The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah

A plain on the edge of two worlds

Between the Euphrates and the desert edge of Najd, south of what would later be called Kufa, lies an open plain that in Arab geography is called al-Qadisiyyah. Along its eastern edge winds an irrigation canal, the Atiq, which led water from the Euphrates into the fields of the Sasanian empire. Along its western edge stretches the basaltic, gravel-strewn foreland that passes into the desert of the Arabian peninsula. For the Sasanian administrators who had kept watch here for centuries, this plain was the border of their empire; beyond the Atiq lay inhabited, civilised Mesopotamia, and on this side of the Atiq lay the chaos of the Arab tribes that they had tried to restrain through clients since the Lakhmids.

In the previous article we followed the battle of Yarmuk, where in Rajab of the fifteenth year of the Hijra the Byzantine army had suffered its definitive defeat in Syria. At almost the same moment, in another part of the peninsula, a second confrontation was imminent. The empire that Byzantium knew on its eastern side as its eternal rival, the Sasanian empire of the Persians, stood on the point of meeting at al-Qadisiyyah the same turning point that the Romans had met at the Yarmuk. It would be some weeks before the battle truly unfolded, but the lead-up of men, horses, camels and elephants had already begun moving in the desert.

Suyuti’s single sentence

As with Yarmuk, Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀ in his Tarikh al-Khulafa gives the battle of al-Qadisiyyah in a single summarising sentence. He places it in the same calendar year as Yarmuk, the fifteenth year of the Hijra, and he adds to it what would take place in the direct aftermath.

A single sentence for what has been a turning point in world history. We follow Suyuti ﵀ in this register for the factual core, and for the phase-narratives of the battlefield we refer to our battle-story.

The Sasanian empire in its last decade

To be able to read the battle of al-Qadisiyyah in its full weight, one must know the condition of the Sasanian empire in the years immediately before it. It was an empire that had reached its zenith under Khosrau Anushirvan in the sixth century, that under Khosrau II Parviz at the beginning of the seventh century had even conquered Jerusalem and carried the True Cross off to Ctesiphon, but that in the years between 622 and 628 had been struck to its heart by Heraclius of Byzantium. Khosrau II was murdered in 628 by his own son Kavadh II. After that there followed in four years no fewer than ten successors to the throne, among them two queens, in a convulsion of succession that had consumed the empire from within. Yazdegerd III, who came to the throne in 632, was the grandson of Khosrau II and at the moment of his appointment eight years old. He stood at the head of an empire that was administratively intact, but that had suffered heavy losses in its army command, in its finances and in its provincial administration.

The great families that had borne the Sasanian empire, the Suren, the Karen, the Mihran, had goaded one another to blood vengeance in the succession struggle. The marzban, the border commanders in Mesopotamia, had clouded their own relation to the central throne. The army was still imposing in its equipment, with cataphract cavalry, infantry, archers and war elephants from India, but it was no longer an army that marched under a single unified supreme command.

On the other side stood a force out of Medina, made up of Sahaba ﵃ of the first hour, younger men from Mecca and Medina who had been converted in the past years, and bedouin from the tribes of Tamim, Asad, Bakr and others who after the riddah wars under Abu Bakr ﵁ had been taken into the fighting body of Islam.

The appointment of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁

ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ had, after his accession in Medina, considered marching to Iraq in person. The thought of a caliph who leads his troops on the battlefield himself was not unusual among the Sahaba ﵃; the Prophet ﷺ had done it himself, and Abu Bakr ﵁ had done it himself in the first months of the riddah wars. But on closer reflection he was convinced by his council, and in particular by ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ and ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, that the administration in Medina, which took upon itself the coordination between two fronts and the decision-making over the distribution of the spoils, required a presence at the centre that could not be left unmanned by one person. He therefore appointed a commander.

