The Battle of Uhud, part 4

Nine men between him and two hundred

إِذْ تُصْعِدُونَ وَلَا تَلْوُونَ عَلَىٰ أَحَدٍ وَالرَّسُولُ يَدْعُوكُمْ فِي أُخْرَاكُمْ فَأَثَابَكُمْ غَمًّا بِغَمٍّ لِّكَيْلَا تَحْزَنُوا عَلَىٰ مَا فَاتَكُمْ وَلَا مَا أَصَابَكُمْ ۗ وَاللَّهُ خَبِيرٌ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ

“[Remember] when you [fled and] climbed [the mountain] without looking aside at anyone while the Messenger was calling you from behind. So Allāh repaid you with distress upon distress so you would not grieve for that which had escaped you [of victory and spoils of war] or [for] that which had befallen you [of injury and death]. And Allāh is [fully] Aware of what you do.”

Surah Al Imran 3:153Listen Read 3:153 with tafsir

Picture the field as the hour breaks open. Most of the army is dispersed, certain the war is over, and no one has seen the counterattack coming until it is already among them. One voice never stopped watching: the Prophet ﷺ, shouting to the Muslims that the enemy was behind them, calling them back. The Qur'an itself keeps the sound of that moment: climbing, looking back at no one, while the Messenger ﷺ called from the rear.

Now count who is actually beside him: nine men. Two of the Muhajirun, Talha ibn Ubaydillah and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas radiyallahu anhuma, both of them of the ten promised Paradise, and seven of the Ansar whose names no book ever learned. Nine do not withstand two hundred, but a mountain can. The Ansar knew Uhud the way they knew their own courtyards, and the Quraysh, staring up at a wall of rock, knew nothing at all. So the small band fell back and climbed, drawing the Prophet ﷺ toward shelter.

The pursuers kept closing, and a question began to repeat that should never have to be asked: who will deal with these men, and he will be my companion in Jannah? Every time, Talha volunteered first. Every time, the Prophet ﷺ told him: stay where you are, O Talha, and sent one of the Ansar instead, keeping his best defender for the end. One by one, seven men of the Ansar walked back down the slope, each a decoy pulling the hunt away from him ﷺ, and one by one all seven fell. Companions of the highest rank of sacrifice, and we cannot even name them.

The most dangerous hour of the seerah

The shelter they were making for is still in the mountain today. Calling it a cave flatters it: it is a slit in the rock, a crevice with room for barely one or two bodies, a place to vanish rather than a fortress. Somewhere on that climb, with seven escorts already dead behind him, the Prophet ﷺ reached it with Talha and Sa'd.

Stop here, because Dr. Yasir Qadhi does, to weigh the moment. Ta'if was cruel beyond telling, but the mob of Ta'if meant to humiliate him ﷺ, not to kill him. The cave of the hijrah had one pursuer at a time, and even Suraqah wanted his prize alive. This is different. This is open war, with armed men scouring the rocks below for one purpose. The Sheikh calls it, and Allah knows best, perhaps the single most critical point of the entire seerah: everything balanced on a slit in the rock, two guards, and the protection of Allah.

Talha planted himself at the opening. When the Prophet ﷺ kept leaning out to read the field, Talha pleaded with him: do not look out, O Messenger of Allah, may my mother and father be ransomed for you; some stray arrow might strike you. My chest instead of your chest. And Sa'd knelt with his bow while the Prophet ﷺ did something that should rearrange how you imagine him: he gathered fallen arrows off the ground and handed them to his archer one by one, saying, shoot, may my father and mother be ransomed for you. The companions said that ransom over him ﷺ all their lives, and rightly: who else could deserve it? But it was the only time in his entire life that he ﷺ joined both his parents in that phrase for another human being. Sa'd carried the sentence like a decoration until the day he died.

One more attacker came up the rock, and Talha went out alone to meet him. He won the fight, but the man's sword took some of his fingers, and the pain got a single syllable out of him, the old Arabic ouch. The Prophet ﷺ told him, gently, what the moment had been worth: had you said Bismillah instead, the angels would have lifted you up with the people watching. Not a scolding for a wounded man. A measurement of how high Talha stood that day.

