Battle of Hunayn

The Battle of Hunayn (Arabic: غزوة حنين, Ghazwat Hunayn) was fought in January 630 CE (Shawwal, 8 AH), roughly a month after the conquest of Mecca, between Prophet Muhammad ﷺ's army of twelve thousand and a coalition of the Hawazin and Thaqif tribes under the command of Malik ibn Awf an-Nasri. Fought in the valley of Hunayn, on the road between Mecca and Ta'if, the battle opened with a devastating ambush that broke the Muslim advance guard and briefly threatened to become a rout, before a rally around the Prophet turned the engagement into a decisive Muslim victory. The campaign continued into an unsuccessful siege of the Thaqif stronghold of Ta'if, and concluded with the distribution of an unusually large body of captives and spoils at al-Ji'ranah — a distribution whose handling produced both a notable moment of tension with the Ansar and, subsequently, an act of clemency toward the defeated Hawazin that the sources connect directly to the Prophet's own childhood among them.

The battle is addressed directly in the Qur'an, which describes the initial disorder among the Muslims and its reversal: "Allah has already given you victory in many regions and on the day of Hunayn, when your great number pleased you, but it did not avail you at all, and the earth was confining for you with its vastness; then you turned back, fleeing. Then Allah sent down His tranquillity upon His Messenger and upon the believers" (Quran 9:25-26).

Background: Hawazin and Thaqif After the Conquest of Mecca

The conquest of Mecca in January 630 CE had removed the city that had anchored Quraysh resistance to Islam for two decades, and its bloodless fall persuaded much of Arabia that Muslim ascendancy was no longer in doubt. Not every tribe accepted this conclusion. The Hawazin, a large confederation of Najd centred south-east of Mecca, and the Thaqif, based in the fortified town of Ta'if, judged that they were strong enough to resist where the Quraysh had not, and resolved to fight rather than submit. Several smaller groups within the wider Qays Aylan grouping — the Nasr, the Jusham, and the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr among them — joined the coalition Malik ibn Awf assembled.

Malik ibn Awf, a young commander of the Hawazin, took the unusual step of ordering his people to bring their wealth, women, and children with the army to their encampment at Awtas, a valley near Hunayn adjacent to Dhu al-Majaz, roughly ten miles from Mecca toward Arafat. The veteran Duraid ibn al-Simmah, brought along for his long experience of warfare despite his age, questioned this decision sharply once he learned of it. Told that Malik intended the presence of the families and herds to make every man fight harder to protect them, Duraid replied that nothing could stop a defeated man from fleeing regardless, and that if the army lost, it would lose its people and its property together rather than its property alone. Malik refused to change his plan, declaring that the Hawazin would obey him or he would fall on his own sword. Duraid, overruled, remarked that this would be a battle he would not be tempted to witness, though he did not withdraw from it.

Malik's scouts, sent to observe the Muslim army, returned with their limbs cut off and could report nothing beyond what had been done to them. The Prophet, for his part, had his own intelligence: Abu Hadrad al-Aslami had been sent to move among the Hawazin and report on their preparations, and did so successfully.

The March to Hunayn

On Saturday, the 19th of Shawwal, nineteen days after entering Mecca, the Prophet set out for Hunayn with twelve thousand men — ten thousand who had marched with him to the conquest of Mecca, and two thousand more, the greater part of them Meccans who had only recently accepted Islam. He borrowed a hundred suits of armour and their equipment from Safwan ibn Umayya, who had not yet embraced Islam, and left Attab ibn Asid as governor of Mecca in his absence.

On the evening before the battle, a scout reported to the Prophet that he had climbed the surrounding hills and seen the Hawazin gathered with their riding camels, livestock, and sheep. The Prophet is reported to have smiled and said that all of it would be the spoils of the Muslims the next day, if God willed it.

On the march, the army passed a great green tree the Arabs called Dhat Anwat, at which it had been customary before Islam to hang weapons and slaughter animals in devotion. When some of the men — evidently recent converts unfamiliar with the implications of the request — asked the Prophet to establish a similar tree for them, he responded sharply that this was exactly what the people of Moses had asked of him, requesting a god as their enemies had, and warned them against following the customs of earlier nations rather than the guidance given to them.

