Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib (c. 570–632 CE / 53 BH–11 AH) is regarded in Islam as the final prophet and messenger of Allah, the recipient of the Qur'an, and the founder of the first Muslim community.^[a][b] The Qur'an calls him "the Messenger of Allah and seal [i.e., last] of the prophets" (Quran 33:40), addresses him as one sent "as a witness and a bringer of good tidings and a warner, and one who invites to Allah, by His permission, and an illuminating lamp" (Quran 33:45–46), and says of him, "indeed, you are of a great moral character" (Quran 68:4). It also tells believers that "there has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern" (Quran 33:21).

He was born in Mecca into the clan of Banu Hashim of the tribe of Quraysh and lost both parents in childhood.^[c] He worked as a shepherd and a merchant, married Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, and at the age of forty began to receive the revelations that Muslims recognise as the Qur'an. For some thirteen years he called the people of Mecca to worship Allah alone, and he and his followers met ridicule, boycott and violence. In 622 he migrated to Yathrib, afterwards called Medina, where the Muslim community formed around the mosque he built, the agreements he made and the revelation he taught. In the decade that followed, Medina fought and negotiated with Quraysh and the tribes of Arabia; Mecca came under his authority in 8 AH, delegations came to Medina from across the peninsula, and he died there in 11 AH.

His life is known through the Qur'an, which refers to many of its events; through the hadith collections, which preserve his words and the recollections of those who lived with him; and through the biographical literature (sira), in which later historians such as Ibn Kathir quote the account of Ibn Ishaq throughout.¹ These sources overlap but are not of the same kind, and for many dates and numbers they preserve more than one account.

Arabia before Islam

Mecca, Quraysh, and the sanctuary

Mecca lay in the Hijaz, in a valley that the Qur'an, recording the prayer of Abraham, calls "an uncultivated valley near Your sacred House" (Quran 14:37). Its importance came from the sanctuary at its centre. The Qur'an describes the House there as "the first House [of worship] established for mankind", "blessed and a guidance for the worlds", containing "clear signs [such as] the standing place of Abraham", and says that "whoever enters it … shall be safe" (Quran 3:96–97). It recalls "when Abraham was raising the foundations of the House and [with him] Ishmael" (Quran 2:127), and the Kaaba was accordingly associated with Abraham and Ishmael. Arabs came to it from all over the peninsula to perform the pilgrimage.

Mecca had no king. Its leading tribe was Quraysh, whose rise the genealogists traced to Qusayy ibn Kilab. In the account al-Mubarakpuri summarises in The Sealed Nectar, the custodianship of the House had been held by the tribe of Khuza'ah until Qusayy, supported by Quraysh and Kinanah, took control of Mecca and the sanctuary after a war with Khuza'ah and an arbitration that confirmed his rule. Qusayy settled his kinsmen in Mecca and built the Dar al-Nadwa, an assembly house on the northern side of the Kaaba where Quraysh met to consult and where marriages were announced. He held the offices on which the life of the town depended: presiding over the Nadwa, granting the war standard, commanding the caravans, keeping the door of the Kaaba, and providing water and food for the pilgrims, for which he levied a contribution from Quraysh each pilgrimage season. His descendants later divided these offices between the lines of his sons Abd al-Dar and Abd Manaf.

The clans of Quraysh traced their descent from Fihr ibn Malik, whose other name, Quraysh, the tribe bore. Among them were Jumah, Sahm, Adi, Makhzum, Taym and Zuhrah, together with the descendants of Qusayy — the houses of Abd al-Dar, Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza and Abd Manaf. Abd Manaf's line divided into four: Abd Shams, Nawfal, al-Muttalib and Hashim. Muhammad belonged to the house of Hashim, who held the charge of feeding and watering the pilgrims. Al-Mubarakpuri records that Hashim was the first to give the pilgrims bread crumbled into broth, from which his name came, and the first to organise the two caravan journeys of Quraysh in winter and summer. The Qur'an recalls those journeys in the chapter named after the tribe: "For the accustomed security of the Quraysh — their accustomed security [in] the caravan of winter and summer — let them worship the Lord of this House, who has fed them, [saving them] from hunger and made them safe, [saving them] from fear" (Quran 106:1–4).

Protection in Mecca came through kinship and through the formal protection that a man of standing could extend to another, and the course of Muhammad's years there turned repeatedly on it: the protection of his uncle Abu Talib, the protection Ibn al-Daghinah extended to Abu Bakr, and that of al-Mut'im ibn Adi after the journey to Ta'if. Many of those who were tortured in the years of persecution were slaves and freed slaves without a clan to defend them.

Arabia between larger powers

Arabia bordered two empires, the Byzantine Empire in Syria and the Sasanian Empire of Persia in Iraq. Al-Mubarakpuri describes the rulers of Arabia at the rise of Islam as of two kinds: crowned kings, who were not in fact independent, and the heads of tribes and clans, who were mostly independent. The crowned kings were those of Yemen, of the family of Ghassan in Syria, and of al-Hirah in Iraq. The Ghassanids held rule over the Arabs of Syria on behalf of the Byzantines, and al-Hirah stood under Persian domination. Yemen had been conquered by the Christian Abyssinians in 525; Abraha, who seized power there, is the commander remembered for the expedition against Mecca in the year of Muhammad's birth. Some years afterwards the Yemenis, with Persian help, drove out the Abyssinians, and Yemen passed under governors appointed by the Persian king. Mecca and the rest of the Hijaz were governed by their own tribes and clans. The later history of Muhammad's community — the letters to rulers, the expedition to Mu'tah, the march to Tabuk — unfolded against this geography.

Religious communities and practices

Most of the tribes of the Hijaz worshipped idols. Al-Mubarakpuri writes that they believed the idols would bring them nearer to Allah and intercede with Him on their behalf, and the Qur'an quotes those who took protectors besides Him as saying, "We only worship them that they may bring us nearer to Allah in position" (Quran 39:3). Ibn Kathir, quoting Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham, records the account of how idolatry came to Mecca: Amr ibn Luhayy of Khuza'ah, a leader of the time when Khuza'ah held the sanctuary, travelled to Ma'ab in the region of al-Balqa' in Syria, saw its people worshipping idols, and brought back an idol named Hubal, which he set up in Mecca and ordered the people to venerate.² Hubal, the largest of the idols of Quraysh, stood over a well inside the Kaaba, and divining arrows were cast before it to settle questions of blood money, kinship and other matters of consequence. Ibn Ishaq also names Isaf and Na'ila, two idols near Zamzam at which Quraysh made sacrifices.² Al-Mubarakpuri writes that most of the practices of idol worship in Arabia were instituted by Amr ibn Luhayy. The Qur'an names the goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat (Quran 53:19–20), and it rejects the customs by which camels were dedicated to idols and set free from the service of their owners (Quran 5:103). When Muhammad entered Mecca in 8 AH, 360 idols stood around the Kaaba (Sahih al-Bukhari 4287).

Other religions were present. Three Jewish tribes lived in Yathrib — Banu Qaynuqa, allied with the Arab tribe of Khazraj, and Banu al-Nadir and Banu Qurayza, allied with Aws — and there were Jewish settlements farther north at Khaybar and Tayma. Christianity had entered Arabia with the Abyssinians and the Byzantines. It was established in Najran in the south, and among the tribes al-Mubarakpuri names as Christian were Ghassan, Taghlib and Tayy, together with other tribes on the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Magianism had followers among the Arabs of Iraq, Bahrain and the Gulf coast. The biographies also name men of Mecca who had turned away from idol worship before Islam. One was Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl: a report in Sahih al-Bukhari records that he met Muhammad at Baldah before revelation began and refused to eat meat that had been slaughtered for idols (Sahih al-Bukhari 3826). Another was Waraqah ibn Nawfal, Khadijah's cousin, who had become a Christian before Islam and wrote out the Gospel in Hebrew script (Sahih al-Bukhari 3).^[d]

Family, birth, and childhood

Lineage and the Banu Hashim

The genealogists recorded Muhammad's descent as Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim ibn Abd Manaf ibn Qusayy ibn Kilab ibn Murrah ibn Ka'b ibn Lu'ayy ibn Ghalib ibn Fihr ibn Malik ibn al-Nadr ibn Kinanah ibn Khuzaymah ibn Mudrikah ibn Ilyas ibn Mudar ibn Nizar ibn Ma'add ibn Adnan. His father was Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and his mother was Aminah bint Wahb, daughter of Wahb ibn Abd Manaf ibn Zuhrah ibn Kilab, the chief of the clan of Zuhrah; her line met her husband's at Kilab. A report in Sahih Muslim from Wathilah ibn al-Asqa' preserves Muhammad's own statement of his descent: "Allah chose Kinanah from among the children of Isma'il, and He chose Quraysh from Kinanah, and He chose Banu Hashim from Quraysh, and He chose me from Banu Hashim" (Sahih Muslim 2276). Al-Mubarakpuri distinguishes three levels in the recorded genealogy: the line to Adnan, whose authenticity biographers and genealogists agree upon; the line from Adnan back to Abraham, which is subject to disagreement; and the line from Abraham back to Adam, parts of which he calls definitely incorrect. Ibn Kathir quotes earlier genealogists who said that they knew of no one with reliable knowledge of the line beyond Ma'add ibn Adnan.

His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, whose own name was Shaybah, had been born in Yathrib to Hashim's wife Salma of the clan of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar, and was brought to Mecca as a boy by his uncle al-Muttalib; the name by which he was known, "al-Muttalib's servant", came from the Meccans' first sight of him riding behind his uncle. After al-Muttalib's death he took over the charge of feeding and watering the pilgrims. The sira records that he was ordered in a dream to dig the well of Zamzam at a particular place, and that in digging it he found the swords, armour and two golden deer that the tribe of Jurhum had buried there when they were forced out of Mecca. When the water flowed, Quraysh claimed a share in the well; the dispute was settled in his favour, and he then vowed that if he were given ten sons he would sacrifice one of them at the Kaaba. When the arrows were cast before Hubal, the lot fell on Abdullah. In the account al-Mubarakpuri gives from Ibn Hisham, Quraysh, the young man's maternal uncles of Makhzum and his brother Abu Talib dissuaded Abd al-Muttalib, and a woman diviner had the arrows cast between Abdullah and ten camels, adding ten camels each time the lot fell on Abdullah, until at a hundred it fell on the camels, which were slaughtered in his place.³ Al-Mubarakpuri adds that the customary blood money in Arabia, previously ten camels, was raised to a hundred after this event.

The Year of the Elephant

The Qur'an's short chapter al-Fil recalls how Allah dealt with "the companions of the elephant": He made their plan into misguidance, sent against them "birds in flocks, striking them with stones of hard clay", and "made them like eaten straw" (Quran 105:1–5). The sira identifies the army as that of Abraha, the Abyssinian viceroy of Yemen. Al-Mubarakpuri writes that Abraha built a great church at San'a to draw the Arab pilgrimage away from Mecca, and that after a man of Kinanah defiled it he marched on the Kaaba with an army of sixty thousand men and elephants. In Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Kathir quotes it, Abraha's men seized two hundred of Abd al-Muttalib's camels.¹ Abd al-Muttalib told Abraha's envoy that if Allah protected the House it would be because it was His sanctuary and His house, and that Quraysh had no means of defending it themselves. He went to Abraha to ask for the return of his camels, then told Quraysh to withdraw to the mountains, and stood holding the door of the Kaaba praying for its protection. The same account relates that Abraha's elephant knelt and would not move towards Mecca, though it rose and went when turned in any other direction. The Qur'anic chapter itself does not name Abraha or date the campaign; those details come from the sira.

The year of the expedition became known as the Year of the Elephant, and the sources place Muhammad's birth in that year. They disagree over the interval. Ibn Kathir records reports that the birth came one month, forty days, fifty days — the view he calls most favoured — or fifty-five days after the attack, as well as minority reports placing the attack ten or twenty-three years before the birth. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the expedition to Muharram, fifty or fifty-five days before the birth, corresponding to late February or early March 571.

Birth and the death of Abdullah

The day of the week is the one point on which the reports agree. Asked about fasting on Mondays, Muhammad replied, "That is the day on which I was born and the day on which I was sent — or on which Revelation came to me" (Sahih Muslim 1162). The day of the month is disputed. Ibn Kathir calls the Monday birth undisputed, rejects a report placing it on Friday the seventeenth of Rabi al-Awwal as an error, and records the second, the eighth and the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal among the dates transmitted by earlier authorities; the twelfth is reported from Ibn Abbas and Jabir. Al-Mubarakpuri gives Monday morning, the ninth of Rabi al-Awwal, in the Year of the Elephant and the fortieth year of the reign of the Persian king Khosrow Anushirvan — which, following the calculations of al-Mansurpuri and the astronomer Mahmud Pasha, he equates with 20 or 22 April 571. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi identifies two strong reports, Monday 12 Rabi al-Awwal 53 BH (17 June 569) and Monday 9 Rabi al-Awwal 51 BH (20 April 571), and bases its chronology on the first.⁴ Haykal dates the birth to 570. A report in Jami' at-Tirmidhi preserves the statement of Qays ibn Makhramah, "I and the Messenger of Allah were born in the Year of the Elephant" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3619, which al-Tirmidhi grades hasan gharib).

Abdullah did not live to see his son. Soon after his marriage to Aminah in Mecca he travelled north with a Quraysh trading caravan. In the account that al-Waqidi called the best established, which Ibn Kathir quotes, he fell ill on the way back, stayed behind at Yathrib with his relatives of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar, and died there after a month, at the age of twenty-five, while Aminah was still pregnant; he was buried in the house of al-Nabighah. Another version has Abd al-Muttalib send him to Yathrib to buy dates. Most historians, al-Mubarakpuri writes, place his death two months before the birth; other reports, which Ibn Kathir also records, place it two, seven or twenty-eight months after it. He left, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, five camels, a small number of goats and a servant named Barakah, known as Umm Ayman, who later nursed his son. The Qur'an recalls Muhammad's orphanhood: "Did He not find you an orphan and give [you] refuge?" (Quran 93:6).

When the child was born, Aminah sent word to Abd al-Muttalib, who carried him to the Kaaba, prayed and gave thanks, and named him Muhammad, a name not common among the Arabs of the time; the boy was circumcised on the seventh day. Accounts of wonders at the birth — the collapse of fourteen balconies of the Persian king's palace, the extinguishing of the sacred fire of the Magians, the sinking of the churches around Lake Sawa — were recorded by al-Tabari, al-Bayhaqi and others, but al-Mubarakpuri notes that none of their chains of transmission is confirmed.

Thuwaybah, Halimah, and the years in the desert

The first woman to nurse Muhammad after his mother was Thuwaybah, a freedwoman of his uncle Abu Lahab, who also nursed his uncle Hamzah and later Abu Salamah ibn Abd al-Asad; a report in Sahih al-Bukhari records Muhammad saying that Thuwaybah had nursed both him and Abu Salamah (Sahih al-Bukhari 5101). It was the custom of the townspeople of Mecca to send their infants to be nursed among the Bedouin, and Muhammad was entrusted to Halimah bint Abi Dhu'ayb of the tribe of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, whose husband was al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza. Al-Mubarakpuri names their children — Abdullah, Unaysah and Hudhafah, known as al-Shayma', who cared for the infant — as Muhammad's foster siblings, and adds that his cousin Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith was also nursed by Halimah.

Halimah's own account, which Ibn Ishaq preserved and al-Mubarakpuri quotes, describes a year of drought in which she, her husband and their infant son set out with other women of Banu Sa'd to look for children to nurse.³ She had no milk to quiet her own child, and their old she-camel gave none. Every woman of the party refused Muhammad because he was an orphan and they looked for a reward from a child's father; Halimah, finding no other child, took him rather than return empty-handed. In her account she then had milk enough for him and for her own son, the she-camel gave milk, her lean donkey outpaced the others on the way home, and the flocks of her household came back from pasture full. After two years, when he was weaned, she and her husband took him back to his mother and persuaded her to let him stay longer; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records that an epidemic in Mecca at the time made Aminah willing to agree.⁵

Muhammad remained with Halimah's family until he was about four or five. It was during these years that the event known as the opening of the chest occurred. In a report from Anas ibn Malik in Sahih Muslim, Jibril came to him while he was playing with the other boys, laid him down, opened his chest, took out his heart and removed from it a clot of blood, saying, "This was the Shaytan's share of you." He washed the heart in a gold vessel filled with water of Zamzam and returned it to its place. The boys ran to his wet nurse crying that Muhammad had been killed; they found him safe, but his face had lost its colour. Anas added that he had seen the mark on his chest (Sahih Muslim 162). A second opening of the chest, at Mecca on the night of the Night Journey, is described in a separate report from Abu Dharr (Sahih al-Bukhari 349).

Aminah, Abd al-Muttalib, and Abu Talib

After this event Halimah returned the boy to his mother, and he lived with Aminah until he was six. Aminah then took him to Yathrib, where Abdullah was buried and where the family of Abd al-Muttalib's mother, the Banu al-Najjar, lived. Al-Mubarakpuri, following Ibn Hisham, describes a journey of some five hundred kilometres with Abd al-Muttalib and the servant Umm Ayman, and a stay of a month.² On the way home Aminah fell ill and died at al-Abwa, on the road between Yathrib and Mecca. In al-Mubarakpuri's account Abd al-Muttalib then brought the boy back to Mecca; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi names Umm Ayman as Aminah's companion and has her bring him home and hand him to his grandfather.⁵ Years later, a report in Sahih Muslim records, Muhammad visited his mother's grave and wept, and those with him wept too; he said that he had asked his Lord for permission to seek forgiveness for her and had not been given it, but had been given permission to visit her grave (Sahih Muslim 976).

Abd al-Muttalib kept the boy close. Ibn Hisham, as al-Mubarakpuri quotes him, describes a mattress placed for Abd al-Muttalib in the shade of the Kaaba.³ His sons sat around it out of deference, but the boy would sit on it, and when his uncles tried to move him Abd al-Muttalib would say, "Leave my grandson," seat him on the mattress beside him and pat his back. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi adds that he took the boy with him when he presided over gatherings at the Dar al-Nadwa.⁵ Abd al-Muttalib died when Muhammad was, by al-Mubarakpuri's reckoning, eight years, two months and ten days old, having entrusted him to Abu Talib, Abdullah's full brother.

Abu Talib placed his nephew among his own children and gave him precedence over them, and he protected him for the rest of his life. His wife Fatimah bint Asad, whom the Prophet later called his second mother, cared for him, the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records, more than for her own children.⁵

Youth, work, and marriage to Khadijah

Shepherding and the journey to Syria

Muhammad worked as a shepherd in his youth — among Banu Sa'd, al-Mubarakpuri writes, and in Mecca. A report from Abu Hurayrah in Sahih al-Bukhari records his saying that Allah sent no prophet who had not shepherded sheep; asked whether he had done so himself, he answered, "Yes, I used to shepherd them for the people of Makkah for some qirats," a small wage (Sahih al-Bukhari 2262).

When he was about twelve, he went with Abu Talib on a trading journey to Syria. Al-Mubarakpuri, drawing on a report in Jami' at-Tirmidhi, describes what happened at Busra, on the edge of Syria in the region of Hawran: a monk named Bahira came out to meet the caravan, took the boy's hand, and said that Allah would send him with a message that would be a mercy to all beings. Asked how he knew, the monk spoke of stones and trees that had prostrated as the caravan approached and of the seal of prophethood below the boy's shoulder, which he recognised from his books, and he urged Abu Talib to send the boy back to Mecca for fear of the Romans and the Jews. Al-Tirmidhi grades the report hasan gharib and knows it through this one chain only (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3620).^[e] His version adds that Abu Bakr and Bilal were sent back with the boy; al-Mubarakpuri, citing Zad al-Ma'ad, calls the mention of Bilal clearly an error, since Bilal was not with them. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives Muhammad's age on the journey as nine or twelve, and records that whether the meeting with Bahira took place, and what passed between them, is disputed, since the meeting does not rest on sound reports.⁵

The Fijar wars and the Hilf al-Fudul

When Muhammad was about twenty, the wars known as al-Fijar, "the sacrilegious", broke out between Quraysh and Kinanah on one side and the tribe of Qays Aylan on the other. Al-Mubarakpuri explains the name by the fighting's having been carried into the sacred months, when fighting was forbidden. Harb ibn Umayyah led Quraysh and their allies. In one of the battles Muhammad helped his uncles, and his part, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, was confined to picking up the enemy's arrows as they fell and handing them to his uncles.

When peace was restored, in the sacred month of Dhu al-Qa'dah, representatives of Banu Hashim, Banu al-Muttalib, Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, Zuhrah ibn Kilab and Taym ibn Murrah met in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an of Taym and bound themselves in a confederacy, the Hilf al-Fudul, to suppress injustice in Mecca and protect the rights of the weak and the poor. The occasion, as al-Mubarakpuri relates it, was the case of a merchant of the Zubayd tribe who had sold goods to al-As ibn Wa'il of Sahm and could not obtain payment. When his appeals to Quraysh went unanswered he recited his complaint in verse from a hilltop; al-Zubayr ibn Abd al-Muttalib took up the matter, and the confederates made al-As pay. Muhammad was present, and he later said of the pact: "I witnessed a confederacy in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an. It was more appealing to me than herds of cattle. Even now in the period of Islam, I would respond positively to attending such a meeting if I were invited."

Khadijah's trade and their marriage

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, of the clan of Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, was a merchant who, in Ibn Ishaq's account, employed men to trade with her goods for a share of the profits.² Haykal writes that Abu Talib, who was poor and had many mouths to feed, looked for better-paid work for his nephew than herding. Khadijah had heard of Muhammad's truthfulness and honesty, and when he was twenty-five she offered him a higher rate than others to take her goods to Syria, sending her servant Maysarah with him. On his return she found that the venture had brought more profit than usual, and Maysarah told her of his manners and honesty.

Khadijah had refused several prominent men who had sought to marry her. She now confided her wish to marry Muhammad to her friend Nafisah bint Munyah, who took the proposal to him. He agreed, his uncles went to Khadijah's uncle, and the marriage was concluded in the presence of Banu Hashim and the chiefs of Mudar, with a dowry of twenty camels. Al-Mubarakpuri gives Khadijah's age at the time as forty. She was his first wife, and he married no other woman while she lived.

Khadijah bore all of his children except Ibrahim: al-Qasim, Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum, Fatimah, and Abdullah, who was also called al-Tayyib and al-Tahir. The sons died in childhood. The daughters all lived to accept Islam and emigrate to Medina; all except Fatimah died in their father's lifetime.

The rebuilding of the Kaaba

When Muhammad was thirty-five, Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba. Al-Mubarakpuri describes the old building as a low, roofless enclosure of stones no more than nine cubits high, its walls cracked with age, which a great flood five years before the prophetic mission had almost destroyed. The chiefs of Quraysh resolved to spend on it only money lawfully earned, excluding anything gained from usury or injustice. At first they were afraid to pull the walls down, until al-Walid ibn al-Mughirah of Makhzum began the work; when he came to no harm the others joined him, and they dug down to the foundation laid by Abraham. The clans divided the walls among themselves, and a Roman mason named Baqum laid the stones. A report from Jabir ibn Abdullah in Sahih al-Bukhari records that Muhammad and his uncle al-Abbas carried stones for the building (Sahih al-Bukhari 1582).

When the walls reached the place of the Black Stone, the clans quarrelled for four or five days over which of them would have the honour of setting it in place, and fighting seemed near. The oldest of the chiefs, Abu Umayyah ibn al-Mughirah of Makhzum, proposed that the first man to enter the sanctuary should decide. Muhammad was the first to come in, and those present said, "Al-Amin (the trustworthy) has come. We are content to abide by his decision." He asked for a cloak, spread it on the ground and placed the stone in the centre, had a representative of each clan take hold of the edges and lift it together, and then set the stone in its place with his own hands.

The lawful money ran out before the building was finished, so Quraysh left out an area of about six cubits on the northern side, the area called al-Hijr or al-Hatim, raised the door above the level of the ground, and roofed the structure on six columns once the walls stood fifteen cubits high. Years later Muhammad told Aishah that had her people not been so recently out of the Period of Ignorance, he would have rebuilt the Kaaba to include al-Hijr (Sahih al-Bukhari 1586).

Revelation and the Meccan call

Retreat in Hira and the first revelation

In the years before his mission Muhammad took to withdrawing to Hira, a small cave in the mountain known as Jabal al-Nur about two miles from Mecca, which al-Mubarakpuri describes as four cubits long and one and three-quarter cubits wide. He spent the month of Ramadan there in particular, taking provisions with him and feeding the poor who came to him; al-Mubarakpuri dates the beginning of these retreats to about three years before the mission. Aishah's account of the beginning of revelation, which opens Sahih al-Bukhari, describes it in these terms: "The commencement of the (Divine) Revelation to Allah's Messenger was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams which came true like bright daylight, and then the love of seclusion was bestowed upon him." He worshipped in the cave "continuously for many nights" before returning to Khadijah for more provisions (Sahih al-Bukhari 3). Al-Mubarakpuri, citing Ibn Hajar, gives the period of true dreams as six months.

