Khalid ﵁ against Banu Asad & Ghatafan (+ death of Fatimah ﵂)

The decision to march out

Medina in the first months of the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁ was a city holding its breath. The expedition of Usama ibn Zayd ﵁ had been sent out, had marched for weeks through the desert and returned with its banner intact, while the zakat-refusers within a day’s ride of the city had been driven back by that same Abu Bakr ﵁ in person. Yet all of that was still only preliminary skirmishing, for the real storm lay farther away, on the high plateau of Najd, in the tents of Banu Asad and Ghatafan, where a man had named himself a prophet and whole tribes had listened. There the caliphate now had to give its answer hard and clear, or it would never be able to give an answer again.

It was Jumada al-Akhirah of the year 11 AH. Abu Bakr ﵁ summoned Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ to his house in as-Sunh and set the command before him, and whoever knew this man knew the choice was the right one. Khalid ﵁ was the sword the Prophet ﷺ himself had called Sayfullah, the Sword of Allah, and at Mu’tah, when three commanders had fallen one after another, he had taken up the standard and brought the army back unharmed. What the Prophet ﷺ had placed in his hands was now in the hands of his caliph, and those hands did not hesitate.

What Suyuti ﵀ relates is brief, but its import is clear: Khalid ﵁ marched out with an army from Medina toward Najd, with orders to meet Banu Asad first and then to press on wherever the resistance gathered. On the way, before the fighting had even begun, he carried in his memory the words that Abu Bakr ﵁ had spoken to his commanders in an earlier sitting, for these are the five matters that forever form the dividing line between Islam and apostasy.

The five matters for which the fighting was waged

Handhalah ibn ʿAli al-Laythi ﵁ preserved those words for the Ummah, and Suyuti ﵀ records them in his account. Abu Bakr ﵁ did not send Khalid ﵁ out as a raider, nor as an avenger, nor as an enforcer of Quraysh against the desert tribes, but he sent him out to fight for five matters, five pillars that make Islam Islam.

Five matters, no more and no less, no tribal interest, no Qurayshite preference, no worldly ambition. Whoever brought them forward was a brother, and whoever cast them off chose the side of Musaylimah and of Tulayha and of everyone who sought the shadow of a false prophet to shake off the burden of the Book of Allah ﷻ. Khalid ﵁ thus marched out with a truce in his hands that he would offer to each tribe first before he drew his sword: speak the shahadah, establish the prayer, pay what belongs to Allah ﷻ, fast and make pilgrimage, and not a drop of your blood will flow. Refuse that, and we come not as the survivors of a civil war but as the envoys of a Message that has descended among mankind for the last time.

Here, in these five matters, lies the heart of what the Ridda wars actually were: not a political conflict between Medina and the desert, not a power struggle between Quraysh and the Bedouin, not the restoration of a tributary system. The Ridda was the first, and in a sense the hardest, touchstone of what Islam means once the Messenger ﷺ is no longer present to embody it in his own person. The Ummah stood before the question of whether the Message could survive without the Messenger, or whether it would be buried along with him, and Abu Bakr ﵁ chose. In his choice he chose the five matters, not one field less and not one bar lower.

The road to Najd

Najd is no gentle landscape. The plain rises east of the Hijaz mountains, a steppe of black basalt and yellow sand, with harrat volcanic fields that shimmer under the heat in summer and let the wind cut mercilessly through in winter. Among the oases and the rock-beds the tribes lived, half-sedentary and half-nomadic, with horses and camels and a memory of independence older than the names of their fathers.

Banu Asad was at the heart of that plain, its tents scattered around the springs of what would later be called Ḥāʾil, while Ghatafan, a confederation of related tribes, covered the northern approach. Both tribes had sent delegations to Medina in the last months of the Prophet ﷺ and accepted Islam, both had in the first weeks after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ withdrawn what they had professed, and both had attached themselves to Tulayha, a man from Banu Asad who had declared himself a prophet.

Suyuti ﵀ does not name Tulayha and keeps to Banu Asad and Ghatafan as a whole. What he does name is the outcome, and that outcome presupposes the resistance of an organized adversary. Khalid ﵁ did not enter an empty plain to count scattered herds, he entered a battle that had been prepared by both sides.

