her mother Khadijah, who had given it to her. The Prophet ﷺ saw it and the memories flooded back, and he asked the companions, if you see fit, to release the captive and return her necklace, for it was theirs to decide, not his to command. They freed him gladly. But the Prophet ﷺ had made Abu al-As promise one thing in return: send me Zaynab. And he had kept his word and sent her on to Madinah.
Now Abu al-As was a captive again, and this time it was Zaynab's voice that rang out from the women's side of the mosque after the dawn prayer: O Muslims, I am Zaynab, daughter of Muhammad, and I have granted my protection to this man. The Prophet ﷺ turned and asked the congregation, did you hear what I heard? By Allah, I had no knowledge of this until now. Then he taught them the principle the whole ummah would carry: the believers are as one in their protection; the least of them may grant safety, and the rest are bound to honor it. So Abu al-As was protected, his caravan goods returned to him, and he carried every last entrusted dirham back to its owner in Makkah before announcing his own Islam, publicly, in the open, so that no one could ever say he had done it for his life or his wealth. Of all the Prophet's ﷺ sons-in-law, the Sheikh notes, this is the one of whom he said: he spoke to me and was truthful, he promised me and he kept his promise.
The gift the size of a hill
أُحِلَّ لَكُمْ صَيْدُ الْبَحْرِ وَطَعَامُهُ مَتَاعًا لَّكُمْ وَلِلسَّيَّارَةِ ۖ وَحُرِّمَ عَلَيْكُمْ صَيْدُ الْبَرِّ مَا دُمْتُمْ حُرُمًا ۗ وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ الَّذِي إِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ
“Lawful to you is game from the sea and its food as provision for you and the travelers, but forbidden to you is game from the land as long as you are in the state of ihram. And fear Allah to whom you will be gathered.”
Surah al-Maidah 5:96 Read 5:96 with tafsir
The last story the Sheikh tells is the one that gave this whole stretch of expeditions a name: the army of al-khabat, the withered leaves. Some three hundred men under Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah were sent to intercept a Quraysh caravan and missed it, and on the long march the supplies ran out. Abu Ubaydah gathered every scrap of food and rationed it, smaller and smaller, until it came down to a single date per man per day, and then nothing. They sucked on date pits and drank water for the taste of it. They stripped the withered leaves off the thorn bushes, the khabat, and ate those just to stay alive.
Then they reached the shore near a coastal town, and Allah laid a gift in front of them: a whale, al-Anbar, beached and dead, a creature the like of which they had never seen. The reports strain to describe it. They said more than ten men sat together inside its eye socket. They planted one of its rib bones upright in the sand, and Abu Ubaydah mounted the tallest camel in the army and rode beneath it without lowering his head. For a month, three hundred starving men ate from this one animal until they grew fat, and then they packed the meat and carried it home.
But they were uneasy. They had eaten a creature already dead, without slaughtering it. So they brought the remaining meat to the Prophet ﷺ and asked: was it lawful? He asked if any was left, and when they brought it, he ate of it himself, the one and only time, by the Sheikh's knowledge, that the Prophet ﷺ ever tasted seafood. He ate to show them, plainly, that the food of the sea is lawful: it need not be slaughtered, it need not even be caught alive. By naming the greatest creature of the sea as permitted, the lesson teaches itself about everything smaller. And it rests on the verse Allah revealed: lawful to you is the game of the sea and its food.