His choice fell upon Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁. It was no self-evident choice. Saʿd ﵁ was not the best known commander of the Sahaba ﵃; he was no Khalid ﵁ in military rivalry, no Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ in administrative maturity, no ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ in talent for negotiation. But Saʿd ﵁ had something that ʿUmar ﵁ valued more highly in this commission than all these qualities together. He had heard the supplication of the Prophet ﷺ spoken over him. In the years of Mecca the Prophet ﷺ had asked for him: O Allah ﷻ, answer his supplication when he asks of You. Saʿd ﵁ was moreover one of the early converts, he was the seventh or so to embrace Islam according to the tradition, he was the first Sahabi ﵁ to shoot an arrow for the cause of Islam, and he was of Banu Zuhra, a maternal uncle of the Prophet ﷺ.

ʿUmar ﵁ wrote Saʿd ﵁ a letter in which he handed over the supreme command to him. The letter, insofar as its texts have been preserved in later sources, carries the familiar grave register that ʿUmar ﵁ used in all his correspondence: a reminder of the duty of taqwa, a warning against the temptation of worldly pride, an instruction on the treatment of the soldiers and of the population along the way, an express exhortation to take the Messenger ﷺ as the example in everything.

The march to al-Qadisiyyah

Saʿd ﵁ gathered an army in Madinat al-Munawwarah and marched northward. The figures in the transmissions vary widely; what is certain is that it was an army in which every kind of weapon was represented, from the heavy cavalry of Bani Bajilah under Jarir ibn ʿAbdillah ﵁ to the archers of Banu Tamim. Among his men were some Sahaba ﵃ who had fought at Badr, and hundreds who had been present at Uhud, at al-Khandaq and at Hudaybiyyah. The desert march to Iraq took weeks. At each stage water was distributed, the horses were rested, the sick were cared for. At a certain point Saʿd ﵁ himself was overtaken by sciatica, an affliction that on the battlefield would force him to command from a flat stone position above the field of battle rather than on horseback.

Arrived at al-Qadisiyyah, Saʿd ﵁ pitched his camp on the western edge of the plain. On the far side of the Atiq, Rustam, the supreme commander of the Sasanian army, built up a forward position. Between the two armies there stretched for some weeks a silence in which negotiators travelled back and forth.

The camp of the Sahaba ﵃

The camp that Saʿd ﵁ had pitched on the western edge of the Qadisiyyah plain was no princely army camp in the Sasanian style, with pavilions of silk, with carpets on the ground, with servants in livery. It was a collection of tents of woven camel hair, with horse posts on the southern side of the camp, with a central space for the communal prayer. In the heart of the camp stood the tent of Saʿd ﵁; it was scarcely larger than the tents of his subordinate commanders. On the eastern side a row of wagons was drawn up on which archers could take their position when the battle was begun.

In this camp the Qur’an recitations were held in the evenings before the battle. Ten qari’s among the Sahaba ﵃, among them ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ as a young man, representing his father in the army, and al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁, had the habit of reciting surahs at dusk that the men around them came to take in silently. It was no ceremony; it was the natural evening occupation of an army that had the prayer as its basic rhythm. Among the surahs that were most heard were Surah al-Anfal, Surah at-Tawbah and Surah al-Fath, all three chapters that were given with the struggle for the cause of Allah ﷻ in hand.

The meals in the camp were simple. Dates, barley bread, sometimes meat from a slaughtered goat or a sheep that an ally from the surroundings had brought, water from waterskins that had been filled from the Atiq. The men ate seated on the ground. The servants were there, for those who had them, but most men cared for their horses and their equipment themselves. ʿUmar ﵁ had written expressly in his instructions to Saʿd ﵁ that no man under his command should lead a life more prosperous than the life of a poorer bedouin tribe, so that the strengthening of the body should not turn against the strengthening of the cause.

The embassy to Rustam

Saʿd ﵁ sent a first delegation of Sahaba ﵃ to Rustam in his palace-like tent. The first envoy was Rabʿi ibn ʿAmir ﵁, a bedouin horseman in a simple cloak, who entered on a low-walking horse, carrying his lance with him until just before the throne, in a bearing that astonished and offended the Sasanian courtiers. He refused to bow, he sat down on the silken carpet with the words that he sat in his own cloak and not on anyone’s ground, and in a few sentences he gave the programme for which he had come.