The Ambush

Malik ibn Awf had entered the valley of Hunayn by night ahead of the Muslim advance and stationed his men in hiding along the roads, entrances, and narrow places of the valley, with orders to open with a barrage of stones and arrows and then to charge as one body. On the night of Wednesday the 10th of Shawwal, the Muslim army reached Hunayn, and at first light the Prophet began organising his men and distributing the army's standards. In the darkness before dawn the Muslims began descending into the valley, unaware that an enemy lay concealed around them.

As the Muslim advance guard began to make camp, the ambush was sprung. Arrows fell on the column and the Hawazin fighters attacked simultaneously from their concealed positions. The Muslim front ranks, taken entirely by surprise, broke and fled in confusion. The disorder was severe enough that Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, who had accepted Islam only weeks before at the conquest of Mecca, remarked that the retreat would not stop short of the Red Sea, and one of the Hawazin commanders, hearing of the Muslim collapse, observed that "the magic has grown inactive today."

Amid the rout, the Prophet held his ground with only a small number of Emigrants and close kinsmen around him. Sahih al-Bukhari preserves the testimony of al-Bara' ibn Azib, given directly in response to a man who asked him whether he had fled on the day of Hunayn: al-Bara' testified that the Prophet did not flee, though the hastily converted new Muslims did, and that the Hawazin loosed their arrows at them. Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith held the head of the Prophet's white mule, and his uncle al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib held its stirrup, both trying to keep the animal steady as the Prophet turned toward the enemy and called out, "I am the Prophet, without a lie; I am the son of Abd al-Muttalib" — identifying himself amid the chaos so that his own side would know he stood firm. The Prophet dismounted and asked God for help, saying, "O Allah, send down Your help."

The Rally

The Prophet ordered his uncle al-Abbas, a man whose voice was renowned for its carrying power, to call the fleeing soldiers back. Al-Abbas himself later described the effect: at the sound of his call, the men turned back toward the battlefield "as if they had been wild cows tending toward their calves," answering with cries of "Here we are, at your service." Those who could not turn their mounts flung down their weapons, dismounted, and ran back on foot. Al-Abbas called first for the lancers, until a hundred had gathered around the Prophet and resumed fighting; he then called the Ansar, and finally the Banu al-Harith ibn al-Khazraj, and the Muslim ranks reformed in the same order in which they had broken.

With the army reassembled, the fighting intensified and both sides held firm for a time. The Prophet, watching the battle, remarked that the fight had grown fierce, then picked up a handful of dirt and threw it toward the faces of the enemy, saying, "May your faces be shameful." The Hawazin's eyes filled with dust, and their line began to give way.

The Rout of Hawazin and Thaqif

Within a few hours of the Prophet's action, the enemy was decisively defeated. Roughly seventy men of the Thaqif alone were killed in the collapse, and the Muslims seized the whole of the enemy's camels, weapons, and cattle. The defeated forces scattered toward Ta'if, Nakhlah, and Awtas. A detachment under Abu Amir al-Ashari pursued the group that fled to Awtas, and Abu Amir was killed in the clashes that followed. A body of cavalry pursuing those who fled toward Nakhlah caught and killed Duraid ibn al-Simmah — the veteran commander who had opposed Malik's battle plan from the outset — killed by Rabi'a ibn Rafi'.

The booty taken was substantial: six thousand captives, twenty-four thousand camels, more than forty thousand sheep, and four thousand ounces of silver. The Prophet ordered the booty gathered at al-Ji'ranah under the charge of Masud ibn Amr al-Ghifari, and left for Ta'if once the campaign against the fleeing remnants was complete.

The Siege of Ta'if

The defeated troops of Hawazin and Thaqif who had fled to Ta'if fortified themselves there under Malik ibn Awf, making the siege a direct continuation of the Hunayn campaign. An advance force of a thousand men under Khalid ibn al-Walid marched ahead, while the Prophet advanced by way of Nakhlah al-Yamaniyah and Qarn al-Manazil. At Laiyah, the Prophet ordered the destruction of a castle belonging to Malik ibn Awf before continuing to Ta'if itself, where he camped near the town's fortifications and began a siege that the sources place at between ten and twenty days.

