Hunayn is behind him. Ta'if is behind him. Central Arabia, six months ago a battlefield, is now almost entirely his ﷺ, and the small tribes are coming in. And then, into the hottest part of the year, with the harvest about to come in and no enemy massing on any horizon anyone can see, the order comes: march north. A thousand miles, on foot and on thirsty camels, through the desert in late July.
This is the last campaign the Prophet ﷺ ever leads, and the companions would remember it by a name heavier than victory. Not the expedition of Tabuk. The army of hardship.
Why march at all?
Here is the strange thing, and Sheikh Yasir Qadhi is honest that after teaching the seerah many times he has never found a clean answer: there was no obvious reason to go. The classical historians offer causes, and he weighs them one by one. A report that the Jews of Madinah goaded the Prophet ﷺ into the journey to be rid of him? It cannot stand: there were no Jews left in Madinah by then, and the verse cited for it is Makkan, revealed years before Tabuk ever happened. A report that forty thousand Roman troops were marching south to crush the Muslims? The narration is shaky, and the Romans, masters of millions, had no interest in a desert they could have taken any time in the last three centuries.
What lingers is a smaller fear. The Ghassanids, the Christian Arab tribe on the Roman frontier, had spilled Muslim blood before. The Sheikh recalls the day the Prophet ﷺ withdrew from his wives for a month and the whole city panicked: a man burst in on Umar shouting that something had happened, and Umar's first guess was, has the king of the Ghassanids attacked? The fear was real. But even this does not answer the only question that matters: why now? Why in July, when no army on earth would come down through that heat? Revenge could wait for January.
And so the Sheikh lands where the story itself pushes him. There was no immediate threat. This was a command from Allah, given plainly, to test these companions before their Prophet ﷺ would leave them. He reads it against Surah at-Tawbah, the surah revealed almost entirely around this expedition, so blunt in its call to march that one of its names is Surat al-Qital, the surah of fighting. Allah was preparing the men who would carry Islam out of Arabia after the Prophet ﷺ was gone. The test came first. Everything else would follow from whether they passed it.
Go forth, light or heavy
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا مَا لَكُمْ إِذَا قِيلَ لَكُمُ انفِرُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ اثَّاقَلْتُمْ إِلَى الْأَرْضِ ۚ أَرَضِيتُم بِالْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا مِنَ الْآخِرَةِ ۚ فَمَا مَتَاعُ الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا فِي الْآخِرَةِ إِلَّا قَلِيلٌ
“O you who have believed, what is [the matter] with you that, when you are told to go forth in the cause of Allah, you adhere heavily to the earth? Are you satisfied with the life of this world rather than the Hereafter? But what is the enjoyment of worldly life compared to the Hereafter except a [very] little.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:38 Read 9:38 with tafsir
Read Surah at-Tawbah with Tabuk in mind, the Sheikh asks, and you will feel an urgency you find nowhere else in the Qur'an. This was no quiet, voluntary call like the early battles. Going was fard ayn: an obligation on every healthy adult man around Madinah, even the new Muslims of Makkah. And the verses that came down do not coax. They confront.
What is wrong with you, that when you are called to march you sink into the ground, heavy, clinging to home? Have you traded the next life for this one? And the warning right after it is sharper still: if you do not go forth, Allah will punish you and replace you with a people who are not like you, and you will not harm Him in the least. Elsewhere in the same surah the call rings out, march light or march heavy, whatever state you are in, just go.
And here the Sheikh stops you, because these are the verses extremist groups love to lift and aim at whatever cause they please. The verse, he insists, belongs to the moment it descended. Allah revealed this for Tabuk. No one gets to cut it loose from its battle and staple it onto theirs as though it were sent down for them. The words are eternal; the specific command was for that summer, that army, that test.
