The ink on the treaty of Hudaybiyah was barely dry. The Quraysh, the great threat to the south, were now bound by a ten year peace, and for the first time in years the Prophet ﷺ could turn and look north. There, two hundred and thirty kilometres from Madinah, sat a problem he had been carrying for a long time: Khaybar.
Khaybar was the richest oasis in Arabia, a sea of date palms fed by an underground river, and it was guarded by the most formidable fortresses the peninsula had ever seen. It had also become the gathering place of the tribes that had spent years trying to destroy him. Today the Muslims march, the walls come down one by one, a banner is placed in the hand of a man who could barely open his eyes, and a meal is set before the Prophet ﷺ that he will still be tasting on the day he dies.
The threat that moved to Khaybar
To understand why the Prophet ﷺ marched north, you have to remember who was waiting for him there. Over the years in Madinah, three Jewish tribes had broken faith with the Muslims and been removed: the Banu Qaynuqa after Badr, the Banu Nadir after Uhud, and the Banu Qurayza after their treachery in the battle of the trench. Madinah no longer held a hostile tribe inside it. But the exiles had not gone quietly into the distance. The leaders of the Banu Nadir, men like Huyayy ibn Akhtab, had simply moved up the road to the nearest stronghold, and from there they never stopped.
It was these exiles in Khaybar who had helped arm the confederate armies at the trench, and it was they who had slipped into Madinah during that siege and talked the Banu Qurayza into breaking their covenant. Dr. Yasir Qadhi is careful to name the real reason for Khaybar plainly: there was no army marching on Madinah that day, no plot already in motion. This was a preemptive move against the one remaining power in central Arabia that would seize any chance to come back for its lost land. The Sheikh refuses to dress it up. This was the law of that whole world, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and pagan alike: every tribe waited for its moment, which is exactly why the people of Khaybar had built fortresses in the first place. There was no treaty between Khaybar and Madinah to honour. There was only the question of who would move first.
What an evil morning
The Muslims set out in high spirits, roughly sixteen or seventeen hundred of them, shouting the takbir at the top of their voices as they marched. The Prophet ﷺ turned and calmed them: be gentle with yourselves, for the One you are calling upon is not deaf and not absent. He hears you, He sees you, and He is nearer to you than your own jugular vein. Lower your voices. Allah is with you wherever you are.
He timed the approach with the instinct of a commander. He camped the last night just short of the oasis and moved the army before dawn, so that Khaybar would wake to find it already on its doorstep. When the first farmers came out at sunrise with their plows and tools, expecting nothing but another day in the fields, they saw the army and dropped everything, running back through the gates and crying out that Muhammad and his forces had come. The Sheikh pauses on that cry: they were surprised, yes, but not innocent. The panic in their voices was the panic of people who knew exactly what they had done and exactly who would one day come to collect.
As the gates slammed shut, the Prophet ﷺ said the words that every book of seerah preserves: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Khaybar has been destroyed. When we come down upon the courtyard of a people, it is an evil morning for those who were warned. The siege had begun.
Fortress by fortress
Khaybar was not a city to be taken in a day. It was a scatter of fortresses, perhaps fifteen of them, split across two halves of the oasis, each one a walled town in itself holding a few hundred people. And here, the Sheikh notes, lay a flaw the Jews never foresaw in all their genius for building walls: locked separately inside their own strongholds, they could not unite. Each fortress would face the entire army alone, and one by one that is what happened.
It was brutal, close work, and unfamiliar to men who had only ever fought in the open. The defenders did what fortress dwellers do: they hurled stones and heavy objects and rained arrows down from the slits. At the great fortress of Naim the fighting dragged on for days, Abu Bakr taking the standard, then Umar, and still the walls held. Then Mahmud ibn Maslamah, one of the Ansar, came too close to the base of the wall, and they dropped a massive log on him and crushed him. He died a martyr, and his death sat heavily on the army.
The siege would grind on like this across both halves of Khaybar, at least eight or nine separate battles, some lasting a single day, some ten. Every time a fortress fell, its survivors who could flee would gallop to the next one, so the strongholds that remained only swelled. The Muslims were learning, the hard way, what it costs to break a wall.
The banner given to Ali
After the long, draining day at Naim, the Prophet ﷺ made an announcement at the night prayer that changed the mood of the entire camp. Tomorrow, he said, I will hand the banner to a man who loves Allah and His Messenger and whom Allah and His Messenger love, and Allah will grant us victory at his hands. Umar ibn al-Khattab would later say that never in his life did he long to lead as he did that night. Every man went to sleep hoping the banner would be his.