The siege was fiercely contested. Defenders shot arrows in such numbers that they were compared to a swarm of locusts, wounding a number of Muslims and killing twelve. The Muslims withdrew to higher ground beyond arrow range — the site later occupied by the Ta'if mosque — and the Prophet had a catapult set up to bombard the town. When a breach was made in the wall, a party of Muslims attempted to enter under the cover of a wooden shelter to set fire to the defences, but the defenders poured down molten metal on them, forcing a withdrawal under renewed fire.

To press the siege, the Prophet ordered the surrounding vineyards cut and burned, a measure that prompted the defenders to plead for it to stop for the sake of their kinship ties with the Muslims; the Prophet agreed. A call was made offering freedom to any slave who left the fortress, and twenty-three men came out, among them a man who lowered himself from the wall on a well-wheel and was afterwards known by the nickname Abu Bakrah, "the man with the wheel," on that account.

The siege ultimately failed to take the town, and when the Prophet's companions expressed disappointment at withdrawing, he told them they would return the next day if God willed, which pleased them. As the army departed, the Prophet is reported to have said, when asked to pray against the Thaqif, "O Allah, guide Thaqif and bring them to us as Muslims" — a supplication the sources note was answered when the Thaqif sent a delegation to accept Islam the following year.

The Distribution of the Spoils at al-Ji'ranah

The Prophet returned from Ta'if to al-Ji'ranah and remained there ten nights before distributing the captured wealth, delaying in the hope that a Hawazin delegation would arrive to claim their losses through repentance rather than force. When none came, he proceeded with the distribution, giving the largest shares to the most recent converts among the Meccan elite in order to secure their loyalty to the new order. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb received a hundred camels and forty ounces of gold, and on asking after his sons Yazid and Muawiya was given the same for each of them in turn. Hakim ibn Hizam was given a hundred camels and, on asking for more, a hundred further; Safwan ibn Umayya received three hundred camels, given a hundred at a time as he asked; and other chiefs of the Quraysh and allied clans received grants of a hundred, fifty, or forty camels each.

Word spread that the Prophet gave generously and without fear of impoverishing himself, drawing large numbers of Bedouin who crowded around him seeking a share, to the point that he was forced back against a tree and his garment was pulled from him. He told the crowd to return his garment, swearing that he would have distributed camels as numerous as the trees of Tihama had he possessed them, and that he was neither miserly, cowardly, nor untruthful. Holding up a single hair plucked from his camel's hump, he stated that he took nothing from the spoils beyond his own one-fifth share, and that this too returned to the community. The ordinary distribution then proceeded through Zayd ibn Thabit, with each infantryman receiving four camels and forty sheep, and each cavalryman twelve camels and a hundred and twenty sheep.

The Ansar's Disquiet

The scale of the grants to newly converted Quraysh leaders, set against the comparatively modest shares given to the Ansar — the Medinan Muslims who had fought at Hunayn from the outset and had stood firm through the ambush — caused real resentment among some of the Ansar, who felt that those who had fled the field were being rewarded above those who had held it. Abu Said al-Khudri reported that some among them said openly that the Messenger of God had been ill spoken of by his own people over the matter. When Sa'd ibn Ubada brought this concern directly to the Prophet, he asked Sa'd to gather the Ansar in a shelter, admitting only the Ansar and no others.

Addressing them, the Prophet reminded the assembled Ansar of what they had been before Islam — astray until God guided them, poor until God enriched them, divided until God united them — and asked what had prevented them from answering him. They replied that all grace belonged to God and His Messenger. He then told them that had they chosen to answer, they might truthfully have said: "You came to us rejected, and we accepted you; helpless, and we helped you; a fugitive, and we sheltered you; poor, and we comforted you." He asked whether they resented that others left with sheep and camels while the Ansar left with the Messenger of God himself, and declared that had there been no migration to Medina, he would have chosen to be one of the Ansar himself — that were the community to go one way and the Ansar another, he would go the way of the Ansar. The Ansar wept until their beards were wet with tears, and answered that they were satisfied with their portion.

The Hawazin Delegation and the Return of the Captives

A delegation of fourteen men from the Hawazin, now Muslim, arrived at al-Ji'ranah just after the distribution had been completed, led by Zuhayr ibn Surad and including, by the accounts preserved by Ibn Kathir, the Prophet's own foster-uncle by marriage into the tribe that had nursed him — Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb al-Sa'diyya, of the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, a branch of Hawazin, had been the infant Prophet's wet-nurse decades earlier. The delegation asked for the return of their captured wealth and families, addressing the Prophet in verse that invoked this very tie: "The captives in the wards of your army are themselves your relatives... have pity on women you once sucked, your mouth filled with their pure milk." Zuhayr reminded the Prophet that had a delegation made such an appeal to any lesser king on the strength of a shared wet-nurse, that king would have granted it readily, and that the Prophet, the most honourable of men, should do no less.