Fight those nearest to you
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا قَاتِلُوا الَّذِينَ يَلُونَكُم مِّنَ الْكُفَّارِ وَلْيَجِدُوا فِيكُمْ غِلْظَةً ۚ وَاعْلَمُوا أَنَّ اللَّهَ مَعَ الْمُتَّقِينَ
“O you who have believed, fight against those adjacent to you of the disbelievers and let them find in you harshness. And know that Allah is with the righteous.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:123 Read 9:123 with tafsir
Why read the order to march as a command straight from Allah and not as ordinary strategy? Partly because of how the Prophet ﷺ went about it. Every other campaign he had kept secret, even feinting in the wrong direction to keep his enemies guessing. Tabuk he announced. He sent word to the surrounding tribes and even to Makkah, calling able men by name. No surprise, no concealment: an open, declared march that everyone could see coming.
And partly because of a verse like this one. The earliest commentator we have, at-Tabari, read it as the instruction that turned the Muslims first against the Arabs around them and then, once Arabia was settled, northward toward Rome. Fight those nearest to you of the disbelievers, and let them find in you firmness. It reads, the Sheikh suggests, almost like a map: the central Arabs are conquered, the rest will follow, and now the gaze lifts to the frontier in the north. Tabuk was the first step of that turning.
The army of hardship
There was never a battle at Tabuk. No clash of armies, no swords drawn, not a drop of blood spilled. And yet the companions called it the harder fight, and they were right, because the enemy this time was the road itself.
Count the weights stacked on these men. It would be the largest army Arabia had ever raised: the sources reach for twenty thousand, even thirty, and the Sheikh, ever careful, notes that crowds always grow in the retelling, so call it simply the biggest force the Prophet ﷺ ever led. A larger army means more mouths, more water, more everything, across more distance, for this was the farthest he ﷺ ever marched at the head of men, close to a thousand miles, there and back better than a month. And it fell in late July, when Madinah bakes past a hundred and ten degrees and the people who live there stop working through the middle of the day because no body can.
Then the cruelest weight, one we barely feel today. August was harvest. For a farming city living hand to mouth, with no salaries and no certainty of next month, the harvest was the whole year's income arriving at once. To march now was to walk away from the single paycheck a family lived on. The Prophet ﷺ was not asking them to risk death in battle. He was asking them to abandon their bread, in the heat, for a journey with no enemy waiting at the end of it. That is why they named it the army of hardship, jaysh al-usrah.
Those who followed in the hour of difficulty
لَّقَد تَّابَ اللَّهُ عَلَى النَّبِيِّ وَالْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَالْأَنصَارِ الَّذِينَ اتَّبَعُوهُ فِي سَاعَةِ الْعُسْرَةِ مِن بَعْدِ مَا كَادَ يَزِيغُ قُلُوبُ فَرِيقٍ مِّنْهُمْ ثُمَّ تَابَ عَلَيْهِمْ ۚ إِنَّهُ بِهِمْ رَءُوفٌ رَّحِيمٌ
“Allah has already forgiven the Prophet and the Muhajireen and the Ansar who followed him in the hour of difficulty after the hearts of a party of them had almost inclined [to doubt], and then He forgave them. Indeed, He was to them Kind and Merciful.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:117 Read 9:117 with tafsir
The Qur'an gives this expedition its own name. Not Tabuk, but the hour of difficulty, sa'at al-usrah: Allah has turned in mercy to the Prophet ﷺ and the Muhajireen and the Ansar who followed him in the hour of difficulty. Qatada, the leading student of Ibn Abbas, said plainly that this was Tabuk: they set out toward Syria in the blazing heat and were tested almost past bearing.
How tested? Two or three men would share a single date for the whole day, the Sheikh recounts, splitting one date between them, and when it was gone they would pass the pit from mouth to mouth, sucking it for whatever ghost of taste remained. And the thirst was worse than the hunger. Umar ibn al-Khattab himself described it: they reached a place so dry they thought their throats would collapse, that they would simply die. Men went hunting for water and came back with nothing, more spent than before. Some slaughtered their own camels to squeeze the moisture from the stomach, which meant they would now have to walk the whole way home.