The column from Medina marched in formation, probably in detachments, with Khalid ﵁ at the head and the prominent sahabah distributed across the wings, and among them rode men whose names already rang for whoever knew them. ʿUkkashah ibn Mihsan ﵁ from Banu Asad itself, who in his youth had been among the very first Muhajirun, now returned to the tribe in which he was born, not as a returning son but as a soldier of the Message. Thabit ibn Aqram ﵁ of the Ansar was one of the warriors who had raised his shield above the head of the Prophet ﷺ at Uhud, two men whose lives would cross in this single campaign in a way the Ummah has remembered ever since.

The two shuhada

Suyuti ﵀ records the course of the battle in a single sentence. “Khalid ﵁ and those who were with him marched out in Jumada al-Akhirah, and they fought Banu Asad and Ghatafan. They killed whom they killed and took captive whom they took captive, and the rest returned to Islam. In this event ʿUkkashah ibn Mihsan ﵁ and Thabit ibn Aqram ﵁ were made shahid.”

One sentence for a campaign that could have lost a continent. But whoever reads between the lines sees the order of the work: first the announcement, fataalu, they fought; then the divergence of the outcome, killed and taken captive on the one side, return to Islam on the other; then the two names, because the dead of Allah do not pass by as a number but are recorded by name in the annals, so that the Ummah might pray for them until the Day of Resurrection.

ʿUkkashah ibn Mihsan ﵁ belonged to the seventy whom the Prophet ﷺ had named in a famous hadith as the group who would enter Paradise without reckoning. When the Prophet ﷺ spoke of this in the mosque, ʿUkkashah ﵁ rose and asked: pray to Allah ﷻ that He make me one of them, and the Prophet ﷺ answered that he was one of them. Another rose with the same request and was told: ʿUkkashah has preceded you. Those words had been carried by the Ummah as a promise, and now, in the black stones of Najd, the promise was fulfilled. He fell beneath the swords of men who had played with him when he was a child in the same tribe, he fell in the name of the shahadah that in his youth had not yet been spoken, and he fell beside Thabit ﵁ of the Ansar, so that Muhajir and Ansar might fall in the battle for the sword as they had stood beside each other in the mosque for the prayer.

Thabit ibn Aqram ﵁ had been at Badr, at Uhud, at Khandaq, at every campaign of the Prophet ﷺ that had not kept him at the gate of Medina. He was not a man of the main army but of the small, indispensable group that carried the banner whenever the chief standard-bearer fell. At Mu’tah, four years earlier, he had stood in the same role: it was he who, after the fall of Zayd ibn Harithah ﵁ and Jaʿfar ﵁ and ʿAbdullah ibn Rawahah ﵁, had offered the banner to Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁, with the words that a man like himself, an Ansari without a Qurayshite blood-tie, was not the right one to bear the sword of the Mu’tah army against Quraysh. Khalid ﵁ had accepted the banner, and in its shadow Khalid’s ﵁ legend was born. Now, in Najd, that same Thabit ﵁ fell in the same campaign as his commander, and the chain was closed. The Sword of Allah ﷻ sat on his horse looking at the man who had once handed him his own standard and saw his soul rise up above the battlefield.

The return and the surrender

The battle ended as Khalid ﵁ ended his battles: swift, decisive, leaving nothing behind. The survivors of Banu Asad and Ghatafan came in groups before his tent, some in tears, others silent. They spoke the shahadah anew, they established their prayer, and they consented to the zakat they had earlier refused. Khalid ﵁ accepted their return in the name of Abu Bakr ﵁, for he had not been sent to them to count them among the dead but to bring them back to the living body of the Ummah.

Suyuti ﵀ sums it up in four words: wa rajaʿa ʾl-baqūn ilā ʾl-islām, and the rest returned to Islam. In those four words lies the whole philosophy of the Ridda: no genocide, no war of annihilation, no permanent banishment, but a correction, hard where it had to be hard, gentle where the hand reached out. The five matters of Abu Bakr ﵁ were the gate, and whoever passed through it was home, while whoever closed himself off before it found Khalid’s ﵁ horses before his tent.

The captives were sent to Medina. The fallen of the Muslim side were buried on the spot according to the custom the Prophet ﷺ had established after Uhud: the shahid is buried in the garment in which he falls, unwashed, his blood is his perfume, his sword is his remembrance. Khalid ﵁ then turned his horses to the east and prepared for the next phase. Banu Asad and Ghatafan had been brought back, but in al-Yamamah Musaylimah waited with an army of tens of thousands, and the sword of Khalid ﵁ had not yet rested when Medina already had a second letter from Abu Bakr ﵁ ready to send him to the southeast.

