The Battle of the Chains (Dhāt al-Salāsil)

In Safar of the twelfth year, Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ crossed the south-eastern frontier and met the first Persian commander who lay in wait for him in position: Hormuz, who had bound his foot soldiers to one another with iron chains so that flight would be impossible. What Suyuti ﵀ compresses into a single verb, “he raided”, is in the broader chronicle a series of encounters of which this was the first.

The lead-up

In the final months of the eleventh year after the Hijra the tribes of Najd, Bahrain, Oman, Hadramawt and Yemen had been restored to the community, and the Ridda, but for a handful of surviving embers, was over. Khalid ﵁ stood on the northern edge of the peninsula after the hard days of al-Yamamah, with an army that had marched through the winter of Central Arabia and that now, in the first weeks of 12 AH, awaited fresh instructions from Medina.

What Khalid ﵁ had seen between Banu Hanifa and Banu Bakr ibn Waʾil could no longer be put out of mind. On the far side of the dunes, beyond the tribes that still stood under Persian protectorate, lay a world that until then had taken almost no notice of what was happening in Medina. The Sasanians had long treated the Arab tribes on their south-western border as a frontier people: useful for tribute, reliable for guarding the caravan roads, but not as players in the politics of the empire. Less than twenty years earlier Khosrau Parviz had torn up the letter of the Messenger ﷺ, and ever since he had dismissed the reports out of Medina as the affairs of an insignificant desert folk.

The Persian frontier tribes, above all the Banu Bakr ibn Waʾil and the Banu ʿIjl, had spent those twenty years living under the shadow of Ctesiphon. They paid tribute, supplied auxiliary troops to the garrisons along the Euphrates, and spoke a mixture of Arabic and Persian that the merchants of the Hijaz could barely follow. When the reports of the Ridda reached them, some of them took sides: a number of Bakr ibn Waʾil, under the leadership of al-Muthanna ibn Haritha ash-Shaybani ﵁, had already turned to Islam and were carrying out skirmishes on their own initiative against the Persian posts in southern Iraq.

It was al-Muthanna ﵁ who opened the case for Medina. According to the broader chronicle he travelled to Abu Bakr ﵁ with the message that the Persian grip on the southern Euphrates was weaker than it appeared from outside, that the garrisons stood scattered, and that a resolute commander with a good army could open the whole land between Hira and the Gulf. Abu Bakr ﵁ listened and sent him back with a promise: help would come.

The letter of Abu Bakr ﵁

Khalid ﵁ received the letter in his camp in Central Arabia. The pen of Suyuti ﵀ withholds the precise wording, but the general thrust is preserved in the broader chronicle: Khalid ﵁ was to march northward with his army, make contact with al-Muthanna ﵁ at the Euphrates, and open the land of Basra. “After finishing the fight against those who had apostatised,” Suyuti ﵀ writes in his single sentence about the entire campaign, “as-Siddiq ﵁ sent Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ to the land of Basra, and he raided Ubullah.”

In that single sentence lies the turning of the twelfth year. The caliph ﵁ who only months earlier had accompanied Usama ﵁ on foot no farther than al-Jurf, now sent his finest commander not against another Arab tribe but against an empire. The choice was deliberate. Khalid ﵁ had learned among the Banu Asad how to carry out a cavalry charge against a massed formation, he had learned at Yamamah how to break through a fanatical defence, and in the desert of Bahrain and Hadramawt he had gathered indirect experience of logistics over long distances. No other available commander possessed those three qualities at once.

Khalid ﵁ set out with a core of his army. The broader chronicle gives figures ranging from ten to eighteen thousand men, but in Suyuti’s ﵀ wording those figures are absent, and we follow his pen. What is certain is that the march from Central Arabia to the south-eastern border of Iraq took weeks, that the route ran through barren land where wells were scarce, and that along the way Khalid ﵁ met al-Muthanna ﵁ and merged his army with the local Muslims of Bakr ibn Waʾil.

Hormuz and his chains

Facing Khalid ﵁ stood Hormuz, the Persian governor of the frontier district that guarded the mouth of the Tigris. Hormuz was no insignificant man. He bore the title of marzban, a frontier lord, and he held the system of garrisons along the southern Euphrates under his direct authority. In the broader chronicle he is described as haughty and unbending, feared both by the Persians beneath him and by the Arab tribes that had to serve him. His name became a proverb among the Arabs: “Treacherous as Hormuz, haughty as Hormuz.” Whoever was handed over to him knew that he could expect little mercy.

Hormuz had drawn up his foot soldiers on a plain north of Kazimah, at the mouth of the Khawr inlet that runs out into the Gulf. The site, near what is today called the coast of Kuwait, had been chosen for its open ground: a commander with cavalry could here spread out his formations. But Hormuz took a measure that should have astonished even his own officers. He had his foremost lines, according to the broader chronicle, bound to one another with iron chains, soldier to soldier, in groups of three to ten. The chains were no symbolic ornament; they were a physical impossibility of flight.