It was here that Abu Bakr came to the Prophet ﷺ and begged him: ya Rasul Allah, make du'a for us. The Prophet ﷺ said, if you wish, and raised his hands, and Umar swore he had not yet brought them down before the sky opened and the rain came pouring, until every man had filled every container he carried.
He took the means first
Notice what the Sheikh notices in that rain. The Prophet ﷺ did not raise his hands the moment the army grew thirsty. He let them reach the very edge: the slaughtered camels, the collapsing throats, the certainty of death. It was Abu Bakr who finally had to ask. Why would a Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who knew the miracle was his to call, hold it back so long?
Because he was teaching every one of us a law deeper than any single day. The Sheikh calls it akhdh bil-asbab: you take the means. You struggle, you exhaust your effort, you do the hard human work, and only then, when you have given everything, does the help of Allah arrive. The miracle came, but never at the start. Only after the struggle, only after the sacrifice.
And there is mercy folded into that for you. Most of us will never raise our hands and split open the sky. But the believers who walk his ﷺ road, who put in the effort and taste the bitterness of it and do not quit, will see their own miracles, quieter ones, arriving in their own lives at the moment they have nothing left to give. Allah blesses the ending, not the wishing. He blesses the ones who paid the price first.
Whoever finances the army of hardship
Once the Prophet ﷺ understood the march had to happen, the first thing he did was raise the money for it. Six months earlier he had held all the spoils of Hunayn and Ta'if in his hands and spent every coin of it in the path of Allah, keeping nothing for himself or the treasury. So now he stood on the mimbar and called: whoever finances the army of hardship will be given Jannah. And the companions came, a bag of gold here, a fistful of coins there, until the piles rose in the masjid.
Then came Uthman ibn Affan, may Allah be pleased with him. A hundred camels of his had just returned laden from a northern trade, and when he heard that promise he gave it all, thousands of gold coins, poured out before the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ turned the coins over in his hands and said: whatever Uthman does after this day will not harm him. Words so weighty that years later, when the rebels had surrounded his house, Uthman himself would recall them in his own defense.
And the famous contest. Umar, who had heard the same promise, hurried home thinking, today at last I will outdo Abu Bakr, and brought half of everything he owned. Then Abu Bakr arrived. What did you leave for your family, the Prophet ﷺ asked him, for it looked like he had brought it all. Abu Bakr answered: I left them Allah and His Messenger. And Umar gave up: after that, he said, I will never try to beat him again. Tabuk was being paid for not by men who had plenty, but by men who emptied their hands and trusted that Allah would refill them.
Wallahi, I have nothing to give you
One last scene from the gathering, and it shows how human these days were. Abu Musa al-Ash'ari was sent by his clan to ask the Prophet ﷺ for camels to ride to Tabuk, for no one could cross that desert on foot. He came not knowing the Prophet ﷺ was already troubled and angry that day, most likely, the Sheikh suggests, over the hypocrites and their excuses, which the story would soon reach. So when Abu Musa asked, the answer was sharp: wallahi, I will give you nothing to ride. He went away crushed, sure he had done something wrong.
Barely any time passed before Bilal came calling him back. The Prophet ﷺ handed him six fine camels he had just purchased: take these, and these, and these. Abu Musa hesitated, confused, for the Prophet ﷺ had sworn by Allah he would give him nothing. It had to be explained: when he spoke, he had nothing to give, and the words came out heavier than he meant; when the means arrived, he remembered Abu Musa and gave. An oath spoken in that way, the Sheikh notes, over something not truly intended, does not bind a person, just as Allah says He does not hold us to the careless oaths of our tongues, but to what our hearts resolve.
And so the funds were gathered, the camels found, the largest army Arabia had ever seen began to assemble in the heat. But the hardship was not only thirst and distance and lost harvests. Among those who hung back, and among those who marched, a deeper test was waiting, the test of the hypocrites and their excuses, and that is where the road to Tabuk turns next.