Khaybar has fallen. The great Jewish fortresses of the north, the last organized power that had been arming the tribes against Madinah, have surrendered. But the most unforgettable moments of Khaybar are not the walls that came down; they are what happened after, in the days the army lingered and the long road home.
Two travellers arrive from across the sea. A daughter of the enemy becomes a mother of the believers. A captive woman is handed everything she has to be bitter about, and answers with faith. Today is day seventy, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi walks us through the quiet aftermath of a battle, where you learn more about the Prophet ﷺ than any siege could teach you.
The emigrants come home
The very day Khaybar was conquered, a ship's worth of long-lost family walked back into the Prophet's ﷺ life. These were the emigrants to Abyssinia, the believers who had fled Makkah years before and taken refuge under the just Christian king, the Najashi. At their head was the Prophet's ﷺ own cousin, Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, who had been away for more than a decade.
The Prophet ﷺ stood and embraced him, and said words the seerah never lets you forget: I do not know which of the two is making me happier today, the conquest of Khaybar or the coming of Ja'far. A military victory of the first order, set on the same scale as the return of one beloved face, and the Prophet ﷺ could not choose between them. That is how he loved.
A daughter of Abu Sufyan
With that group from Abyssinia, most likely, came one of the women who would become a wife of the Prophet ﷺ: Umm Habibah, the daughter of Abu Sufyan. Her story is a hard one. She and her husband had accepted Islam early and emigrated to Abyssinia together, but there her husband abandoned the faith, turned Christian, and soon died. She was left utterly alone in a foreign land, a believing woman with a young daughter and no one to protect her, while her own father was still the leader of the Quraysh who were at war with Islam.
So the Prophet ﷺ sent a proposal to her, and her guardian for the marriage became none other than the Najashi himself, the Muslim emperor in whose land she was stranded. The king was overjoyed. He paid her dowry generously from his own wealth, on the Prophet's ﷺ behalf, and held the wedding feast there in Abyssinia. The wisdom of the match, Sheikh Yasir notes, is plain enough: she is the daughter of Abu Sufyan, the chief of Quraysh. There was no bridge to that house worth building more than this one, and Allah honored a lonely believer by making her a mother of the believers.
The gold of Kinana
Then comes an incident Dr. Yasir Qadhi refuses to soften, because, as he says, he is no apologist and he calls a spade a spade. Part of Khaybar's surrender terms was that its people hand over all their gold, silver, and weapons, and in exchange keep their lands and farm them for half the produce. Hide nothing, or the treaty is void. But Kinana, a chief who had been killed in the fighting, was known to have possessed treasure chests of gold, and the gold could not be found.
His relative, Sa'yah, was questioned: where is it? He swore it had all been spent. The Prophet ﷺ pointed out the obvious, that Kinana had left Madinah only recently and such a fortune could not vanish so fast, that the man was plainly lying, and the man kept lying. So the Prophet ﷺ handed him to az-Zubayr to extract the truth, and he was roughed up until he gave it: he had seen Kinana going toward a certain valley. They dug there, in ground freshly turned, and found the buried gold.
This is the moment, the Sheikh acknowledges, that some today hold up to accuse the Prophet ﷺ of condoning torture against a prisoner. His answer is not to deny what happened but to refuse the anachronism. This was the universal norm of the age, long before any Geneva convention; every civilization did it. The man was lying and knew the consequences. To judge a seventh-century world by treaties signed in the twentieth, he says, is not honesty but distortion. Where our law binds us to an accord we have signed, we honor it. Where no such accord existed, the Prophet ﷺ did nothing his world did not already do.
Safiyyah, conquered and free
وَلَا تَزِرُ وَازِرَةٌ وِزْرَ أُخْرَىٰ ۚ وَإِن تَدْعُ مُثْقَلَةٌ إِلَىٰ حِمْلِهَا لَا يُحْمَلْ مِنْهُ شَيْءٌ وَلَوْ كَانَ ذَا قُرْبَىٰ ۗ إِنَّمَا تُنذِرُ الَّذِينَ يَخْشَوْنَ رَبَّهُم بِالْغَيْبِ وَأَقَامُوا الصَّلَاةَ ۚ وَمَن تَزَكَّىٰ فَإِنَّمَا يَتَزَكَّىٰ لِنَفْسِهِ ۚ وَإِلَى اللَّهِ الْمَصِيرُ
“And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another. And if a heavily laden soul calls [another] to [carry some of] its load, nothing of it will be carried, even if he should be a close relative. You can only warn those who fear their Lord unseen and have established prayer. And whoever purifies himself only purifies himself for [the benefit of] his soul. And to Allah is the [final] destination.”
