Battle of al-Yamamah and the fall of Musaylimah the Liar

The plain that waited

Between the desert of the Hijaz and the palm oases of Bahrain, in a long band of sand plains and low rock ridges, lies al-Yamamah. Today the region is called al-Kharj and al-Jubayla, a network of springs and fields south of the present city of Riyadh. In the year 11 AH it bore a different name and a different weight, for there lived Banu Hanifa, a tribe that was large without ever having been noble, with its centers around Hajr and ʿAqraba. And there, in a house at the edge of an oasis, a man had grown old who called himself a prophet.

His name was Maslama ibn Habib. The Arabs in their mockery call him Musaylimah, “the little Maslama,” and they added what his own life had not taken from him: al-kadhdhab, the Liar. He was a man of fragmentary eloquence, with a voice that rang out in the tents and a hand that tried to work wonders upon the body of a slave. His age was, as the tradition that also echoes in Suyuti ﵀ relates, no longer countable on the ordinary scale, for he had been born, the story says, before ʿAbdullah, the father of the Prophet ﷺ. That would put his age past a hundred, and some reports reckon up to a hundred and fifty years. No man lives so long without his lies devouring him in the end, and on the threshold of the year 12 AH Musaylimah had not yet devoured them all, but the table was set.

In Medina Abu Bakr ﵁ had just received the reports of Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ from Najd. Banu Asad and Ghatafan had been brought back, ʿUkkashah ﵁ and Thabit ﵁ had fallen, and Tulayha had been exposed as a prophet and had fled. The caliph wrote a new letter and sent it eastward. March on to al-Yamamah, it said, there is a work there that cannot be postponed.

The chain of the commands

Khalid ﵁ was not the first against Musaylimah, for Abu Bakr ﵁ had earlier sent two other commanders. ʿIkrimah ibn Abi Jahl ﵁, the son of the arch-enemy from Mecca who through his conversion had become one of the brightest of the sahabah, had ventured with his troops too close to Yamamah before the main force could reach him, and he had been pushed back, not defeated but not victorious. Sharhabil ibn Hasanah ﵁ had been sent to support him and had shared the same fate. Abu Bakr ﵁ wrote them both a letter that forever carries the tone of his authority: stay where you are, I will not replace you for you bear no blame; wait for Khalid ﵁, and fall into the ranks after his arrival. The caliph protected his officers with the same sobriety with which he sent out his armies, for they were not his honor; they were his brothers.

Khalid ﵁ entered Banu Hanifa territory with an army whose number the sources place in the thousands, with a large core of Muhajirun and Ansar within it. Musaylimah marched out with what was a multiple of that, for Banu Hanifa was numerous and had wrapped itself in its new prophet as a man who is cold wraps himself in a cloak. They fought not only for him, they fought for their own independence from Medina, for the idea that in their plain a prophet could be born who would not subject them to Quraysh. The two matters had become intertwined, religious apostasy and political pride, and the sword of Khalid ﵁ had to cut through both at once.

The first encounter

The armies met in the open plain outside ʿAqraba. The ground there was treacherous, for short, hard layers of earth alternated with sandy trenches that made horses stumble. Khalid ﵁ arranged his troops in the order he had learned from the Prophet ﷺ: Muhajirun on one flank, Ansar on the other, the tribal units of the Bedouin between them, the center with Khalid ﵁ himself bearing the banner of Medina.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the course in a single paragraph. “Then Khalid ﵁ went with his army to al-Yamamah to fight Musaylimah the Liar, toward the end of the year. The two armies met, the siege lasted some days, and then the Liar was killed, may Allah ﷻ curse him. Wahshi, who killed Hamzah ﵁, killed him.”

Between those sentences lies the whole of a campaign that would cost the Ummah, in two weeks, its heaviest losses since Uhud. The first days began unfavorably, for Banu Hanifa broke through in the center, the Bedouin flank cracked, and in the dust of the morning parts of the Muslim army tore loose from the main front. The women who remained by the baggage cart, among them Asma’ bint Saleem ﵂ and the mother of several young sahabah, saw fleeing men passing by and dealt them blows with their palm branches.