Revelation began when he was forty. In Aishah's report, the angel came to him in the cave and asked him to read, and he replied, "I do not know how to read." Three times the angel pressed him until he could bear it no more and released him, and the third time the angel said: "Read in the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists). Has created man from a clot. Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3). These are the opening verses of the chapter al-'Alaq: "Recite in the name of your Lord who created — created man from a clinging substance. Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous — who taught by the pen — taught man that which he knew not" (Quran 96:1–5).

He returned to Khadijah with his heart beating severely and said, "Cover me! Cover me!" When his fear had passed he told her what had happened and said that he feared for himself. Khadijah replied: "Never! By Allah, Allah will never disgrace you. You keep good relations with your kith and kin, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guests generously and assist the deserving calamity-afflicted ones." She took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, by then an old man who had lost his sight, and Waraqah, having heard what he had seen, said that this was the same angel whom Allah had sent to Moses. He wished he might live to see the day when Muhammad's people would drive him out; when Muhammad asked, "Will they drive me out?", Waraqah said that no one had ever come with anything like what he brought without meeting hostility, and that if he lived to see that day he would support him strongly. Waraqah died a few days later (Sahih al-Bukhari 3).

The date of this first revelation is given variously. Al-Mubarakpuri places it on the night of Monday, 21 Ramadan, which he equates with 10 August 610, when Muhammad was forty lunar years, six months and twelve days old. Ibn Kathir, who records a Monday as undisputed, gives the view of Ibn Ishaq and others that it was in Ramadan, in keeping with the verse "the month of Ramadhan [is that] in which was revealed the Qur'an" (Quran 2:185), and records the seventeenth and the twenty-fourth of that month among the days proposed; he also records a report from Ibn Abbas and Jabir placing the beginning of the mission on 12 Rabi al-Awwal.² The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates it to the twenty-seventh of Ramadan in 610, marking the day as uncertain.⁴

The pause and the command to warn

After the first revelation there was a pause (fatra). Its length is disputed: al-Mubarakpuri judges the most authentic report to be Ibn Sa'd's from Ibn Abbas that it lasted a few days — he reckons about ten — and rejects the commonly repeated figure of two and a half or three years. A report from Jabir ibn Abdullah in Sahih al-Bukhari describes its end in the Prophet's words: "While I was walking, all of a sudden I heard a voice from the sky. I looked up and saw the same angel, who had visited me at the cave of Hira, sitting on a chair between the sky and the earth. I got scared of him and came back home and said, 'Wrap me (in blankets).'" Then the opening of the chapter al-Muddaththir was revealed — "O you who covers himself [with a garment], arise and warn, and your Lord glorify, and your clothing purify, and uncleanliness avoid, and do not confer favor to acquire more, but for your Lord be patient" (Quran 74:1–7) — "and after this," Jabir's report continues, "the revelation started coming strongly and frequently in succession" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4).

Aishah preserved his own description of how revelation came to him. Asked by al-Harith ibn Hisham, he said that sometimes it came like the ringing of a bell, the hardest form for him, which passed when he had grasped what was revealed, and that sometimes the angel came in the form of a man and spoke to him. Aishah added that she had seen sweat drop from his forehead on a very cold day when revelation ended (Sahih al-Bukhari 2).

The first believers and the private call

The first to accept the message were those closest to him. Khadijah believed him from the first. Ali ibn Abi Talib was living in Muhammad's house: Haykal records that during a time of hardship in Mecca, Muhammad proposed to al-Abbas that the two of them lighten the burden of Abu Talib's large family, al-Abbas taking Abu Talib's son Ja'far and Muhammad taking Ali. Muhammad's freedman Zayd ibn Harithah and his friend Abu Bakr also accepted Islam at the beginning. Through Abu Bakr came Uthman ibn Affan, al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas and Talhah ibn Ubaydullah. Al-Mubarakpuri names among the other early Muslims Bilal ibn Rabah, Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah, Abu Salamah ibn Abd al-Asad, al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam of Makhzum, Uthman ibn Maz'un and his brothers Qudamah and Abdullah, Ubaydah ibn al-Harith, Sa'id ibn Zayd and his wife Fatimah bint al-Khattab, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt and Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, and records that Ibn Hisham counted more than forty.² Ammar ibn Yasir remembered a time when "the only converts with him were five slaves, two women and Abu Bakr" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3857).

For about three years the call spread privately, through personal contact. The believers prayed — twice a day in this period, al-Mubarakpuri writes, citing Ibn Hajar, since the five daily prayers had not yet been prescribed — and Ibn Hisham relates that at the times of prayer they went into the mountain valleys to pray in secret.³ Abu Talib once came upon Muhammad and Ali praying and, told that it was a prayer made obligatory upon them, told them to keep to it. In the fourth year, when a group of Muslims on their way to meet the Prophet in the hills was seen and attacked, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas struck one of the attackers and drew blood. After this, al-Mubarakpuri writes, the Prophet took the house of al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam on al-Safa as a place to meet his followers in secret and teach them the Qur'an.

The public call

The command to widen the call came in the verse "And warn, [O Muhammad], your closest kindred" (Quran 26:214). Al-Mubarakpuri, citing Ibn al-Athir, describes Muhammad gathering some forty-five men of Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib, a meeting cut short by the objections of his uncle Abu Lahab, and a second meeting at which Abu Talib told him, "I shall protect and defend you, but I cannot quit the religion of Abd al-Muttalib." A report from Ibn Abbas in Sahih al-Bukhari describes what followed. Muhammad climbed the hill of al-Safa and called out to the clans of Quraysh by name until they gathered, sending messengers if they could not come themselves. He asked whether they would believe him if he told them that horsemen in the valley were about to attack them; they said, "Yes, for we have not found you telling anything other than the truth." He then said, "I am a plain warner to you of a coming severe punishment." Abu Lahab rebuked him for having gathered them for this, and the chapter al-Masad was revealed: "May the hands of Abu Lahab be ruined, and ruined is he" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770; Quran 111:1). In a report from Abu Hurayrah in Sahih Muslim, he called on each branch of Quraysh in turn — Banu Ka'b ibn Lu'ayy, Banu Murrah ibn Ka'b, Banu Abd Shams, Banu Abd Manaf, Banu Hashim, Banu Abd al-Muttalib — to save themselves from the Fire, and ended, "O Fatimah, save yourself from the Fire! I cannot do anything for you before Allah," while promising to uphold the ties of kinship between them (Sahih Muslim 204).

With the revelation "Then declare what you are commanded and turn away from the polytheists" (Quran 15:94), he began to preach openly and to pray in the courtyard of the Kaaba by day. As the pilgrimage season approached, the leaders of Quraysh met with al-Walid ibn al-Mughirah to agree on what to tell the visiting tribes about him. According to Ibn Hisham, as al-Mubarakpuri relates, they proposed calling him a soothsayer, a madman, a poet or a sorcerer; al-Walid judged that none of these descriptions fitted what they had heard, and they settled on describing him as a sorcerer whose speech could separate son from father, brother from brother, wife from husband and a man from his clan.³ Al-Mubarakpuri connects sixteen verses of the chapter al-Muddaththir with al-Walid; they begin "Leave Me with the one I created alone" and quote the verdict he reached: "This is not but magic imitated [from others]. This is not but the word of a human being" (Quran 74:11–26).

Opposition and persecution

Quraysh sought first to have Abu Talib restrain his nephew. In the account of Ibn Hisham that al-Mubarakpuri gives, a delegation of their leaders asked Abu Talib either to stop him or to leave them to deal with him, and when Abu Talib asked his nephew to spare them both, Muhammad replied that if they put the sun in his right hand and the moon in his left he would not abandon the matter until Allah made it prevail or he perished in it.³ Abu Talib then told him, "Go and preach what you please, for by Allah, I will never forsake you." A second delegation offered Abu Talib the young Umarah ibn al-Walid in exchange for his nephew, and he refused. Al-Mubarakpuri notes that the sources give no exact date for these approaches and that the sixth year of the mission is the more likely.

Another approach was made to Muhammad himself. In Ibn Ishaq's account, which he transmits from Muhammad ibn Ka'b al-Qurazi, Utbah ibn Rabi'ah came to Muhammad on behalf of Quraysh and offered him wealth, leadership, kingship, or, if he believed himself afflicted, a physician's cure.² When Utbah had finished, Muhammad recited the opening of the chapter Fussilat until he reached its verse of prostration, and prostrated. Utbah went back to Quraysh and told them that he had heard words that were neither poetry, nor sorcery, nor soothsaying, and advised them to let him be.

The pressure fell hardest on those who lacked protection. Bilal ibn Rabah, a slave of Umayyah ibn Khalaf, was dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck and laid in the midday heat with a stone on his chest, repeating "One, One", until Abu Bakr bought and freed him. Sumayyah bint Khayyat, her husband Yasir and their son Ammar, clients of Banu Makhzum, were tortured together; Muhammad, passing them, told them to be patient and that their promised place was Paradise. Yasir died under torture, and Sumayyah was killed by Abu Jahl, becoming, in al-Mubarakpuri's words, the first woman martyr in Islam. Ammar, under torture, spoke the words his tormentors demanded, and the Qur'an's exemption for one "who is forced [to renounce his religion] while his heart is secure in faith" (Quran 16:106) is associated with him. Khabbab ibn al-Aratt was dragged over fire until his back was burnt, and women converts were persecuted too; al-Mubarakpuri names among them Zinnirah, al-Nahdiyyah and her daughter, and Umm Ubays. Men of standing were pressed through their own families: al-Mubarakpuri records that Uthman ibn Affan's uncle wrapped him in a mat of palm leaves and set fire beneath him, and that Mus'ab ibn Umayr's mother deprived him of food and turned him out of her house.

Muhammad himself was not spared. A report in Sahih al-Bukhari records that when Urwah ibn al-Zubayr asked Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As for the worst thing the polytheists had done to him, Abdullah described Uqbah ibn Abi Mu'ayt twisting a garment around his neck while he prayed in the Hijr of the Kaaba and throttling him, until Abu Bakr pushed Uqbah away, saying, "Would you kill a man just because he says, 'My Lord is Allah'?" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3856). Another report, from Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, describes the entrails of a slaughtered camel being placed on his back as he prostrated near the Kaaba, while Abu Jahl and his companions watched, until his daughter Fatimah came and removed them (Sahih al-Bukhari 240). Abu Lahab made his two sons divorce Muhammad's daughters Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, and Abu Lahab's wife, Umm Jamil bint Harb, sister of Abu Sufyan, scattered thorns in his path; the chapter al-Masad names her as "the carrier of firewood" (Quran 111:4).

Migration to Abyssinia

By the middle of the fifth year of the mission the persecution had grown severe, and the revelation of the verse "the earth of Allah is spacious" (Quran 39:10) pointed towards emigration. Muhammad told his companions, "If you leave for the land of Abyssinia, there is a king who oppresses no one, and it is a land of truth; stay there until Allah finds you a relief from this misery." In Rajab of the fifth year, twelve men and four women left for Abyssinia, among them Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, and sailed from the port of Shu'aybah in two boats to the country of the Negus, whom al-Mubarakpuri names as Ashamah.

In Ramadan of the same year, Muhammad recited the chapter al-Najm in the sanctuary and prostrated at its end, and those present prostrated with him. A report from Abdullah ibn Mas'ud in Sahih al-Bukhari records that everyone with him prostrated except an old man who lifted a handful of earth to his forehead (Sahih al-Bukhari 1067), and one from Ibn Abbas that the Muslims and the polytheists prostrated with him (Sahih al-Bukhari 1071). News reached the emigrants that Quraysh had accepted Islam, and in Shawwal they started back; within an hour of Mecca they learned that it was not so. Some returned to Abyssinia, and others entered Mecca secretly or under the protection of a man of standing.

A second and larger migration followed. Al-Mubarakpuri, citing Zad al-Ma'ad, gives its numbers as eighty-three men and nineteen women, or eighteen in some versions, and notes that whether Ammar was among them is uncertain. Quraysh sent Amr ibn al-As and Abdullah ibn Abi Rabi'ah to the Negus with gifts for him and his clergy, asking that the emigrants be handed over. The Negus summoned the Muslims, and Ja'far ibn Abi Talib spoke for them. In Ibn Ishaq's account, as al-Mubarakpuri gives it, Ja'far described their former state — "We were an ignorant people. We worshipped idols and ate the meat of dead carcasses" — and the change brought by a messenger who "commanded us to be truthful in our speech, fulfill trusts, nurture the ties of kinship, be kind to our neighbor".³ When the Negus asked to hear something of what had been revealed, Ja'far recited the opening of the chapter Maryam, and the Negus said that these words and those revealed to Jesus were rays of light radiating from the same source. The next day the two envoys told him that the Muslims spoke blasphemy about Jesus; Ja'far answered that they said of him what their Prophet had brought, that he was "the servant of Allah, His Messenger, His spirit and His Word breathed into the Virgin Mary". The Negus refused to surrender the emigrants and returned the gifts of Quraysh. Al-Mubarakpuri notes that some accounts place Amr's mission to the Negus after Badr, and suggests that there were two delegations.

Hamzah and Umar

In Dhu al-Hijjah of the sixth year, Abu Jahl insulted Muhammad at al-Safa and struck him on the head with a stone, drawing blood. Al-Mubarakpuri, following Ibn Hisham, relates that a slave girl of Abdullah ibn Jud'an saw it and told Muhammad's uncle Hamzah ibn Abd al-Muttalib as he returned from hunting.² Hamzah went to Abu Jahl in the sanctuary, struck him with his bow and said, "Do you abuse him when I too follow his religion?" When men of Makhzum rose to defend Abu Jahl, Abu Jahl told them to leave Hamzah alone, admitting that he had abused his nephew.

Umar ibn al-Khattab accepted Islam in the same month, three days after Hamzah by the reckoning of Ibn al-Jawzi that al-Mubarakpuri follows. A report in Jami' at-Tirmidhi from Ibn Umar records Muhammad's prayer: "O Allah! Honor Islam through the most dear of these two men to You: through Abu Jahl or through Umar ibn al-Khattab," and adds, "the most dear of them to Him was Umar" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3681, which al-Tirmidhi grades hasan sahih gharib). Al-Mubarakpuri gives two accounts of how Umar came to Islam. In one, preserved in Ibn al-Jawzi's history of Umar, Umar heard the Prophet recite the chapter al-Haqqah at the Kaaba, and said, "Then Islam came into my heart." In the other, Umar set out with his sword intending to kill Muhammad, was told on the way that his own sister and her husband had become Muslims, and went to their house, where Khabbab ibn al-Aratt was reading the chapter Ta-Ha to them. He struck his brother-in-law and his sister; seeing his sister's face covered in blood, he asked to see the page, read the opening verses of Ta-Ha, and asked to be taken to Muhammad. He went to the house of al-Arqam, where Hamzah told those inside to let him in, and there he accepted Islam. Umar's brother-in-law was Sa'id ibn Zayd, who later recalled that Umar had once tied him up to force him to leave Islam, before Umar himself accepted it (Sahih al-Bukhari 3862). After Umar's conversion the Muslims prayed openly at the Kaaba, and Abdullah ibn Mas'ud said, "We have been powerful since Umar embraced Islam" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3863).

The boycott, the Year of Sorrow, and the approach to Medina

The boycott of Banu Hashim

When neither persuasion nor pressure had moved Abu Talib, Quraysh turned against the clans that protected Muhammad. A report in Sahih al-Bukhari preserves the memory of the place where the agreement was made: on the day of sacrifice at Mina, years later, Muhammad said that the next day they would stop at Khayf Bani Kinanah, the Muhassab, where Quraysh and Banu Kinanah had sworn together against Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib "that they would not intermarry with them or deal with them in business until they handed over the Prophet to them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1590). In Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Kathir quotes it, the terms were written down and the document hung inside the Kaaba.¹ The sources name its writer differently — Ibn Ishaq as Mansur ibn Ikrimah of Abd al-Dar, others as al-Nadr ibn al-Harith or Talhah ibn Abi Talhah — and Ibn Kathir judges it well established that the writer was Mansur.² Abu Lahab alone of Banu Hashim left his clan and joined Quraysh.

Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib, those who had accepted Islam and those who had not, withdrew into the valley known as Shi'b Abi Talib. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the confinement from the beginning of Muharram in the seventh year of the mission to the tenth year, a period of three years. Quraysh bought up the food that reached Mecca so that none came to the valley; those inside ate leaves and skins, and the crying of their children could be heard outside. When Hakim ibn Hizam tried to take wheat to his aunt Khadijah, Abu Jahl stopped him, and it was another Qurayshi, Abu al-Bakhtari, who intervened to let it through. Each night Abu Talib had his nephew lie down in his usual place and then, when the others were asleep, move to another, to foil any attempt on his life, while Muhammad continued to go out to pray at the Kaaba and to preach to the pilgrims in the sacred months.

The boycott was ended by men of Quraysh who were bound to the besieged by kinship. In Muharram of the tenth year, Hisham ibn Amr, who had been taking food into the valley secretly at night, went to Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayyah of Makhzum and reproached him for accepting the treatment of his uncles; they were joined by al-Mut'im ibn Adi, Abu al-Bakhtari and Zam'ah ibn al-Aswad, five men who agreed to repudiate the document. After circling the Kaaba seven times, Zuhayr went to the assembly of Quraysh in the sanctuary and swore that he would not rest until the document was torn up. Abu Jahl answered that it would never be torn, and the others spoke in Zuhayr's support. In Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Kathir quotes it, al-Mut'im rose to tear up the document and found that worms had already consumed it, all except the words "In your name, O God!"; in the version that Ibn Hisham adds from some scholars, and that al-Mubarakpuri follows, Muhammad had told Abu Talib of this beforehand, and Abu Talib brought the news to Quraysh before the document was examined. The document was cancelled and the clans returned to their homes.¹

The Year of Sorrow

Within months of the end of the boycott Muhammad lost the two people who had most sustained him, and al-Mubarakpuri writes that the year came to be called the Year of Grief. The order of the two deaths is reported differently. Al-Mubarakpuri places Abu Talib's death first, in Rajab of the tenth year of the mission, six months after the boycott ended, and Khadijah's two or three months later, in Ramadan, when she was sixty-five and Muhammad fifty. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates Khadijah's death to 10 Ramadan (19 April 620) and Abu Talib's to Shawwal (May 620), noting reports that he died three or fifty-five days after her, or some time before her.⁴ A report in Sahih al-Bukhari from Hisham ibn Urwah's father states that Khadijah died three years before the Prophet left for Medina (Sahih al-Bukhari 3896).

A report from al-Musayyab in Sahih al-Bukhari describes Abu Talib's last hours. Muhammad went to him and found Abu Jahl and Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah sitting with him. "O my uncle! Say: La ilaha illallah," he urged, "an expression with which I will defend your case before Allah." The two men asked Abu Talib whether he would leave the religion of Abd al-Muttalib, and the last thing he said was that he remained upon it. Muhammad said that he would go on asking forgiveness for him unless he were forbidden, and verses were revealed concerning the matter (Sahih al-Bukhari 3884), among them the verse addressed to Muhammad, "Indeed, [O Muhammad], you do not guide whom you like, but Allah guides whom He wills" (Quran 28:56).

Khadijah's place in his memory is recorded in the hadith. Abu Hurayrah related that Jibril came to Muhammad as she was bringing him a dish of food and told him to greet her on behalf of her Lord and on his own, and to give her the glad tidings of a palace in Paradise "where there will be neither any noise nor any toil" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3820). Aishah, who never met her, said that she was more jealous of Khadijah than of any of the Prophet's other wives, because he mentioned her so often and, whenever he slaughtered a sheep, sent portions to Khadijah's friends (Sahih al-Bukhari 3818).

With Abu Talib gone, the protection of the clan was no longer the same. Ibn Hisham relates, as al-Mubarakpuri quotes him, that a man of Quraysh threw dust on Muhammad's head in the street, and that when he came home one of his daughters washed it off, weeping.³ "Do not weep, my daughter," he told her. "Allah will verily protect your father." He said that Quraysh had not been able to harm him as they did after Abu Talib's death. Abu Bakr, too, found Mecca closed to him. A report from Aishah in Sahih al-Bukhari relates that he set out to emigrate to Abyssinia and had reached Bark al-Ghimad when Ibn al-Daghinah, the chief of the Qarah tribe, met him, declared that a man who helped the destitute, kept the ties of kinship and honoured his guests should not be driven out of his land, and brought him back under his protection. Abu Bakr later gave up that protection, telling Ibn al-Daghinah that he was content with the protection of Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 3905).

Ta'if

In Shawwal of the tenth year of the mission, Muhammad set out on foot for Ta'if, about sixty kilometres from Mecca, with his freedman Zayd ibn Harithah, to seek support from the tribe of Thaqif. Al-Mubarakpuri names the three brothers who led Thaqif — Abd Yalil, Mas'ud and Habib, sons of Amr ibn Umayr — and records that each refused him. One said that he would tear the covering of the Kaaba if Allah had sent him; another asked whether Allah could find no one else to send; the third said that he would not speak to him at all. Muhammad asked them at least not to make his visit known. He stayed in Ta'if for ten days, speaking to its leading men one after another, until the more foolish among them and their servants chased him through the lanes, pelting him with stones, and drove him out of the town. Blood ran down both his legs, and Zayd, trying to shield him, was wounded in the head. The crowd pursued them for two or three miles, and the two took refuge against the wall of a vineyard. The sira preserves the supplication he made there, which begins, "O Allah! To You alone I complain of my weakness."

The vineyard belonged to Utbah and Shaybah, the sons of Rabi'ah, and their Christian servant Addas brought him a bunch of grapes. In Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Kathir quotes it, Muhammad said "In the name of God" before eating, and when Addas said that the people of the land did not use such words, Muhammad asked where he came from.¹ Addas answered that he was from Nineveh. "The town of the righteous man Jonah son of Matta," Muhammad said, and when Addas asked how he knew of Jonah, he replied, "He is my brother. He was a Prophet and so am I." Addas bent over him and kissed his head, his hands and his feet.

A report from Aishah in Sahih al-Bukhari preserves Muhammad's own memory of the day. Asked whether he had known a day harder than Uhud, he said that the worst he had suffered from her people was on the day he presented himself to Ibn Abd Yalil ibn Abd Kulal and was refused. He walked away overwhelmed with sorrow and did not recover himself until he reached Qarn al-Tha'alib, where a cloud shaded him and Jibril called to him, saying that Allah had heard what his people had said and had sent the angel of the mountains to do whatever he commanded. The angel offered to bring the two mountains of Mecca, al-Akhshabayn, down upon them. Muhammad answered, "No, but I hope that Allah will let them beget children who will worship Allah Alone, and will worship none besides Him" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231).

On the way back he stayed some days at Nakhlah, and the sira connects with this halt the verses that tell of jinn who listened to the Qur'an: "And [mention, O Muhammad], when We directed to you a few of the jinn, listening to the Qur'an" (Quran 46:29), and "It has been revealed to me that a group of the jinn listened and said, 'Indeed, we have heard an amazing Qur'an'" (Quran 72:1). He could not safely re-enter Mecca without protection. He sent to al-Akhnas ibn Shariq, who declined on the ground that he was an ally rather than a full member of Quraysh, and to Suhayl ibn Amr, who also declined; al-Mut'im ibn Adi agreed, armed his sons, and stood guard with them while Muhammad entered the sanctuary, prayed two units of prayer and went home. Muhammad remembered the protection. After Badr, a report from al-Mut'im's son Jubayr records, he said that had al-Mut'im been alive and interceded for the captives, he would have released them for his sake (Sahih al-Bukhari 3139).

New marriages

In Shawwal of the tenth year Muhammad married Sawdah bint Zam'ah, an early convert who had gone to Abyssinia in the second migration with her husband al-Sakran ibn Amr, who died there or soon after their return. In the same period the marriage contract with Abu Bakr's daughter Aishah was concluded. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the contract to the eleventh year of the mission, two years and five months before the Hijra.

The search for support among the tribes

From the fourth year of his mission until the last pilgrimage season before the Hijra, Muhammad presented his message to the tribes who came to Mecca for the pilgrimage and the fairs, and al-Mubarakpuri, citing Ibn Sa'd, writes that he did so most intensively in the season of the tenth year. Ibn Ishaq names several of the tribes he approached, among them Banu Abdullah of Kalb, Banu Hanifah, and Banu Amir ibn Sa'sa'ah.² One of the men of Banu Amir, Bahirah ibn Firas, asked whether, if they supported him and Allah gave him victory, the rule would pass to them after him; Muhammad replied that the matter belonged to Allah, who placed it wherever He willed, and the tribe declined.

The Isra and Mi'raj

The Qur'an opens the chapter al-Isra with the Night Journey, the Isra, that gave it its name: "Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs" (Quran 17:1). A report from Anas ibn Malik in Sahih Muslim gives the account in detail. Muhammad was brought al-Buraq, "a tall white beast, bigger than a donkey and smaller than a mule, whose stride reaches as far as he can see", and rode it to Bayt al-Maqdis, Jerusalem, where he tethered it to the ring used by the prophets, entered the mosque and prayed two units of prayer. Jibril offered him a vessel of wine and a vessel of milk; he chose the milk, and Jibril said, "You have chosen the Fitrah." Then Jibril took him up through the heavens. At each gate he was asked who was with him and whether he had been sent for, and at each heaven Muhammad was welcomed by a prophet: Adam in the first; the cousins Jesus son of Mary and John son of Zechariah in the second; Joseph, "who had been given half of worldly beauty", in the third; Idris in the fourth; Aaron in the fifth; Moses in the sixth; and in the seventh Abraham, leaning with his back against al-Bayt al-Ma'mur, the Much-Frequented House, which seventy thousand angels enter every day and never return to. He was taken to Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Lote-Tree of the Utmost Boundary, whose leaves were like the ears of elephants and its fruit like large earthenware jars.