Others were finding their way up now, and among the first was a man of the Ansar. The Prophet ﷺ handed him a bow (notice him ﷺ, in the middle of his own hunt, collecting arrows and spare weapons off the ground for whoever could use them), and the man shot with it until the wood went soft and useless in his hands. When his arrows were finished and the enemy's were not, he made his own body the shield, reading each arrow in the air and stepping into its path, until one came that he could only block with his face. It struck his eye. The Prophet ﷺ wept at the sight of him, drew the arrow out, and prayed: Allah has protected Your Prophet with this man's face, so make his eye the better of his two, the sharpest in sight. The man would say afterward that it healed on the spot, and that for the rest of his life he saw more precisely with that eye than with the one that was never struck.

Three wounds, one in each cheek

How many times was the Prophet ﷺ wounded that day, and by whom? Here the reports themselves disagree: some say once, some twice; laid side by side they suggest at least three separate wounds in three separate moments, and the exact order is one of the places where honest scholarship simply says, we were not there. What no report disputes is the blood.

A rock struck his face and split his lip, and the hand that threw it belonged, of all people, to Sa'd's own blood brother, riding with the Quraysh: one brother in the crevice bleeding to defend him ﷺ, one brother below making him bleed. Then an arrow found the gap in his armor and went into his cheek, knocking a tooth from its place and lodging in the flesh, the worst wound of the day. And a horseman closed the distance and swung a sword at his head; a shield caught the blow and blunted it, but the strike crushed the rings of his own helmet into his other cheek (the reports name two different Abdullahs for this blow, and both names are left standing). Two wounds, then, one in each cheek, iron buried in both.

Hold the severity of that all the way to nightfall. When he ﷺ finally reached home, Fatima washed her father's face while Ali poured the water, and the bleeding would not stop; by then he had been losing blood for the better part of half a day. So Fatima burned a piece of date palm matting, crumbled the ash into a paste, and pressed it into the wound until it sealed shut. A daughter closing her father's face with her own hands: that is what this day cost him ﷺ.

Not yours to decide

لَيْسَ لَكَ مِنَ الْأَمْرِ شَيْءٌ أَوْ يَتُوبَ عَلَيْهِمْ أَوْ يُعَذِّبَهُمْ فَإِنَّهُمْ ظَالِمُونَ

“Not for you, [O Muḥammad, but for Allāh], is the decision whether He should [cut them down] or forgive them or punish them, for indeed, they are wrongdoers.”

Surah Al Imran 3:128Listen Read 3:128 with tafsir

Sahih Muslim keeps the sound of that hour: the Prophet ﷺ wiping the blood from his face as it ran down into his beard, saying, how can a people succeed who have done this to their own Prophet? How can Allah forgive them, when he was calling them to their Lord and this was their answer? Read it slowly. He is not cursing them. He is bleeding, and reasoning, and the reasoning carries the edge of a verdict: surely this cannot be forgiven.

And when they returned to Madinah, revelation answered him with one of the bluntest sentences ever addressed to the most beloved of creation: this matter is none of yours. Whether Allah turns to them in mercy or punishes them belongs to Allah alone. Yes, they wounded you; saying that much is fact. Deciding heaven's response to it is not the Prophet's ﷺ to do.

Sheikh Yasir stands on this ayah and makes the claim of the night: if the ummah truly absorbed this one scene, shirk would vanish from it. Here is the Prophet ﷺ himself, the most honored soul Allah ever made, told plainly that the file of forgiveness is not his. He carries the message; the judgment belongs to the One who sent him. So whoever pins his hope on a saint, a grave, a holy soul imagined as the real dispenser of pardon and Paradise has the order of the universe exactly backwards: if even he ﷺ was told 'not yours to decide,' what is left for anyone else? Take your asking straight to Allah.

Then watch what the correction produced. The Prophet ﷺ turned his sentence around and began to pray: O Allah, forgive my people, for they do not know. And forgiveness came looking for them. The man who led the very charge that turned Uhud upside down would die not as the Prophet's ﷺ wounder but as Khalid ibn al-Walid, Sayfullah, the drawn sword of Allah: living proof that the prayer was heard.

But where was the protection in all this? One of the companions who was there swore that on the day of Uhud he saw two men in the whitest of garments fighting in front of the Prophet ﷺ, fighting as no human fights, men he had never seen before that day and never saw after it: angels. And angels do not miss an arrow. So the wounds were not a lapse in the guarding of him ﷺ; they were measured and permitted, blood with a wisdom folded inside it, while his life itself never left Allah's keeping. He walked off that mountain wounded, never broken.