Khalid ﵁ reorganized. He called the Muhajirun and the Ansar under separate banners, and he called each tribe under its own banner, so that no man could hide in the crowd of another. Today, he shouted across the line, each banner shall see who stands beneath it. It was not a customary arrangement, it was the arrangement that addresses men under their own name, and it worked: whoever knew that his tribe would see him fall or flee, no longer gave way.

The Garden of Death

After the first skirmishes Banu Hanifa withdrew to a walled garden, a great enclosure around a palm plantation that served as their last point of defense. Hadiqat ar-Rahman Musaylimah called it, the garden of Allah the Merciful, just as he had also called himself Rahman al-Yamamah. The Ummah would later give it another name that has endured the centuries: Hadiqat al-Mawt, the Garden of Death.

The wall was high. It enclosed tens of thousands of Banu Hanifa, armed and unarmed, their women and their goods, their prophet and his bodyguard. From the side of the Muslims no climbing engines rose, no ladders as at Khaybar. Khalid ﵁ stood before the gate and knew that time allowed him little, for waiting meant fatigue, meant thirst, meant the possibility that reinforcement for Banu Hanifa might arrive from Bahrain or from the Hanifa outliers on the eastern side. He had to get in.

A sahabi, in some reports al-Bara’ ibn Malik ﵁, the brother of Anas ibn Malik ﵁, called out that he would be thrown over the wall. Lift me on your shields, he said, and throw me inside. I will open the gate or die as a shahid. Men hesitated, but he compelled them, and they lifted him on several shields at once and threw him over the wall. He fell hard, broke something, rose to his feet, and ploughed with his sword through the first rank toward the gate. It was the recklessness of a believer, not of a fool, and it was, as it would later be said, the gate of the Garden of Death and the gate of his own disbelief in death.

The gate opened. Khalid ﵁ poured in with his cavalry, followed by the Muhajirun and the Ansar, and the battlefield in that moment was no longer a field but a garden among palms, with narrow lanes between the trees, with houses at the edges, with the cohesion of an army broken into dozens of skirmishes. The course within Hadiqat al-Mawt was no longer an order of banners but a series of personal combats, and in it history shifted in a way no one in Medina could have foreseen.

The man with the spear

Among the Muhajirun there was a man who in any other phase of his life would not have been noticed. He was tall, dark, a former Habash slave, with a spear-hand that had no equal in the Arab world. His name was Wahshi ibn Harb ﵁. He had once, many years earlier, on the hill of Uhud thrown a spear that had pierced the body of Hamzah ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib ﵁, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ, the lion of Allah ﷻ and of His Messenger ﷺ. Wahshi had then worked for his mistress Hind bint ʿUtbah, who had promised him his freedom in exchange for the blood of Hamzah ﵁.

He had thrown the spear, he had received his freedom, and he had seen the body of Hamzah ﵁ mutilated by the hand of Hind. He had fled to Ta’if, and years later, when Mecca had returned to Islam, he had finally come to the Prophet ﷺ himself to speak the shahadah. The Prophet ﷺ had looked at him and asked of him one favor: stay out of my sight, for I can hardly bear your face without thinking of my uncle. Wahshi ﵁ had accepted it, in silence. He had withdrawn, he had lived in the community but not before the eye of the Prophet ﷺ, and he had waited.

Wahshi ﵁ himself later related what stirred within him when the announcement came that Khalid ﵁ would march against Musaylimah.

He went with the army not as a commander, not as a prominent sahabi, not as a man with a banner. He went with his spear and with that one thought.

The denouement

Within Hadiqat al-Mawt, in the chaos of the palm lanes, Wahshi ﵁ at a certain moment saw a figure against the wall, a man with a cloak about him, in a niche between two trees, with several bodyguards before him. Wahshi ﵁ saw at once what it was. He approached along an encircling route, raised his spear, commanded his body to remember what it had done on the hill of Uhud, and threw.