The room beside the mosque

While Khalid ﵁ was turning his horse in Najd, something else was happening in Medina that in the flow of events weighed in its own way just as heavily. In the room beside the mosque, in the modest house where Fatimah bint Muhammad ﵂ lived with her husband ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ and their sons al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁, the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ was dying.

Suyuti ﵀ notes the fact briefly: she died in Ramadan of the year 11 AH, at the age of twenty-four. Six months after her father ﷺ, exactly as he had told her in confidence in the last days of his life: you will be the first of my household to follow me. He had whispered it in her ear while she sat beside his bed, and when she first wept and then laughed, her aunts later asked her what the Prophet ﷺ had said to her. First he said that he would depart, she answered, and then I wept, and then he said that I would be the first of his household to follow him, and then I laughed, for what is dearer to a daughter than to be near her father on the other side of the threshold.

Ramadan that month was meager. Medina still bore the wound of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ fresh, the caliphate was new, the army was away, and at the heart of the city Fatimah ﵂ lay on a mat covered with a cloth. She was the youngest of the daughters of the Prophet ﷺ, and she was the last still living. Zaynab ﵂ had gone, Ruqayyah ﵂ had gone, Umm Kulthum ﵂ had gone, and Fatimah ﵂ was the daughter who had lived the longest to see her father die, and now she followed him.

The humility of the end

What Suyuti ﵀ records of these last days is sober, as it is. No pomp, no long lamentation, no added details. During her life Fatimah ﵂ had brought before Abu Bakr ﵁ the financial claims she believed she had after her father’s passing, and he had reminded her of the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ: we, the company of the prophets, leave nothing as inheritance; what we leave behind is charity. She had not obtained what she had asked, and in the tension of those months a distance had arisen between her house and the house of Abu Bakr ﵁ that her death would first close.

In her last days she asked Asmaʾ bint ʿUmays ﵂, wife of Jaʿfar ibn Abi Talib ﵁ and later of Abu Bakr ﵁ himself, to build for her body a kind of bier that would not reveal her form after her death. Asmaʾ ﵂ wove a wooden frame and covered it with cloth, as she had seen done among the Habash in Abyssinia, and Fatimah ﵂ smiled when she saw it. This is beautiful, she said, in this no sight of me will be uncovered. She gave instructions that after her death she be washed by ʿAli ﵁ and Asmaʾ ﵂, and be seen by no one else.

ʿAli ﵁ sat at her side. Al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁, still boys, played outside her door and came in now and then to hold their mother’s hand. She spoke little in those last days; she who had been the most eloquent daughter of Mecca, who had spoken from the minbar of her father, devoted her last words to Allah ﷻ alone. The fevers came and went, and one evening, toward the end of Ramadan, she closed her eyes.

Asmaʾ ﵂ looked at her face and knew at once. She went outside and told al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁ only that their mother had slept. She washed the body together with ʿAli ﵁, at the onset of evening, and the bier of Asmaʾ ﵂ received her as Fatimah ﵂ had wished.

The burial in the night

ʿAli ﵁ chose to bury her in the night. Whoever washes her knows her place, and whoever carries her bier may keep silent about its direction. It had been her wish and it remained his decision, and in conveying the body he called no one from outside his own circle. Abu Bakr ﵁ received the news late in the evening, in his house in as-Sunh. He was caliph, he was father-in-law, for his own daughter ʿAʾishah ﵂ was the widow of the Prophet ﷺ, and he had been her father’s most beloved companion. He came, as Suyuti ﵀ briefly relates, and he prayed for her, without it being worth noting who else stood gathered in the small community around the bier.

Then she was laid to rest in al-Baqi’, the cemetery of Medina, near the place where her grave-house would later bear a simple stone that has endured the centuries. No procession, no long lament. ʿAli ﵁ walked back to the house with al-Hasan ﵁ at one hand and al-Husayn ﵁ at the other. The room beside the mosque was empty, and above Medina the heat of the day was already shimmering away into the night air.