The purpose was simple and cruel. Hormuz knew that his foot soldiers, made up of auxiliaries and mixed local recruits, did not have the discipline of the imperial savaran cavalry. If the first lines were to break, the second and third lines would flow back with them, and the whole formation would collapse. By chaining the men together he forced them to stand as one block or to fall as one block. It gave the battlefield its name: Dhāt al-Salāsil, “the one of the Chains”.

In the spiritual reading of the tradition this chain is a sign. An army that must chain its own men to keep them in place has already lost its inner courage. The Messenger ﷺ had said that the Muslim does not turn his back to the enemy and that victory comes through patience and prayer, not through iron and compulsion. What Hormuz tried to achieve with iron carried within it the seed of his own undoing.

Before the battle began, Khalid ﵁ received an invitation from Hormuz to single combat. The practice of the mubaraza, the duel between commanders, was old among both the Arabs and the Persians, and Hormuz relied on his own strength and on an ambush that he intended to spring at the moment Khalid ﵁ stepped forward. The broader chronicle gives the scene with some fullness; we follow it in outline because it is essential for understanding what followed.

Khalid ﵁ accepted. He dismounted from his horse, walked to the middle of the plain, and waited. Hormuz came against him on horseback. As the two commanders drew near, Hormuz gave a sign to his bodyguard to spring out from a nearby gully. But Khalid ﵁ had noticed the movement; he threw himself upon Hormuz, seized hold of him, and killed him with his own sword at the very moment the Persian bodyguard approached. A second Muslim commander, al-Qaʿqaʿ ibn ʿAmr at-Tamimi ﵁, came to Khalid’s ﵁ aid and scattered the bodyguard.

The fall of Hormuz was not the end of the battle, but it was the end of the Persian steadfastness. The lines of foot soldiers, bound to their chains, no longer had a commander; they had no plan, no signal, no point of retreat. When Khalid’s ﵁ cavalry struck the flanks and the Muslim archers brought the first lines under fire, the Persian block could neither regroup nor withdraw. The chains that were meant to bind them to the battlefield made them into a fixed target.

The battle

Khalid’s ﵁ attack proceeded, as was his custom, in three waves. The cavalry of the right wing, under ʿAdi ibn Hatim at-Taʾi ﵁, struck the left Persian flank and drove it in upon the centre. The cavalry of the left wing, under ʿAsim ibn ʿAmr ﵁, did the same on the other side. The centre, under Khalid ﵁ himself, held the Persian vanguard fast with a frontal attack that was not meant to break through, but to give the trapped foot soldiers no chance to loosen their chains.

The Muslims spared, according to the broader chronicle, neither arrow nor lance. The Persian prisoners who were left on the battlefield with their iron bands were freed by the Muslims themselves, who struck off the chains and brought the survivors to the rear. The spoils were extraordinary: besides the ordinary armour and horses, the Persian camp yielded a treasure of gold, silver and precious garments, for Hormuz had the habit, as marzban, of carrying his wealth with him on the spot.

Among the spoils was one object that occupied the Arab imagination for centuries. Hormuz wore a precious headdress, a kind of turban woven through with gold and set with jewels, which in the custom of the Persian court was permitted only to marzbans of his rank. The broader chronicle records that the headdress alone had a value of a hundred thousand dirham. Khalid ﵁ had the headdress set apart and would have it sent to Medina together with the remaining fifth of the spoils.

The geography of Kazimah

Before the pen moves on to the message that the rider carried from Khalid’s ﵁ camp to Medina, the geography of the place itself must be held in view. Kazimah, on the northern shore of what is today called the Bay of Kuwait, was no insignificant place in the seventh century. It lay at the transition between the Arabian desert and the Mesopotamian delta, at the point where the caravan routes from Central Arabia reached the salt marshes of the Khawr inlet and branched eastward toward the Persian ports or northward toward the Euphrates. An army that controlled Kazimah held the key to the southern approach to Iraq.

The Persians knew this and had for centuries maintained a frontier-guard system that made the marzban of the district responsible for the defence of this threshold. Hormuz had followed his predecessors in raising fixed posts along the inlet, with small garrisons at Hufayr, at Ubullah and at a string of intervening oases where water was available. The whole system worked as long as the Arab tribes on the far side of the dunes remained divided. When one commander managed to unite the tribes under a single banner, the system fell apart.

This was what Khalid ﵁ did in the weeks preceding Dhāt al-Salāsil. He united the Muslims of Bakr ibn Waʾil under al-Muthanna ibn Haritha ﵁ with his own army from Central Arabia, and to both he added the local knowledge of the oases that he himself lacked. No Persian marzban had expected that an army out of the Hijaz would be able to master the water supplies along the southern coast; no Persian marzban had expected that the Banu Bakr, who for centuries had been treated as tribute-payers, would shift their loyalty so swiftly to a new central authority in Medina.