The spear struck Musaylimah in the chest and came out the other side through his back. At that same moment a second sahabi, Abu Dujanah Simak ibn Harb ﵁, rushed in from the other side with his sword, and in one blow the head of the Liar was undone. Abu Dujanah ﵁ himself would fall in the same fighting, and his name is in Suyuti’s list of the fallen.

Wahshi ﵁ would later, whenever anyone asked him about it, say two things. He had killed the best of men when he was a disbeliever, and he had killed the worst of men when he was a Muslim, and he hoped that Allah ﷻ would forgive him the first for the sake of the second. He spoke not with pride, he spoke with the voice of a man who knew his guilt and who had received the forgiveness that the Prophet ﷺ in his life had held back from giving himself. He died later in Hims, at a great age, after a life that was carried on in silence.

What was contained in this throw

It is hard to overstate what the Ummah received in this moment. At one end of history stood Uhud, with the martyred body of Hamzah ﵁ at the foot of the hill, and the Prophet ﷺ standing over him saying that he could not recognize him by his face. At the other end stood ʿAqraba, with the body of the Liar of Yamamah at the foot of a palm, and the same Wahshi ﵁ taking back his spear with a hand that was now the hand of a Muslim.

Between those two moments lay the whole concept of tawbah in Islam, not as psychological comfort, not as ritual softening in tears, but as a deep reversal in which the hand that had done evil was used in the same jihad for the work for which it had been created. Wahshi ﵁ did not have his punishment remitted by a magnanimous pronouncement; he was given the opportunity to walk, with the same tools, in the same manner, in the same dust, in the other direction.

What the Prophet ﷺ could not do in his life, because the wound of Uhud was still too fresh to look upon Wahshi ﵁ daily, Allah ﷻ accomplished after his death. He placed Wahshi ﵁ on the field where the most hated enemy of the Message would fall, and gave him the same spear in his hand. Who can fathom the forgiveness of Allah ﷻ when He stages it thus? The Ummah preserves this event not to make Wahshi ﵁ a hero, it preserves it to show the gate of tawbah so wide that no sinner can ever again pass by it with the delusion that his fault is too great.

The price in Muslim blood

The Garden closed, but before its gate lay a row of shuhada such as the Ummah in its young existence had not yet known. Suyuti ﵀ names seventy sahabah who fell in this one campaign. He gives a list, and we pass the names on here not as path-seeking numbers but as a row of souls who each in themselves represent a whole journey.

Abu Hudhayfah ibn ʿUtbah ﵁, one of the first Muhajirun, died beside his freedman Salim mawla Abi Hudhayfah ﵁, two men who in life had never been parted from each other and who in death embraced beneath the same palm. Their bodies were later found side by side, hand in hand, in the blood-red earth.

Shujaʿ ibn Wahb ﵁, the man who years earlier had accompanied the Prophet ﷺ as an envoy to the Ghassanids. Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁, the elder brother of ʿUmar ﵁, who had embraced Islam before ʿUmar and whose name ʿUmar ﵁ could never again mention without a tear in his eye. ʿUmar ﵁ would later, when he was himself caliph, say to someone: the wind that precedes me in every good matter is Zayd, for he preceded me in Islam and he preceded me in martyrdom. Zayd ﵁ fell at Yamamah under the banner of the Muhajirun.

ʿAbdullah ibn Sahl ﵁; Malik ibn ʿAmr ﵁; at-Tufayl ibn ʿAmr ad-Dawsi ﵁, the poet from Daws who years earlier had himself called his tribe to Islam, and who now at al-Yamamah laid down the price of his own life for the Ummah. Yazid ibn Qais ﵁; ʿAmir ibn al-Bukayr ﵁; ʿAbdullah ibn Makhramah ﵁; as-Saʾib ibn ʿUthman ibn Madhʿun ﵁, a cousin of Khadijah ﵂ in the wider line of Banu Jumah; ʿAbbad ibn Bishr ﵁; Maʿan ibn ʿAdi ﵁; Thabit ibn Qais ibn Shamas ﵁, the voice of the Ansar, who had spoken from the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ on behalf of the helpers in Medina. And Abu Dujanah Simak ibn Harb ﵁, the man who beside Wahshi ﵁ had struck the blow against the cloak of Musaylimah; he fell in the same fighting in which he had killed the Liar, and his body was found in the evening beside the wall of the garden, with his sword still in his hand.