In the same hour, at differing distances, two events brushed against each other in history. In Najd Khalid ﵁ had just withdrawn his horses from the place where ʿUkkashah ﵁ and Thabit ﵁ had fallen, and in Medina ʿAli ﵁ had just closed the earth over Fatimah ﵂. The caliph stood in his room and heard, in the same week or perhaps on the same day, the reports come in: the command had been carried out, two of the blessed of the Ummah had gone to Allah ﷻ, and a third blessed one, the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ himself, had passed away beneath him that same week. He knew that in each of these events there was something irreversible. The Message had not been erased, it had asked its price, and the price was the most precious names the Ummah knew.

What Najd means

What does this campaign say about the caliphate that ordered it? Something simple and something deep. It says that Abu Bakr ﵁ was no king defending his throne. He was an old merchant from Banu Taym who had accepted that he was the first successor of a Prophet ﷺ, and who had said from the minbar: I have been placed in authority and I am not the best of you. When the real problem presented itself, his answer was not the answer of a warlord but of a believer, for he sent Khalid ﵁ out to fight for five matters, not to subdue a territory. He unfurled the banner of la ilaha illa Allah, not the banner of Quraysh.

And that is why the Ummah continues to this day to call him as-Siddiq, the truthful witness, a man who, in a week of departing armies and dying daughters, of fallen sahabah and of burials in the night, did not collapse. He received the bad news as he received the good: with the words innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn, we belong to Allah ﷻ, and to Him we return. He read the names of ʿUkkashah ﵁ and Thabit ﵁ to his council and spoke a du’a over them, and he walked to al-Baqi’ to visit the grave of Fatimah ﵂ after her burial, not to claim a presence he had not had, but to kneel by her stone and be silent, as a father-in-law is silent at the grave of the daughter of his best friend.

The chain of the Message

In Najd something had happened that would not be recorded in any textbook as a chapter: only one sentence in Suyuti ﵀, a handful of names, a return of apostates to Islam. But whoever understands the chain of the Message sees what was actually established. For the first time since the Messenger ﷺ had fled from Mecca and founded a state in Medina, a military action had been undertaken not by himself, not under his direct command, but by his successor in his name. The Message had its second breath, for what the Prophet ﷺ had founded could be continued by another without the essence shifting.

Khalid ﵁ knew this when he returned from Najd for provisions and new orders. He knew that his sword was now no longer in the service of the man who had given him the sword, but of the Message that had been transmitted through that man. It was the same sword, the same hand, the same shahadah, but the commander was no longer the Messenger himself, and the fact that the sword had lost none of its sharpness proved that the Message was independent of the body that had carried it.

For the death of Fatimah ﵂ something comparable held in another key. With her the last living daughter of the Messenger ﷺ vanished. The Prophet ﷺ left behind four daughters, and within six months all four had either already been with him or had followed him into the earth of Medina. Only ʿAʾishah ﵂ and Hafsa ﵂ and the other Mothers of the Believers outlived him, and the direct bloodline of the Messenger ﷺ through his daughters was now in the hands of two boys, al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁, who walked about at six and five years old in the room beside the mosque where they were born.

The Ummah stood at a threshold. On one side lay the time of the Prophet ﷺ, in which the Message was delivered through his person, and on the other side stretched the time in which the Message had to be carried by his successors, his companions, his book, and his descendants. Najd and al-Baqi’ together mark that threshold: the sword outside and the grave within, both in the same month, in the same caliphate, under the same as-Siddiq.

The eye toward the south

When Khalid ﵁ was summoned after a short rest in Medina, Abu Bakr ﵁ entrusted him with the second command. Najd had been pacified and the tribes brought back, but al-Yamamah was no Najd. There lay Musaylimah, a man who called himself a prophet, who had himself styled Rahman al-Yamamah, who dictated his own qur’an, who according to later reports was already more than a hundred years old and whose army was estimated in the tens of thousands. There waited a battle over which Suyuti ﵀ gives, in all his thrift, a whole paragraph, and over which the Ummah would preserve its deepest story of conversion and redemption. Khalid ﵁ turned his horse to the southeast, and the second month of his campaign began.

In Medina the silence of a new emptiness remained. Fatimah ﵂ had been buried, Abu Bakr ﵁ was bent over the reports coming from Najd, ʿAli ﵁ had withdrawn into his room with the two boys, and one night late in Ramadan, or early in Shawwal, someone read Surah Yasin by a lamp, and it was as though Medina was learning anew what the Prophet ﷺ had said: that every soul that comes upon the earth will return to Him, and that rest lies not in the walls of a house but in the words that rise up over the walls.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 62–63.