The Prophet asked the delegation which was dearer to them, their property or their women and children; they answered that nothing compared to kinship. He directed them that after the midday prayer they should stand and appeal jointly to him and to the believers to release the captives that had fallen to each share. When they did so, the Prophet announced that whatever belonged to himself and to the family of Abd al-Muttalib was returned to the Hawazin freely, and he called on the rest of the army to do the same. The Emigrants and the Ansar agreed at once. A few individual chiefs — al-Aqra ibn Habis for the Banu Tamim, Uyayna ibn Hisn for the Banu Fazara, and initially al-Abbas ibn Mirdas for the Banu Sulaym — refused to give up their own shares, though the tribesmen of the last of these overruled him and offered their portion regardless. The Prophet then offered that anyone who preferred to keep a captive could do so and receive sixfold compensation from the next spoils instead; on hearing this, the remaining holders relented, and all the captives were returned except for one elderly woman initially held back by Uyayna ibn Hisn, who was later released as well. Each returning captive was given a garment as a parting gift.

Shayma bint al-Harith

Among the Hawazin captives was Shayma bint al-Harith, daughter of Halima and foster-sister to the Prophet. According to The Sealed Nectar, she was brought before the Prophet, who recognised her "by a certain mark," honoured her, spread out his own garment for her to sit on, and, on learning she wished to return to her people rather than remain, released her with gifts. Muhammad Husayn Haykal's account adds that she was at first treated roughly by soldiers unaware of who she was, and that she identified herself loudly as the Prophet's sister by shared wet-nursing before he was brought to confirm it and recognised her himself. The two accounts differ in these particulars of how the recognition occurred, but agree that she was found among the captives, that the Prophet knew her, and that she was honoured and freed.

Departure for Medina

Having completed the distribution at al-Ji'ranah, the Prophet put on the garments of umrah and went to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage rites before departing for Medina, appointing Attab ibn Asid as governor of Mecca in his place. He reached Medina in the final days of Dhu al-Qa'dah, 8 AH.

Significance

The Battle of Hunayn removed the last organised tribal military threat to Muslim authority in the Hijaz following the conquest of Mecca, and its outcome — an initial disaster reversed by the Prophet's own steadiness and al-Abbas's rally — was significant enough to be addressed directly in the Qur'an as a lesson against overconfidence in numbers. The subsequent distribution of spoils, and the tension it briefly created with the Ansar, is remembered in the tradition principally for the Prophet's response: a reminder of the community's origins that the sources record as moving its audience to tears, and a statement of loyalty to the Ansar that later generations treated as a model of gratitude toward those who give without seeking reward. The eventual return of the Hawazin captives, prompted by an appeal to the Prophet's own childhood foster-ties, stands in the tradition as an example of clemency exercised at the height of military and political strength rather than compelled by weakness.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran, Surah at-Tawbah (9:25-26) — the direct Qur'anic address to the battle, its initial disorder, and its reversal through divine tranquillity
• Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Maghazi, Hadith 4315 — al-Bara' ibn Azib's testimony that the Prophet did not flee at Hunayn, and the Prophet's words identifying himself while Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith held his mule
• Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Maghazi, Hadith 4316 — a further narration of al-Bara' ibn Azib on the same day
• Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Zakat — the report of the rallying call and the army's return to the Prophet during the rout

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Hisham, recension of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah — the fullest early narrative of the campaign, the distribution, and the Hawazin delegation
• Ibn Kathir, Ismail ibn Umar. Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya [English translation]. [Compiled c. 1373 CE] — for the Hawazin delegation's verses and the Prophet's reply
• Al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. [Completed c. 915 CE]
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. [Compiled c. 845 CE]

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum). Riyadh: Darussalam, 1996.
• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad. Translated by Isma'il Razi al-Faruqi. Indianapolis: North American Trust Publications, 1976.
• Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• Peters, Francis E. Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Further Reading

• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983.
• Guillaume, Alfred, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Muhammad. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.