The rumor, and the man who smelled Jannah

مِّنَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ رِجَالٌ صَدَقُوا مَا عَاهَدُوا اللَّهَ عَلَيْهِ ۖ فَمِنْهُم مَّن قَضَىٰ نَحْبَهُ وَمِنْهُم مَّن يَنتَظِرُ ۖ وَمَا بَدَّلُوا تَبْدِيلًا

“Among the believers are men true to what they promised Allāh. Among them is he who has fulfilled his vow [to the death], and among them is he who awaits [his chance]. And they did not alter [the terms of their commitment] by any alteration -”

Surah al-Ahzab 33:23Listen Read 33:23 with tafsir

Somewhere in the same chaos, Mus'ab ibn Umayr fell. He shared the Prophet's ﷺ complexion, his features are said to have echoed him, and one report adds that he may have been wearing a cloak borrowed from him ﷺ. So when the same horseman who had swung at the Prophet ﷺ cut Mus'ab down, he believed he had done the unthinkable, and he screamed it across the field: I have killed Muhammad ﷺ! The lie spread like fire in dry grass.

Strangely, the lie carried a mercy inside it. Most of the Quraysh force, perhaps four of every five men, had already drifted from the field; only the smaller contingent was still fighting. Once the rumor said the deed was done, the appetite for war died with it: nobody risks his life for a goal already achieved, and the same false sentence that broke the believers' hearts began quietly emptying the field of their enemies. But broken the hearts were. Some men wandered without direction. Some sat down where they stood and let the swords fall from their hands. What is a sword for, now?

Then a man walked into the despair and refused it. Anas ibn al-Nadr radiyallahu anhu, the uncle of Anas ibn Malik, found a group of believers sitting with their grief and asked why they were not fighting. They said: have you not heard? The Prophet ﷺ has been killed. His answer deserves engraving: even if Muhammad ﷺ has been killed, the Lord of Muhammad has not been killed. And what will you do with life after him? Rise and die upon what he died upon. Passing an old friend among the Ansar, he called out: I smell the fragrance of Jannah from behind this mountain. Then came one of the strangest, most beautiful battlefield prayers ever spoken: O Allah, I seek Your forgiveness for what these have done, meaning his fellow Muslims, and I am free before You of what those have done, meaning the army of Quraysh. And he threw himself in.

They found him afterward with more than eighty wounds, his body so altered that no one could recognize him until his sister knew him by his fingertips. A hadith in Bukhari preserves his stand, and Allah sent down what the ummah still recites over every soul like his: among the believers are men who were true to what they promised Allah. Some, the ayah continues, have already fulfilled their vow, and some still wait their turn. Anas ibn al-Nadr had fulfilled his.

Found by the brightness of his eyes

Meanwhile the searchers refused the rumor and kept looking. The first on the field to recognize the Prophet ﷺ was Ka'b ibn Malik (hold onto that name: his own mountain of a story waits at Tabuk, years from now). Helmet and mail had swallowed the Prophet's ﷺ face, and Ka'b knew him anyway, by his eyes alone, by their brightness. Joy did what joy does: he shouted at the top of his voice, O Muslims, rejoice! The Messenger of Allah ﷺ is alive! The Prophet ﷺ motioned him to be quiet, since a hunted man does not advertise his position, but the word was already running through the believers the way the false word had run an hour earlier, in reverse.

Ka'b reached him and handed over his own armor, perhaps because the Prophet's ﷺ was spent, perhaps so that no enemy eye could pick out which armored figure was him; men were known by their armor in those days. Ka'b finished the day with no armor of his own and more than twenty wounds. The ledger of Uhud keeps recording the same entry: his pain ﷺ, transferred onto people who volunteered for it.

Now they came up in numbers: Abu Bakr, Umar, Ali, Zubayr, the rest. Abu Bakr would tell the story years later: when we rushed to him ﷺ, one man was already there, standing over him and fighting off everyone who approached. I said: let it be Talha! If anyone is to have that honor, let it be Talha. And it was. And as I ran, a man overtook me, flying up the rock light as a gazelle out of sheer joy: Abu Ubaydah. They found iron in the Prophet's ﷺ face, lodged in each cheek; Abu Bakr's telling remembers two arrowheads, other reports count one arrowhead and one driven helmet ring, and the two wounds themselves are beyond dispute.