It was a formula that would be repeated throughout the whole Islamic diplomacy of that century. Three elements: from the worship of men to the worship of Allah ﷻ; from the narrow world to the wide; from injustice to justice. It was no formula of negotiation; it was a declaration of what Islam came into the world to do. Rustam heard the words, answered diplomatically that he would take them into deliberation, and sent Rabʿi ﵁ back. In the days that followed, still other envoys came, among them Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁ and Hudhayfah ibn Mihsan ﵁; all repeated the same message in their own words. None of them let himself be impressed by the splendour of the Sasanian tent. None of them asked for favours.

The delay and the waiting

What stands out in the lead-up to the battle of al-Qadisiyyah is the long delay. The Muslim commander waited, the Sasanian commander waited, and between them lay the Atiq and the open plain, and neither of them wished to take the first step. For the Muslims it held that they wanted the Sasanians to become the attacking party, so that in their defence they might choose the terrain. For the Sasanians it held that they hoped the Muslims, far from their supply lines, would be weakened by hunger and heat. For weeks the stalemate was sustained.

In Medina ʿUmar ﵁ received notes from the camp of Saʿd ﵁, and he wrote notes back. He ordered patience, he ordered prayer, and he ordered that no lost soul should be left behind from the camp, that the sick should be cared for, that the women behind the lines should be allowed to do their work. He also ordered that no one should express himself in pride over the coming battle, for pride, he wrote, is the first cause of defeat.

Yazdegerd III and his counsellors

In the capital Madāʾin Kisra, in the palaces on the eastern bank of the Tigris, Yazdegerd III had meanwhile grown years older than when he had come to the throne in 632. He was in these months seventeen or eighteen years old, and the counsellors around him were not the faithful of his forefathers, but the survivors of the families that had decimated one another in the succession struggle. Rustam Farrukhzad, a nobleman from Khorasan and spahbed of the empire, was the man who put himself forward as military leader; he was against sending a great army to al-Qadisiyyah, because he feared that a defeat would strike the empire to its heart. But Yazdegerd III, driven by the pressures of his palace council and by the Sasanian nobles who saw their lands in the Sawad threatened, insisted that the Muslims be halted at the border itself.

Rustam accepted the supreme command with the resignation of a man who knew that he stood before a commission whose favourable outcome he did not foresee. He had, so the tradition transmits, an astrologer brought to consult the stars before he led the main army out of Madāʾin Kisra to the west. The astrologer gave him a sign that was unfavourable. Rustam, in an act that typified his character, marched out nonetheless, not because he believed in the signs, but because he believed in his duty toward his young king.

The four days of the battle

When the battle began, it lasted four days, and in the Arab transmissions each of those days received its own name. Yawm Armath, Yawm Aghwath, Yawm ʿImas, and Yawm al-Qadisiyyah itself. The names refer to the particular events on each day. On the first day the attack was opened by the Sasanian vanguard, led by elephants that had been brought from India and whose smell threw the Arab horses into panic. The Muslim cavalry could not carry out its customary charge on the first day because the horses shied from the elephants. On the second day reinforcements arrived from Syria under the leadership of Hashim ibn ʿUtbah ﵁, a nephew of Saʿd ﵁, who had been sent from the north by Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ after the victory at Yarmuk. These reinforcements tipped the balance.

On the third day the elephants were put out of action by focused attacks of Muslim infantry on their eyes and on their trunks. At each elephant men crept under the belly to cut the tendon of the legs. It was bloody work and it cost many martyrs, but it dismantled the heaviest weapon of Rustam. On the fourth day, the Yawm al-Qadisiyyah in the narrower sense, a sandstorm broke loose that drove across the plain from the west, straight into the faces of the Sasanians. Saʿd ﵁ gave the order for the general attack, and the Muslim lines thrust straight through the Sasanian vanguard into the headquarters of Rustam.

Rustam himself was found by Hilal ibn ʿUllafah ﵁ in the tent, where he tried to hide himself on the ground. He was killed; his body was hung from a throne post as a sign that the battle had been decided. With his death the Sasanian main army had fallen apart. The survivors fled in an easterly direction, back to Madāʾin Kisra, the capital on the Tigris.