There fifty prayers a day and night were enjoined upon him. On his way down Moses told him that his community would not be able to bear it, and sent him back to ask for a reduction. The number was reduced by five at a time as he went back and forth between his Lord and Moses, until he was told: "O Muhammad, they are five prayers each day and night, for every prayer there will be a tenfold (reward), and that is fifty prayers" (Sahih Muslim 162). A separate report from Abu Dharr describes the roof of his house in Mecca opening that night, and Jibril opening and washing his chest with water of Zamzam before the ascent (Sahih al-Bukhari 349). The chapter al-Najm also speaks of what was seen "at the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary" (Quran 53:14), and closes the passage, "He certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord" (Quran 53:18). When Quraysh refused to believe his account of the journey, a report from Jabir ibn Abdullah records, he stood in the Hijr and Allah displayed Jerusalem before him, so that he described it to them as he looked at it (Sahih al-Bukhari 3886).

The date of the journey is disputed. Al-Mubarakpuri lists six views, ranging from the first year of the mission to the thirteenth and including the twenty-seventh of Rajab in the tenth year, and sets aside the first three: Khadijah died in Ramadan of the tenth year before the five prayers had been made obligatory, and it is agreed that the five prayers were prescribed on the night of the journey. Among the remaining three — Ramadan of the twelfth year, Muharram of the thirteenth, and Rabi al-Awwal of the thirteenth — he finds nothing to prefer one over another, except that the context of the chapter al-Isra points to a late date. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates it to 27 Rajab 621.⁴

The pledges of al-Aqabah

In the pilgrimage season of the eleventh year, Muhammad met six men of the Khazraj of Yathrib at al-Aqabah, near Mina. In al-Mubarakpuri's account, he asked whether they were allies of the Jews of Yathrib, and when they heard him they said to one another that this must be the prophet of whom the Jews had spoken to them. They accepted Islam, telling him that no people were so divided by hatred and enmity as theirs, and that Allah might unite them through him.

In the next season twelve men came: five of the six, and seven others, ten of them of Khazraj and two of Aws. At al-Aqabah they gave the pledge that became known as the First Pledge. Ubadah ibn al-Samit, one of them, recorded its terms: that they would not associate anything with Allah, steal, commit illegal sexual intercourse, kill their children, utter slander, or disobey in what was good; whoever fulfilled the pledge would be rewarded by Allah; whoever fell into one of these sins and was punished for it in this world would find the punishment an expiation; and whoever's sin Allah concealed, his case was left to Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 18). Muhammad sent Mus'ab ibn Umayr of Abd al-Dar back with them to teach Islam and the Qur'an in Yathrib. Mus'ab stayed with As'ad ibn Zurarah and went with him from clan to clan. Al-Mubarakpuri relates that when the two were sitting with new converts in the quarter of Banu Zafar, Usayd ibn Hudayr, one of the chiefs of the clans of Abd al-Ashhal and Zafar, came at them with his spear and told them to stop. Mus'ab invited him to sit and listen, and to reject what he heard if he disliked it. "That's fair," said Usayd; he planted his spear in the ground, listened to the Qur'an, and accepted Islam, and the other chief, Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, followed him.

In the pilgrimage season of the thirteenth year a larger party came from Yathrib. Ka'b ibn Malik's account, which al-Mubarakpuri follows, relates that they met Muhammad secretly at al-Aqabah after a third of the night had passed: seventy-three men and two women, Nusaybah bint Ka'b, known as Umm Umarah, of Banu Mazin ibn al-Najjar, and Asma' bint Amr of Banu Salamah. Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas, who in al-Mubarakpuri's account was then still following the religion of his people, spoke first. Muhammad, he told them, was honoured among his own people, who had protected him; if they meant to take him to their town and could defend him against his enemies, they should take on the burden, but if they would later abandon him, they should leave him where he was. Al-Mubarakpuri, citing a report of Jabir recorded by Imam Ahmad, gives the terms of the pledge: to listen and obey in hardship and ease, to spend in plenty and in scarcity, to enjoin good and forbid evil, to fear the censure of no one in the service of Allah, and to protect Muhammad as they protected themselves, their wives and their children, "then Paradise is in store for you". When Abu al-Haytham ibn al-Tayyihan asked whether, once they had cut their ties with the Jews of Yathrib and Allah had given Muhammad victory, he might return to his own people, he answered, in Ibn Hisham's account, "Your blood will be my blood. In life and death I will be with you and you with me."²

Muhammad asked them to name twelve leaders (nuqaba') to be responsible for their people, and they chose nine of Khazraj — As'ad ibn Zurarah, Sa'd ibn al-Rabi', Abdullah ibn Rawahah, Rafi' ibn Malik, al-Bara' ibn Ma'rur, Abdullah ibn Amr ibn Haram, Ubadah ibn al-Samit, Sa'd ibn Ubadah and al-Mundhir ibn Amr — and three of Aws: Usayd ibn Hudayr, Sa'd ibn Khaythamah and Rifa'ah ibn Abd al-Mundhir. He told them that they were responsible for their people as the disciples of Jesus son of Mary had been, and that he was responsible for his own. The women's pledge was given by word, without a handclasp. A cry in the night exposed the meeting. Al-Abbas ibn Ubadah offered to fall on the people at Mina the next morning, and Muhammad replied, "We have not been commanded to follow that course." When the leaders of Quraysh came to the camp of the Khazraj the following day to protest, the polytheists of Yathrib, who knew nothing of the meeting, swore that the report was untrue, and Abdullah ibn Ubayy said that his people would do nothing of the kind without consulting him.

The Hijra and the foundations of Medina

The emigration of the Companions

After the second pledge the Muslims of Mecca began to leave for Yathrib, most of them in small groups and some alone, and the sources record what the departures cost. Umm Salamah, in the account al-Mubarakpuri gives from Ibn Hisham, was parted from her husband Abu Salamah when he emigrated and lost her young son to his family; she spent a year weeping before a relative persuaded the others to return the child and let her go.³ She set out alone with him on a journey of some five hundred kilometres, until Uthman ibn Talhah met her at al-Tan'im and escorted her to Quba, where she joined her husband. Suhayb ibn Sinan was allowed to leave only after he had given up all his wealth, and Muhammad, hearing of it, said, "Suhayb has profited." Umar ibn al-Khattab, Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah and Hisham ibn al-As agreed to meet outside Mecca and travel together; Hisham was detained, and after Ayyash had reached Medina his brothers Abu Jahl and al-Harith came after him and persuaded him to return to Mecca, telling him that their mother had sworn not to comb her hair or shade herself from the sun until she saw him.

The council at the Dar al-Nadwa and the night of departure

In al-Mubarakpuri's chronology, the leaders of Quraysh met at the Dar al-Nadwa on Thursday, 26 Safar in the fourteenth year of the mission, which he equates with 12 September 622, about two and a half months after the second pledge. Ibn Hisham, whom he follows, names the men present from each clan, among them Abu Jahl, Jubayr ibn Mut'im, Utbah and Shaybah the sons of Rabi'ah, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, Hakim ibn Hizam and Umayyah ibn Khalaf.² Expelling Muhammad from Mecca was proposed and rejected, for fear that he would win over other Arabs and return with them; imprisoning him for life was rejected for fear that his followers would free him by force. Abu Jahl then proposed that a young man be chosen from each clan and that all of them strike Muhammad together, so that responsibility for his blood would be shared among the clans and his own clan could not avenge him. The proposal was accepted. The Qur'an refers to the plot: "And [remember, O Muhammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners" (Quran 8:30).

Aishah's account in Sahih al-Bukhari describes the day Muhammad told Abu Bakr of his own plans. Abu Bakr had already prepared two riding camels, feeding them for four months. Muhammad came to Abu Bakr's house at noon, at an hour when he had never come before, with his head covered, asked that those present leave, and told him, "I have been given permission to emigrate"; Abu Bakr asked to accompany him and was told that he would. When food for the journey had been packed in a leather bag, Abu Bakr's daughter Asma' cut a piece from her waist-belt to tie its mouth, and for that she was called Dhat al-Nitaqayn, "she of the two belts" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3905).

That night, al-Mubarakpuri relates from Ibn Hisham, the young men of the clans gathered outside Muhammad's house.³ Muhammad told Ali to sleep in his bed wrapped in his green cloak and assured him that no harm would come to him. He went out through the men, casting a handful of dust over them and reciting the verse "And We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier and covered them, so they do not see" (Quran 36:9), and went to Abu Bakr's house. When the watchers looked in, they saw Ali in the bed and took him for Muhammad; only in the morning, when Ali rose, did they learn that Muhammad was gone. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the departure to the night of 27 Safar, 12 or 13 September 622. Quraysh beat Ali and held him for a time at the Kaaba, and Abu Jahl, going to Abu Bakr's house, struck Asma' when she would not tell him where her father was.

The cave of Thawr and the road to Medina

Muhammad and Abu Bakr went south to Mount Thawr, about five miles from Mecca, and hid in a cave near its summit for three nights. Aishah's account records the arrangements. Abu Bakr's son Abdullah spent the nights with them and returned to Mecca before dawn, so that he could bring them the news of Quraysh each evening; Abu Bakr's freedman Amir ibn Fuhayrah brought Abu Bakr's milch sheep to the cave a little after nightfall, so that they had fresh milk, and drove the flock away again before daybreak, doing the same on each of the three nights. They had hired as a guide a man of Banu al-Dil, of the family of Banu Abd ibn Adi and allied to the family of al-As ibn Wa'il, who still followed the religion of Quraysh but whom they trusted with their camels, and he met them at the cave after three nights (Sahih al-Bukhari 3905). Al-Mubarakpuri names him Abdullah ibn Urayqit.

Quraysh offered a reward equal to the blood money of each of the two men — a hundred camels, al-Mubarakpuri writes — to anyone who brought them back dead or alive (Sahih al-Bukhari 3906). Searchers reached the mouth of the cave. Abu Bakr recalled saying to the Prophet, "If any of them should look under his feet, he would see us," and being answered, "O Abu Bakr! What do you think of two, the third of whom is Allah?" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3653). The Qur'an recalls the moment: "Allah has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out [of Makkah] as one of two, when they were in the cave and he said to his companion, 'Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us.' And Allah sent down His tranquility upon him" (Quran 9:40).

They left the cave, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, on Monday, 1 Rabi al-Awwal, and the guide took them by the coastal road. Suraqah ibn Malik ibn Ju'sham, hearing that riders had been seen on the coast, set out after them for the reward. In his own account, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, his horse stumbled and threw him, and as he came close its forelegs sank into the ground up to the knees; each time he cast divining arrows the lot told him not to pursue them. He called out to them, told them of the reward on their heads and offered them provisions, and asked for a written guarantee of safety, which Amir ibn Fuhayrah wrote for him on a piece of leather (Sahih al-Bukhari 3906).

Quba and the entry into Medina

The Muslims of Medina, having heard that Muhammad had left Mecca, went out to the stony plain of al-Harrah every morning to wait for him until the midday heat drove them home. On the day he came, a Jewish man on one of the forts was the first to see the travellers and called out to the people that the one they were waiting for had arrived. Many of those who came to meet him had never seen him and greeted Abu Bakr, until the sun fell on Muhammad and Abu Bakr shaded him with his cloak (Sahih al-Bukhari 3906).

He stopped first at Quba, on the upper side of Medina, among the clan of Banu Amr ibn Awf. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the arrival to Monday, 8 Rabi al-Awwal in the fourteenth year of the mission, 23 September 622, the day on which, by al-Mansurpuri's reckoning, Muhammad completed fifty-three years; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates it to 20 September.⁴ He lodged with Kulthum ibn al-Hadm, or, in other reports, with Sa'd ibn Khaythamah. Ali, who had stayed in Mecca for three days to return to their owners the goods that people had deposited with Muhammad, joined him at Quba. There Muhammad founded a mosque, the mosque which the Qur'an calls "founded on righteousness from the first day" (Quran 9:108; Sahih al-Bukhari 3906). The length of his stay at Quba is reported differently: four days in Ibn Ishaq's account, and in the reports of Sahih al-Bukhari ten nights, ten-odd nights, fourteen nights and twenty-four; Anas ibn Malik's report gives fourteen (Sahih al-Bukhari 3932).²

On the Friday he rode on towards the centre of Medina and led the Friday prayer on the way, in the valley of Banu Salim ibn Awf, with about a hundred men. Anas remembered the scene as he entered the town, with Abu Bakr riding behind him and the men of Banu al-Najjar, the kin of Abd al-Muttalib's mother, walking around him armed with their swords (Sahih al-Bukhari 428). Each of the Ansar asked him to stay with them, and in al-Mubarakpuri's account he answered each of them, "Leave it (camel) on its way, for it is commanded." It knelt on a plot of land among Banu al-Najjar, and he lodged in the nearby house of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari (Sahih al-Bukhari 3911), taking its lower floor as his residence. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the entry into Medina to 12 Rabi al-Awwal, 24 September 622.⁴

His household followed. Al-Mubarakpuri lists among those who came later his wife Sawdah, his daughters Fatimah and Umm Kulthum, Usamah ibn Zayd and Umm Ayman, and Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr with Abu Bakr's family, Aishah among them. His daughter Zaynab stayed in Mecca with her husband Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi' until after Badr. When, under Umar, the Muslims came to date their years, they counted them from the Hijra, and al-Sallabi, citing Ibn Hajar, records that the beginning of the year was moved from Rabi al-Awwal, the month of the arrival, to Muharram, the first month after the resolve to emigrate had been made at the second pledge of al-Aqabah; that is why the Islamic calendar begins with Muharram.

The mosque and the people of the Suffa

The plot where the camel had knelt was a yard for drying dates belonging to two orphan boys, Suhayl and Sahl, under the guardianship of As'ad ibn Zurarah. When the boys offered it as a gift, Muhammad, the report in Sahih al-Bukhari adds, bought it from them (Sahih al-Bukhari 3906). Anas records that Muhammad sent for their clan and said, "O Banu An-Najjar! Suggest to me the price of this (walled) piece of land of yours," and that they answered, "No! By Allah! We do not demand its price except from Allah." There were graves of polytheists on the land, uneven ground and date palms; he had the graves removed, the ground levelled and the palms cut, and the trunks were set up as the wall facing the qiblah.^[f] The Companions carried stones for the building reciting verses, and Muhammad worked with them, repeating, "There is no goodness except that of the Hereafter, O Allah! So please forgive the Ansar and the Muhajirah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 428). Al-Mubarakpuri describes the building as walls of stone and adobe brick under a roof of palm branches, with its qiblah at first towards Jerusalem. Rooms for the Prophet's household were built beside it, and it was in one of these that Aishah, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, joined his household in Shawwal of the first year; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi places the marriage in Shawwal of the second year.⁴

At the northern side of the mosque a place, the Suffa, was set aside for Muslims who had no family and no home. Abu Hurayrah, who was one of them, described them as "the guests of Islam who had neither families, nor money, nor anybody to depend upon"; when charity was brought to Muhammad he sent it to them without taking any of it, and when a gift was brought he sent them part of it and kept part. In one of his reports he remembered being told, when he was hungry, to call the people of the Suffa to share a single bowl of milk, handing it to each of them in turn until all had drunk their fill, and drinking only after them, before the Prophet drank what remained (Sahih al-Bukhari 6452).

The call to prayer

When the Muslims first came to Medina they gathered for prayer at times they judged for themselves, with no one calling them. A report from Ibn Umar in Sahih al-Bukhari records the discussion that followed: some proposed a bell like the Christians' and some a horn like the Jews', and Umar suggested that a man be sent to call the people to prayer, and Muhammad told Bilal to stand and call (Sahih al-Bukhari 604). Sunan Abi Dawud preserves the account of Abdullah ibn Zayd, who saw in a dream a man teaching him the words of the call, and the Prophet's instruction that he teach them to Bilal, whose voice carried further (Sunan Abi Dawud 499, graded hasan by its editor).

The Muhajirun and the Ansar

Muhammad joined the emigrants and the Muslims of Medina in pairs of brotherhood. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, one of the emigrants, recalled that he was made the brother of Sa'd ibn al-Rabi', who told him that he was the richest of the Ansar and offered him half of his property and one of his two wives. Abd al-Rahman thanked him and asked, "Is there any market-place where trade is practised?" He was directed to the market of Banu Qaynuqa, began trading there in dried curd and butter, and within days was able to marry (Sahih al-Bukhari 2048). When the Ansar asked Muhammad to divide their date palms between themselves and the emigrants, he declined; instead the emigrants worked the orchards and shared the fruit (Sahih al-Bukhari 2325). The brothers at first inherited from one another, until the verse on heirs (Quran 4:33) ended the arrangement (Sahih al-Bukhari 4580). The Qur'an describes the Ansar as those who "love those who emigrated to them and find not any want in their breasts of what they [i.e., the emigrants] were given but give [them] preference over themselves, even though they are in privation" (Quran 59:9).

The Constitution of Medina

Ibn Ishaq preserved the text of a written agreement that Muhammad made between the emigrants of Quraysh, the Muslims of Yathrib, and those who followed them, the document now known as the Constitution of Medina.²

That name is a modern one, and the document does not use it of itself. Ovamir Anjum's study for the Yaqeen Institute, which translates and annotates the text, records that it calls itself a kitab, a writ, and a sahifa, a document or scroll; and that the question of which modern term fits it — constitution, dustur; treaty, 'ahd; charter, wathiqah; truce, muwada'ah; or safe conduct, aman — is a real one rather than a quibble, since the label chosen shapes what the reader expects to find. The description that has attached itself most firmly comes from the twentieth-century Indian scholar of sira Muhammad Hamidullah, who called it the first written constitution in human history.⁶

The same study sets out how the text reaches us, and the position is more qualified than the document's fame suggests. It survives in two main versions, that of Ibn Ishaq, who died in 150 AH, and that of the philologist Abu Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam, who died in 224 AH. Numerous sound hadith reports corroborate parts of its content, and no scholar classical or modern has disputed that Muhammad made one or more agreements with the inhabitants of Yathrib soon after arriving and afterwards put them in writing. What has been questioned is its authenticity as a single document, because no sound chain of transmission survives for it as a whole: the Syrian historian Yusuf al-Ishsh pressed the point that it appears in no book of fiqh or sound hadith despite its legal importance and is reported by Ibn Ishaq without an isnad. Anjum records that view as an outlier, most Muslim and non-Muslim scholars accepting the document as authentic in some form, and notes that the open questions among them are when exactly it was composed, whether it is one document or several agreements later gathered by the compilers of sira, and which of the Jewish groups of the city were parties to it and which were not. He adds that classical scholarship read it within the setting of early Medinan life as an early instance of the dhimmah, the protected legal status that became the standard Islamic norm.⁶ In the summary al-Mubarakpuri gives from Ibn Hisham, it begins as "a document from Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, concerning the Emigrants and Helpers and those who followed and strove with them", and declares them "one nation to the exclusion of other people".³ The emigrants of Quraysh and each clan of the Ansar were to pay blood money and ransom their captives among themselves; the believers were not to leave any of their number destitute by failing to help him with a ransom or blood money; they were to stand together against any among them who acted unjustly, "even if he be his son"; a believer was not to kill a believer for the sake of an unbeliever, nor support an unbeliever against a believer; and the protection of Allah extended equally to the humblest of them. Jews who followed the believers were to have their help and not be wronged. The peace of the believers was indivisible, no believer was to shelter a criminal, deliberate killing entailed retaliation unless the heirs agreed otherwise, and disputes were to be referred to Allah and to Muhammad.

A further set of clauses, which al-Mubarakpuri gives from Ibn Hisham as a treaty with the Jews, declared the Jews of Banu Awf "one community with the believers. The Jews will profess their religion and the Muslims theirs."³ Each party was to bear its own expenses and come to the other's help if attacked; they were to consult one another, and the wronged party was to be aided; the Jews were to share the costs of war while they fought alongside the believers; neither party was to give any support to Quraysh; each was to defend its own quarter of the town against attack; disputes between the parties were to be referred to Allah and His Messenger; and Medina was to be sacred and inviolable for all who joined the treaty.

Early Medina: the Jews of the city, Ashura, and the qiblah

Abdullah ibn Salam, one of the Jews of Medina, went out with the crowds when Muhammad arrived. "When I gazed upon the face of the Messenger of Allah," he recalled, "I knew that this face was not the face of a liar," and the first words he heard him say were: "O you people! Spread the Salam, feed (others), and perform Salat while the people are sleeping; you will enter Paradise with (the greeting of) Salam" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2485, which al-Tirmidhi grades sahih). A report in Sahih al-Bukhari records that Abdullah came to Muhammad, asked him three questions which he said only a prophet could answer, and accepted Islam (Sahih al-Bukhari 3329). In another, Muhammad found the Jews of Medina fasting on the day of Ashura and was told that it was the day on which Allah rescued the Children of Israel from their enemy; he said, "We have more right to Moses than you," fasted that day and told the Muslims to fast it (Sahih al-Bukhari 2004).

For sixteen or seventeen months after his arrival Muhammad prayed facing Jerusalem, while wishing, al-Bara' ibn Azib recalled, to face the Kaaba (Sahih al-Bukhari 40). Then the command came: "We have certainly seen the turning of your face, [O Muhammad], toward the heaven, and We will surely turn you to a qiblah with which you will be pleased. So turn your face toward al-Masjid al-Haram. And wherever you [believers] are, turn your faces toward it [in prayer]" (Quran 2:144). Al-Bara' recorded that the first prayer Muhammad offered facing the Kaaba was the afternoon prayer, and that a man who had prayed with him passed by another mosque where the people were bowing in prayer and told them, and they turned towards the Kaaba as they were (Sahih al-Bukhari 40). Al-Mubarakpuri dates the change to Sha'ban of the second year, February 624; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi to Rajab of the same year.⁴ The fast of Ramadan was prescribed in the same period, in Sha'ban of the second year according to the TDV chronology.⁴

The Medinan campaigns, 1–5 AH

Permission to fight and the first expeditions

In Medina the Qur'an gave the Muslims leave to fight: "Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory. [They are] those who have been evicted from their homes without right — only because they say, 'Our Lord is Allah'" (Quran 22:39–40). From the first year after the Hijra, parties went out from Medina along the routes by which the caravans of Quraysh travelled between Mecca and Syria. Al-Mubarakpuri lists them in order. In Ramadan of 1 AH Hamzah led thirty emigrants to the coast at Sif al-Bahr; in Shawwal Ubaydah ibn al-Harith led sixty horsemen towards Rabigh; in Dhu al-Qa'dah Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas led twenty men to al-Kharrar. In Safar of 2 AH Muhammad went out himself for the first time, with seventy men, to al-Abwa and Waddan, and concluded an agreement of mutual non-aggression with the tribe of Banu Damrah; in Rabi al-Awwal he led two hundred men to Buwat after a caravan of Quraysh, and the same month, with seventy men, pursued Kurz ibn Jabir al-Fihri, who had raided the pastures of Medina and driven off animals, as far as Safawan near Badr; and in Jumada he went with some one hundred and fifty to two hundred men to Dhu al-Ushayrah after a large caravan bound for Syria, which passed before they arrived, and made an agreement there with Banu Mudlij and their allies of Banu Damrah.

In Rajab of 2 AH Muhammad sent Abdullah ibn Jahsh with twelve emigrants and a sealed letter, to be opened only after two days' march. It told him to go on to Nakhlah, between Mecca and Ta'if, to intercept a caravan of Quraysh and gather news of their intentions. There they met a small caravan. It was still Rajab, one of the sacred months in which fighting was forbidden by Arab custom, and after debating among themselves they attacked; Amr ibn al-Hadrami was killed by an arrow and two men were taken captive. When the party returned Muhammad disapproved of what they had done and suspended any action on the captives and the goods. The Qur'an then answered those who objected to fighting in the sacred month: "They ask you about the sacred month — about fighting therein. Say, 'Fighting therein is great [sin], but averting [people] from the way of Allah and disbelief in Him and [preventing access to] al-Masjid al-Haram and the expulsion of its people therefrom are greater [evil] in the sight of Allah. And fitnah is greater than killing'" (Quran 2:217). The captives were later released, and, al-Mubarakpuri writes, blood money was paid for the man who had been killed.

