Yesterday the trap closed. Twelve thousand men poured into the valley sure of an easy day, the arrows fell from every height at once, and the army shattered and ran. One man did not move: the Prophet ﷺ pressed his mule toward the enemy and called the believers back by name, and slowly they began to turn.
Today is what happens after the turn. The rout reverses, an army no eye could see comes down to fight, an assassin galloping at the Prophet's back is stopped by a prayer and ends the day a Muslim, and when the dust settles the believers find themselves standing over the largest fortune Islam had ever taken. Day 83 is the victory of Hunayn, and the long, strange road it opens toward Ta'if.
When they heard their own names
لَقَدْ نَصَرَكُمُ اللَّهُ فِي مَوَاطِنَ كَثِيرَةٍ ۙ وَيَوْمَ حُنَيْنٍ ۙ إِذْ أَعْجَبَتْكُمْ كَثْرَتُكُمْ فَلَمْ تُغْنِ عَنكُمْ شَيْئًا وَضَاقَتْ عَلَيْكُمُ الْأَرْضُ بِمَا رَحُبَتْ ثُمَّ وَلَّيْتُم مُّدْبِرِينَ
“Allāh has already given you victory in many regions and [even] on the day of Ḥunayn, when your great number pleased you, but it did not avail you at all, and the earth was confining for you with [i.e., in spite of] its vastness; then you turned back, fleeing.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:25 Read 9:25 with tafsir
Hold the picture from where we left it. The volleys are still coming, the bulk of the army has scattered into the rocks, and in the middle of it the Prophet ﷺ stands his ground on his mule, refusing to flee in the face of the arrows. Around him is the smallest of circles: Abu Bakr and Umar, Uthman and Ali, his uncle Abbas, a handful of the Ansar. That is what twelve thousand had narrowed down to.
Then Abbas, whose voice could carry like a horn, began to call the companions back, not as a crowd but one band at a time, tribe by tribe and name by name. And the men, scattered and blind with panic, heard their own names rise out of the valley, and it was as if they woke from a bad dream. They asked themselves where they thought they were running to, and they turned and came flooding back. The Prophet ﷺ bent again to the valley floor, took a fistful of pebbles, and flung it at the faces of the enemy as he had once done at Badr, and their archers faltered and their sight clouded, and the believers gathered tighter around him with every breath.
This is the day Allah singled out by name in His Book. He reminds the believers that He has carried them through many a field, and then He says: and on the day of Hunayn, when your great numbers pleased you and availed you nothing, and the wide earth shrank around you until you turned and fled. One verse holds the whole morning, Dr. Yasir Qadhi points out: the confidence, the cockiness, the numbers that bought them nothing, the vast valley that suddenly had no room in it, the backs that turned. Allah does not hide His servants' worst moment. He records it, so the lesson can never be lost.
An army no eye could see
ثُمَّ أَنزَلَ اللَّهُ سَكِينَتَهُ عَلَىٰ رَسُولِهِ وَعَلَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَأَنزَلَ جُنُودًا لَّمْ تَرَوْهَا وَعَذَّبَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا ۚ وَذَٰلِكَ جَزَاءُ الْكَافِرِينَ
“Then Allāh sent down His tranquility upon His Messenger and upon the believers and sent down soldiers [i.e., angels] whom you did not see and punished those who disbelieved. And that is the recompense of the disbelievers.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:26 Read 9:26 with tafsir
Then the verse turns, and so does the day. Allah sent down His tranquillity, His sakinah, onto the Messenger ﷺ and the believers in the instant their courage had failed, and He sent down soldiers no human eye could see. As at Badr, the angels came to Hunayn, and Allah Himself states it in His Book, so that no one would mistake where the help came from.
And as at Badr, some who were there caught a glimpse. Jubayr ibn Mutim, by now a Muslim, watched a great black mass come down out of the sky when the two armies met, dense and dark, then scatter across the field like a storm of ants poured over the ground. He understood what he was seeing: this was the help of Allah, descending to fight for the believers.
But the moment the Sheikh lingers on belongs to a man who came to Hunayn for the opposite of faith. Shaybah ibn Uthman was a distant cousin of the Prophet ﷺ whose father had been killed at Uhud fighting on the side of the pagans, and the wound had never healed. He had accepted Islam only days earlier, at the conquest of Makkah, an Islam still on his tongue and not yet in his heart. Seeing the Prophet ﷺ stand exposed while everyone fled, he saw his chance, took up his spear, and spurred his horse at the Prophet's ﷺ back to finish what Uhud had started. And out of nowhere, he said, a light rose up so bright he had to throw his arm across his face, and his eyes burned. The Prophet ﷺ turned, understood in an instant what was galloping toward him, and raised his hands: O Allah, drive the devil from Shaybah. O Allah, guide Shaybah. Three times. And Shaybah said that faith poured into his heart on the spot, and by the end of that same gallop the man who had set out to kill the Prophet ﷺ was fighting at his side. He lived a righteous life after that day.
The rout that ran the other way
Now the whole field tipped. Hawazin and Thaqif, it turned out, had staked everything on a single tactic: shower the Muslims with arrows, watch them break, then fall on them as they fled. It was a fine plan A. They had no plan B. When the believers refused to stay broken and came charging back at full speed, the enemy had nothing left to reach for, and the rout simply reversed direction. They fled headlong, every man for the mountains and the valleys.
The Prophet ﷺ would not let them regroup. Twenty thousand scattered men can become twenty thousand gathered men again, so he commanded the companions to pursue them into the valleys and the heights and give them no room to stop and rest and reform. Out of that command came a long string of small expeditions, two hundred sent this way, three hundred that, and in the chasing some of the best of the companions fell.
One of them was the uncle of Abu Musa al-Ashari. Sent in command of a pursuit, he was struck down by a thrown javelin. His nephew reached him with the shaft still in his chest, learned from his dying lips who had thrown it, and fell on the man at once. Then he came back: I have dealt with him, now what can I do for you? Pull it out, his uncle said, and the bleeding took him. With his last breath he sent his salam to the Prophet ﷺ and begged him to pray for his forgiveness. When Abu Musa carried the message back, the Prophet ﷺ rose, called for water, made wudu, and lifted his hands so high his arms could be seen, asking Allah to forgive the man and raise his rank. And me too, Messenger of Allah, said Abu Musa. So he prayed for Abu Musa as well, that Allah forgive him and bring him to a noble place on the Day of Judgment, a prayer Abu Musa's family would treasure for generations after.
She should not have been killed
Walking the battlefield in the aftermath, the Prophet ﷺ came upon the body of a woman who had been killed in the fighting, and it stopped him cold. This was wrong, he said. She should not have been killed. Who did this? He was told it was Khalid ibn al-Walid, already sent ahead on another pursuit.
Catch Khalid, the Prophet ﷺ ordered, before he goes any further, and tell him: he is not to kill any woman, any child, or any servant. The word for that last group the scholars have turned over carefully, the Sheikh notes, taking it to mean the hired help, or the elderly, or anyone on the edges of a camp who has not come out to fight. In that age there was no separate class of civilians; every grown man was a fighter. But the people who were not fighters, the Prophet ﷺ placed firmly outside the reach of the sword.
It is one of the foundation stones, the Sheikh emphasizes, that the books of fiqh return to again and again, and one of the most urgent in our own time: at Hunayn, on a battlefield he had every reason to think of only as war, the Prophet ﷺ plainly forbade the killing of non-combatants. He did not wait to be asked. He saw a single body that should not have been there, and he sent a rider to stop it from happening twice.
The largest spoils ever taken
Hunayn brought the Muslims the greatest war booty they had ever seen, and the reason was the enemy's own mistake. Hawazin had dragged their entire world to the battlefield, wives, children, herds, everything they owned, on the theory that a man fights harder with his family at his back. When they fled, all of it stayed behind. The counts the Sheikh gives are staggering: some six thousand captives, women and children; more than twenty-four thousand camels; over forty thousand goats. Reckon it in today's money and you are speaking of a fortune the Muslims had never come within sight of. The Prophet ﷺ had it all gathered and guarded in a valley called Jiranah, on the road from Ta'if back to Makkah.
Two small scenes survive from the gathering, and both are about him ﷺ more than the gold. As the captives were led in, one woman began to cry out that she was no ordinary prisoner: she was his sister. Brought before him, she said she was Shayma, his foster-sister from his earliest childhood. Prove it, he said gently, for he had not laid eyes on her in more than half a century. She said: you still left a mark on my back, from the day you bit me as a baby while I carried you. He knew her then, and laughed, and gave her the choice to stay with him in honour or return to her people with gifts. It is even narrated, in a chain the Sheikh is careful to flag as broken and uncertain, that his foster-mother Halima herself was brought to him, and that he rose for her, took the cloak from his own back, and spread it on the ground for her to sit on, the very highest honour a man could show.
The Sheikh pauses on one detail it would be easy to miss: only four Muslims were killed at Hunayn, yet many were wounded, and among the wounded were all four of the men who would one day lead the ummah after him, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. Every one of them bled here, and every one of them had stood by the Prophet ﷺ when the rest of the army ran. And Hunayn shares something with only one other day in all of history: it is one of just two battles Allah names outright in the Qur'an, the other being Badr. Badr was the victory of faith, Hunayn the victory of fortune; one a boost to the spirit, the other to the hand. In both, the help came down from above, and in both, the believers tried their utmost and then watched Allah do the rest.
On to Ta'if
The scattered enemy ran in many directions, but the people of Thaqif did not melt into the wilderness like the rest. They ran home, to the one place they trusted: Ta'if, their green city nestled high in the mountains, walled and watered and stocked, the proud rival of Makkah. And so, with the spoils still under armed guard at Jiranah, the Prophet ﷺ turned and marched on Ta'if. The scholars usually tell Hunayn and the siege of Ta'if as one story, the Sheikh notes, because they happened back to back against the same enemy, but they are two distinct events: a battle in the open field, and then a siege at the walls.
And here the Sheikh draws out something that should reframe how we picture the Prophet ﷺ as a commander. Long before any of this, while he was still in Makkah and had only just heard that Hawazin and Thaqif were arming against him, he had quietly sent a few of the companions away to a distant tribe to learn the machinery of siege warfare, weapons the Muslims had never used: the catapult, the battering ram, and the great shield, the testudo, under which a body of men could advance to a wall while burning oil and arrows rained down. That is foresight, the Sheikh says, thinking three steps ahead. While the battle of Hunayn was still in front of him, he was already preparing for the walls of Ta'if. By the time he reached the city, those companions were back, and for the first time in that part of the world, the Muslims raised a catapult.
So the army that had nearly broken in a valley at dawn marched, within days, against the most fortified city in Arabia, carrying engines of war it had never owned before. The spoils waited at Jiranah; the people of Hawazin had not yet come to claim back what was theirs; and the proud, walled city that had once driven the Prophet ﷺ out and bloodied him in its streets now waited at the end of the road. What happened beneath those walls, and the astonishing way he chose to divide the fortune of Hunayn, is the story of the days to come.