In the morning the Prophet ﷺ prayed Fajr, turned to the gathered army, and asked: where is Ali ibn Abi Talib? They told him Ali was in his tent, his eyes swollen shut with infection, unable to even open them. Bring him to me, he said. When Ali came, the Prophet ﷺ applied his blessed saliva to those eyes, and they were healed on the spot. Then he placed the banner in Ali's hand and told him: go forth in the name of Allah, and do not turn back.
Ali set off, then stopped. He had a question he needed answered, but turning around to ask it would have meant disobeying the order not to turn back. So without turning his head, he shouted it over his shoulder: Messenger of Allah, on what terms do I fight them? The answer the Prophet ﷺ gave is one Dr. Yasir Qadhi lingers on, because it tells you what these expeditions were actually for. Fight them, he said, until they bear witness that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. If they say it, their lives and their wealth are protected from you, and their account is with Allah. Then the line that reframes everything: by Allah, if Allah guides a single soul through you, it is better for you than a whole herd of red camels. Ten days of siege, men dead at the walls, and still the goal he names is not land and not plunder. It is one heart turned toward Allah.
The duel and the door
When Ali reached the fortress, its champion came out to meet him. Marhab was a famous and ferocious warrior, bold enough to call for single combat. He cut down the first Muslim who answered, Amir ibn al-Akwa, who fell a martyr. Then Ali himself stepped forward. He was the commander and by rights should have stayed back, but he took the challenge, and he killed Marhab. It broke the spirit of the defenders, the first great blow of Khaybar, and soon the fighting spilled out into the open.
Then comes the moment every Muslim child has heard. In the thick of it, one of the enemy commanders struck the shield clean out of Ali's grip, leaving him exposed. Ali turned to the fortress gate, took hold of the great door, and tore it from its hinges, and he carried it as his shield through the rest of the battle before casting it aside. Abu Rafi, who was there, said that afterward seven of them tried together to lift that same door and could not move it. Dr. Yasir Qadhi names this for what it is, a karama, a small miracle granted to Ali, and he insists we never be stingy in giving Ali ibn Abi Talib his due. Here was a man whom Allah loved and whom the Messenger ﷺ loved, who loved them both in return, one of the very greatest of the companions, radiyallahu anhu.
Three deaths, three lessons
Khaybar is remembered for its fortresses, but the Sheikh stops the army's advance again and again to stand over individual men, because each one teaches something. When the fortress of as-Sab fell, it was a mercy timed to the hour: the Muslims' food had run out entirely, and inside they found it stockpiled with grain and provisions enough to feed the whole army for the rest of the campaign.
There was a slave, owned by the people of Khaybar, who heard there was a man claiming prophethood and came to ask him directly what he was about. The Prophet ﷺ explained Islam to him and the man accepted it on the spot. Then he asked: my master gave me these sheep to graze, what do I do with them now? Return them, the Prophet ﷺ told him, for it is not permissible for us to take what was given to you in trust. The Sheikh draws out the staggering honesty of this: the Prophet ﷺ was at that very moment at war with the man's master, and still the sheep had to go back, because that is not how property is taken. The slave drove the flock back, returned, and fought until a stray arrow killed him. Standing over his body, the body of a man who owned nothing but a loincloth and never once prayed a single prayer, the Prophet ﷺ lowered his gaze and turned away. When they asked why, he said: his two wives from Paradise have come to greet him.
And there was a third man, a Bedouin fighting so fiercely that the army said he was a man of Paradise walking the earth. No, said the Prophet ﷺ, he is of the people of the Fire. A companion, unable to believe it, followed him to see. The man fought ferociously, but when an arrow wounded his hand and he could fight no more, he set his sword in the ground and threw himself upon it. He had not been fighting for Allah at all, only for his own name and glory. The Prophet ﷺ explained: a man may do the deeds of the people of Paradise as people see it, and end his life with a deed of the Fire. Deeds are judged by their endings.
Surrender, and a meal that never left him
وَقَالُوا لَن تَمَسَّنَا النَّارُ إِلَّا أَيَّامًا مَّعْدُودَةً ۚ قُلْ أَتَّخَذْتُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ عَهْدًا فَلَن يُخْلِفَ اللَّهُ عَهْدَهُ ۖ أَمْ تَقُولُونَ عَلَى اللَّهِ مَا لَا تَعْلَمُونَ
“And they say, "Never will the Fire touch us, except for [a few] numbered days." Say, "Have you taken a covenant with Allah? For Allah will never break His covenant. Or do you say about Allah that which you do not know?"”