Badr

In Ramadan of 2 AH a large caravan of Quraysh, led by Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, was returning from Syria — the same caravan Muhammad had missed at Dhu al-Ushayrah — and he went out to intercept it. Al-Mubarakpuri gives the size of his force as between three hundred and three hundred and seventeen men, of whom eighty-two to eighty-six were emigrants, sixty-one of Aws and a hundred and seventy of Khazraj. They had two horses, ridden by al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and al-Miqdad ibn al-Aswad, and seventy camels, which two or three men rode in turn; Muhammad shared one with Ali and Marthad ibn Abi Marthad al-Ghanawi. Ibn Umm Maktum, and then Abu Lubabah ibn Abd al-Mundhir, was left in charge of Medina, and Mus'ab ibn Umayr carried the banner. His daughter Ruqayyah was gravely ill, and he told her husband Uthman to stay with her; he later gave Uthman a share of the spoils and a reward like that of the men who had fought (Sahih al-Bukhari 3130). Ruqayyah died that month.

Abu Sufyan learned that Muhammad had come out, sent Damdam ibn Amr al-Ghifari to Mecca to call Quraysh to the caravan's defence, and led the caravan off the main route towards the Red Sea. Quraysh marched with a force al-Mubarakpuri gives as thirteen hundred men, a hundred of them mounted and six hundred in mail, slaughtering nine or ten camels a day for food; every clan of Quraysh went except Banu Adi. At al-Juhfah word came from Abu Sufyan that the caravan was safe and that they should go home. Abu Jahl insisted on going on to Badr; Banu Zuhrah turned back on the advice of al-Akhnas ibn Shariq, and the rest, about a thousand men, went on. Muhammad, now facing an army rather than a caravan, consulted his companions. In Ibn Mas'ud's report al-Miqdad told him, "We will not say as the people of Moses said: 'So, go you and your lord and fight you two.' But we shall fight on your right and on your left and in front of you and behind you," and Ibn Mas'ud saw the Prophet's face brighten with happiness (Sahih al-Bukhari 3952). He went on asking for advice, and al-Mubarakpuri explains that he meant the Ansar, whose pledge at al-Aqabah had committed them to defend him within their own territory; Sa'd ibn Mu'adh answered for them that if he led them into the sea they would follow him.

At Badr the army first camped at the nearest spring. Al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir asked whether the place had been chosen by revelation or was a matter of judgement and strategy; told that it was the latter, he advised moving to the well nearest the enemy and blocking the others, and Muhammad did so. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh proposed a shelter from which Muhammad could direct the battle. Rain fell in the night. The battle of Badr was fought on Friday, 17 Ramadan 2 AH.

Umar's report in Sahih Muslim, transmitted by Ibn Abbas, records that the Prophet looked at the polytheists, who numbered a thousand, and at his companions, who numbered three hundred and nineteen, then turned towards the qiblah and called on his Lord with outstretched hands: "O Allah, give me what You have promised me! O Allah, if this small band of Muslims is destroyed, You will not be worshipped on earth." He went on until his cloak fell from his shoulders, and Abu Bakr put it back, embraced him from behind and told him that his Lord would accomplish what He had promised (Sahih Muslim 1763). Another report, from Ibn Abbas in Sahih al-Bukhari, preserves the words of the prayer — "O Allah! I appeal to You (to fulfil) Your Covenant and Your Promise" — and adds that he then came out reciting the verse "[Their] assembly will be defeated, and they will turn their backs [in retreat]" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3953; Quran 54:45). The Qur'an later recalled the day: "Already there has been for you a sign in the two armies which met [in combat at Badr] — one fighting in the cause of Allah and another of disbelievers" (Quran 3:13).

The fighting began with single combats. Utbah ibn Rabi'ah, his brother Shaybah and his son al-Walid came out; when three men of the Ansar went to meet them, they called instead for their own kinsmen of Quraysh, and Muhammad sent Hamzah, Ali and Ubaydah ibn al-Harith. Ali and Abu Dharr recalled that the verse "These are two adversaries who have disputed over their Lord" (Quran 22:19) was revealed concerning these six men (Sahih al-Bukhari 3965, 3969). Hamzah and Ali killed their opponents; Ubaydah lost a leg and, al-Mubarakpuri writes, died four or five days later. In the general battle that followed Quraysh were defeated. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf recalled two young men of the Ansar, Mu'adh ibn Amr ibn al-Jamuh and Mu'adh ibn Afra', who asked him to point out Abu Jahl and struck him down (Sahih al-Bukhari 3141), and after the battle Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, sent to find him, came upon him dying (Sahih al-Bukhari 3962). Fourteen Muslims were killed, al-Mubarakpuri records, six emigrants and eight of the Ansar; of Quraysh seventy were killed and seventy taken captive (Sahih Muslim 1763). The bodies of twenty-four of the leaders of Quraysh were thrown into a disused well at Badr, and a report from Abu Talhah records Muhammad standing at its edge on the third day and addressing them by name (Sahih al-Bukhari 3976).

Muhammad consulted Abu Bakr and Umar about the captives. In the same report in Sahih Muslim, Abu Bakr advised accepting ransom from men who were their cousins and kinsmen, in the hope that Allah would guide them, and Umar advised putting them to death; Muhammad inclined to Abu Bakr's view, and the verses beginning "It is not for a prophet to have captives [of war] until he inflicts a massacre [upon Allah's enemies] in the land" (Quran 8:67) were then revealed (Sahih Muslim 1763). The captives were ransomed. Among them was Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi', the husband of Muhammad's daughter Zaynab, and a report from Aishah in Sunan Abi Dawud records that Zaynab sent for his ransom a necklace that Khadijah had given her at her marriage. When Muhammad saw it he was deeply moved, and asked the Companions, if they saw fit, to release Abu al-As and return the necklace to her; they did, on the condition that Abu al-As let Zaynab come to Medina, and Zayd ibn Harithah was sent to bring her (Sunan Abi Dawud 2692, graded hasan by its editor).

Banu Qaynuqa and Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf

In Shawwal of 2 AH relations with Banu Qaynuqa broke down. The sources differ over the immediate cause: a report in Sunan Abi Dawud of an address by Muhammad to the Jews in the market of Banu Qaynuqa after Badr is graded da'if by the collection's editor, while al-Mubarakpuri gives a report of Ibn Hisham from Abu Awn of a quarrel in the same market in which a Muslim and a Jew were killed. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the siege of their forts to Saturday, 15 Shawwal 2 AH.³ It lasted fifteen days, with Abu Lubabah left in charge of Medina and Hamzah carrying the standard, until Banu Qaynuqa surrendered to Muhammad's judgement. Abdullah ibn Ubayy, whose clan of Khazraj had been allied with them, pressed Muhammad to spare them, and Muhammad agreed. They surrendered their property, armour and weapons, a fifth of which was set aside, and left Medina.

In the months after Badr, Muhammad asked who would deal with Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, "who has hurt Allah and His Messenger", and Muhammad ibn Maslamah and a small party went to him and killed him (Sahih al-Bukhari 4037).

Uhud

A year after Badr Quraysh marched on Medina. Al-Mubarakpuri gives their army as three thousand men, seven hundred of them in mail and two hundred mounted, with three thousand camels and fifteen women; Abu Sufyan ibn Harb led it, the cavalry was commanded by Khalid ibn al-Walid with Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahl, and the clan of Abd al-Dar carried the standard. Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas, still in Mecca, sent word of the march. Muhammad's own view, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, was to stay inside Medina and fight in its streets if the enemy entered, and Abdullah ibn Ubayy supported it; but men who had missed Badr, led by Hamzah, urged him to go out and meet the enemy, and it was decided to fight outside the city. When Muhammad came out in his armour, some of those who had pressed him offered to stay after all, and he answered, "It does not suit a Prophet that once he has put on his armor, to take it off until Allah has decided between him and the enemy." He went out with about a thousand men in three divisions, the emigrants under Mus'ab ibn Umayr, Aws under Usayd ibn Hudayr and Khazraj under al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir. At al-Shawt, before dawn, Abdullah ibn Ubayy turned back with about three hundred of them, a third of the army, saying, "We do not know why we should kill ourselves," and complaining that his advice had been rejected.

With about seven hundred men, Muhammad drew up his army with its back to Mount Uhud and its face towards Medina. He placed fifty archers under Abdullah ibn Jubayr on a small hill about a hundred and fifty metres from the army, afterwards called the Mount of Archers, and told them, in al-Bara' ibn Azib's report, "Do not leave your place even if you see birds snatching us" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3039). The battle of Uhud was fought, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, on Saturday, 7 Shawwal 3 AH; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives 7 or 11 Shawwal.⁴ Muhammad wore two coats of mail. Holding up a sword, he asked who would take it and give it its due, and Abu Dujanah took it (Sahih Muslim 2470).

The Muslims at first drove Quraysh back. Hamzah was killed by Wahshi, a slave of Jubayr ibn Mut'im, who had been promised his freedom if he killed Hamzah in revenge for Jubayr's uncle, slain at Badr. Wahshi later came to Muhammad with the delegation of Ta'if, and years afterwards described the killing himself in Hims (Sahih al-Bukhari 4072). When Quraysh began to fall back, most of the archers left their post to take the spoils, despite the objections of their commander, and Khalid's cavalry came round behind the Muslim lines. Mus'ab ibn Umayr, who was carrying the standard, was killed by Ibn Qami'ah, who, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, took him for Muhammad, whom he resembled, and cried out that Muhammad had been killed. Ibn Kathir connects with the rumour the verse "Muhammad is not but a messenger. [Other] messengers have passed on before him. So if he was to die or be killed, would you turn back on your heels [to unbelief]?" (Quran 3:144). Anas ibn al-Nadr, who had missed Badr, went on fighting until he was killed; he was found with more than eighty wounds, and the verse "Among the believers are men true to what they promised Allah" (Quran 33:23) was understood to refer to him and to men like him (Sahih al-Bukhari 4048).

Muhammad was wounded. Sahl ibn Sa'd recalled that his face was cut, one of his front teeth was broken and his helmet was smashed on his head; Fatimah washed the blood from his face while Ali poured water, and when the bleeding would not stop she burned a piece of matting and pressed its ash into the wound (Sahih al-Bukhari 2911; Sahih Muslim 1790). Talhah ibn Ubaydullah shielded him with his hand, which remained paralysed afterwards (Sahih al-Bukhari 4063), and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas shot arrows beside him as Muhammad handed them to him, saying, "Shoot, let my father and mother be sacrificed for you" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4055).

When the fighting ended, Abu Sufyan called from the hill, asking whether Muhammad, Abu Bakr and Umar were among the living, and then cried, "O Hubal, be high!" Muhammad told his companions to answer, "Allah is Higher and more Sublime," and when Abu Sufyan boasted of al-Uzza, to answer that Allah was their protector (Sahih al-Bukhari 3039). Al-Mubarakpuri gives the Muslim dead as seventy — sixty-five of the Ansar, forty-one of Khazraj and twenty-four of Aws, together with one Jew and four emigrants — and the dead of Quraysh as twenty-two, or thirty-seven in some versions. The martyrs were buried in their blood without being washed, sometimes two wrapped in a single cloth, and Muhammad asked which of each pair had known more of the Qur'an and placed him first in the grave (Sahih al-Bukhari 1343). Mus'ab ibn Umayr, Khabbab ibn al-Aratt recalled, left nothing but a sheet too short to cover him, so that when his head was covered his feet were bare (Sahih al-Bukhari 4047).

The next day Muhammad called the men who had fought at Uhud — and only those — to march out after Quraysh. Al-Mubarakpuri records that Abdullah ibn Ubayy offered to go and was refused, and that Jabir ibn Abdullah, who had stayed in Medina at his father's request to look after his sisters, was allowed to join. They went to Hamra al-Asad, eight miles from Medina, and camped there. Aishah told her nephew Urwah that the verse "Those [believers] who responded to Allah and the Messenger after injury had struck them" (Quran 3:172) referred to these men, among them his father al-Zubayr and his grandfather Abu Bakr, and that about seventy of them went out (Sahih al-Bukhari 4077).

Al-Raji', Bi'r Ma'unah, and Banu al-Nadir

In Safar of 4 AH two parties sent from Medina were destroyed. At al-Raji', between Rabigh and Jeddah, a small party of Companions was surrounded by about a hundred archers of Banu Lihyan. Abu Hurayrah's report in Sahih al-Bukhari describes ten men sent to gather intelligence under Asim ibn Thabit; al-Mubarakpuri, following the sira, describes six men, or ten in another version, sent as teachers at the request of the tribes of Adal and al-Qarah under Marthad ibn Abi Marthad. Most were killed, and Khubayb ibn Adi was taken to Mecca and put to death there; before his execution he prayed two units of prayer, and prayed, "O Allah, convey our news to Your Prophet" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3045). At Bi'r Ma'unah, the same month, seventy men known as the Qurra', the reciters, were killed by the clans of Ri'l and Dhakwan of Banu Sulaym; for a month Muhammad invoked Allah against those clans in his morning prayer (Sahih al-Bukhari 4088, 4090).

One of the survivors of Bi'r Ma'unah, Amr ibn Umayyah al-Damri, killed on his way home two men of Banu Kilab who had Muhammad's pledge of protection. Muhammad undertook to pay their blood money, and, al-Mubarakpuri relates, went with Abu Bakr, Umar, Ali and others to Banu al-Nadir to ask for their contribution under the treaty. In the account of the Ibn Ishaq tradition that al-Mubarakpuri follows, he was asked to sit beside the wall of one of their houses, a plan was made to drop a stone on him from the roof, and he left after being warned of it by revelation; he then sent Muhammad ibn Maslamah to tell Banu al-Nadir to leave Medina within ten days.³ Abdullah ibn Ubayy urged them to stay, promising them help. When they refused to go, Muhammad besieged them for six nights, or fifteen in another version, and some of their palms at al-Buwayrah were cut down and burned, which the Qur'an addresses: "Whatever you have cut down of [their] palm trees or left standing on their trunks — it was by permission of Allah" (Quran 59:5; Sahih al-Bukhari 4031). They surrendered on terms that allowed them to leave with whatever their camels could carry except weapons, some for Khaybar, among them Huyayy ibn Akhtab and Sallam ibn Abi al-Huqayq, and others for Syria. Their lands, taken without fighting, were left for Muhammad to allot. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the expulsion to Rabi al-Awwal 4 AH, and the chapter al-Hashr was revealed concerning it; Ibn Abbas called it "Surat an-Nadir" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4029).

During these years, in an expedition to Najd known as Dhat al-Riqa', Muhammad led the prayer of fear, the form of congregational prayer used in the face of an enemy (Sahih al-Bukhari 4125). On the way back from Najd, Jabir recalled, Muhammad was resting under a tree, his sword hanging from it, when a Bedouin took the sword and asked, "Who will protect you from me?" Muhammad answered, "Allah," and when the Companions came the man was sitting there; Muhammad did not punish him (Sahih al-Bukhari 2910).

Banu al-Mustaliq and the incident of al-ifk

The expedition against Banu al-Mustaliq, also called the expedition of al-Muraysi', is dated differently: the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi places it in Sha'ban of 5 AH, before the Trench, and al-Mubarakpuri in Sha'ban of 6 AH.⁴ Among the captives was Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith, the daughter of the tribe's chief. Aishah's account in Sunan Abi Dawud records that she fell to the share of Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas and made a contract with him to buy her freedom, and came to Muhammad for help with the payment; he offered to pay it and marry her, and she accepted. When the Companions heard that Banu al-Mustaliq were now the Prophet's in-laws, they freed the captives they held, and Aishah said that she had never seen a woman who brought more blessing to her people: a hundred families of Banu al-Mustaliq were set free because of her (Sunan Abi Dawud 3931, graded hasan by its editor).

It was on this expedition, al-Mubarakpuri writes, that a quarrel between an emigrant and a man of the Ansar set the two groups calling on each other for help. Muhammad rebuked them for using the call of the Period of Ignorance. Abdullah ibn Ubayy, hearing of the quarrel, said, "By Allah, if we return to Al-Madina, indeed, the more honourable will expel therefrom the meaner." When Umar asked leave to kill him, Muhammad answered, "Leave him, lest the people say that Muhammad kills his companions" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4905). The chapter al-Munafiqun quotes Ibn Ubayy's words (Quran 63:8).

On the same journey Aishah was left behind at a halt. In her own account in Sahih al-Bukhari, she had gone out of the camp at night and returned to find that her necklace of Zafar beads was missing; while she searched for it, the men who led her camel lifted her litter onto it, thinking her inside, and the army moved on. She sat down where the camp had been and fell asleep, and in the morning Safwan ibn al-Mu'attal al-Sulami, who was travelling behind the army, found her and brought her to the army on his camel, walking beside it. In Medina a rumour began, and Urwah, who transmitted her account, names among those who spread it Abdullah ibn Ubayy, Hassan ibn Thabit, Mistah ibn Uthathah and Hamnah bint Jahsh. Aishah fell ill for a month without knowing what was being said, noticing only that Muhammad did not show her his usual kindness. When she learned of it she went to her parents' house, where she could neither stop weeping nor sleep. Muhammad consulted Ali and Usamah ibn Zayd; Usamah told him that they knew nothing of her but good, and her maid Barirah, when asked, said the same, as did Muhammad's wife Zaynab bint Jahsh. When at last Muhammad asked Aishah herself, she answered with the words of Joseph's father in the Qur'an: "So (for me) patience is most fitting. And it is Allah (Alone) Whose Help can be sought against that (lie) which you describe" (Quran 12:18). Revelation then came, and Muhammad's first words when it ended were, "O Aishah! Allah has declared your innocence" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4141). The passage revealed begins, "Indeed, those who came with falsehood are a group among you" (Quran 24:11), and asks why the believers who heard the accusation did not think well of one another and call it "an obvious falsehood" (Quran 24:12). Abu Bakr, who had supported Mistah, a poor relative, swore that he would give him nothing more, and returned to his support after the revelation of the verse "and let them pardon and overlook. Would you not like that Allah should forgive you?" (Quran 24:22; Sahih al-Bukhari 4141).

The Trench

In 5 AH, in the campaign known as the battle of al-Khandaq, the Trench, Quraysh returned against Medina in alliance with the tribes of Ghatafan — Fazarah under Uyaynah ibn Hisn, Murrah under al-Harith ibn Awf, and Ashja' — together with other allies, and al-Mubarakpuri numbers the Confederates (al-Ahzab) at ten thousand men. Al-Mubarakpuri records that a delegation of twenty Jewish leaders, among them men of Banu al-Nadir, had gone to Mecca and then to Ghatafan to bring the alliance together. When Muhammad consulted his companions, Salman al-Farsi proposed digging a trench across the open approach to the city, and the proposal was adopted. The Muslims, about three thousand strong, camped with their backs to Mount Sal' and the trench between them and the enemy.

The digging was done in cold weather and hunger. Anas recalled the emigrants and Ansar digging on a cold morning with no servants to do it for them, and Muhammad, seeing their tiredness and hunger, reciting, "O Allah! The real life is that of the Hereafter, so please forgive the Ansar and the emigrants" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4099). Jabir recalled a rock too hard for the diggers, which Muhammad broke with a pickaxe although he had tied a stone to his stomach against hunger (Sahih al-Bukhari 4101), and the meal of a young goat and a measure of barley, prepared by Jabir's wife, from which Muhammad fed the whole company of diggers (Sahih al-Bukhari 4102).

The Confederates could not cross the trench, and the siege, which al-Mubarakpuri dates from Shawwal into Dhu al-Qa'dah, went on for about a month. The Qur'an describes the danger of those days: "[Remember] when they came at you from above you and from below you, and when eyes shifted [in fear], and hearts reached the throats, and you assumed about Allah [various] assumptions. There the believers were tested and shaken with a severe shaking" (Quran 33:10–11). On one day the fighting kept the Muslims from the afternoon prayer until the sun had set (Sahih al-Bukhari 2931). Muhammad prayed, "O Allah, the Revealer of the Holy Book, the Quick Taker of the accounts! (Please) defeat the Ahzab. O Allah! Defeat them and shake them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4115). Al-Mubarakpuri records that Nu'aym ibn Mas'ud of Ghatafan, who had accepted Islam without his people knowing, came to Muhammad and was told to do whatever he could to help the Muslims; he went between Banu Qurayza, Quraysh and Ghatafan, sowing distrust among them. On a night of strong wind and extreme cold, Muhammad sent Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman into the enemy camp to bring him news of them (Sahih Muslim 1788), and the Confederates withdrew. The Qur'an recalls the end: "O you who have believed, remember the favor of Allah upon you when armies came to [attack] you and We sent upon them a wind and armies [of angels] you did not see" (Quran 33:9). When the Confederates had gone, Muhammad said, "Now we will go to attack them and they will not come to attack us" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4109).

Banu Qurayza

The same passage of the Qur'an goes on to the fate of "those who supported them among the People of the Scripture" (Quran 33:26), whom the sira identifies as Banu Qurayza. Al-Mubarakpuri relates that during the siege Huyayy ibn Akhtab persuaded Ka'b ibn Asad, the leader of Banu Qurayza, who had a treaty to aid Muhammad in war, to break it and join the Confederates. On the day the Confederates withdrew, Muhammad told his companions, "None of you should offer the Asr prayer but at (the place of) Banu Quraiza" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4119), and the Muslims besieged their forts. In the account al-Mubarakpuri follows, Ka'b ibn Asad put three courses before his people, the first of which was to accept Islam, and they took none of them. They asked to consult Abu Lubabah ibn Abd al-Mundhir of Aws, their former ally, and when they asked him whether they should surrender to Muhammad's judgement he pointed to his throat. Regretting the gesture at once, he went to the mosque in Medina and tied himself to one of its pillars, swearing that only the Messenger of Allah would untie him; Muhammad said that had he come to him he would have asked forgiveness for him, but since he had bound himself, it was for Allah to turn to him in forgiveness.

Haykal records that Banu Qurayza offered to leave for Adhri'at in Syria, and that Muhammad would accept nothing but their surrender to his judgement. They surrendered. The men of Aws, their former allies, interceded for them, and it was agreed that one of their own, Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, the chief of Aws, should judge; Sa'd had been wounded at the Trench. Abu Sa'id al-Khudri recalled that when Sa'd came riding on a donkey, Muhammad told the Ansar, "Stand up for your leader." Sa'd judged "that their warriors should be killed and their children and women should be taken as captives," and Muhammad said, "O Sa'd! You have judged amongst them with (or similar to) the judgement of the King (Allah)" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3043). The Qur'an refers to the outcome: "a party [i.e., their men] you killed, and you took captive a party [i.e., the women and children]. And He caused you to inherit their land and their homes and their properties" (Quran 33:26–27).

Among those put to death were Huyayy ibn Akhtab of Banu al-Nadir and one woman who had killed a Muslim with a millstone; a few men who accepted Islam were spared. Al-Mubarakpuri lists the weapons taken as fifteen hundred swords, two thousand spears, three hundred coats of mail and five hundred shields. Sa'd ibn Mu'adh's wound reopened soon afterwards and he died of it in a tent that had been set up for him in the mosque (Sahih al-Bukhari 4122). Jabir ibn Abdullah recorded Muhammad saying that the Throne of Allah shook at his death (Sahih al-Bukhari 3803).

From Hudaybiyyah to the Conquest of Mecca

The expedition to Hudaybiyyah

In Dhu al-Qa'dah of 6 AH Muhammad set out for Mecca to perform the lesser pilgrimage, the umrah, after a dream in which he saw himself and his companions entering the sanctuary. Al-Mubarakpuri records that he rode his camel al-Qaswa' and took his wife Umm Salamah with him. At Dhu al-Hulayfah, the report of al-Miswar ibn Makhramah and Marwan ibn al-Hakam in Sahih al-Bukhari records, he garlanded and marked the animals brought for sacrifice and entered the state of ihram for umrah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4178). The number of those with him is given differently in the reports of Sahih al-Bukhari: fourteen hundred in al-Bara' ibn Azib's report (Sahih al-Bukhari 4150); fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred in two reports of what Jabir ibn Abdullah said (Sahih al-Bukhari 4153); and thirteen hundred in the report of Abdullah ibn Abi Awfa (Sahih al-Bukhari 4155).

Learning that Khalid ibn al-Walid was waiting with the cavalry of Quraysh at al-Ghamim, Muhammad took another route. At the mountain pass by which the road led down to Quraysh, his camel knelt and would not rise, and when the people said that al-Qaswa' had become stubborn, he answered, "Al-Qaswa' has not become stubborn, for stubbornness is not her habit, but she was stopped by Him Who stopped the elephant." Then he said, "By the Name of Him in Whose Hands my soul is, if they ask me anything which will respect the Ordinances of Allah, I will grant it to them." He camped at the far end of al-Hudaybiyyah by a well with little water (Sahih al-Bukhari 2731–2732). Envoys went between the two sides — Budayl ibn Warqa' of Khuza'ah, then Urwah ibn Mas'ud and others on behalf of Quraysh — and Muhammad told each of them that he had come only to perform the umrah. He sent Uthman ibn Affan into Mecca to explain his purpose to its leaders. Quraysh would not let the Muslims come to the House, but offered Uthman leave to perform the umrah himself, and al-Mubarakpuri records his answer: "How is it possible that I avail myself of this opportunity, while the Prophet is denied of it?" When his return was delayed and a rumour spread that he had been killed, Muhammad took a pledge from his companions under a tree. Al-Mubarakpuri records that all who were present pledged except one man, Jadd ibn Qays. Ibn Umar recalled that Muhammad held out his right hand and said, "This is Uthman's hand," and struck his other hand with it, making the pledge on Uthman's behalf (Sahih al-Bukhari 3699). The Qur'an refers to it: "Certainly was Allah pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you, [O Muhammad], under the tree" (Quran 48:18), and it became known as the Pledge of Ridwan.