The command of ʿUmar ﵁ during the battle

In Medina ʿUmar ﵁ received in the days of the battle daily couriers who kept him informed of the situation on the battlefield. The distance between Medina and al-Qadisiyyah, measured in days that a seasoned courier needed to cover with changing mounts, was about twelve to fifteen days, too long to truly intervene in the course of the battle. What ʿUmar ﵁ could do was to send ahead, in his letters to Saʿd ﵁, instructions for various possible scenarios. He wrote letters for the possibility that the battle was won: instructions for the treatment of the Sasanian prisoners, for the distribution of the spoils, for the holding back of the Sawad lands as community property. He also wrote letters for the possibility that the battle was lost: instructions for the orderly retreat to the Hijaz, for the protection of the families of the fallen martyrs, for the strengthening of the Muslim presence on the desert border.

It was this multiplicity of foresighted command that characterised ʿUmar ﵁ as an administrator. He foresaw not only the favourable outcome; he foresaw also the unfavourable, and he saw to it that the community could act in an orderly way in both cases. When after the victory the messenger reached Medina, ʿUmar ﵁ was sleeping not in his own house but in the mosque, in the place where he usually made his supplications in his nights. The messenger arrived outside Medina, and in the desert around the city he did not immediately recognise where he was; he asked for the direction of the mosque, and a man who came to stand beside him, ʿUmar ﵁ himself, in his simple cloak not recognisable as caliph, led him personally into the city and asked him along the way to share the news without delay.

The Qur’anic context

Among the men who had stood at al-Qadisiyyah, the Qur’an was not only a text that they cited, but a rhythm that carried their struggle. On each night before the battle Surah al-Anfal was recited by one of the qari’s, and the men listened in silence. On the eve of the fourth day the verse was repeated that the believers carried on their lips in all their battles:

This verse, which originally concerned the struggle of Talut ﵇ against Jalut, was recognised by the men of al-Qadisiyyah as a word that applied also to their situation. They were fewer in number, they were fewer in equipment, they were far from home. But they were patient, and Allah ﷻ was with the patient.

Saʿd ﵁ on his sickbed

A detail that recurs in virtually every transmission of al-Qadisiyyah is that Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ did not lead the battle from his horse, but from a raised flat stone position on the western edge of the battlefield. He suffered from an affliction that struck his loins and made it impossible for him to sit on horseback. A single Sahabi ﵁ reproached him in this unusual position for not being at the head of his men. Saʿd ﵁ did not let himself be drawn out of the command by this reproach. He answered the critic with the words that a commander who loves his men gives an example not through self-sacrifice but through wisdom in command; and that a man who completes his task in his illness wages a greater struggle than a man who sits in his health upon his horse.

This detail, preserved by the transmitters with so much care, is not incidental. It shows how in the first generation of Islam the commander was measured not by his physical presence on the front line, but by his ability to oversee the battle in its entirety and to lead its phasing. Saʿd ﵁ would later, after his victory, have the same stone elevation marked with a simple stone, not as a trophy, but as a memorial of who in his illness had struck down an empire.

The outcome and what it meant geographically

With the death of Rustam and the scattering of his army, the road to Mesopotamia lay open. Yazdegerd III, in Madāʾin Kisra, lost in the following months his very capital; Suyuti ﵀ mentions in a following sentence that in the year 16 of the Hijra Ahwaz and Madāʾin Kisra itself were opened to Islam, and that Saʿd ﵁ led the first Friday prayer of Iraq in the great hall of Khosrau, in the month Safar of that year. The story of the fall of Madāʾin Kisra is told at length in a separate article of this cycle.

In the short term al-Qadisiyyah made the Euphrates and the Tigris Muslim rivers. The land between these two rivers, known in Arab geography as as-Sawad on account of the dark colour of its fertile fields seen from the desert edge, came into Muslim hands. ʿUmar ﵁ decided, after consultation with ʿAli ﵁ and the other senior Sahaba ﵃, not to distribute this land among the fighters as was the usual rule for conquered ground, but to keep it in its entirety as community property of the Ummah, with the farmers who worked it as kharaj-payers. This decision, explained in a separate article on the establishment of the diwan and the administrative form, was a break with the old law of war of Arabia and a first step toward what would be codified in the later fiqh as fayʾ.