Among the seventy was also ʿAbdullah ibn Abi Bakr ﵁, son of the caliph himself. He had not died at Yamamah in a formal sense but in Shawwal of that same year passed away from a wound he had earlier suffered at Ta’if and which had now reopened in the strain of the campaign; in the chronology of Suyuti ﵀ his death falls in the same months, in the same wave, in the same chapter of blood that the young Ummah had to pay in his father’s caliphate.

What the loss of seventy huffaz meant

The hardest reckoning was not only in the quantity but in the nature, for among these seventy were men who knew the Quran by heart from beginning to end. Some were among the four or five whom the Prophet ﷺ himself had named in a hadith. The Ummah at that moment, many years before the invention of paper on a large scale, had no other mechanism of preservation than two parallel channels: the written fragment in the hands of the wahy-scribes, and the memory in the breast of the huffaz. Both had to confirm each other to bring certainty. When a shoulder-blade was lost, the text was still safe as long as a hafiz carried it, and when a hafiz fell, the text was still safe as long as a shoulder-blade or parchment carried it. But when both fell away together, without a double testimony having been secured, something could shift.

In Hadiqat al-Mawt not only men fell; in Hadiqat al-Mawt oral archives fell. Each of these seventy carried in his breast a part or the whole of the Quran. Each of them had heard the Prophet ﷺ recite verses in the mosque, in battle, from the minbar, in the night, on camels, on the heights of Mecca. Each of them carried a register that could not be duplicated, and with seventy graves beneath the palms of Yamamah the Ummah had lost a quantity of memory that it could not replace by simply adding new names.

Khalid ﵁ knew it when he counted the dead, and ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ knew it when he read the reports in Medina. But of all the men who knew it, there was one who knew it as a wound. His name was ʿUmar ﵁ himself, and what he would lay before Abu Bakr ﵁ after the return of the army would give the Ummah its Mushaf forever.

The return to Medina

Khalid ﵁ left Banu Hanifa under the conditions of Abu Bakr ﵁: return to Islam, prayer, zakat, heads high but obedient. The captives were counted, the spoils were divided according to the laws of the Book, and the wounded were tended beneath the palms where the dead had been buried. Among the captives was a daughter of Mujjaʿah ibn Murara ﵁, one of the notables of Banu Hanifa who had taken the sensible decision to negotiate with Khalid ﵁. She would later be freed, brought to Medina, and would eventually bring forth Muhammad ibn ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, better known as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, who carried the Bani Hanifa name in his own name down into the Umayyad period.

Khalid ﵁ wrote to Abu Bakr ﵁ from the battlefield, and the letter was short. He gave the names of the fallen as far as he could recover them, he gave the number of seventy, he gave the name of Musaylimah as killed, and he reported the return of Banu Hanifa to Islam. He gave no glorification of his own role. It was his horses that had ridden through the gate, but his letter let others speak for him: the spear of Wahshi ﵁, the leap of al-Bara’ ibn Malik ﵁, the head in the hand of Abu Dujanah ﵁.

In Medina Abu Bakr ﵁ read the letter. He read aloud, in the mosque, with a voice that did not break even though every line was a wound. He read the names one by one, and he paused at each name. He pronounced over Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁ a du’a in which he recalled his brother to ʿUmar ﵁, who stood beside him with dry eyes because a man who weeps in public is no man, yet whose heart one could hear cracking in the silence between the names.