Quraysh then sent Suhayl ibn Amr to make terms. "Now the matter has become easy," Muhammad said when he saw him coming (Sahih al-Bukhari 2731–2732). Ali was called to write. When Muhammad dictated "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful", Suhayl objected that he did not know what al-Rahman meant and asked him to write, as they used to, "In Your name, O Allah"; Muhammad agreed. When the document described him as the Messenger of Allah, Suhayl objected that if Quraysh believed he was the Messenger of Allah they would not have barred him from the House, and asked that he be named Muhammad ibn Abdullah. Ali would not erase the words, and Muhammad erased them with his own hand (Sahih Muslim 1783). The terms of the treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah, as al-Mubarakpuri summarises them, were that the Muslims would return to Medina that year without entering Mecca and come back the following year for three days, carrying no weapons but sheathed swords; that there would be no war between the two sides for ten years (the ten years are also recorded in Sunan Abi Dawud 2766, graded hasan by its editor); that any tribe could enter an alliance with either party; and that anyone of Quraysh who came to Muhammad without his guardian's permission would be returned, while anyone who went from Muhammad to Quraysh would not. Khuza'ah entered into alliance with Muhammad and Banu Bakr with Quraysh.

The return clause was tested at once. While the terms were being settled, Suhayl's own son Abu Jandal, who had accepted Islam and been held in chains, came stumbling in his fetters into the Muslim camp, and Suhayl insisted that he be the first to be returned under the agreement. Muhammad returned him. When the treaty was concluded he told his companions to slaughter their sacrificial animals and shave their heads. No one moved, and he repeated the order three times; then he went to Umm Salamah and told her. She advised him to go out without speaking to anyone and to slaughter his own animal and call his barber, and when the companions saw him do so they rose, slaughtered their animals and shaved one another's heads (Sahih al-Bukhari 2731–2732). On the way home, Aslam recorded, Umar asked Muhammad about the terms, and that night the chapter al-Fath was revealed (Sahih al-Bukhari 4177). It opens, "Indeed, We have given you, [O Muhammad], a clear conquest" (Quran 48:1), and al-Bara' ibn Azib told his hearers that while they counted the conquest of Mecca as the conquest, his generation counted it to be the Pledge of Ridwan at al-Hudaybiyyah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4150).

The return clause was not applied to women. When believing women came to Medina as emigrants, among them Umm Kulthum bint Uqbah ibn Abi Mu'ayt, their relatives asked for them, and they were not returned, since the Qur'an had said, "When the believing women come to you as emigrants, examine them … and if you know them to be believers, then do not return them to the disbelievers" (Quran 60:10; Sahih al-Bukhari 2711–2713). Men were returned. One of them, Abu Basir, escaped from the two men sent to take him back and, seeing that Muhammad would return him again, made his way to the seashore, where Abu Jandal and other Muslims who escaped from Mecca joined him. They formed a band that attacked the caravans of Quraysh on the road to Syria, until Quraysh themselves sent to Muhammad asking him to take them in (Sahih al-Bukhari 2731–2732).

Letters to rulers

In the months after al-Hudaybiyyah, from Muharram of 7 AH in the TDV chronology, Muhammad sent letters to the rulers around Arabia.⁴ Anas ibn Malik recalled that when the Prophet was told that rulers would not read a letter unless it was sealed, he had a silver ring made with the words "Muhammad the Messenger of Allah" engraved on it (Sahih al-Bukhari 65). Al-Mubarakpuri lists the letters to the Negus of Abyssinia; al-Muqawqis, the ruler of Egypt; Khosrow, the king of Persia; the Byzantine emperor Heraclius; al-Mundhir ibn Sawa of Bahrain; Hawdhah ibn Ali of al-Yamamah; al-Harith ibn Abi Shimr al-Ghassani of Damascus; and Jayfar and Abd, the sons of al-Julanda, in Oman.

A detailed account concerns Heraclius. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, who was trading in Syria during the truce, was summoned with his companions before the emperor, who questioned him about Muhammad's lineage, his followers, his truthfulness and what he taught; Abu Sufyan later described the interview to Ibn Abbas, and the report stands in the first book of Sahih al-Bukhari. The letter, which Dihyah al-Kalbi delivered to the governor of Busra for the emperor, read in part: "In the Name of Allah the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. (This letter is) from Muhammad, the slave of Allah and His Messenger, to Heraclius the ruler of Byzantines. Peace be upon him who follows the right path. Then after: I invite you to Islam, and if you become a Muslim you will be safe, and Allah will double your reward," and it closed with the verse "O people of the Scripture! Come to a word common to you and us, that we worship none but Allah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 7; Quran 3:64). The letter to Khosrow was taken by Abdullah ibn Hudhafah al-Sahmi, who delivered it through the governor of Bahrain, and Khosrow tore it up (Sahih al-Bukhari 64, 4424). Al-Muqawqis sent gifts in return, among them Mariyah, who became the mother of Muhammad's son Ibrahim.

Khaybar

Ibn Ishaq, as al-Mubarakpuri quotes him, relates that after returning from al-Hudaybiyyah Muhammad stayed in Medina through Dhu al-Hijjah and part of Muharram, and at the end of Muharram set out for the oasis of Khaybar, where leaders of Banu al-Nadir had settled; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the campaign to Safar of 7 AH.³ Anas recalled that Muhammad offered the dawn prayer near Khaybar while it was still dark and said, "Allahu Akbar! Khaibar is destroyed, for whenever we approach a (hostile) nation (to fight), then evil will be the morning for those who have been warned," and the people of Khaybar came running out onto the roads (Sahih al-Bukhari 4200). The forts were taken one after another, the first being the fort of Na'im. When the fighting was hard, Muhammad said, "Tomorrow I will give the flag to somebody who will be given victory (by Allah) and who loves Allah and His Messenger, and is loved by Allah and His Messenger." In the morning he asked for Ali, who was suffering from an eye complaint, touched his eyes with his saliva and prayed for him, and gave him the flag, telling him to invite the people to Islam before he fought them, "for, by Allah, if Allah gives guidance to somebody through you, it is better for you than possessing red camels" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3009). Al-Mubarakpuri records that Marhab, a champion of Khaybar, was killed by Ali, and that the Muslim dead numbered sixteen to eighteen, the sources differing, and the dead of Khaybar ninety-three.

Muhammad left the land in the hands of its people on condition that they work it and give half of its produce, an arrangement that continued until Umar, as caliph, moved them out (Sahih al-Bukhari 2285, 2329). Al-Mubarakpuri describes how Fadak, Wadi al-Qura and Tayma were then brought under terms. Among the captives was Safiyyah, the daughter of Huyayy ibn Akhtab, and Anas recorded that Muhammad freed her and made her freedom her bridal gift (Sahih al-Bukhari 5086), and al-Mubarakpuri writes that the wedding feast was held at Sadd al-Sahba' on the way home. After Khaybar was taken, Abu Hurayrah recalled, a cooked sheep containing poison was given to Muhammad as a present (Sahih al-Bukhari 4249). Al-Mubarakpuri names the woman who prepared it as Zaynab bint al-Harith, and records that Muhammad spat out the mouthful he had taken, while one of his companions, Bishr ibn al-Bara', who had eaten of it, died. In his final illness, Aishah recalled, he said that he still felt the pain of the food he had eaten at Khaybar (Sahih al-Bukhari 4428).

At Khaybar, too, Ja'far ibn Abi Talib and the last of the emigrants to Abyssinia rejoined him, together with Abu Musa al-Ash'ari and men of his tribe from Yemen, whose ship had taken them to Abyssinia on their way to Medina (Sahih al-Bukhari 4230). In the same year, al-Mubarakpuri records, Muhammad married Umm Habibah bint Abi Sufyan, who had been in Abyssinia since the early migration; her husband there had become a Christian and died, and the marriage was concluded in Abyssinia through the Negus.

The umrah of 7 AH

In Dhu al-Qa'dah of 7 AH, a year after al-Hudaybiyyah, Muhammad came to Mecca with his companions to perform the umrah that had been agreed, and they stayed for the three days the treaty allowed (Sahih al-Bukhari 4251). Ibn Abbas recalled that the Meccans had spread word that the Muslims had been weakened by the fever of Medina, and that Muhammad told his companions to walk briskly in the first three circuits of the Kaaba to show their strength (Sahih al-Bukhari 1602). During this umrah he married Maymunah bint al-Harith, the sister of Umm al-Fadl Lubabah bint al-Harith (Sahih al-Bukhari 4258–4259). In Safar of 8 AH, the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records, Khalid ibn al-Walid, Amr ibn al-As and Uthman ibn Talhah accepted Islam.⁴

Mu'tah

In Jumada al-Ula of 8 AH, September 629 in al-Mubarakpuri's reckoning, Muhammad sent an army of three thousand men north towards Syria after his envoy to the ruler of Busra, al-Harith ibn Umayr al-Azdi, had been killed by Shurahbil ibn Amr al-Ghassani, a governor in al-Balqa'. Ibn Umar recorded his instructions: Zayd ibn Harithah was to command, "if Zaid is martyred, Ja'far should take over the command, and if Ja'far is martyred, 'Abdullah bin Rawaha should take over" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4261). At Mu'tah the army met a far larger force — al-Mubarakpuri gives it as two hundred thousand, Byzantine troops together with their Arab allies — and all three commanders were killed in turn. Ibn Umar counted fifty stab and sword wounds on Ja'far's body, none of them in his back (Sahih al-Bukhari 4260). Anas recalled that Muhammad announced the deaths of Zayd, Ja'far and Ibn Rawahah to the people in Medina before the news had come, his eyes shedding tears, and said that the flag had then been taken by "a Sword out of the Swords of Allah", through whom Allah gave the Muslims victory (Sahih al-Bukhari 4262). Khalid ibn al-Walid himself said that nine swords broke in his hand that day (Sahih al-Bukhari 4265), and he brought the army back to Medina.

The breach of the truce

Under the treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah, Banu Bakr had allied themselves with Quraysh and Khuza'ah with Muhammad. In Sha'ban of 8 AH, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, Banu Bakr attacked Khuza'ah at the watering place of al-Watir by night, with men and weapons supplied by some of Quraysh, and pursued them into the sanctuary. Amr ibn Salim al-Khuza'i rode to Medina with forty horsemen to ask for help, followed by Budayl ibn Warqa'. Al-Mubarakpuri records that Muhammad put three alternatives to Quraysh: to pay blood money for the dead of Khuza'ah, to end their alliance with Banu Bakr, or to regard the truce as ended. Abu Sufyan came to Medina to renew the treaty; he went to his daughter Umm Habibah, and then to Muhammad, Abu Bakr, Umar and Ali, and returned to Mecca without obtaining it.

The Conquest of Mecca

Muhammad prepared for the march that ended in the conquest of Mecca without announcing where it was going. Ali recalled that he was sent with al-Zubayr and al-Miqdad to Rawdat Khakh, where they took from a woman on the road a letter that Hatib ibn Abi Balta'ah had written to warn some of the Meccans. Hatib explained that he had relatives in Mecca and no clan to protect them, and that he had not done it out of disbelief; Muhammad accepted his explanation, and when Umar asked leave to kill him, reminded him that Hatib had fought at Badr (Sahih al-Bukhari 4274).

The army left Medina in Ramadan of 8 AH, ten thousand strong (Sahih al-Bukhari 4276); al-Mubarakpuri dates the departure to 10 Ramadan and the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi to 13 Ramadan.⁴ On the way, al-Abbas and his family met the army at al-Juhfah, and Muhammad's cousin and foster brother Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith came to him at al-Abwa. At Marr al-Zahran, near Mecca, the army lit its fires. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, Hakim ibn Hizam and Budayl ibn Warqa' came out from Mecca to find out what was happening, saw fires like the fires of Arafat, and were taken by Muhammad's guards and brought to him, and Abu Sufyan accepted Islam. Muhammad told al-Abbas to keep Abu Sufyan on a height where he could watch the army pass. The tribes went by one after another — Ghifar, Juhaynah, Sa'd Hudhaym, Sulaym — and then the Ansar under Sa'd ibn Ubadah, who called out to Abu Sufyan, "Today is the day of a great battle and today (what is prohibited in) the Ka'bah will be permissible." When Muhammad passed, with the smallest company of all and al-Zubayr carrying his flag, Abu Sufyan told him what Sa'd had said. "Sa'd told a lie," Muhammad said, "but today Allah will give superiority to the Ka'bah, and today the Ka'bah will be covered with a (cloth) covering" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4280).

He announced the terms of safety. In Abu Hurayrah's report in Sahih Muslim, it was proclaimed: "Whoever enters the house of Abu Sufyan will be safe. Whoever throws down his arms will be safe. Whoever locks his door will be safe" (Sahih Muslim 1780). The army entered Mecca in separate columns, Khalid ibn al-Walid by way of Kada' and Muhammad by way of Kuda (Sahih al-Bukhari 4280). Khalid's column met resistance, in which, al-Mubarakpuri records, twelve of those who opposed it were killed, and two of Khalid's horsemen, Hubaysh ibn al-Ash'ar and Kurz ibn Jabir al-Fihri, died (Sahih al-Bukhari 4280). Abdullah ibn Mughaffal remembered Muhammad riding into the city on his camel reciting the chapter al-Fath (Sahih al-Bukhari 4281). The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the entry to 20 Ramadan 8 AH, 11 January 630.⁴

At the sanctuary 360 idols stood around the Kaaba. Muhammad struck them with a stick he held, reciting, "Truth has come, and falsehood has departed. Indeed is falsehood, [by nature], ever bound to depart" (Quran 17:81) and "The truth has come, and falsehood can neither begin [anything] nor repeat [it]" (Quran 34:49; Sahih al-Bukhari 4287). He would not enter the Kaaba while the images inside it remained, and had them brought out, among them figures of Abraham and Ishmael holding divining arrows (Sahih al-Bukhari 4288). He took the key from Uthman ibn Talhah, entered the Kaaba with Usamah ibn Zayd and Bilal, and prayed inside. Standing in its doorway, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, he addressed Quraysh: every claim of privilege of blood or property from the time before Islam was beneath his feet, except the custody of the Kaaba and the giving of water to the pilgrims; for a killing with a club or a whip, even if it was not deliberate, the blood money was a hundred camels, forty of them pregnant; Allah had abolished the pride of the time of ignorance and of ancestry, for "all men are descended from Adam, and Adam was made from dust". He recited, "O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you" (Quran 49:13). Then he asked Quraysh what they expected him to do with them. "O noble brother and son of noble brother," they said, "we expect nothing but goodness from you." He answered with the words of Joseph to his brothers: "No reproach on you this day; go your way, for you are freed ones." Al-Mubarakpuri gives this account, and Kandhlawi records the same words in Hayat al-Sahaba as part of a longer report from Abu Hurayrah; Joseph's words are in the Qur'an: "No blame will there be upon you today. Allah will forgive you; and He is the most merciful of the merciful" (Quran 12:92).

He returned the key of the Kaaba to Uthman ibn Talhah, left the supplying of water with al-Abbas, and Bilal climbed onto the Kaaba to give the call to prayer. The safety was not extended to everyone. In a report from Anas in Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad, told that Ibn Khatal was clinging to the curtains of the Kaaba, ordered him to be killed (Sahih al-Bukhari 3044). In the house of Umm Hani, Muhammad bathed and prayed eight units of prayer (Sahih al-Bukhari 4292). On the second day he addressed the people on the sanctity of Mecca, which Allah, not the people, had made sacred, and in which fighting had been permitted to him alone, for a few hours of one day (Sahih al-Bukhari 4295), and when a man of Yemen named Abu Shah asked for the address to be written down for him, he said, "Write it for Abu Shah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 2434). He stayed in Mecca for nineteen days, shortening his prayers (Sahih al-Bukhari 4298). Al-Mubarakpuri adds that Abu Usayd al-Khuza'i was sent to renew the boundary markers of the sanctuary, and that parties were sent to break the idols in the country around Mecca. In Abu Hurayrah's report in Sahih Muslim the Ansar said among themselves that love of his town and kindness to his clan had taken hold of him; he told them, "I emigrated for the sake of Allah and to you, and I will live with you and die with you" (Sahih Muslim 1780).

Hunayn, Ta'if, Tabuk, and the delegations

Hunayn

While Muhammad was in Mecca, branches of the tribes of Hawazin and Thaqif gathered against him under Malik ibn Awf al-Nasri. Al-Mubarakpuri dates his departure to Saturday, 19 Shawwal, which he describes as nineteen days after the entry into Mecca, and gives his army as twelve thousand men: the ten thousand who had come from Medina and two thousand Meccans who had recently accepted Islam. He borrowed a hundred suits of armour from Safwan ibn Umayyah, who had not yet accepted Islam, and left Attab ibn Asid as governor of Mecca. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the battle of Hunayn to 11 Shawwal 8 AH.⁴

Al-Mubarakpuri describes the army descending into the valley of Hunayn in the dark before dawn, unaware that the enemy was lying in wait; arrows fell on it as it began to make camp, and most of it fell back in confusion. Al-Bara' ibn Azib, asked years later whether they had fled that day, said that Muhammad had not: he stayed on his white mule, with Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith holding its rein, and called out, "I am the Prophet, without a lie; I am the son of Abd al-Muttalib" (Sahih al-Bukhari 2864, 4315). Al-Abbas recalled in Sahih Muslim that he and Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith stayed close to the Prophet and did not leave him, and that at Muhammad's bidding he called out to the men who had given the pledge under the tree, who turned back and rallied (Sahih Muslim 1775). The Qur'an recalls the day: "Allah has already given you victory in many regions and [even] 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 [i.e., in spite of] its vastness; then you turned back, fleeing. Then Allah sent down His tranquility upon His Messenger and upon the believers and sent down soldiers [i.e., angels] whom you did not see" (Quran 9:25–26). Hawazin were defeated, and their families and flocks, which they had brought with them, were taken.

The siege of Ta'if and the distribution at al-Ji'ranah

Those of Thaqif who survived withdrew into Ta'if, and Muhammad besieged the town. Al-Mubarakpuri gives the length of the siege as between ten and twenty days, the sources disagreeing, and records that a catapult was set up and that twelve Muslims were killed by arrows from the walls. Abu Bakrah was among a few men who came down from the fort to join the Muslims (Sahih al-Bukhari 4326–4327). The town was not taken, and Ibn Umar recalled Muhammad saying, "We will return (to Madinah) if Allah will" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4325).

He went back to al-Ji'ranah, where the captives and spoils of Hunayn had been held. A delegation of Hawazin came to him as Muslims and asked for the return of their families and their property. He told them to choose one of the two, and when they chose their families, he asked the Muslims to give up the captives who had fallen to them, promising compensation to any who wished it, and the captives were returned (Sahih al-Bukhari 4318–4319). The spoils he distributed at al-Ji'ranah, giving large shares to the emigrants and to men of Quraysh who had only lately accepted Islam, those whose hearts were being reconciled, and nothing to the Ansar (Sahih al-Bukhari 4330, 4337). When a man remarked that the distribution had not been made for the sake of Allah, Muhammad, told of it, said, "May Allah bestow mercy on Musa (Moses), for he was troubled more than this but he remained patient" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4336). Some of the Ansar were aggrieved. Muhammad gathered them, and Abdullah ibn Zayd recorded his words: "Would you not be pleased that the people take away sheep and camels while you go with the Prophet to your homes?" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4330). He performed an umrah from al-Ji'ranah, one of the four he made, the others being those of al-Hudaybiyyah, of the following year, and the one joined with his pilgrimage (Sahih al-Bukhari 1778), and then returned to Medina.

After the siege, al-Mubarakpuri relates, a chief of Thaqif, Urwah ibn Mas'ud, came to Muhammad and accepted Islam, and went back to call his people to it, and was killed by them. In Ramadan of 9 AH a delegation of Thaqif came to Medina. Al-Mubarakpuri records that they asked to be excused from prayer and from the prohibitions of fornication, wine and usury, and that their idol al-Lat be spared; Muhammad refused, agreeing only that they would not have to destroy al-Lat with their own hands, and they accepted Islam. He sent a party under Khalid ibn al-Walid, in which al-Mughirah ibn Shu'bah took the axe to the idol, and appointed the youngest of the delegation, Uthman ibn Abi al-As, who had spent the midday hours of the visit learning the Qur'an, as the leader of his people.

Tabuk

In Rajab of 9 AH Muhammad announced an expedition to Tabuk, towards the Byzantine frontier in the north. It came in a time of intense heat, when the fruit had ripened and the shade was pleasant, Ka'b ibn Malik recalled (Sahih al-Bukhari 4418), and the army became known as the army of hardship, al-Usrah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4415). The Qur'an refers to those "who followed him in the hour of difficulty" (Quran 9:117). Uthman ibn Affan contributed heavily to the equipping of the army, and a report in Jami' at-Tirmidhi from Abd al-Rahman ibn Khabbab records his gifts to "the army of distress" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3700, graded hasan by its editor). Al-Mubarakpuri gives the army as thirty thousand, marching on a Thursday, with so few mounts that eighteen men took turns on a single camel and so little food that they ate the leaves of trees.

Muhammad left Ali as his deputy in Medina, and when Ali asked whether he was being left behind with the women and children, he answered, "Will you not be pleased that you will be to me like Aaron to Moses? But there will be no prophet after me" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4416). When they passed al-Hijr, he told his companions, "Do not enter the dwelling places of those people who were unjust to themselves unless you enter in a weeping state," and covered his head as he passed (Sahih al-Bukhari 4419).

No army came to meet them. Muhammad stayed at Tabuk for twenty days, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, and made agreements with the communities of the frontier, among them the people of Aylah, whose terms guaranteed their travel by land and sea; he sent Khalid ibn al-Walid with four hundred and fifty horsemen to Ukaydir, the ruler of Dumat al-Jandal. The whole expedition lasted fifty days, from Rajab into Ramadan, and it was the last campaign in which Muhammad took part in person.

A building put up in his absence was dealt with on the return. Al-Mubarakpuri relates that men whom the sources call the hypocrites had erected a mosque they called Masjid al-Dirar, the mosque of harm, and had asked him to come and pray in it and so bless the place; he was at that moment about to leave for Tabuk, and the request was put off until he came back. In the interval, that account continues, revelation told him that it was not a place of devotion and prayer but a meeting place for those opposed to Islam, and on his return he sent a party to demolish it. The Qur'an describes the building and the intention behind it: "And [there are] those [hypocrites] who took for themselves a mosque for causing harm and disbelief and division among the believers and as a station for whoever had warred against Allah and His Messenger before. And they will surely swear, 'We intended only the best.' And Allah testifies that indeed they are liars" (Quran 9:107). The verse that follows forbids him to stand in it and sets against it "a mosque founded on righteousness from the first day" (Quran 9:108) — the words quoted earlier in this article for the mosque he founded at Quba.

On his return more than eighty men who had stayed behind came with excuses, which he accepted. Three men of the Ansar who had no excuse — Ka'b ibn Malik, Murarah ibn al-Rabi' and Hilal ibn Umayyah — told him the truth, and the Muslims were told not to speak to them. Ka'b left a long account of those days in Sahih al-Bukhari: the people changed towards them until the very land seemed strange to him, and "we remained in that condition for fifty nights," until the verse was revealed that accepted their repentance (Sahih al-Bukhari 4418): "And [He also forgave] the three who were left alone … to the point that the earth closed in on them in spite of its vastness and their souls confined them and they were certain that there is no refuge from Allah except in Him. Then He turned to them so they could repent" (Quran 9:118).

The pilgrimage of 9 AH and the Year of Delegations

In Rajab of the same year, the TDV chronology records, the Negus died in Abyssinia, and Muhammad told the people in Medina on the day he died, "Today a pious man has died. So, get up and offer the funeral prayer," and led them in prayer for him (Sahih al-Bukhari 3877, 1245).⁴ Abdullah ibn Ubayy died in Dhu al-Qa'dah of 9 AH. His son asked Muhammad for his shirt to shroud him in and asked him to pray over him; Muhammad gave the shirt and stood to pray, and when Umar objected, he said that he had been given a choice; the verse "And do not pray [the funeral prayer, O Muhammad], over any of them who has died" (Quran 9:84) was revealed afterwards (Sahih al-Bukhari 1269).

That year Muhammad did not go on the pilgrimage himself. He sent Abu Bakr to lead it, and Abu Hurayrah, who was among those Abu Bakr sent to make the announcements at Mina on the day of sacrifice, recorded what was proclaimed: "No pagan is allowed to perform Hajj after this year and no naked person is allowed to perform the Tawaf around the Ka'bah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 369). Ali was sent after them with the opening of the chapter al-Tawbah to proclaim as well (Sahih al-Bukhari 4655).