In the following calendar year Kufa was founded, on the spot where Saʿd ﵁ had set up his camp after the battle. The Muslim troops no longer wished to live in the old Sasanian cities, and they did not wish to return to Arabia either. ʿUmar ﵁ gave the order that a new city should be built near al-Qadisiyyah, with the mosque in the centre, with the living quarters around the mosque arranged by tribe, with the governor’s seat beside the mosque. It became Kufa, and in the centuries that followed it became one of the centres of Arab-Islamic culture. In the south Basra was founded in the same spirit.

The fall of Yazdegerd III

The Sasanian king fled after the fall of Madāʾin Kisra to the east, first to Hulwan, then to Isfahan, then to Istakhr, then to Khorasan. In each city he tried to raise a new army; in each city it became clear that the nobility that still followed him had, with the loss of its lands, also lost its will to support him. In the year 21 of the Hijra the last great Sasanian effort would take place in the battle of Nahavand, which has gone down in history as Fath al-Futuh, the Opening of the Openings. Yazdegerd III died at last in 651 in Merv, murdered by a miller who wished to steal his clothes.

With this an end came to a dynasty that had ruled over Iran for more than four hundred years. The Sasanians had come to power in 224 under Ardashir I by overthrowing the Parthian dynasty; they had under Shapur I taken the Roman emperor Valerian prisoner; they had under Khosrau Anushirvan set up a legal system that was envied by the Byzantines; they had under Khosrau II Parviz carried the True Cross off from Jerusalem. And they ended on a plain by the Euphrates opposite an army out of Medina. With their end Zoroastrianism too died as a state religion; it would live on in Iran for centuries more in dwindling communities, but the imperial protection was over.

The consequences for the community in Medina

For ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina the news of the victory at al-Qadisiyyah came in a time in which he had also already received the news of Yarmuk. In a single season Islam had struck two of the three great empires that lay on its borders in their backbone. The caliph, as several sources transmit, did not respond to the news by holding a feast or by having himself praised in the mosque. He went to the room of ʿAʾishah ﵂, where Abu Bakr ﵁ and the Prophet ﷺ lay buried, and he spoke to them, in a prayer that the men who followed him heard without being able to take in the words fully. What they heard was that he thanked Allah ﷻ for what had been given to them, and that he asked for protection against the pride that can enter with great victories. He asked that his community, now that it would rule over so many worlds, should not forget that the simplicity it had learned in Mecca and Medina was its only true wealth.

After that he distributed the spoils that had been carried out of al-Qadisiyyah and out of Madāʾin Kisra. Among the spoils were golden vessels, precious carpets, jewels that knew no equal in the whole old world. The most famous piece was the Bisat al-Khusrau, the Carpet of Khosrau, an immense piece of fabric inlaid with gold and pearls that had served in the winter court of the Sasanian palaces to suggest the image of a garden when the winter outside made real gardens unavailable. ʿUmar ﵁ had this carpet cut into pieces and distributed among the Sahaba ﵃, an act mentioned in the tradition with some astonishment; when ʿAli ﵁ later sold his own share for a considerable sum, ʿUmar ﵁ praised him for his practical sense. The whole palace carpet, however princely, was among the Muslims nothing more than a quantity of fabric to be distributed.

The names of the martyrs

It has been a fixed practice of the Muslim transmitters to record the names of the martyrs in lists after each battle. For al-Qadisiyyah some hundreds of names have been transmitted. Among them are Sahaba ﵃ who had fought at Badr, men who had experienced the Hijra to Abyssinia and afterwards to Medina, men who in the riddah wars under Khalid ﵁ had fought at al-Yamamah and who now in Iraq had rendered their last service to Islam. ʿUmar ﵁ had, as soon as the lists arrived in Medina, a share from the bait al-mal paid out to the survivors for each martyr. He kept the lists himself in a book that he kept in his room, and he read in them at night when he could not sleep. A Sahabi ﵁ who came upon him on one such night heard him softly murmuring names; he asked what the caliph was doing, and ʿUmar ﵁ answered that he was naming before Allah ﷻ the men whose names stood in his book, in the hope that they were in the meantime being received in Paradise.