Surah Fatir 35:18 Read 35:18 with tafsir
Safiyyah was the daughter of Huyayy, the very chief who had marshalled the Jewish tribes against Madinah. She told her own story afterward: as a little girl she had been her father's favorite, and the day the Prophet ﷺ first arrived in Madinah, her father and uncle came home from meeting him with their shoulders dragging, crushed. Is it really him, her uncle asked. Yes, by the Lord, her father answered, it is him. And what will you do? We will oppose him as long as we live.
Years later, exiled with her people and now widowed when her tribe was defeated at Khaybar, Safiyyah was taken captive. Her father, her brother, and her husband had all been killed in the fighting. When the companions saw her, many urged the Prophet ﷺ that a woman of her standing should not be left in the share of an ordinary soldier, so he ransomed her and took her himself. On the journey out, he knelt and made his own knee a step for her to climb onto the camel, and Safiyyah, unwilling to place her foot on the Prophet ﷺ, set her knee on his thigh instead. He covered her with his cloak, and by that the companions understood she was to be a wife, not a slave.
Then, on their wedding night, he said something deliberately harsh: your father was the most relentless of all the Jews in his enmity toward me, until Allah caused his death. He was watching her, the Sheikh explains, testing for any hidden bitterness or thirst for revenge before he kept her. And Safiyyah answered with the Qur'an itself, that no soul carries the sin of another, that her father's enmity was her father's, not hers. He offered her a choice: accept Islam and remain with him, or keep her religion and go free back to her people. She said she had already inclined to Islam and believed in him before he ever asked, and that Allah and His Messenger ﷺ were more beloved to her than freedom. Never in human history, the Sheikh says, do we find its like: a conqueror takes a woman whose father, brother, husband, and tribe his army has destroyed, and instead of hatred she chooses faith, and chooses to belong to him over going free. It shows two things at once: Safiyyah had a pure heart, and Islam is true.
The wife with no clan to defend her
Safiyyah came to Madinah with beauty and dignity but no family and no faction, and the household of the Prophet ﷺ was not free of human jealousy. Some of the other wives, the Sheikh is honest, looked down on her origins. Once she came to the Prophet ﷺ in tears because she had been taunted for being a daughter of the Jews. Why did you not defend yourself, he asked, and taught her exactly how: tell them your father is a prophet, Harun, your uncle is a prophet, Musa, and you are married to a prophet. What do they have over you?
Sheikh Yasir lingers on the love this reveals. When Safiyyah's camel fell sick before Hajj and the Prophet ﷺ asked another wife to lend a spare, she refused and sneered at Safiyyah again, and he was so displeased that he kept apart from her for the length of that journey until she understood her error. And at the very end, when the Prophet ﷺ lay dying in his fever, it was Safiyyah who cried out, how I wish I could carry your pain in your place. The other wives, not yet knowing he was about to leave them, exchanged knowing looks, and from his sickbed he told them: she has spoken the truth. The woman whose whole world his army had taken now wished only to take his suffering onto herself. Where, the Sheikh asks, does a love like that come from? That is what enters a heart when iman enters it.
The man who would carry his words
Khaybar is also where the single greatest narrator of hadith in the history of Islam joined the Prophet ﷺ. Abu Hurayrah had come up from Yemen, a man of the tribe of Daws, intending to reach Madinah, and when he heard the Prophet ﷺ was at Khaybar he turned aside to find him there. He arrived just after the conquest, alongside that same wave of emigrants returning from Abyssinia.
For the men from Abyssinia the Prophet ﷺ gave a share of the spoils, and for Abu Hurayrah and his small group he asked the companions' leave to give them a share too, and they agreed. So a man who never lifted a weapon in the battle walked away with a portion of Khaybar, and far more than that. He would accompany the Prophet ﷺ for only three years, less than almost any famous companion, and yet he would transmit more hadith than any other human being who ever lived, with no exception. The aftermath of Khaybar quietly delivered the channel through which so much of the Prophet's ﷺ life would reach us.
A frightened girl on his camel
A group of women from the Ansar had volunteered to come along to Khaybar, to tend the wounded, carry water, and help behind the lines. Because this campaign was so clearly safe, the Prophet ﷺ allowed them, against his usual practice of not taking women into battle. Among them was a girl of perhaps seven or eight with no mount of her own, so on the way out the Prophet ﷺ sat her on the baggage behind him on his own camel.
When they stopped and he told her to climb down, she froze and would not move. She had just had her first menses, there, behind the Prophet ﷺ himself, and she was terrified and ashamed. He saw the traces of blood on the saddle and understood at once. Gently he told her not to worry, to go and clean herself and set her clothing right, and to come back with water and salt to wash the saddle, and then take her place again. No anger, no embarrassment, only calm. Years later she would say his only gift to the women on that journey was a necklace he tied around her neck with his own hand, and that she would never part with it as long as she lived, and asked to be buried in it. This, the Sheikh says, is how the Prophet ﷺ met a moment most men would have made unbearable: he made the frightened one feel safe.