In the years after the Conquest, delegations came to Medina from across Arabia, and the ninth year became known as the Year of Delegations. Al-Mubarakpuri writes that the biographers counted more than seventy, most of them arriving after the Conquest, and describes only those of particular significance. The two leaders of the Christians of Najran, al-Aqib and al-Sayyid, came intending a mutual invocation of Allah's curse on whichever side was lying, the mubahalah; they decided against it, agreed terms with Muhammad, and asked for a trustworthy man to go back with them, and he sent Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4380). When a delegation of Banu Tamim came, Abu Bakr and Umar disagreed in his presence over which of two of their leaders should be put in charge of them and raised their voices, and the opening verses of the chapter al-Hujurat were revealed (Sahih al-Bukhari 4367; Quran 49:1–2). Musaylimah of Banu Hanifah came to Medina and asked to be made Muhammad's successor, and Muhammad, holding a piece of a palm stalk, told him that he would not give him even that (Sahih al-Bukhari 4373).

Muhammad sent Companions to teach and to govern the communities that had accepted Islam. He sent Abu Musa al-Ash'ari and Mu'adh ibn Jabal to Yemen, each to his own province, telling them, "Make things easy for the people and do not make things difficult for them … and give the people glad tidings and do not repel them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4341–4342). Ibn Abbas recorded his instructions to Mu'adh: he was going to a people of the Scripture, and should invite them first to bear witness that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is His Messenger; if they accepted, he should tell them of the five daily prayers, and then of the charity to be "taken from the rich among them and given to the poor among them"; he was to avoid taking the best of their property, and to "be afraid of the curse of an oppressed person because there is no screen between his invocation and Allah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1496).

The Farewell Pilgrimage, final illness, and death

The Farewell Pilgrimage

Muhammad had not performed the pilgrimage in the nine years he had spent in Medina. In the tenth year it was announced that he would go, and many people came to Medina to go with him on the pilgrimage known as Hajjat al-Wada', the Farewell Pilgrimage. The account of Jabir ibn Abdullah in Sahih Muslim follows him from Medina to Mecca and through each of the rites. Al-Mubarakpuri dates the departure to a Saturday in the last four days of Dhu al-Qa'dah, and the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi to 26 Dhu al-Qa'dah (23 February 632).⁴ Aishah perfumed him before he set out. In the valley of al-Aqiq, Umar recalled, Muhammad said, "Tonight a messenger from my Lord came to me and said, 'Offer prayer in this blessed valley and say: (I intend) Umrah along with Hajj'" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1534). He entered Mecca, in al-Mubarakpuri's account, on Sunday, 4 Dhu al-Hijjah, after eight days on the road. Because he had brought sacrificial animals with him he remained in the state of ihram, and he told those who had not brought animals to complete an umrah and leave ihram until the days of the pilgrimage; in Jabir's report he said that had he known beforehand what he knew now, he would not have brought the animals and would have done the same (Sahih Muslim 1218).

On the eighth of Dhu al-Hijjah the pilgrims went to Mina, and on the ninth to Arafat, where a tent had been pitched for him at Namirah. After midday he rode to the floor of the valley and addressed the people; al-Mubarakpuri gives the number present as one hundred and twenty-four or one hundred and forty-four thousand. In Jabir's report he said: "Your blood and your wealth are sacred to one another, as sacred as this day of yours, in this month of yours, in this land of yours. All matters of the Jahiliyyah are abolished beneath my feet." He abolished the blood feuds of the time before Islam — "the first blood feud that I abolish is that of Rabi'ah bin Al-Harith" — and its usury, beginning with the usury of his uncle al-Abbas. He told the men to fear Allah with regard to women, whom they had taken as a trust from Allah, and set out the rights of husbands and wives upon each other, among them that "you should provide for them and clothe them in a reasonable manner". Then he said: "I have left you something which, if you adhere to it, you will never go astray: The Book of Allah. You will be asked about me. What will you say?" They answered, "We bear witness that you have conveyed (the Message) and fulfilled (your duty) and offered sincere advice," and he raised his forefinger towards the sky and then pointed it towards the people, saying three times, "O Allah, bear witness." He then led the midday and afternoon prayers together and stood in prayer at the place of standing, facing the qiblah, until the sun set (Sahih Muslim 1218). The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the address at Arafat to 9 Dhu al-Hijjah, 7 March 632.⁴

Umar later told a Jewish man who had spoken of the verse "This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion" (Quran 5:3) that he knew when and where it had been revealed: on a Friday, while the Prophet was standing at Arafat (Sahih al-Bukhari 45).

He spent the night at Muzdalifah and on the day of sacrifice stoned the pillar at Mina from his mount, saying, "Learn your rituals from me, for I do not know, perhaps I will not perform Hajj again after this Hajj of mine" (Sahih Muslim 1297). He addressed the people again that day. Abu Bakrah recorded his words: "Time has taken its original shape which it had when Allah created the heavens and the earth. The year is of twelve months, four of which are sacred" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4406). He asked them what day, what month and what city it was, and told them that their blood and their property were as sacred to one another as that day in that month in that city, that they should not, after him, turn back into disbelievers striking one another's necks, and that those present should convey what they had heard to those who were absent (Sahih al-Bukhari 1739, 4403, 4406). He sacrificed sixty-three camels with his own hand and Ali slaughtered the rest of the hundred (Sahih Muslim 1218). He then went to the Kaaba for the circuit of the pilgrimage, prayed the midday prayer in Mecca, and came to the men of Banu Abd al-Muttalib who were drawing water at Zamzam for the pilgrims.

The chapter al-Nasr, "When the victory of Allah has come and the conquest, and you see the people entering into the religion of Allah in multitudes, then exalt [Him] with praise of your Lord and ask forgiveness of Him" (Quran 110:1–3), was understood by Ibn Abbas as a sign of the approaching end of the Prophet's life, and when Umar asked him about it in the presence of older Companions, Umar said that he knew of it only what Ibn Abbas had said (Sahih al-Bukhari 4970). Abu Hurayrah recorded that Jibril used to review the Qur'an with the Prophet once every year, and reviewed it with him twice in the year he died, and that he used to spend ten days of Ramadan every year in retreat in the mosque, but spent twenty days in the year he died (Sahih al-Bukhari 4998).

The final months

Back in Medina, Muhammad appointed Usamah, the son of Zayd ibn Harithah, to command an army to be sent towards Syria. When some criticised the appointment, Muhammad said that they had criticised his father's command before, that Zayd had been worthy of it, and that Usamah was one of the people most beloved to him (Sahih al-Bukhari 4468–4469, 3730). The army was delayed by the Prophet's illness, and it was Abu Bakr who later dispatched it.

In Safar of 11 AH, eight years after Uhud, he offered the funeral prayer for the martyrs of that battle "as if bidding farewell to the living and the dead", then ascended the pulpit and said: "I am your predecessor before you, and I am a witness over you … I am not afraid that you will worship others besides Allah, but I am afraid that worldly life will tempt you and cause you to compete with each other for it." Uqbah ibn Amir, who reported it, said that it was the last time he saw the Messenger of Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4042). Al-Mubarakpuri records that he went out by night to the cemetery of al-Baqi' to pray for those buried there, and that on Monday, 29 Safar, after attending a funeral at al-Baqi', he was taken ill with a headache and fever; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the beginning of the illness to Sunday, 27 Safar (24 May 632).^4[g] The illness lasted thirteen or fourteen days, and for eleven of them he continued to lead the prayers.

As the illness grew worse he kept asking, "Where will I be tomorrow?", counting the days until Aishah's turn, and his wives allowed him to stay wherever he wished; he moved to Aishah's room and remained there until he died (Sahih al-Bukhari 4450). Aishah described him walking there between al-Abbas and another man, whom Ibn Abbas identified as Ali, his feet dragging on the ground (Sahih al-Bukhari 198, 4442). On the Wednesday before his death, al-Mubarakpuri relates, his fever was severe, and he asked for seven skins of water to be poured over him (Sahih al-Bukhari 198) and then went out to the mosque. He warned against taking the graves of prophets as places of worship (Sahih al-Bukhari 1330, 4441). Anas recalled that when Abu Bakr and al-Abbas found the Ansar weeping at the thought of losing him, Muhammad came out with a strip of cloth tied round his head, ascended the pulpit for the last time, and asked the people to take care of the Ansar, "my near companions to whom I confided my private secrets", and to "accept the good (deeds) of the good-doers amongst them and excuse the wrong-doers amongst them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3799). In the same days, Abu Sa'id al-Khudri recalled, Muhammad said from the pulpit that Allah had given one of His slaves the choice between this world and what was with Him, and that he had chosen what was with Allah; Abu Bakr wept, and the others wondered at it until they understood that the Prophet had been speaking of himself. He said that no one had favoured him more with his company and his wealth than Abu Bakr, and ordered that every small door opening onto the mosque be closed except Abu Bakr's (Sahih al-Bukhari 466, 3904).

On the Thursday, Ibn Abbas recalled, his pain grew worse and he said, "Fetch me something so that I may write to you something after which you will never go astray." Those present disagreed. Some wanted to bring the writing material; Umar said that the Prophet was seriously ill and that they had the Book of Allah, which was sufficient for them. When their disagreement grew loud, Muhammad told them to leave him. He gave them instructions: to turn the polytheists out of the Arabian peninsula, and to respect and give gifts to delegations as they had seen him do; of a third instruction, the sub-narrator said that Ibn Abbas either kept silent or had forgotten it (Sahih al-Bukhari 114, 4431, 4432). That evening he led the sunset prayer and recited the chapter al-Mursalat; Umm al-Fadl, who heard him, said that he led no other prayer after it until he died (Sahih al-Bukhari 4429). When he could no longer go out, he told them to have Abu Bakr lead the prayer. Aishah tried to excuse her father as a tender-hearted man who would weep when he stood in the Prophet's place, and Muhammad answered, "You are the companions of Joseph," and repeated his instruction (Sahih al-Bukhari 664, 713). Al-Mubarakpuri counts seventeen prayers that Abu Bakr led in the Prophet's lifetime. On one of the last days, al-Mubarakpuri relates, Muhammad came out supported between two men and sat at Abu Bakr's left, and Abu Bakr repeated his takbirs aloud for the people.

On the Sunday, al-Mubarakpuri writes, he freed his slaves, gave away the seven dinars he had in the house, and gave his weapons to the Muslims; that night Aishah had to borrow oil for the lamp. He died, Aishah recalled, with his armour pledged to a Jewish man for thirty measures of barley (Sahih al-Bukhari 2916). He told her that he still felt the pain of the food he had eaten at Khaybar (Sahih al-Bukhari 4428).

Death

At dawn on Monday the Muslims were praying behind Abu Bakr when Muhammad raised the curtain of Aishah's room and looked at them standing in rows, and smiled; they almost broke off their prayer in joy, and he signalled to them to complete it, and let the curtain fall. He died later that day (Sahih al-Bukhari 680, 4448). During these days he had spoken quietly to his daughter Fatimah, who wept and then laughed; she told Aishah after his death that he had first told her he would die of this illness, and then that she would be the first of his family to follow him (Sahih al-Bukhari 3623, 4433–4434). When his pain overcame him, she said, "Oh, how distressed my father is!", and he answered, "Your father will have no more distress after today" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4462).

Aishah described his last moments, in her room, with his head resting against her chest. Her brother Abd al-Rahman came in with a tooth-stick (siwak) in his hand, and when she saw Muhammad look at it, she softened it for him and he used it. He dipped his hands in a vessel of water beside him and wiped his face, saying, "La ilaha illallah. Death has its agonies." Then he raised his hand and said, "With the highest companions," until his hand fell (Sahih al-Bukhari 4449). Aishah had heard him say while he was well that no prophet dies until he is shown his place in Paradise and given the choice. In his last illness she heard him recite the words of the verse that speaks of "the ones upon whom Allah has bestowed favor of the prophets, the steadfast affirmers of truth, the martyrs and the righteous. And excellent are those as companions" (Quran 4:69), and when she heard him say "with the highest companions", she understood that he had been given the choice and was not choosing to stay (Sahih al-Bukhari 4435, 4463, 6509).

The reports agree that he died on a Monday; Aishah recalled Abu Bakr asking on his own deathbed on which day the Messenger of Allah had died, and being told that it was a Monday (Sahih al-Bukhari 1387). Al-Mubarakpuri gives the date as 12 Rabi al-Awwal 11 AH, late in the morning, and his age as sixty-three years and four days; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives 13 Rabi al-Awwal, corresponding to 8 June 632.⁴ His age is reported differently in the hadith. Aishah, Anas and Mu'awiyah give it as sixty-three (Sahih al-Bukhari 3536, 4466; Sahih Muslim 2348, 2352); a report from Ibn Abbas gives sixty-five, fifteen years in Mecca and ten in Medina after revelation began at forty (Sahih Muslim 2353); and Anas, in another report, speaks of ten years in Mecca and ten in Medina, which would give sixty (Sahih al-Bukhari 3547–3548).

Abu Bakr, the Saqifah, and the burial

When the news spread, Umar would not accept it and told the people that the Messenger of Allah had not died. Abu Bakr came from his house at al-Sunh, went in to where the Prophet lay, uncovered his face and kissed him, and said, "Let my father and my mother be sacrificed for you; Allah will never make you taste death twice." Then he went out to the people, and when he spoke, Umar sat down. "Whoever worshipped Muhammad," Abu Bakr said, "then Muhammad is dead, but whoever worshipped Allah, then Allah is Alive and shall never die." He recited, "Indeed, you are to die, and indeed, they are to die" (Quran 39:30), and "Muhammad is not but a messenger. [Other] messengers have passed on before him. So if he was to die or be killed, would you turn back on your heels [to unbelief]?" (Quran 3:144; Sahih al-Bukhari 3667–3668).

The same day the Ansar gathered with Sa'd ibn Ubadah in the roofed hall (saqifah) of Banu Sa'idah to discuss who should lead the community, and Abu Bakr, Umar and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah went to them (Sahih al-Bukhari 3668). Umar later gave an account of the meeting from the pulpit, describing the discussion there and how it ended with his pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr, followed by the emigrants and the Ansar (Sahih al-Bukhari 6830). The next day, Anas recalled, Umar spoke in the mosque and the people gave Abu Bakr the general pledge (Sahih al-Bukhari 7219). With that pledge Abu Bakr became the first caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate.

The body was washed on Tuesday. Al-Mubarakpuri names those who took part — al-Abbas, Ali, al-Abbas's sons al-Fadl and Qutham, the Prophet's freedman Shuqran, Usamah ibn Zayd, and Aws ibn Khawli of the Ansar — and records that he was washed three times, with water and lote leaves, in his shirt, with water brought from the well of Ghars at Quba. Ibn Kathir quotes Ibn Ishaq's report from Aishah that the Companions differed over whether to remove his clothing, and that he was washed in his shirt; he gives other accounts of who took part, one of which he calls very strange.¹ Aishah recalled that he was shrouded in three white cotton cloths of Yemen, without a shirt or a turban (Sahih al-Bukhari 1264).

There was disagreement over where he should be buried. Aishah recalled that Abu Bakr settled it with something he had heard the Prophet say, that a prophet is buried in the place where he dies, and the grave was dug where his bed had been (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1018; the editor grades it sahih, while al-Tirmidhi calls it gharib). The people prayed over him in groups, one after another, without anyone leading them — first his own family, then the emigrants, the Ansar, the women and the children — through Tuesday and much of Wednesday, and al-Mubarakpuri records Aishah's recollection that they heard the sound of the digging in the depth of the night before Wednesday. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the burial to Tuesday, 14 Rabi al-Awwal (9 June 632).⁴

Amr ibn al-Harith, the brother of the Prophet's wife Juwayriyyah, recorded that he left behind "neither a Dinar nor a Dirham nor a slave nor a slave woman", only his white mule, his weapons and a piece of land that he had given in charity (Sahih al-Bukhari 2739, 4461). When Fatimah asked Abu Bakr for her inheritance, he answered with the Prophet's saying, "Our property will not be inherited, whatever we leave is Sadaqa" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3093). Fatimah died six months after her father (Sahih al-Bukhari 4240–4241).

Names, titles, and the finality of prophethood

The narrative of events ends with the burial. What the Companions preserved, however, reaches well beyond the sequence of those events: they remembered what he was called, how he looked and spoke, how he prayed, ate and slept, what he taught and how he judged, and the signs they held to have been given to him — none of which belongs to any single date. The sections that follow are arranged by subject for that reason, and the Historiographical Note at the close sets out the points on which the sources used here disagree.

Two questions are treated together here because the sources treat them together: what Muhammad was called, and what the tradition holds about his standing as the last of the prophets. The names are not incidental to the second question. Qasasul Ambiyaa makes the point that his names and attributes were not merely customary, in the way that a family is free to name a child as it wishes and acquaintances free to coin a nickname; several of them were given by revelation and carry a meaning tied to what he did, and the clearest instance is al-Aqib, "the one who comes last", which is itself a statement about the end of prophethood.

Names and titles

The Qur'an calls him Muhammad in four places (Quran 3:144; 33:40; 47:2; 48:29), and it records Jesus giving "good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad" (Quran 61:6). Those two are the proper names. Qasasul Ambiyaa draws the distinction plainly: Muhammad and Ahmad are proper nouns, and the other words applied to him in the Qur'an are descriptive attributes and epithets rather than names in the same sense. One chapter of the Qur'an is named after him, chapter 47, Muhammad, and his name stands in its opening verses; the name Ahmad occurs once only, in the passage of al-Saff that carries Jesus's prophecy.

Where the Qur'an addresses him directly it does so as Ya ayyuha al-Nabi, "O Prophet", and Ayyuha al-Rasul, "O Messenger". Alongside those, Qasasul Ambiyaa lists the words of praise and description the Qur'an applies to him, among them Abdullah, the servant of Allah, and Abduhu, His servant; Shahid and Shaheed, witness; Bashir and Mubashshir, the bringer of good news, against Nadhir and Mundhir, the warner; Mudhakkir, the reminder; Hadi, the guide; Da'i ila Allah, the one who calls to Allah; Ra'uf and Rahim, kind and merciful; Amin, trustworthy; Siraj Munir, the shining lamp; Nur, light, and Haqq, truth; al-Muzzammil, the one wrapped in a garment, and al-Muddaththir, the one wrapped in a mantle, each the title of the chapter that opens by addressing him so; the two chapter-opening invocations Ya Sin and Ta Ha; and Khatam al-Nabiyyin, the seal of the prophets.

How many such names there are has itself been a subject of scholarship, and the counts differ widely. Qasasul Ambiyaa reports that Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, in his commentary on the Jami' of al-Tirmidhi, put the number at sixty-four; that other scholars have given ninety-nine; and that others again have enumerated a thousand, citing Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's Fath al-Bari. From the same source it records the list on which Ibn Hajar held the scholars to be agreed as the names occurring in the Qur'an itself — al-Shahid, al-Bashir, al-Nadhir, al-Mubin, al-Da'i ila Allah, al-Siraj al-Munir, al-Mudhakkir, al-Rahmah, al-Ni'mah, al-Hadi, al-Shaheed, al-Amin, al-Muzzammil and al-Muddaththir — and, as well known from the hadith rather than the Qur'an, al-Mutawakkil, al-Mukhtar, al-Mustafa, al-Shafi' al-Mushaffa' and al-Sadiq al-Masduq.

The hadith collections preserve his own enumerations. Jubayr ibn Mut'im recorded his words: "I have five names: I am Muhammad and Ahmad; I am Al-Mahi through whom Allah will eliminate Al-Kufr (disbelief); I am Al-Hashir who will be the first to be resurrected, the people being resurrected thereafter; and I am also Al-Aqib (i.e., there will be no Prophet after me)" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3532; Sahih Muslim 2354). The gloss on the last of the five is not the article's: Qasasul Ambiyaa attributes it to al-Zuhri, who read al-Aqib as meaning "I am the last prophet". In a report from Abu Musa al-Ash'ari he named himself Muhammad, Ahmad, al-Muqaffi, al-Hashir, the Prophet of Repentance and the Prophet of Mercy (Sahih Muslim 2355). His kunya was Abu al-Qasim, and he told his companions, "Name yourselves after me but do not call yourselves by my kunya" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3537).^[h]

The seal of the prophets

The Qur'an describes him as "the Messenger of Allah and seal [i.e., last] of the prophets" (Quran 33:40), and he told Ali that there would be no prophet after him (Sahih al-Bukhari 4416). He compared himself and the prophets before him to a house that a man had built well and beautifully except for the place of one brick in a corner, which people walked around and admired, wishing that the brick were in its place: "So I am that brick, and I am the last of the Prophets" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3535).

Ibn Kathir, commenting on the verse in his Tafsir, writes that it states clearly that there will be no prophet after him, and therefore no messenger either, since every messenger is a prophet but not every prophet is a messenger, and that this is reported in many mutawatir hadiths from a group of the Companions. The distinction he draws there is worth keeping in view, because the two words are not interchangeable: the claim of finality is made of the narrower category and so covers the wider one, which is why the sources treat "no prophet after me" as settling the question of messengers as well.

Sent to all mankind

The finality is bound up with a second claim, that the message was not addressed to one people. Ibn Kathir contrasts the earlier prophets, sent only to their own peoples, with Muhammad, sent to all mankind, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, citing the verse "Say, [O Muhammad], 'O mankind, indeed I am the Messenger of Allah to you all'" (Quran 7:158); Muhammad himself said, "Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind" (Sahih al-Bukhari 438). Qasasul Ambiyaa puts the two together in the same way, reading the seal of prophethood and the universality of the mission as one position rather than two: because the message is for all nations, no further messenger is required. The Qur'an addresses him: "And We have not sent you, [O Muhammad], except as a mercy to the worlds" (Quran 21:107).

The interval after Jesus

The sources place him at the end of a sequence, and they are specific about the gap immediately before him. Qasasul Ambiyaa records that Jesus was the last of the prophets sent to the Children of Israel, as Muhammad is the last of the prophets altogether; that between the time of Jesus and the time of Muhammad no prophet appeared, an interval in which revelation was cut off; and that Jesus is regarded among the prophets of Israel as the renovator of what came before, the Injil standing in that account as the completion of the Tawrat rather than its replacement. It is in the same connection that it names Jesus as the one who prophesied the coming of Muhammad most clearly, which returns to the verse of al-Saff quoted above.

What Muhammad himself taught about the prophets before him — that the call of every messenger was the worship of Allah alone, and that he was the nearest of all people to Jesus — belongs to his teaching rather than to his titles, and is set out under Teaching, law, and public leadership below.

Signs and miracles

The Qur'an as his sign

The Qur'an records the signs his opponents demanded of him: that he make a spring break open from the ground, have a garden of palm trees and grapes with rivers gushing through it, make the sky fall upon them in fragments, bring Allah and the angels before them, have a house of gold, or ascend into the sky and bring down a book they could read. It gives him the answer: "Say, 'Exalted is my Lord! Was I ever but a human messenger?'" (Quran 17:90–93). To the demand, "Why are not signs sent down to him from his Lord?" it answers: "Say, 'The signs are only with Allah, and I am only a clear warner.' And is it not sufficient for them that We revealed to you the Book [i.e., the Qur'an] which is recited to them?" (Quran 29:50–51). It challenges those in doubt to "produce a surah the like thereof" (Quran 2:23), and tells him to say, "If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants" (Quran 17:88). Muhammad spoke of the revelation in the same way: "There was no Prophet among the Prophets but was given miracles because of which people had security or had Belief, but what I have been given is the Divine Revelation which Allah has revealed to me. So I hope that my followers will be more than those of any other Prophet on the Day of Resurrection" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4981).

The splitting of the moon

The chapter al-Qamar opens: "The Hour has come near, and the moon has split [in two]. And if they see a sign [i.e., miracle], they turn away and say, 'Passing magic'" (Quran 54:1–2). Al-Bukhari and Muslim record the splitting of the moon from several Companions. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud said that they were with the Prophet at Mina when the moon split in two, and that he said, "Bear witness" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3869; Sahih Muslim 2800); in one of his reports one part remained over the mountain and the other went beyond it (Sahih al-Bukhari 4864). Anas said that the people of Mecca had asked him to show them a sign, and that he showed them the moon split in two halves, with Mount Hira between them (Sahih al-Bukhari 3637, 3868). Ibn Abbas is also recorded as reporting that the moon was split in his lifetime (Sahih al-Bukhari 3638; Sahih Muslim 2803).

Other signs in the hadith collections

Al-Bukhari gathers many further reports in a chapter headed "The signs of Prophethood in Islam". At al-Zawra', in Anas's report, a bowl of water was brought to Muhammad; he placed his hand in it and the water flowed from among his fingers, and the people, three hundred or nearly three hundred, all made their ablution with it (Sahih al-Bukhari 3572). At al-Hudaybiyyah, when the people had no water for drinking or ablution except a small pot in front of him, Jabir saw the water flow from among his fingers "like springs", and all of them drank and made ablution: "Even if we had been one hundred thousand, it would have been sufficient for us, but we were fifteen hundred" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3576). Al-Bara', who gives their number as fourteen hundred, recalled that they had drawn the well at al-Hudaybiyyah dry when Muhammad sat at its edge, rinsed his mouth with water and threw it into the well; after a short while they drew from it again, and they and their riding animals drank their fill (Sahih al-Bukhari 3577). Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, who saw the water flow from his fingers on another journey, said, "We used to consider miracles as Allah's Blessings, but you people consider them to be a warning," and added that "we used to hear the meals (food) glorifying Allah, when it was being eaten" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3579).