The silence after the reading of the names

When Abu Bakr ﵁ had read the last name, he folded the letter and gave it to his scribe. He spoke another du’a and turned to Allah ﷻ concerning these fallen who had belonged to Him, who had been lent to the Ummah for a time and whom He had now called back to Himself. He asked that the Book they had carried in their breasts be preserved by Him, so that no letter of what they had memorized would ever be lost.

The words were formulaic, the ordinary phrasing of a prayer at the news of death. But in the mouth of Abu Bakr ﵁ in that moment, with the names of seventy huffaz still warm on the page, they carried a decision that had not yet taken shape. He knew something, and he knew that he knew it. He knew that the Book the Ummah carried about in pieces, in hundreds of breasts and on hundreds of fragments, had a body that was now no longer invulnerable. When seventy huffaz can fall in one battle, then in a next battle a hundred can fall, and in a next war two hundred, and between one and a hundred verses there can arise, if both witnesses fall together before the shoulder-blade has been recorded under double confirmation, a slight ripple that through the centuries would become incorrigible.

He did not yet speak that thought aloud. He walked back to the house of as-Sunh, he ate his meager meal, he slept a short sleep, and he rose for the night prayer. But within him something began that he could not turn off. ʿUmar ﵁, in his own house on the far side of the city, felt the same pressure, for the brother he had lost was not only a brother; he was a carrier. And Zayd ﵁ was not the only carrier who had fallen, and whoever had heard them reciting together knew what had been buried in them.

The hinge that formed

Some days later, in the mosque, or perhaps in the shade of the palms before the house of Abu Bakr ﵁ in as-Sunh, ʿUmar ﵁ and Abu Bakr ﵁ sat down facing each other. What was spoken in that conversation belongs not to this chapter but to the next. It is there that the Ummah receives its Mushaf, not with Khalid ﵁ in the Garden of Death but with Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ in the mosque of Medina. But that conversation was made possible by Yamamah. Without the seventy gravestones beneath the palms, without the names that Abu Bakr ﵁ had read aloud in silence, ʿUmar ﵁ would have mourned in his own house and not knocked at the door of the caliph. Without the silence after the reading of the names, Abu Bakr ﵁ would not have found the inner room first to hesitate and then to say by Allah ﷻ, it is good.

Yamamah was not only a battle, Yamamah was the gate out of which the Mushaf of the Ummah emerged. Wahshi ﵁ killed the Liar, al-Bara’ ﵁ leapt over the wall, Abu Dujanah ﵁ fell with his sword in his hand. But the real fruit of those days did not ripen beneath the palms of ʿAqraba; it ripened in the head of a young man in Medina who did not yet know that a mountain was coming toward him. His name was Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, and he was the other Zayd, not the one who had fallen at Yamamah but the one who in Medina waited at his writing-desk for a charge he himself would never have dared to ask for.

The silence of the Garden

Whoever today rides through the region of al-Kharj sees nothing of what happened here. The palm plantation has vanished, the wall has sunk into the ground, the springs have been diverted. But the Ummah carries the name Hadiqat al-Mawt in its memory as though the earth there had been turned over yesterday. There fell the first false prophet who had fought Islam with military force, there Wahshi ﵁ paid off his guilt, there fell seventy huffaz of whose graves the wind still carries what they bore in their breasts. And there opened, without anyone then having the words to say it, the gate through which the Book would enter the Ummah in its final form.

That is what Suyuti ﵀ has preserved uncompromisingly in his one paragraph. A Liar killed by a forgiven sinner, a list of names each representing an entire life, a short sentence about the return of Khalid ﵁ to Medina. And behind it, in silence, the hinge on which the textual history of the Quran turns. The next page of his book begins with the words of ʿUmar ﵁ to Abu Bakr ﵁ concerning the slaughter of the Day of al-Yamamah, and how he fears that the fighting will spread still further to the reciters in these battles, so that much of the Quran will vanish unless they collect it. But that is the next page. For now, in the silent garden of ʿAqraba, the earth lies over the dead, and the Sword of Allah ﷻ turns to the north.

Sources

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