The role of Salman al-Farisi ﵁

Among the men who were present at al-Qadisiyyah was a Sahabi ﵁ whose presence carried its own meaning. Salman al-Farisi ﵁ was of Persian descent, born in Isfahan, raised in the Zoroastrian faith, then become a Christian, and at last, after a long journey through Syria and Arabia, come to Islam in Medina at the hand of the Prophet ﷺ. He had proposed the trench strategy for the battle of al-Khandaq. He spoke Persian as his mother tongue, and at al-Qadisiyyah he was the intermediary to whom the Muslim commanders could turn for the understanding of the Sasanian customs, language and military design. When Saʿd ﵁ asked him for his counsel before the battle, Salman ﵁ spoke of the weak spot of the Sasanian army: not its armour, not its elephants, but the separation between the Persian-speaking officer corps and the auxiliaries from Mesopotamia, Khorasan, Daylam, and the Arab client tribes, who did not understand one another’s language and who each followed their own commander rather than Rustam himself. Strike that separation, he said, and the army falls apart into incoherent pieces.

It was this counsel that Saʿd ﵁ followed in his phasing of the battle. The breakthrough in the Sasanian ranks on the fourth day was not only a military breakthrough; it was a breakthrough in the fragile coherence of an army that had been built up out of incoherent pieces. Salman ﵁ himself fought in the battle, and he survived it; he would in later years become governor of Madāʾin Kisra itself, a Persian who ruled over Persians on behalf of an Arab caliph, in an Islamic order in which birth no longer determined what a man could become.

The spiritual meaning for the generations that followed

For the generations of Sahaba ﵃ and Tabiʿun ﵀ who remained living in Iraq after al-Qadisiyyah, and for those who after them formed the sciences of Islam in Kufa and Basra, the battle was not only a military event. It was a sign that Islam, which had suffered in Mecca, which had been established in Medina, which under Abu Bakr ﵁ had fought for its existence, had now reached an extent that no one could have foreseen at the Hijra. What this sign asked of them was not pride but humility. ʿUmar ﵁ said more than once on the minbar during his time in office that he feared more for his community when the world lay at its feet than when the world wished to wipe it out. A community that is threatened keeps standing in its faith; a community that receives abundance risks trading its faith for its possessions.

In the centuries that followed, Muslim scholars of Kufa and Basra made this warning into a recurring theme in their sermons and in their writings. Imam al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀, who lived in Basra in the generation after the Sahaba ﵃, spoke repeatedly on his minbar of the dangers of a prosperity not held in balance by justice. It was the old warning of ʿUmar ﵁, passed on to the next generation, passed on yet another generation later, and so carried into the centuries.

What al-Qadisiyyah left to the Ummah

Politically al-Qadisiyyah gave the Muslims the Euphrates and Tigris plain, and with it the urban and agrarian wealth of ancient Mesopotamia. Spiritually it gave the Muslims a second great victory in the same calendar year as Yarmuk, and thereby a double confirmation that the cause for which they fought was not carried by human calculations. Administratively it gave ʿUmar ﵁ the occasion to set up a new form of government: governors at a distance, a register of stipends for the fighters, a tax system for the acquired land, and new cities for the troops to live in. All of this, directed from the minbar in Medina, became the model for what would be called in the first centuries of Islam as-siyasah ash-sharʿiyyah, the governance grounded in the sharia.

In the next article we follow the fall of Madāʾin Kisra, the palace-capital of the Sasanian kings, in which Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ led the first Friday prayer of Iraq in the winter hall of Khosrau, and in which the treasure of an empire that had ruled for centuries came into the hands of a community that a few decades earlier had still suffered under the lash of Quraysh in Mecca. What had been opened at al-Qadisiyyah on the battlefield was ratified at Madāʾin Kisra in the capital itself.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd edition 1995), p. 135.
• For the phase-narratives of the battlefield: see the battle-story umar-qadisiyyah in this cycle, which draws on at-Tabari ﵀, Tarikh ar-Rusul wa-l-Muluk (trans. Yarshater, SUNY) and Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya.