The Battle of the Trench, part 2

A trench dug on an empty stomach

It was winter, the hardest season Madinah knows: no fruit on the trees, the stores thin, the cold biting. The siege had taken them by surprise. No one had laid in supplies, the caravans in and out had stopped, and now every able man was in the ditch instead of in the market, so what little there was ran out fast. Dr. Yasir Qadhi is honest with you here: the books of seerah never quite explain why the shortage hit so suddenly and so hard. We are left to piece the reasons together, and to sit with the plain fact that for the first days of digging, the companions of the Prophet ﷺ simply did not have enough to eat.

What they did have was barely food. Bukhari preserves it: dried barley mixed with a little oil, a paste so rancid it turned the stomach, eaten only because there was nothing else. Jabir radiyallahu anhu remembered days when all they could find were the pits of dates to chew. And then there is the image the whole episode turns on. The Prophet ﷺ was down in the trench doing manual labor alongside everyone else, and as he raised his arm his shirt lifted, and Jabir saw a stone bound tight against his stomach. In those days a hungry man would tie a rock to his belly and cinch it hard, partly to dull the gnawing, partly to trick the body into feeling full. The leader of all of them was starving like the rest, and he had told no one. They only knew because his shirt slipped.

A thousand fed from one small goat

Jabir could not bear what he had seen. Newly married, barely seventeen or eighteen, he went home and asked his wife what they had. A little barley dough, she said, and one small goat, a kid really, too young to be worth slaughtering. It would yield almost no meat. Make the bread, he told her, and he slaughtered the kid and put it on to cook. Then he slipped quietly to the Prophet ﷺ and whispered an invitation: come, you and one or two others, my wife has prepared a little food.

And here the famous thing happened. The Prophet ﷺ stood and announced to the whole of the trench: Jabir and his wife have made a meal for us, all of you come. Jabir went running home in a panic, but his wife asked one steadying question: did you invite them, or did he? He did, said Jabir. Then leave it to him, she said, her faith perfectly calm. He knew what he was doing.

The Prophet ﷺ came first and told Jabir not to lift the lid off the pot or touch the bread until he arrived. Then he made du'a over the dough, and he made du'a over the meat still cooking on the fire, and he sent them in ten at a time, because the room held only ten. A group ate their fill and left, then another ten, then another, and the pot did not empty and the bread did not run out, until every person there had eaten. Jabir was later asked how many. Around a thousand, he said. The whole of the trench, fed from one small goat and a handful of barley.

This, the Sheikh explains, is what barakah actually means: not more stuff, but increase in good. The quantity looks the same, but Allah stretches it. A single plate that feeds a thousand is the same secret as a single dollar made to do the work of a hundred, a single hour made to hold the work of ten. The companions saw at least three or four food miracles in this siege, but Jabir's is the one remembered above all, for the sheer scale of it.

The rock that showed him three empires

Then they hit a rock. It sat right on the line the Prophet ﷺ had drawn, and no matter how they hacked at it, it would not break. Some said simply dig around it. But one of them refused: he is the one who marked this line, so we do not move it until we ask him. Look, the Sheikh pauses, at how carefully they followed even the smallest instruction of his Sunnah. They could have gone around a stone. They would not, because he had said here.

So they brought him down into the trench, and he took the pick. He struck once, and a third of the rock crumbled, and he said Allahu akbar, I have been given the keys of Sham, I can see the red palaces of Syria from where I stand. He struck a second time, and another third fell away: Allahu akbar, I have been given the keys of Persia, I can see the white palace of al-Mada'in. He struck a third time and the rock shattered: Allahu akbar, I have been given the keys of Yemen, I can see its gates from this very spot.

Sit with when he said it. A starving, outnumbered band, penned behind a ditch in their own city, bracing to be overrun, and their Prophet ﷺ is naming the empires that will fall to them. And they did fall, in the order he gave: Sham first, in the days of Abu Bakr and the early reign of Umar; then Persia; then Yemen. Dr. Yasir Qadhi calls this what it is, a miracle no historian has ever truly explained. Desert tribesmen, fewer in number and poorer in arms, carved away half the Roman empire and toppled the Persian one outright. The white pillars of Ctesiphon, the capital he described without ever having seen it, still stand against the sky today.

The word over Ammar

While they worked, the Prophet ﷺ watched young Ammar ibn Yasir radiyallahu anhu carrying twice the load of everyone else, the same fierce, determined boy who had watched his mother and father martyred in Makkah for their faith. Covered in dust and worn down, Ammar drew from the Prophet ﷺ a word that would echo for decades: may Allah have mercy on you, the transgressing party will be the ones to kill you.

Keep the Sheikh's care with this. The Prophet ﷺ did not call them disbelievers or evil. He said a party that had stepped outside the law, that had disobeyed the rightful authority: wrong, but believers still. Years later, in the strife between Ali and Muawiyah, Ammar was struck down by an arrow from Muawiyah's side, and that side recognized the sign, for everyone remembered the prophecy. We hold that Ali was the closer to the truth, and that Muawiyah made a sincere judgment in which he erred, and we ask Allah's forgiveness for him. Some scholars note the saying may have been spoken twice, once at the building of the masjid and again here at the trench. Either way, the words were planted long before the day they came true.

The Confederates, and the men who led them

This is the war the Qur'an calls al-Ahzab, the Confederates, and the name is the key to understanding it. This was no single army with a single commander. Quraysh brought four thousand, the largest force they ever raised, but they were only the core. The Banu Ghatafan added a thousand, others hundreds more, tribe upon tribe stitched together by bribes and promises until around ten thousand stood outside Madinah. And because there was no one leader they all answered to, the alliance was brittle. That fracture, the Sheikh notes, is exactly what Allah would later use to break them apart.

Their leaders were a study in contrasts. Over Quraysh stood Abu Sufyan, now the senior man of his people after the dead of Badr: an enemy, yes, but a dignified one, who never stooped to the gutter taunts of an Abu Jahl. He would accept Islam at the conquest of Makkah, and the Prophet ﷺ would later win his heart with overwhelming generosity at Hunayn. Beside him rode Uyaynah ibn Hisn, a coarse Bedouin chief who once barged into the Prophet's home without permission and boasted he had never asked leave of any man, a man the Prophet ﷺ described as the fool who is obeyed by his people. And there was Tulayha al-Asadi, who would later claim prophethood himself after the Prophet ﷺ died, then repent so sincerely that he died a martyr at al-Qadisiyyah, a story the Sheikh holds up as real hope: if a false prophet can be forgiven, so can we.

There is wisdom even in who refused to join. Ghatafan, the second largest contingent, sent word that they would withdraw for a third of Madinah's harvest. The Prophet ﷺ consulted Sa'd ibn Mu'adh and Sa'd ibn Ubadah, the two chiefs of the Aws and the Khazraj. Is this something Allah commanded, they asked, or your own idea? Your own idea, he indicated. Then no, they said: we never bowed to humiliation in our days of ignorance, why would we bow to it now in Islam? And the Prophet ﷺ was pleased, and sent the messenger back with nothing. That, the Sheikh observes, is why Allah chose the Ansar: a people who had never been conquered, and would not learn to kneel now.

The longest, most fearful nights

The believers camped with their backs to the mountain of Sila and the trench before them, Madinah behind. The women and children were moved into the fortress of Fari for safety. And then began the watching. Aisha radiyallahu anha, who was there in the Prophet's own tent, said she had witnessed many battles, but never one more exhausting or more terrifying than this. Shifts of companions patrolled the length of the trench all night long, in the freezing dark, calling out Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, so that any enemy creeping toward the ditch would think a great host stood waiting on the other side. You could hear their voices, she said, until the dawn.

The Prophet ﷺ took a watch of his own. One bitter night Abbad ibn Bishr came to him in his armor and offered to stand guard so the Prophet ﷺ could rest, and the Prophet ﷺ lay down and slept so deeply from sheer exhaustion that they could hear him breathing. The men would step out into the cold to keep watch, then duck back into the tent only long enough to thaw before going out again. Hungry, sleepless, frozen. And it was precisely here, at the lowest point, that the real blow landed.

The treachery within

إِذْ جَاءُوكُم مِّن فَوْقِكُمْ وَمِنْ أَسْفَلَ مِنكُمْ وَإِذْ زَاغَتِ الْأَبْصَارُ وَبَلَغَتِ الْقُلُوبُ الْحَنَاجِرَ وَتَظُنُّونَ بِاللَّهِ الظُّنُونَا

“[Remember] when they came at you from above you and from below you, and when eyes shifted [in fear], and hearts reached the throats, and you assumed about Allah [various] assumptions.”

Surah al-Ahzab 33:10Listen Read 33:10 with tafsir

Inside Madinah, behind the trench, lived the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayzah, still bound to the Muslims by treaty. Huyayy ibn Akhtab, chief of the already-exiled Banu an-Nadir and one of the bitterest enemies of the Prophet ﷺ, slipped back into the city he knew so well and went to work on their leader, Ka'b ibn Asad. At first Ka'b refused outright: we have a covenant, he said, three times he said it. But Huyayy knew his people, and he wore Ka'b down with promise after promise of protection, until the treaty was broken. Now the danger was not only the ten thousand in front. It was a hostile force inside, with the women and children barely shielded.

The Prophet ﷺ did not act on rumor. I fear something from Banu Qurayzah, he said; who will go and find out? Az-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam stood up, alone, to spy on them, and the Prophet ﷺ said the famous words: every prophet has a disciple, and my disciple is az-Zubayr. Then, because certainty had to be total, he sent four leaders of the Aws who had old ties to the tribe to put the question to them directly. They came back with the same answer: evasions, the treaty no longer named or honored, treachery plainly in the air.

Now picture it as the believers did. Ten thousand outside the ditch, some two thousand turned hostile inside it, the women and children exposed, the food nearly gone, and no sign of where help could possibly come from. This, said many of them, was the worst night of their lives. And it is exactly this moment that Allah Himself describes in Surah al-Ahzab: when they came at you from above and below, when the eyes glazed and the hearts climbed into the throats, and the believers began to entertain dark assumptions about Allah, that He might not help them after all. They were tested, the next ayah says, and shaken with a severe shaking. Even sincere believers were rattled to the core. To be shaken, the Sheikh reminds you, is not hypocrisy; it is only proof you are not yet at the rank of Abu Bakr. And here, on this cliff edge, the tide is about to turn.