When Umm Sulaym sent Anas with a few loaves of barley, Muhammad brought the men who were with him in the mosque to Abu Talhah's house. The bread was broken into pieces, Umm Sulaym poured butter over it, and ten at a time were called in, until all of them, seventy or eighty men, had eaten their fill (Sahih al-Bukhari 3578). The meal that Jabir's wife prepared during the digging of the Trench was shared in the same way (Sahih al-Bukhari 4102).

In a year of drought, Anas recalled, a man stood up while Muhammad was giving the Friday sermon, said that the horses and sheep had perished, and asked him to pray for rain. The sky was as clear as glass. Muhammad raised his hands, a wind gathered the clouds, and it rained until the following Friday, when a man asked him to pray for it to stop; he smiled and said, "O Allah, (let it rain) around us and not on us," and the clouds parted and ringed Medina like a crown (Sahih al-Bukhari 3582, 1033).

Before the pulpit was made, he used to give the Friday sermon standing by the trunk of a date palm. When he moved to the pulpit, the trunk cried out — "like a child", in Jabir's words, and with a sound "like that of a pregnant she-camel", in another of his reports — until Muhammad came down to it and put his hand on it, and it fell quiet. "It was crying for (missing) what it used to hear of religious knowledge given near it," he said (Sahih al-Bukhari 3583–3585). He also spoke of a stone in Mecca that used to greet him before he was sent as a prophet: "I would recognize it even now" (Sahih Muslim 2277).

Reports of foretelling

Alongside the signs, the tradition treats reports in which Muhammad is said to have foretold events as a class of their own, and it has long been collected as such. This article reports what the sources record and does not take up the argument the evidential literature builds on them; that literature's purpose is to establish prophethood, which is a theological case rather than a historical one, and §6 of this encyclopaedia's standards keeps it out of the prose.

What the classical scholars said about the genre can be reported as a fact about the scholarship. Al-Qadi Iyad, who died in 1149, described this body of hadith as "a bottomless ocean and an unending stream", and held the reports to be "one of his miracles which are undeniably established, transmitted to us by tawatur" — abundant concurrence — "due to their many narrators and the concordance of their meanings". His Kitab al-Shifa is not in the approved source base and that passage reaches this article at second hand, through the Yaqeen Institute's survey of the subject.⁷

The Qur'anic instance most often cited is the opening of the chapter al-Rum, which speaks of a defeat already suffered and a reversal to come: "The Byzantines have been defeated. In the nearest land. But they, after their defeat, will overcome. Within three to nine years" (Quran 30:2–4). The passage goes on that "the decision of the matter, before and after [these events], is only with Allah. And on that Day, the believers will rejoice" (Quran 30:4–5). The Yaqeen survey sets the verses against the course of the Byzantine–Persian war, in which Byzantium lost Antioch, Damascus, Armenia, Jerusalem, Chalcedon and finally Egypt between 613 and 619 before Heraclius reversed the position, and it quotes Edward Gibbon's remark in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that at the time the prediction is said to have been delivered "no prophecy could be more distant from its accomplishment". Gibbon is likewise cited there rather than consulted here.⁷

Several of the particular reports that literature assembles are already set out above, in the narrative where they belong rather than gathered here: among them the announcement at Medina of the deaths of Zayd ibn Harithah, Ja'far and Abdullah ibn Rawahah at Mu'tah, made before any news had arrived, with the flag passing to "a Sword out of the Swords of Allah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 4262).

Household and family life

Wives and the Mothers of the Believers

The Qur'an gives the Prophet's wives a particular standing in the community: "The Prophet is more worthy of the believers than themselves, and his wives are [in the position of] their mothers" (Quran 33:6). Khadijah was his only wife for about twenty-five years, until her death. In the chapter on his household in The Sealed Nectar, al-Mubarakpuri lists eleven women whom he married and with whom the marriage was consummated, in this order:

• Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, whom he married when he was twenty-five, and who died in the tenth year of the mission.
• Sawdah bint Zam'ah, married in Shawwal of the tenth year, a few days after Khadijah's death.
• Aishah bint Abi Bakr, whose marriage contract was made in the eleventh year of the mission and who joined his household in Medina.
• Hafsah bint Umar, widow of Khunays ibn Hudhafah al-Sahmi, who had died between Badr and Uhud; married in 3 AH.
• Zaynab bint Khuzaymah of Banu Hilal ibn Amir, known as Umm al-Masakin, "mother of the poor", married in 4 AH; she died two or three months after the marriage, or eight months in another version.
• Umm Salamah, Hind bint Abi Umayyah, whose husband Abu Salamah died in Jumada al-Akhirah of 4 AH; married in Shawwal of the same year.
• Zaynab bint Jahsh of Banu Asad ibn Khuzaymah, his paternal cousin, previously married to Zayd ibn Harithah; married in Dhu al-Qa'dah of 5 AH.
• Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith, daughter of the chief of Banu al-Mustaliq, married after the expedition against her people.
• Umm Habibah, Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, married in Muharram of 7 AH while still in Abyssinia.
• Safiyyah bint Huyayy, freed and married after Khaybar in 7 AH.
• Maymunah bint al-Harith, married in Dhu al-Qa'dah of 7 AH, at the time of the umrah of that year.

Khadijah and Zaynab bint Khuzaymah died in his lifetime, and nine of his wives survived him. Al-Mubarakpuri records two further marriages, to a woman of Banu Kilab and to a woman of Kindah known as al-Jawniyyah, that were never consummated. He also names Mariyah the Copt, whom al-Muqawqis of Egypt sent to Muhammad and who became the mother of his son Ibrahim, and Rayhanah bint Zayd, of Banu al-Nadir or Banu Qurayza, whom some counted among his wives; al-Mubarakpuri reports that Ibn al-Qayyim gave more weight to the view that she was a slave-woman in his household.

The Qur'an's words on Zaynab bint Jahsh's marriage address the custom of treating an adopted son as a son by birth: "So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you in order that there not be upon the believers any discomfort [i.e., guilt] concerning the wives of their claimed [i.e., adopted] sons when they no longer have need of them" (Quran 33:37). That marriage stands apart from the others in being the one the Qur'an not merely endorses but contracts, and the Yaqeen Institute's study of it reads two purposes out of the passage. The first is the one the verse states: to end the pre-Islamic rule that barred a man from marrying the former wife of an adopted son, a rule which rested on treating an adopted child as a child by birth — and Zayd ibn Harithah had been known by Muhammad's patronym. The second the study draws from the verse that follows, which declares that he was not the father of any of the men among them (Quran 33:40): that no male descendant would be ascribable to him, and so no claim to his prophethood or his leadership could be made by inheritance. Abu Bakr's succession, on that reading, rested on his own standing rather than on descent.⁸ Aishah recorded how the household was ordered. When he intended a journey he drew lots among his wives and took the one whose lot came out, and he gave each wife her own day and night; Sawdah gave her day to Aishah (Sahih al-Bukhari 2593). In 9 AH, the TDV chronology records, after he had kept apart from his wives for a month, the verses were revealed that told him to offer them the choice between the life of this world and "Allah and His Messenger and the home of the Hereafter" (Quran 33:28–29).⁴ Aishah recalled that he began with her, telling her not to answer in haste but to consult her parents first; she chose Allah and His Messenger, and the others did the same (Sahih al-Bukhari 4785).

Children and grandchildren

Of his children by Khadijah, the sons died in childhood: al-Mubarakpuri names them as al-Qasim and Abdullah, who was also called al-Tayyib and al-Tahir, while Ibn Kathir's Tafsir names al-Qasim, al-Tayyib and al-Tahir. Of the four daughters, Zaynab married her maternal cousin Abu al-As ibn al-Rabi' before the Hijra; Ruqayyah and then Umm Kulthum were married in turn to Uthman ibn Affan; and Fatimah married Ali ibn Abi Talib between Badr and Uhud, and their children were al-Hasan, al-Husayn, Zaynab and Umm Kulthum. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi dates the death of Ruqayyah to Ramadan of 2 AH, that of Zaynab to the end of Safar in 8 AH, and that of Umm Kulthum to 9 AH.⁴

His son Ibrahim was born to Mariyah in Medina, in Dhu al-Hijjah of 8 AH according to Ibn Kathir. Anas recalled the Prophet saying, "A boy was born to me tonight, and I have named him after my father Ibrahim," and giving him to a wet nurse, Umm Sayf, the wife of a blacksmith in the uplands of Medina, where he would go to visit him (Sahih Muslim 2315–2316). "I have never seen anyone who was more compassionate towards children than the Messenger of Allah," Anas said. Ibrahim died as an infant. Anas was present when Muhammad held him as he was dying, and saw his eyes fill with tears; when Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf spoke in surprise, Muhammad said, "The eyes are shedding tears and the heart is grieved, and we will not say except what pleases our Lord," and spoke of his grief at the parting (Sahih al-Bukhari 1303). The sun was eclipsed on the day Ibrahim died, and when people said that it had eclipsed because of his death, Muhammad told them, "The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of the death or life of someone," and told them to pray (Sahih al-Bukhari 1043). Al-Mubarakpuri dates Ibrahim's death to 28 or 29 Shawwal 10 AH, 27 January 632.

His grandchildren appear often in the hadith. Abu Qatadah saw him lead the prayer carrying his granddaughter Umamah, the daughter of Zaynab, putting her down when he prostrated and picking her up again when he stood (Sahih al-Bukhari 516). When al-Aqra' ibn Habis saw him kiss al-Hasan and said that he had ten children and had never kissed any of them, Muhammad looked at him and said, "Whoever is not merciful will not be treated mercifully" (Sahih al-Bukhari 5997; Sahih Muslim 2318). He said of al-Hasan and al-Husayn that they would be the chiefs of the youth of Paradise (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3768, which al-Tirmidhi grades sahih hasan). Aishah said that she had seen no one who resembled the Messenger of Allah more in dignity, bearing and manner than Fatimah, and that when she came to him he would stand to welcome her, kiss her and seat her in his place, and she did the same for him (Sunan Abi Dawud 5217, graded hasan by its editor).

Appearance, character, and conduct

Physical descriptions

His companions described his appearance in detail. Anas said that he was "of medium height amongst the people, neither tall nor short; he had a rosy complexion, neither absolutely white nor deep brown; his hair was neither completely curly nor quite lank", and that when he died there were scarcely twenty white hairs in his head and beard (Sahih al-Bukhari 3547). Abu Hurayrah, who often described him, said that he had long eyelashes and fair-complexioned flanks, and added a detail of manner rather than feature: "When he faced someone, he faced him completely. When he turned away, he turned away completely" (Al-Adab al-Mufrad 255, graded authentic by its editor).⁹ Al-Bara' ibn Azib described him as of moderate height and broad-shouldered, with hair reaching his earlobes, and said that he once saw him in a red cloak and had never seen anyone more handsome (Sahih al-Bukhari 3551). Asked whether the Prophet's face had been as bright as a sword, al-Bara' said, "No, but (as bright) as a moon" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3552). Jabir ibn Samurah remembered that the hair of his beard was thick; asked whether his face had been bright like a sword, he said, "No, rather it was like the sun and the moon, and it was round," and he described the seal of prophethood on his shoulder, "like a pigeon's egg, the same color as his body" (Sahih Muslim 2344). Al-Sa'ib ibn Yazid, whose aunt brought him to the Prophet because of an ailment in his legs, stood behind him and saw the seal between his shoulders (Sahih al-Bukhari 190). Anas said that he had never touched silk softer than the Prophet's palm or smelled a perfume more pleasant than his sweat (Sahih al-Bukhari 3561). Aishah recalled that he spoke so distinctly that someone who wished to could have counted his words (Sahih al-Bukhari 3567), and that she never saw him laugh so fully that the back of his mouth could be seen: he would only smile (Sahih al-Bukhari 6092). Abu Sa'id al-Khudri said that he was more modest than a veiled virgin girl, and that when he disliked something it could be seen in his face (Sahih al-Bukhari 3562).

Character and conduct

The Qur'an describes his character as great (Quran 68:4) and his dealings with his companions as lenient: "So by mercy from Allah, [O Muhammad], you were lenient with them. And if you had been rude [in speech] and harsh in heart, they would have disbanded from about you. So pardon them and ask forgiveness for them and consult them in the matter" (Quran 3:159). Asked about his character, Aishah answered, "The character of the Prophet of Allah was the Qur'an" (Sahih Muslim 746).

The companions' reports record his conduct in particular terms. Anas served him for ten years, and in all that time he never said to him so much as "Uff" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6038). Aishah said that he never struck anyone with his hand, neither a woman nor a servant, except in fighting in the way of Allah, and that he never took revenge for a wrong done to himself unless one of the limits set by Allah was violated, when he acted for Allah's sake (Sahih Muslim 2328). Whenever he was given a choice between two matters he chose the easier, so long as it was not sinful (Sahih al-Bukhari 3560). Jabir said that he was never asked for anything to which he answered "no" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6034). At home, Aishah said, "He used to keep himself busy serving his family and when it was the time for the prayer, he would go for it" (Sahih al-Bukhari 676).

He applied the law without regard to rank. When a woman of the clan of Makhzum was convicted of theft, Quraysh asked Usamah ibn Zayd to intercede for her. Muhammad refused and addressed the people: those before them had been destroyed because when a noble person among them stole they let him go, and when a weak person stole they punished him; "if Fatimah, the daughter of Muhammad, stole, I would cut off her hand" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3475, 6788). In the prayer he considered those behind him. "When I stand for the prayer, I intend to prolong it," he said, "but on hearing the cries of a child, I cut it short, as I dislike to trouble the child's mother" (Sahih al-Bukhari 707), and he told those who led prayers to keep them short, since among the people were the weak, the sick and the old (Sahih al-Bukhari 703). Anas saw him pass some children and greet them (Sahih Muslim 2168), and Jabir ibn Samurah remembered that after the dawn prayer, as he went out to his family, some children met him and he patted their cheeks one after another (Sahih Muslim 2329).

His household lived simply. Aishah said that from the time he came to Medina until he died, his family never ate their fill of bread for three days in succession (Sahih al-Bukhari 5416), and she told her nephew Urwah that three new moons would pass, two months, without a fire being lit in the Prophet's houses, when they lived on dates and water, with some milk that their neighbours of the Ansar sent them (Sahih al-Bukhari 6459).

Al-Adab al-Mufrad, al-Bukhari's collection on manners, preserves an episode that shows him correcting an excess of his own making. Abu Hurayrah recorded that he came out to a group of his companions who were talking and laughing and said, "By Him who holds my soul in His hand, if you knew what I knew, you would laugh little and weep much," and left them; the group were in tears. He then returned to them and said, "Receive the good news: follow the right path and try to reach to that if you can't exactly attain that and choose the middle way between going to excess and falling too short" (Al-Adab al-Mufrad 254, graded authentic by its editor).⁹

The character sketches of the later tradition

Descriptions of his character were composed and collected throughout Islamic history, and one of the best known is the chapter al-Ghazali devotes to it in the Ihya' ulum al-din, the "Book of the Etiquette of Life and the Prophetic Character", which gathers sketches made by earlier scholars. That work is not in the approved source base and reaches this article at second hand, through the Yaqeen Institute's study of prophetic ethics, which quotes a portion of it and states plainly that nearly every sentence in it rests on an authentic report while footnoting only some of them.¹⁰ What follows is therefore what al-Ghazali's compilation says, as that study gives it, rather than a set of claims independently traced to the hadith collections — a distinction that matters because the compilation's value lies in the portrait it assembles rather than in each sentence standing alone.

The sketch describes him as the most forbearing of men, the most courageous, the most just and the most forgiving; as never having touched the hand of a woman he had no right to touch. On generosity it records that he would not let a dinar or a dirham stay with him overnight without giving it away, and that if something was left with him he would not retire to his chambers until he had found someone in need to take it, giving even out of his own year's provision and leaving himself short. It records him mending his own sandal, patching his own cloak, serving his household and carving meat; responding to an invitation from anyone, free or slave; accepting a gift as small as a draught of milk or the leg of a rabbit and giving something in return, while refusing to eat of what was given as charity; and attending to the needs of a child or a destitute person as carefully as to anyone else's. On anger it says that he grew angry only for his Lord's sake and never on his own account. It describes him as silent without being sullen and eloquent without being voluble, with a cheerful face, and never overawed by the affairs of this world; wearing whatever was at hand, a cloak or a striped Yemeni garment or a gown of wool; mounting whatever was available, a horse, a camel, a mule or a donkey, and taking a servant up behind him; and walking out among his enemies without a guard.

One episode in the sketch bears on the conduct of justice and is worth setting out, because the existing account of Khaybar above does not carry it. Al-Ghazali's compilation records that when one of the dearest of his Companions was found killed in the Jewish quarter there, he neither moved against the inhabitants nor departed from the course of law; lacking conclusive proof, he paid the victim's family the blood money of a hundred she-camels from the treasury, at a time when his own companions had need of every one of them.

Worship and daily life

Prayer and remembrance

He prayed at night until his feet swelled, and when he was asked why, since his sins had been forgiven, he answered, "Should I not be a thankful slave?" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1130, 4837). Aishah said that in Ramadan and outside it his night prayer did not exceed eleven units (Sahih al-Bukhari 1147). He asked for Allah's forgiveness more than seventy times a day, in Abu Hurayrah's report (Sahih al-Bukhari 6307), and a hundred times a day, in the report of al-Agharr al-Muzani (Sahih Muslim 2702). When Abdullah ibn Mas'ud recited the chapter al-Nisa to him at his request and reached the verse "So how [will it be] when We bring from every nation a witness and We bring you, [O Muhammad], against these [people] as a witness?" (Quran 4:41), he said, "Stop!", and Ibn Mas'ud saw that his eyes were overflowing with tears (Sahih al-Bukhari 4582). He cleaned his teeth with the tooth-stick, and said that had he not feared making things hard for his community he would have ordered them to use it before every prayer (Sahih al-Bukhari 887).

Fasting

Aishah said that at times he fasted until it seemed he would never stop, and at times left fasting until it seemed he would never fast; she never saw him fast a whole month except Ramadan, nor fast more in any month than in Sha'ban (Sahih al-Bukhari 1969), and he used to aim to fast on Mondays and Thursdays (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 745, graded sahih by its editor). He spent the last ten days of Ramadan in retreat (i'tikaf) in the mosque (Sahih al-Bukhari 2025, 2029).

Food, sleep, and dress

Abu Hurayrah said that he never criticised food: if he liked it he ate it, and if not, he left it (Sahih al-Bukhari 3563). He taught Umm Salamah's son Umar, who as a boy in his care let his hand wander around the dish, "Mention the Name of Allah and eat with your right hand, and eat of the dish what is nearer to you" (Sahih al-Bukhari 5376). Al-Miqdam ibn Ma'dikarib heard him teach moderation in eating: "It is sufficient for the son of Adam to eat what will support his back. If this is not possible, then a third for food, a third for drink, and a third for his breath" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2380, graded sahih by its editor; al-Tirmidhi calls it hasan sahih). He taught al-Bara' ibn Azib to perform ablution before going to bed, to lie on his right side, and to recite a supplication entrusting himself to Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 247, 6311).

A report in Sunan Abi Dawud from Ibn Abbas records his instruction, "Wear white garments, for they are among the best of your garments" (Sunan Abi Dawud 4061, graded hasan by its editor). Aishah perfumed him for the state of ihram (Sahih al-Bukhari 1539). The silver ring with which his letters were sealed was engraved in three lines — "Muhammad", "Messenger", "Allah" — and after him it was worn by Abu Bakr, then by Umar, then by Uthman, until it slipped from Uthman's hand into the well of Aris; the well was drained, but the ring was not found (Sahih al-Bukhari 5878–5879).

Health and medicine

The Book of Medicine in Sahih al-Bukhari gathers what the Companions remembered of his counsel about illness and its treatment, and it is the basis of a later literature of prophetic medicine that is a subject in its own right rather than part of his life; what follows is confined to the reports themselves. The article records what the sources say he said and did, and makes no claim about the effect of any remedy.

Three treatments recur. Ibn Abbas reported him saying, "Healing is in three things: cupping, a gulp of honey or cauterization, (branding with fire) but I forbid my followers to use cauterization" (Sahih al-Bukhari 5681), and Jabir ibn Abdullah heard a version in which the prohibition is softened to a preference: "If there is any good in your medicines, then it is in a gulp of honey, a cupping operation, or branding (cauterization), but I do not like to be (cauterized) branded" (Sahih al-Bukhari 5702). The collection places its chapter on treatment with honey under the verse "Wherein is healing for men" (Quran 16:69). He was himself cupped: Ibn Abbas recorded that he was cupped on the head while in the state of ihram, at a watering place called Lahy Jamal, and on another occasion for a one-sided headache (Sahih al-Bukhari 5700, 5701).

The collection also preserves his words on black cumin. Aishah heard him say that it is "healing for all diseases except al-sam", and when she asked what al-sam was he answered, "Death"; the report comes by way of Khalid ibn Sa'd, who records Ibn Abi Atiq prescribing it to a sick travelling companion at Medina, five or seven seeds crushed with oil and dropped into the nostrils (Sahih al-Bukhari 5687). Abu Hurayrah reported the same in shorter form (Sahih al-Bukhari 5688). For the sick and for the bereaved, Aishah used to recommend al-talbina, a thin porridge of milk, honey and flour, saying she had heard him call it a rest to the heart of the patient (Sahih al-Bukhari 5689).

Supplication

Supplication ran through his daily life, and the hadith collections preserve the words he used and taught. Umm Salamah, asked which supplication he made most often, said that it was "O Changer of the hearts, make my heart firm upon Your religion" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3522, graded hasan by its editor; Anas's report of the same words in Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2140 is graded hasan sahih by al-Tirmidhi). He taught Ali to say, "O Allah, guide me and make me steadfast," and, when he asked for guidance, to remember those who guide people along the road, and when he asked for steadfastness, to remember those who shoot arrows (Sahih Muslim 2725). Leaving his wife Juwayriyyah in her place of prayer after the dawn prayer and returning in the late morning to find her still there, he told her that since leaving her he had said four words, three times, which would outweigh all that she had said that day: "Glory and praise is to Allah, as much as the number of His creation, as much as pleases Him, as much as the weight of His Throne and as much as the ink of His words" (Sahih Muslim 2726).

One supplication he taught as a settled form for a particular situation. Jabir recorded that he used to teach the istikhara, the seeking of guidance when a decision is in view, "on occasions just as he would teach us a sura of the Qur'an": a man concerned about something he intends to do should pray two rak'ats and then ask Allah for the good by His knowledge and for strength by His power, acknowledging that "You have the power and I do not. You know and I do not know. You are the Knower of the Unseen", and then ask that if the matter is good for him in his religion, his livelihood and the outcome of his affair it be decreed for him, and if it is bad in those same respects it be turned away from him, closing, "Decree for me the good wherever it is and then make me content"; and he should name the thing he needs (Al-Adab al-Mufrad 703, graded authentic by its editor).⁹ The commentary in that edition adds a clarification worth keeping, that the prayer is not a request to be shown the unseen but an act of submitting a decision to Allah.

Aishah said that he liked comprehensive supplications and left the others (Sunan Abi Dawud 1482, graded sahih by its editor). When Abdullah ibn Mughaffal heard his son ask Allah for "the white palace on the right hand side of Paradise", he told him to ask Allah for Paradise and seek refuge from the Fire, for he had heard the Prophet say that there would be people who exceeded the limits in purification and in supplication (Sunan Abi Dawud 96, graded sahih by its editor).

Teaching, law, and public leadership

Belief, worship, and the earlier prophets

The centre of Muhammad's teaching was the worship of Allah alone, stated in the short chapter al-Ikhlas: "Say, 'He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent'" (Quran 112:1–4). The Qur'an presents this as the call of every messenger before him — "And We certainly sent into every nation a messenger, [saying], 'Worship Allah and avoid Taghut'" (Quran 16:36) — and places the revelation to him in the line of the revelation "to Noah and the prophets after him", naming Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon and David (Quran 4:163). Muhammad said that he was the nearest of all people to Jesus son of Mary, in this world and in the Hereafter, and that "The Prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3443).

Umar ibn al-Khattab remembered the day a man whom none of them knew, in exceedingly white clothes, with exceedingly black hair and no sign of travel on him, sat down before the Prophet with his knees against his and asked him about Islam, faith and ihsan. Muhammad answered that Islam was "to bear witness that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; to establish the Salat, to pay the Zakat, to fast (the month of) Ramadan and to perform pilgrimage to the House (the Ka'bah), if you have the means"; that faith was "to believe in Allah, His Angels, His Books, His Messengers, the Last Day, and to believe in Al-Qadar (the divine will and decree), both the good and bad of it"; and that ihsan was "to worship Allah as though you can see Him, for although you cannot see Him, He indeed sees you." When the man had gone, Muhammad told Umar, "That was Jibra'il, who came to you to teach you your religion" (Sahih Muslim 8). In Ibn Umar's report he said that Islam is built on these five, which Muslims call the five pillars (Sahih al-Bukhari 8; Sahih Muslim 16).

