Muhammad’s raids, Badr and the conquest of Mecca: 6 facts

The count of 75 depends on definitions. Ibn Ishaq counts 27 expeditions that Muhammad led in person and 38 missions that he sent out, and other early authorities give other totals.^[1] Only a handful of the larger expeditions ended in a battle. Tabuk ended without one.

A concession is due. The first missions after the migration to Madina were aimed at Quraysh caravans, and the sources say so openly.^[1] The Quraysh had driven the believers out and kept their property, and the Quran permits fighting by those who were wronged and expelled (22:39-40).^[2] At Uhud it was the Quraysh who marched on Madina, to avenge Badr. The charge that the first Muslims were idle mercenaries meets a record of a Prophet who had been a trader and of emigrants who found work in the markets of Madina.^[3]

The critique adds that men of Adal and Qarah who asked for teachers were a pretext for a raid. Ibn Ishaq says a party was sent to teach them; al-Bukhari describes ten men sent as scouts. Both accounts end with the party ambushed and killed at al-Raji by clans of Hudhayl.^[4]

In Rajab of the second year after the migration, Abd Allah ibn Jahsh led a small party toward Nakhla, near Mecca, to watch the Quraysh. They met a caravan, killed one man, Amr ibn al-Hadrami, took two prisoners and brought the goods to Madina. The attack fell on the last day of Rajab, a sacred month in which fighting was forbidden, and Ibn Ishaq says the party debated whether the month had already ended.^[5]

The Prophet disapproved. He said he had not ordered fighting in the sacred month, set the caravan aside and took no share until the matter was settled.^[5] Then came Quran 2:217: fighting in that month is a grave matter, but barring people from the path of God, rejecting Him, shutting the Sacred Mosque against its people and expelling them is graver, and fitna is graver than killing.^[6] Commentators generally took fitna there to mean persecution aimed at making believers abandon their religion. The verse does not call the act blameless. It weighs it against what the Quraysh had done. The prisoners were ransomed only after two Muslims missing from the party returned safely.^[5]

In Ramadan of the second year the Prophet went out with about 313 men to intercept the caravan of Abu Sufyan returning from Syria. The Quran itself says the believers wished to meet the unarmed party (8:7), so the aim was the caravan.^[7] Abu Sufyan took another road and sent for help. An army of about a thousand came out of Mecca, and when word reached it that the caravan was safe, Abu Jahl insisted on going on to Badr; one clan, the Banu Zuhra, turned back.^[8] The battle was therefore fought against an army already on the march.

The Spoils surah opens with a quarrel over the loot (8:1) and later rebukes the wish for the goods of this world when captives were taken (8:67-68).^[9] About seventy men were captured, and the hadith of al-Bara gives seventy killed as well. Ibn Hajar, who comments on that report, notes that the biographers name only about fifty of the dead and explains that a list of names need not include everyone who fell.^[9] Most were ransomed, and the Quran later states the rule for captives as favour or ransom (47:4).^[10] Two were executed, al-Nadr ibn al-Harith and Uqba ibn Abi Muayt, both accused of persecuting the believers in Mecca.^[8] The jurists later argued over whether a captive may be killed. The biographers tie these two cases to named offences.

In 6 AH the Muslims set out for Mecca in pilgrim dress to perform umrah (the lesser pilgrimage), carrying only sheathed swords. The Quraysh stopped them at Hudaybiyah. The treaty set a ten-year truce, and several terms favoured the Quraysh, including the return of any Meccan who came to Madina without his guardian’s leave. Many companions disliked it, yet the Quran called it a clear victory (48:1).^[11] Ismail al Faruqi, in his essay on Islam in the Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World, gives the reason the Prophet accepted terms that many of his people resisted: he needed the peace to speak to the unbelieving majority, and the two years of peace “more than trebled the number of Muslims”.^[12] The early biography records the same judgement from al-Zuhri, with the figures behind it: about 1,400 men went to Hudaybiyah, and about 10,000 marched on Mecca two years later.^[13] Each tribe could ally with either side. Khuza’a joined the Muslims and Bakr joined the Quraysh.

The critique says the Muslims broke the truce by raiding Bakr. The biographies record the reverse: men of Bakr, supplied with weapons by Quraysh leaders, attacked Khuza’a, and some Quraysh men joined them.^[14] Khuza’a appealed to Madina. Abu Sufyan came to renew the treaty and left without an agreement; his offer was not accepted, and the sources say so. The Quraysh could reply that their leaders had not authorised the attack, and that is the point a critic can fairly call contested.

The Muslims entered Mecca in Ramadan of 8 AH with an army of about 10,000. Resistance was brief and local. The Prophet announced that whoever stayed in his house, entered the mosque or entered Abu Sufyan’s house would be safe, and he is reported to have told the Quraysh to go, for they were free.^[14]

The amnesty had exceptions, and they are in the sources. Ibn Ishaq names a few men and women whom the Prophet ordered killed even if found at the Kaaba. Abd Allah ibn Khatal, reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim as killed clinging to its covering, was named for killing a man, leaving Islam and composing satire with his two singing girls.^[15] Others on the list, among them Ikrima ibn Abi Jahl and Abd Allah ibn Sa’d, were pardoned after they came forward.^[15] The story of Umar trampling a woman rests on a report that one woman named on the list was pardoned and died years later under a horse’s hooves in Umar’s caliphate.^[15]

After Mecca, the Hawazin and Thaqif gathered against the Muslims, and the battle of Hunayn followed in Shawwal of 8 AH (see Quran 9:25).^[16] The captives numbered in the thousands, women and children among them. When a Hawazin delegation came as Muslims, the Prophet asked the fighters to give the captives back, and they did.^[17]

He then gave large gifts of camels and sheep to Quraysh leaders who had only just surrendered, and some of the Ansar felt passed over. He told them that others took flocks home while they took the Messenger of God home.^[18] The critique calls these gifts bribery. The Quran lists “those whose hearts are to be reconciled” among the recipients of zakah (9:60), and the sources describe the gifts as a policy to end an old enmity.^[19]

Khalid ibn al-Walid killed men of Banu Jadhima who had said they were saba’na instead of aslamna. The Prophet raised his hands and said twice, “O God, I am free of what Khalid has done,” and sent Ali with blood money.^[20]