Abu Bakr moved to draw the first one out, and Abu Ubaydah begged him, by right of love: let me do it. He would not grip the metal with his fingers and risk tearing the wound wider, so he closed his teeth on it and rocked it loose, gently, gently, taking the pain into his own jaw until the iron came free, and one or two of his teeth came away with it. Then he claimed the second extraction too, and paid for it the same way. Abu Ubaydah walked the earth for the rest of his life missing three, maybe four teeth, a gap he wore, you have to think, the way Sa'd wore his sentence. And the arithmetic is left for you: if drawing the iron out cost a strong man his teeth, what did it cost the face that carried it in?

He is mine

Back in Makkah there had been a man whose hatred had a hobby. Ubayy ibn Khalaf mocked the Prophet ﷺ like no one else, and he kept a horse for the purpose, boasting that he fed it the choicest grain so that one day, from its back, he would kill Muhammad ﷺ. His record was already long and filthy: he was among the men who had heaped a slaughtered camel's innards onto the Prophet ﷺ as he prostrated. To the horse boast, and only to it, the Prophet ﷺ ever returned an answer: rather, it is I who will kill you, insha'Allah.

At Uhud, Ubayy spotted him and wheeled that very horse to charge. There is no outrunning a horseman, so the companions began to wall the Prophet ﷺ in with their bodies, and he waved them off with a sentence that still raises the hair on your arms: leave him. He is mine. He took a spear from one of his men, read the charge, slipped the blow, and drove the spear into a gap at the neck of Ubayy's armor. The armor caught most of it; the point only nicked the neck. By battlefield arithmetic, a scratch. Ubayy rode back to his own lines screaming that Muhammad ﷺ had killed him.

They examined him and laughed: calm down, this will heal. He refused the comfort, and his reason is the part to keep: he promised he would kill me, and by Allah, if he had spat on me, I would have died. He understood, too late and completely, whose word he had spent his life mocking. He died on the road home, in a valley outside Makkah, buried in no man's land, the only human being ever killed by the Prophet's ﷺ own hand, a dishonor Allah reserved for him alone. The books of sira add a chilling epilogue: years later a traveler passing that valley by night saw a fire, and a figure in it croaking thirst, thirst, and a voice warned: give him nothing, for this is the one whom the Messenger of Allah ﷺ killed. And a hadith seals the warning: no one earns a more severe anger from Allah than a man killed by a prophet.

A day for a day, and the answer for Hubal

As the fighting guttered out, the field began to belong to the women. Anas ibn Malik, still a boy, remembered them all his life: women of the believers with their garments hitched up so they could run, hauling water skins between the wells of Madinah and the wounded, washing, pouring, nursing. The verses of hijab had not yet been revealed, the lecture notes, and necessity had its own rulings that day besides; women did not usually march with armies, but Uhud was fought on Madinah's doorstep, and its women did not wait to be asked.

Then, from below, the voice of Abu Sufyan, come to close the day as the leader of Makkah: is Muhammad among you? The Prophet ﷺ commanded silence. Is the son of Abu Quhafah among you? He meant Abu Bakr. Silence. Is the son of al-Khattab among you? Silence. Notice the list itself: an enemy still upon paganism knew with perfect clarity, as early as the year three, who stood first and second after the Messenger ﷺ. Hearing nothing, Abu Sufyan exulted: then we have killed them all! And that was more than Umar could carry. He roared back: you lie, O enemy of Allah! All those you named are alive, and Allah has kept for you what will hurt you yet.

Abu Sufyan answered with the ledger of war: a day for a day of Badr, and war goes in turns. Then, with a strange honesty, he called out that they would find some of their dead mutilated: I did not command it, he said, and I am not angry about it either. Umar gave the dead their answer: they are not the same. Our slain are in Jannah, and your slain are in the Fire. And then Abu Sufyan reached for his god and cried: be exalted, Hubal! Hubal, the great idol of the Quraysh, the one their idolatry had grown up around.

And now the Prophet ﷺ, who had ordered silence for his own name, broke it for Allah's. Answer him, he said. They asked: what should we say? Say: Allah is Higher and more Majestic. Abu Sufyan tried again: we have al-Uzza, and you have no Uzza. He ﷺ said: answer him: Allah is our Protector, and you have no protector. One of the classical commentators stops here in wonder, and it is the right place to stop: presumed dead, twice pierced, taunted by name, he ﷺ chose the dignity of silence; the instant an idol was raised above Allah, silence became impossible. Everything he swallowed for himself, and nothing for his Lord. Abu Sufyan turned away with one last promise, a rematch at Badr a year from that day, and the army of Makkah rode off the field. The mountain fell quiet, and the hardest counting of the seerah, the rows of the shuhada of Uhud, was waiting in the days ahead.