He tied belief to conduct. Umar heard him say, "The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended" (Sahih al-Bukhari 1). "None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself," he said (Sahih al-Bukhari 13), and "Whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should not harm his neighbour, and whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should entertain his guest generously; and whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should talk what is good or keep quiet" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6018).

The Qur'an and the Sunnah

The Qur'an joins obedience to him with obedience to Allah: "O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. And if you disagree over anything, refer it to Allah and the Messenger" (Quran 4:59), and "whatever the Messenger has given you — take; and what he has forbidden you — refrain from" (Quran 59:7). His words, his actions, and his tacit approval of what was done in his presence became the Sunnah, and the hadith collections preserve them on every subject from prayer and purification to trade, inheritance, war and manners.

He pointed his community to both. In his address at Arafat he said that he had left them the Book of Allah, which would keep them from going astray (Sahih Muslim 1218). Zayd ibn Arqam recalled an address given at a watering place called Khumm, between Mecca and Medina, in which Muhammad said, "O people, I am only human, and soon the messenger of my Lord will come to me and I will respond. I am leaving among you two weighty things, the first of which is the Book of Allah in which is guidance and light," urged them to hold fast to it, and then said three times, "I remind you of Allah with regard to the people of my household" (Sahih Muslim 2408). Al-Irbad ibn Sariyah remembered another occasion on which, after an admonition that brought tears to their eyes, someone said that it sounded like a farewell and asked what he enjoined on them. He told them to fear Allah and to hear and obey, and said: "Whoever among you lives after I am gone will see great disputes; you must adhere to my Sunnah and the way of the Rightly Guided Khulafa. Hold on to it and cling fast to it. And beware of newly-invented matters" (Sunan Abi Dawud 4607, graded sahih by its editor). "Religion is sincerity," he said, and when asked to whom, answered: to Allah, His Book, His Messenger, the leaders of the Muslims and their common folk (Sahih Muslim 55).

Methods of teaching and correction

Anas said that he would repeat what he said three times, so that the people could understand it properly from him (Sahih al-Bukhari 95). He taught through questions: "Do you know what bankrupt means?" he asked, and when they answered that among them a bankrupt was one who had neither money nor goods, he said that the bankrupt of his community was the one who would come on the Day of Resurrection with prayer, fasting and zakat, having insulted one person, slandered another, consumed the wealth of another, shed the blood of another and beaten another; his good deeds would be given to those he had wronged, and if they ran out, their sins would be cast upon him (Sahih Muslim 2581). Abdullah ibn Mas'ud recalled him drawing a square, with a line through the middle that extended outside it and small lines attached to the central line, and explaining that the line was the human being, the square his lifespan encircling him, the part outside it his hope, and the small lines the calamities that befall him: if one misses him, another overtakes him (Sahih al-Bukhari 6417; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2454).

Malik ibn al-Huwayrith came to him with a group of young men of about the same age, and they stayed with him for twenty nights. When he saw that they missed their families, he asked them about the people they had left, sent them home to teach them, and told them, "Offer Salat (prayer) as you have seen me praying" (Sahih al-Bukhari 631).

He corrected without harshness. When a Bedouin urinated in the mosque and the people seized him, Muhammad told them to leave him and to pour a bucket of water over the place, and said, "You have been sent to make things easy (for the people) and not sent to make things difficult for them" (Sahih al-Bukhari 220).

Consultation and delegation

The Qur'an told him to "consult them in the matter" (Quran 3:159), and the accounts of his years in Medina show him doing so: on the way to Badr, when he asked the emigrants and the Ansar for their advice, and at Badr itself, when he accepted al-Hubab ibn al-Mundhir's proposal on where to camp; before Uhud, when he went out to meet Quraysh at the urging of those who wished to fight outside the city; at the Trench, when he adopted Salman's proposal; and at al-Hudaybiyyah, when he acted on Umm Salamah's advice. He consulted Abu Bakr and Umar over the captives of Badr, and Ali and Usamah during the affair of al-ifk.

As the community grew he appointed others to act for him. Al-Mubarakpuri names Attab ibn Asid as governor of Mecca after the Conquest and Uthman ibn Abi al-As as the leader of Thaqif; Abu Musa al-Ash'ari and Mu'adh ibn Jabal were sent to Yemen, and commanders led the expeditions he did not lead himself, from Hamzah's party in the first year to the army of Usamah in the last. When he went on campaign he left a deputy in charge of Medina, among them Ibn Umm Maktum and Abu Lubabah.

Treaties, war, and restraint

Agreements, written or witnessed, mark the Medinan years: the pact between the emigrants, the Ansar and the Jewish groups of Medina; the agreement of non-aggression with Banu Damrah in the first campaigns; the truce of al-Hudaybiyyah; the terms of Khaybar and of the frontier communities at Tabuk; and the terms agreed with delegations such as that of Najran.

In war he laid down limits. When he appointed a commander over an army or an expedition, in Buraydah's report, he would advise him to fear Allah and to treat the Muslims under his command well, and would tell them: "Fight but do not steal from the war booty, do not break your promises, do not mutilate (the dead enemy) and do not kill children" (Sahih Muslim 1731). Ibn Umar recalled that when a woman was found killed during one of the campaigns, Muhammad forbade the killing of women and children (Sahih al-Bukhari 3015). He told his army: "O people! Do not wish to meet the enemy (in a battle) and ask Allah to save you (from calamities), but if you should meet the enemy, then be patient" (Sahih al-Bukhari 2966).

Transmission and the historical memory of Muhammad

The Qur'an in his lifetime and after

The Qur'an came to him in portions over the years of his mission, as the Qur'an itself says: "And [it is] a Qur'an which We have separated [by intervals] that you might recite it to the people over a prolonged period. And We have sent it down progressively" (Quran 17:106). His companions learned it from him by heart, and some wrote it down; Zayd ibn Thabit was among those who wrote the revelation for him (Sahih al-Bukhari 4986).

After his death the text was gathered in writing. Zayd ibn Thabit recalled that after many of those who knew the Qur'an by heart had been killed at al-Yamamah, Umar urged Abu Bakr to have it collected, and Abu Bakr gave the task to Zayd, telling him, "You used to write the Divine Revelation for Allah's Messenger." Zayd collected it from what had been written on palm-leaf stalks and thin white stones and from the men who knew it by heart. The sheets remained with Abu Bakr until his death, then with Umar, and then with Hafsah (Sahih al-Bukhari 4986). Under Uthman, when Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman warned him of differences in recitation among the armies, Uthman obtained the sheets from Hafsah and had Zayd, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, Sa'id ibn al-As and Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Harith copy them, telling the three men of Quraysh that where they disagreed with Zayd they should write in the dialect of Quraysh, since the Qur'an had been revealed in their tongue. When the copies were finished he returned the sheets to Hafsah, sent a copy to every province, and ordered that all other written Qur'anic material be burnt (Sahih al-Bukhari 4987), completing the standardisation of the Qur'an under Uthman.

Hadith and biography

His words and actions were remembered and passed on by those who had lived with him — his wives and family, those who served him, such as Anas ibn Malik, and the Companions who prayed, travelled and fought beside him. He had told them, "Convey (my teachings) to the people even if it were a single Verse or a sentence" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3461), and warned, "whoever tells a lie against me intentionally, then (surely) let him occupy his seat in Hell-fire" (Sahih al-Bukhari 110). The collecting of these reports began in his lifetime and relied at first on memory; by the middle of the first century of the Hijra written compilations of hadith had begun to appear, and in time each report came to be examined both for its text (matn) and for the chain of those who had transmitted it (sanad). The reports were gathered in the collections of hadith, among them Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abi Dawud and Jami' at-Tirmidhi.

The narrative biography, the sira, draws on these reports and on the accounts of the early historians of his campaigns. Ibn Kathir brought to his Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya the method of the hadith scholar more than that of the historian: al-Bukhari, Muslim, al-Bayhaqi, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Abu Nu'aym feature in it more prominently than historians such as Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari.² He also quotes Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa'd and others at length, compares their versions, and sometimes comments on their strength, calling one report well established and another very strange.² Later retellings, among them al-Mubarakpuri's The Sealed Nectar and Haykal's The Life of Muhammad, arrange the sira as a continuous narrative; Haykal, in a section headed "The Qur'an and Miracles", compares a number of narratives from the biography and hadith books with the Qur'an.

How the sources are classified and weighed

The academic study of the sources approaches them as a set of overlapping bodies of material rather than as a single record, and The Encyclopaedia of Islam, in the opening of its entry on Muhammad in volume 7, sets out the classification it works with. The sources, it states, "fall into overlapping categories that call for a variety of methods of analysis".

Its judgement on the Qur'an is worth giving in its own words, because it is two-sided: the Qur'an is "by far the most trustworthy source, but at the same time the most difficult to utilise as a historical source", most if not all of it being contemporary with his life. The difficulty is one of purpose rather than of reliability — any use of the Qur'an as a historical source is, in that entry's phrase, "clearly ancillary to its primary purpose and main functions in Muslim life" — and it adds that historians and biographers past and present have only begun to draw on it in this way, the work requiring specialised knowledge and both historical and literary-critical method.

Of the narrative literature it observes that the earliest attempts to report the events of his life "could hardly be called biographies in the modern sense", and distinguishes four kinds of writing that fed into them: the maghazi works, which treated his expeditions and campaigns and merged at an early date with the sira works that preserved stories about him; the tafsir writings, which preserved traditional interpretations of particular verses; and the hadith accounts, which preserved sayings of and about him. Early works in all these categories, it notes, contain material classifiable as mutawatir, handed down by many concurrent lines. Alongside them it names as further sources of value the Sahih of al-Bukhari, who died in 256 AH, the Sahih of Muslim, who died in 261 AH, and the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died in 241 AH — the first two of which this article uses directly.

Historical memory

The Qur'an tells the believers, "Indeed, Allah confers blessing upon the Prophet, and His angels [ask Him to do so]. O you who have believed, ask [Allah to confer] blessing upon him and ask [Allah to grant him] peace" (Quran 33:56). When Ka'b ibn Ujrah and others asked him how they should invoke blessings on him and his family, he taught them to ask Allah to send His blessings on Muhammad and the family of Muhammad as He had sent them on Abraham and the family of Abraham (Sahih al-Bukhari 3370), and he said, "Whoever sends Salat upon me once, Allah will send Salat upon him tenfold" (Sahih Muslim 408). The invocation, written after his name as ﷺ, is one of the ways in which his memory is carried in Muslim life, alongside the recitation of the Qur'an he brought, the prayer as he taught it, and the Sunnah preserved in the hadith.

Historiographical Note

Chronology

The disagreements set out below are not a defect in the particular sources this article uses. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, in volume 7, states the position in general terms: the first question a biographer asks, when the subject was born, "cannot be answered precisely for Muhammad", and there are "no certain chronological data for the Meccan period of his life". The Medinan years are firm, running about ten years from the Hijra in 622 to his death in 632; for Mecca, that entry records that most sources give the prophetic activity there as ten years while there is considerable difference of opinion, cites a line of poetry ascribed variously to Abu Qays ibn Abi Anas and to Hassan ibn Thabit putting it at "ten and some years", and notes that his biographers usually make him forty, and sometimes forty-three, at the time of his call. The tables that follow should be read against that.

The two fullest chronologies among the sources, al-Mubarakpuri's in The Sealed Nectar and that of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, differ at many points.⁴ Al-Mubarakpuri, following the calculations of al-Mansurpuri and the astronomer Mahmud Pasha, places the birth in April 571; the TDV chronology is based on 12 Rabi al-Awwal 53 BH (17 June 569), the first of the two strong reports it identifies.⁴ The Common Era equivalents they give for some events differ by a year — al-Mubarakpuri places the journey to Ta'if in 619, the TDV in 620 — and they sometimes differ over the Hijri day or month as well.⁴ The principal differences, with the variants recorded in other sources, are these:

Event	The Sealed Nectar (al-Mubarakpuri)	TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi	Other reports
Birth	Monday 9 Rabi al-Awwal, Year of the Elephant; 20 or 22 April 571	12 Rabi al-Awwal 53 BH (17 June 569); also 9 Rabi al-Awwal 51 BH (20 April 571)	Ibn Kathir: a Monday, undisputed; the 2nd, 8th and 12th of Rabi al-Awwal transmitted; a Friday 17th rejected as an error; Haykal: 570
Interval after the Elephant	Fifty or fifty-five days	—	Ibn Kathir: one month, forty days, fifty days (most favoured) or fifty-five days; minority reports of ten or twenty-three years
First revelation	Night of Monday 21 Ramadan; 10 August 610	27 Ramadan 610, marked as uncertain	Ibn Kathir: a Monday; in Ramadan, on the 10th, the 17th or the 24th; a report from Ibn Abbas and Jabir of 12 Rabi al-Awwal
Deaths of Abu Talib and Khadijah	Abu Talib in Rajab of the tenth year; Khadijah two or three months later, in Ramadan	Khadijah 10 Ramadan (19 April 620); Abu Talib in Shawwal (May 620), with reports of three or fifty-five days after her, or before her	Sahih al-Bukhari 3896: Khadijah died three years before the Hijra
Journey to Ta'if	Shawwal of the tenth year; late May or early June 619	Shawwal; May–June 620	—
Isra and Mi'raj	Six views, from the first year of the mission to the thirteenth; no preference among the last three	27 Rajab 621	—
Departure from Mecca	Night of 27 Safar; 12 or 13 September 622	26 Safar; 9 September 622	—
Quba	Arrival Monday 8 Rabi al-Awwal (23 September 622); stay of four days (Ibn Ishaq) or ten-odd, fourteen or twenty-four nights (reports of Sahih al-Bukhari)	8 to 12 Rabi al-Awwal (20–24 September 622); entry into Medina 12 Rabi al-Awwal	Sahih al-Bukhari 3906: ten nights; 3932: fourteen nights
Aishah joins the household	Shawwal, 1 AH	Shawwal, 2 AH	—
Change of qiblah	Sha'ban, 2 AH (February 624)	Rajab, 2 AH	Sahih al-Bukhari 40: sixteen or seventeen months after the arrival
Uhud	Saturday 7 Shawwal, 3 AH	7 or 11 Shawwal, 3 AH	—
Banu al-Mustaliq	Sha'ban, 6 AH	Sha'ban, 5 AH	—
Khaybar	End of Muharram, 7 AH (from Ibn Ishaq)	Safar, 7 AH	—
March on Mecca	Left Medina 10 Ramadan, 8 AH	Left 13 Ramadan; entered Mecca 20 Ramadan, 8 AH	—
Hunayn	Left Mecca Saturday 19 Shawwal	Battle on 11 Shawwal, 8 AH	—
Death	Monday 12 Rabi al-Awwal, 11 AH	Monday 13 Rabi al-Awwal (8 June 632)	Sahih al-Bukhari 1387: a Monday
Burial	Night before Wednesday	Tuesday 14 Rabi al-Awwal (9 June 632)	—
Age at death	Sixty-three years and four days	—	Sixty-three (Aishah, Anas, Mu'awiyah); sixty-five (Ibn Abbas); Anas, in another report: sent at forty, then ten years in Mecca and ten in Medina

Numbers

The figures for the armies at Badr vary between the reports. Umar's report in Sahih Muslim gives three hundred and nineteen Muslims against a thousand of Quraysh, al-Bara' ibn Azib's reports in Sahih al-Bukhari speak of a little over three hundred and ten Muslims, and al-Mubarakpuri gives three hundred to three hundred and seventeen, against a Qurayshi army of thirteen hundred that was reduced to about a thousand when Banu Zuhrah turned back.

Reports of different standing

The sources grade their own material. Several widely told episodes of the early life rest on reports that their transmitters or editors qualify, among them the wonders at the birth and the meeting with Bahira, while the opening of the chest in childhood, the first revelation, the Isra and Mi'raj, the splitting of the moon and the events of the final illness are related in the collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim. For the Medinan period the sira and the hadith sometimes give different accounts of the same event, as with the purpose of the party destroyed at al-Raji' and the cause of the breach with Banu Qaynuqa.

The addresses of the Farewell Pilgrimage are known from separate reports of two occasions: Jabir's report in Sahih Muslim of the address at Arafat, and the reports of Ibn Abbas and Abu Bakrah in Sahih al-Bukhari of the address at Mina on the day of sacrifice.

The narrative attached to the marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh

The account of that marriage given above rests on Quran 33:37, which states the reason for it. A quite different narrative about its motive has circulated for centuries, and because a reader is likely to meet it the position is recorded here rather than passed over. That narrative attributes the marriage to a personal attraction rather than to the purpose the verse gives, and it appears in a large number of accounts of the Prophet's life written outside the Muslim tradition.

The Yaqeen Institute's study of the question sets out the scholarly case against it, and the grounds it gives are matters of transmission and dating rather than of sentiment. It records that the hadith reports carrying the story have chains of transmission that the scholars judged weak, and that the narrative is internally inconsistent in several places. It traces the account's development through the century after the Prophet's death, from an undeveloped form into the fuller version now familiar, and identifies the commentary of three early figures on Surat al-Ahzab — Qatadah, Ibn Jurayj and Muqatil ibn Sulayman — as the point at which particular details entered. It argues further that the earliest form of the story arose in reaction to Byzantine polemical writing against Islam, and that the detail was afterwards filled in on the pattern of the biblical account of David and Bathsheba.⁸

That reconstruction is the study's argument and is reported here as such, not adopted as this article's finding: tracing a narrative's growth across a century is a judgement about sources, and the reader should know whose judgement it is. What is not in dispute between the accounts is the Qur'anic text itself, which states the purpose of the marriage in terms, and that is what the article's own treatment rests on. The details of the contested narrative are not reproduced here, since the question at issue is its transmission rather than its content.

See also

• The Quran — the revelation he received over twenty-three years, and the first source of the law he taught
• The Rashidun Caliphate — the thirty years after his death, led by the four Companions closest to him
• Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and Ali ibn Abi Talib — his companion on the Hijra, and the cousin raised in his household
• Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and Aisha bint Abu Bakr — the wife of the Meccan years, and the narrator of a great part of what is known of his household
• Hadith — the literature that preserves his words and practice, and on which this article chiefly rests
• Muhammad al-Bukhari and Imam Muslim — compilers of the two collections cited here most often
• The Hijra — the migration of 622 from which the Islamic calendar is counted
• Masjid al-Nabawi — the mosque he built at Medina and in which he is buried

Notes

References

Citations

Footnotes

1. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham or al-Tabari, as Ibn Kathir quotes them in Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya, translated by Trevor Le Gassick. None of the three was consulted directly; see the note on the early sira under Sources. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham or al-Tabari, at second hand. The sentence does not name which intermediary carries the report, and no claim is made here about which it was; the material reaches this article through Ibn Kathir's Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya or al-Mubarakpuri's The Sealed Nectar. See the note on the early sira under Sources. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

3. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham or al-Tabari, as al-Mubarakpuri quotes them in The Sealed Nectar. None of the three was consulted directly; see the note on the early sira under Sources. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

4. "Muhammed", section 19, "Hz. Peygamber Devri Kronolojisi" — the chronology of the Prophet's era in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 30 (TDV İSAM, 2020). This is one of the two full chronologies the article sets against each other; where it differs from al-Mubarakpuri's, the Historiographical Note sets the difference out rather than resolving it. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶ ↩²⁷

5. "Muhammed", the life section by Mustafa Fayda, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 30 (TDV İSAM, 2020) — the narrative portion of the entry, as distinct from the chronology at its section 19. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. Ovamir Anjum, "The Constitution of Medina: Translation, Commentary, and Meaning Today", Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research (register entry 1), https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-constitution-of-medina-translation-commentary-and-meaning-today. Used for the document's self-designation, the question of which modern label fits it, Muhammad Hamidullah's description of it as the first written constitution, the two reported versions, the state of the question on its authenticity including Yusuf al-Ishsh's dissent, the open questions of dating and composition, and the classical reading of it as an early instance of the dhimmah. Al-Ishsh, Akram Diya al-Umari and Hamidullah are cited as that study quotes them and were not consulted directly. The study's closing argument about the modern political uses of the document is not carried into the article, under Section 2's bar on contemporary political commentary. ↩ ↩²

7. Mohammad Elshinawy, "The Prophecies of Prophet Muhammad", Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research (register entry 1), https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-prophecies-of-prophet-muhammad. Al-Qadi Iyad's characterisation of the genre and Edward Gibbon's remark are both quoted from that paper and were not consulted in the original; neither Kitab al-Shifa nor Gibbon's history is in the approved source base. The paper's evidential argument, and its projections about the future growth of religions, are not carried into the article — the first under 6.1 and 6.3, the second under Section 2, which bars predictive content. ↩ ↩²

8. "The Prophet's Marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh", Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research (register entry 1), https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-prophets-marriage-to-zaynab-bint-jahsh. Used for the twofold purpose it reads out of Quran 33:37 and 33:40, and for its account of the transmission and development of the contested narrative, including the role it assigns to Qatadah, Ibn Jurayj and Muqatil ibn Sulayman and the parallel it draws with the biblical David and Bathsheba account. Those are the study's findings and are attributed to it rather than asserted here. Its polemical characterisations of the narrative and of the Prophet's critics are not carried into the article, per 6.1 and 6.3. ↩ ↩²

9. Al-Adab al-Mufrad — Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari, al-Bukhari's separate collection on manners, as distinct from his Sahih. The three reports cited from it here are hadiths 254 and 255, on his bearing towards those he met and on his correcting an admonition of his own, and hadith 703, in the chapter on the Istikhara Prayer. The gradings and the accompanying commentary are the edition's own. Cited with a marker because the collection is not among the four named under Sources as the basis of this article's hadith numbering, and a reader needs to know which work and which numbering these references belong to. ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ihya' ulum al-din, the "Book of the Etiquette of Life and the Prophetic Character", as quoted in Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, "Prophetic Ethics: A Model for Those Seeking God and Eternal Life" (register entry 1), https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/prophetic-ethics-a-model-for-those-seeking-god-and-eternal-life. The Ihya' is not in the approved source base and was not consulted directly. That study's own caveat is carried into the article: it states that nearly every sentence of the passage rests on an authentic report, and footnotes only some of them. The study's evaluative framing is not used, per 6.3. ↩

Sources

Primary Islamic sources. The Qur'an, and the four hadith collections consulted directly. The editions are named because the hadith numbering in this article follows them; see the note on the editions above.

• The Qur'an: English Meanings — Saheeh International.
• Sahih al-Bukhari — Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari, translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan.
• Sahih Muslim — Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, translated by Nasiruddin al-Khattab.
• Sunan Abi Dawud — Abu Dawud al-Sijistani, translated by Yaser Qadhi; hadiths edited and referenced by Zubair Ali Za'i.
• Jami' at-Tirmidhi — Muhammad ibn Isa al-Tirmidhi, translated by Abu Khaliyl; hadiths edited and referenced by Zubair Ali Za'i.

Classical Islamic sources.

• Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya (The Life of the Prophet Muhammad) — Isma'il ibn Umar Ibn Kathir, translated by Trevor Le Gassick.
• Tafsir Ibn Kathir (Abridged) — Isma'il ibn Umar Ibn Kathir, abridged by a group of scholars under the supervision of Safiur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri.

The early sira, cited at second hand. The following are the earliest narrative sources for the Prophet's life and this article refers to them constantly, but none of them was consulted directly — no copy is in the approved source base. Each reaches the article through Ibn Kathir's Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya or al-Mubarakpuri's The Sealed Nectar, both of which quote them at length and name them when they do. They are listed so that the chain of attribution can be followed, and every reference to them in the text carries a marker saying through which intermediary it comes, or saying plainly that the sentence does not identify one.

• Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah — the earliest connected biography, surviving through the recension of Ibn Hisham.
• Ibn Hisham, the recension of Ibn Ishaq.
• Al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk.

Academic and scholarly sources.

• The Sealed Nectar (Ar-Raheeq al-Makhtum) — Safiur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri.
• The Life of Muhammad — Muhammad Husayn Haykal, translated by Isma'il Razi A. al-Faruqi.
• Hayat al-Sahaba (The Lives of the Sahabah) — Muhammad Yusuf Kandhlawi, translated by Afzal Hoosen Elias.
• Umar ibn al-Khattab: His Life and Times — Ali Muhammad al-Sallabi.
• "Muhammed" — the life section by Mustafa Fayda, and section 19, "Hz. Peygamber Devri Kronolojisi", the chronology of the Prophet's era; TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 30. TDV İSAM, 2020.

Further reading

Offered to the reader for further study. Nothing in this article rests on the works below.

• The Final Prophet: Proofs for the Prophethood of Muhammad — Mohammad Elshinawy, Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.
• The History of Islam, vol. 1 — Akbar Shah Najeebabadi, revised by Safiur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri.
• Strategies of Prophet Muhammad — Omer Khayyam Sheikh.
• A Dua a Day: Prophetic Prayers for Ramadan — Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.

External links

Approved sources only, each with its number on the Register of Approved External Web Sources.

• "Muhammed" — the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, register entry 2: the life section by Mustafa Fayda, and at section 19 the chronology of the Prophet's era, one of the two full chronologies this article sets against each other
• The Prophet Muhammad: how to know him — the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, register entry 1
• The Quran, surah by surah — quran.com, register entry 8: the Arabic text with English translations and tafsir excerpts for the verses cited throughout