Surah al-Baqarah 2:80 Read 2:80 with tafsir
الَّذِينَ آتَيْنَاهُمُ الْكِتَابَ يَعْرِفُونَهُ كَمَا يَعْرِفُونَ أَبْنَاءَهُمْ ۖ وَإِنَّ فَرِيقًا مِّنْهُمْ لَيَكْتُمُونَ الْحَقَّ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ
“Those to whom We gave the Scripture know him [i.e., Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ)] as they know their own sons. But indeed, a party of them conceal the truth while they know [it].”
Surah al-Baqarah 2:146 Read 2:146 with tafsir
Fortress after fortress fell, until only the largest remained, packed now with everyone still alive. The Muslims camped outside it for two full weeks, until the people inside saw there was nowhere left to run, and negotiated. They asked to stay and work the land they knew better than anyone, offering the Muslims half of everything Khaybar produced, with all the labour and upkeep their own burden, under a treaty the Muslims could end whenever they chose. The Prophet ﷺ agreed, and the foresight in it was plain: the Muslims had neither the numbers nor the experience to farm an oasis this size, and half of Khaybar's harvest was a fortune beyond anything the community had ever seen. Years later, under Umar, the terms would finally be invoked and the Jews resettled elsewhere, ending their presence in central Arabia for good.
Then came the meal. One of the families sent the conqueror a gift of roasted lamb, and the woman who prepared it had quietly asked which cut the Prophet ﷺ loved most. Told it was the shoulder, she laced the whole animal with poison and concentrated it there. As the Prophet ﷺ took his first bite he stopped at once and called out for everyone to stop eating: the shoulder of this lamb has told me it is poisoned. He did not swallow. But one companion, Bishr ibn al-Bara, had already eaten, and the poison took him; he died within days. When the Prophet ﷺ questioned the woman, she answered with bitter honesty that she had wanted revenge for her dead, and reasoned that if he were a false prophet she would be rid of him, and if he were a true one the poison could not harm him. Dr. Yasir Qadhi sets her reasoning against the Qur'an's portrait of those who knew exactly who he was and rejected him anyway: they recognised him as they recognised their own sons, and a party of them concealed the truth while they knew it. He forgave what was done to him; but when Bishr died, justice for Bishr required that she be put to death. As for the Prophet ﷺ, the poison never fully left him. On his deathbed, four years on, he would tell Aisha that he could still feel it, that this was the moment it had finally reached his heart.
The day Jafar came home
On the very day Khaybar was finally won, a second joy arrived that nearly eclipsed the first. Jafar ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's beloved cousin, walked back into his life after more than a decade away, returning from Abyssinia with some fifty Muslim men and women who had emigrated there in the earliest, hardest years of the dawah. The Prophet ﷺ rose to meet him, kissed him on the forehead, and said: I do not know which of the two delights me more today, the conquest of Khaybar or the coming of Jafar. A month of siege, the greatest wealth Islam had yet seen, and still he weighed it against the face of one man he loved.
These returnees had not lifted a sword at Khaybar, yet the Prophet ﷺ gave them a share of its spoils all the same, because Allah never wastes the sacrifice of those who sacrifice. Theirs had been a different war: more than a decade in a foreign land, a strange language and people, a civil war that nearly swept them away. The Sheikh tells the homecoming through Asma bint Umays, who had made that journey. When Umar gently teased her that he and the Madinah emigrants had more right to the Prophet ﷺ, having migrated first, she snapped, and took it straight to the Prophet ﷺ himself. He settled it: they had no more right than she did. You made one migration, he told Umar's camp, and these people made two. The Abyssinian Muslims, the riwaya says, were never happier than they were that day.
And so Khaybar was the turning of a long tide. The largest land conquest of the Prophet's ﷺ life poured in: orchards and grain, weapons and armour, the small nearby settlements and even distant Fadak, whose people sent terms before any army ever came near them, making it a gift Allah gave to His Messenger ﷺ directly. The wealth ran so deep that the Muhajirun finally returned to the Ansar the land the Ansar had pressed upon them six years before, when they had nothing. Ibn Umar would say it simply: we never ate our fill until after Khaybar. The reward of the patient, the Sheikh reminds you, always comes.