The turning at Kazimah is therefore not only a military turning. It is a social turning in the geography of the peninsula. Tribes that once looked toward Ctesiphon for their vertical bond now looked toward Medina. The chain that Hormuz had forged around his foot soldiers was an outward sign of an inner unbinding that he could no longer repair: his army was held in place by iron, because the hand of loyalty that had once bound them had been let go.

The spoils and the message

Here lies the moment that has made Dhāt al-Salāsil immortal in the collective memory of the ummah, and it deserves its own mention. Khalid ﵁ gathered his officers, set aside the khums, the fifth that fell to the treasury in Medina, and handed it over to a rider with orders to bring it in haste to Abu Bakr ﵁. The remaining four fifths he distributed among the fighters according to the Sunnah that the Prophet ﷺ had established at Khaybar and at Hunayn: the horseman received two shares, the foot soldier one share, and the commander nothing beyond what his rank as a fighter granted him.

When the rider handed over the headdress of Hormuz in Medina, there occurred what the broader chronicle has preserved with a mixture of admiration and gentle humour. Abu Bakr ﵁ examined the precious object, weighed it in his hand, and gave it back, without a moment’s hesitation, to Khalid ﵁ with the message that it was awarded to him personally in recognition of his bravery on the battlefield. “This is for Khalid ﵁,” Abu Bakr ﵁ is said to have said; “he has earned it with his sword.”

The deed of Abu Bakr ﵁ was not only a gesture of appreciation. It was a choice of principle. At a time when a new campaign might have tempted other commanders to self-enrichment, the caliph ﵁ set a precedent: the spoils belong to the community, the honour to the fighter. No ruler in Medina laid a hand on the personal property of a commander; no commander in the field drew to himself more than his share. The chain of trust between Medina and the Iraqi front, which in the coming years would have to hold across thousands of kilometres, was forged in this single deed.

ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, who was present in Medina at the arrival of the rider, had, according to the tradition, some reservation. Was it right, he wondered, that the caliph ﵁ should take an object of such value from the spoils and give it back to a single man? Abu Bakr ﵁ answered, according to the broader chronicle, with a formulation that convinced ʿUmar ﵁: “Khalid ﵁ has earned it, and we give him what is due to him. We have taken for ourselves neither dinar nor dirham.” The sentence accords with the self-portrait that Abu Bakr ﵁ repeated throughout his caliphate, and which has been discussed at length in the twelfth chapter of this volume.

What followed

The fall of Hormuz and the seizure of his camp opened the road to Ubullah. Khalid’s ﵁ army marched from the battlefield of Dhāt al-Salāsil north-westward along the southern bank of the Khawr inlet and reached within weeks the Sasanian port town at the mouth of the Shatt al-ʿArab. There unfolded what has been told in the ninth chapter of this volume: the raid on Ubullah, the capture of the port, and the breakthrough into the interior of Iraq.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up all of this, from the first opening to the capture of Madāʾin, in a single sentence. His pen passes over Hormuz, passes over the chains, passes over the headdress. But his verb, “he raided”, is chosen precisely and carefully: it is not a verb of slow siege, nor of patient negotiation, but of a swift and decisive attack that gives the opponent no time to recover. Dhāt al-Salāsil is, in this respect, the concrete example of which Suyuti’s ﵀ general verb is a summary.

Khalid’s ﵁ army counted its fallen after Dhāt al-Salāsil. The figures in the broader chronicle vary, but the agreement is that the Muslims suffered few losses in proportion to the Persian slaughter. The chains that Hormuz had ordered had made his own men into a fixed and exhausted target, while Khalid’s ﵁ horsemen stayed light and swift. The rest after the battle was kept short. Khalid ﵁ distributed the spoils, sent the khums with the rider to Medina, and gave the order for the march on Ubullah.

In the spiritual reading of what happened between Safar and Rabīʿ al-Akhirah of the twelfth year lies a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the whole Iraqi campaign. A haughty Persian commander, relying on his own strength and on the matériel of his empire, meets a Muslim commander who carries with him nothing more than his men, his sword and the prayer of the community that has sent him. The Persian commander falls, not because the Muslim is stronger in men or in equipment, but because the chain he has forged around himself has robbed him of the one thing that keeps an army standing in distress: the heart of the fighter who, of his own accord, holds his ground.

In Medina Abu Bakr ﵁ received the news and, according to the broader chronicle, praised Allah ﷻ and sent Khalid ﵁ further instructions. The caliphate ﵁ that in its first year had still been occupied with inward healing now, in its second year, opened a new space for the community. Between the fall of Hormuz and the capture of Madāʾin, within the span of a few months, the geographical horizon of the Muslims tilted from a peninsula to a world.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd edition 1995), p. 64.
• The name Dhāt al-Salāsil, the figure of Hormuz, the headdress, the duel and the saying of Abu Bakr ﵁ about Khalid’s ﵁ share come not from Suyuti himself but from the broader chronicle of at-Tabari (Tarikh ar-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, year 12) and Ibn Kathir (al-Bidaya wa’n-Nihaya, volume 6). We have indicated these where necessary with “the broader chronicle”.