The Battle of al-Yamamah

After Buzakhah, Abu Bakr ﵁ did not send Khalid ﵁ straight back to Medina. He sent new orders after him. Push on to the Banu Tamim in Najd, then to Musaylimah in al-Yamamah. An earlier expedition under ʿIkrimah ibn Abi Jahl ﵁ had already suffered a defeat near al-Yamamah. A second under Shurahbil ibn Hasanah ﵁ was waiting for reinforcements. Khalid ﵁ was to join the two together and redeem the battle.

The distance from Buzakhah to al-Yamamah is great. Nearly fifteen hundred kilometers across scorching plains, past wells that at times had run dry. Khalid ﵁ chose a fast route along Dahna and at-Tahaluf. He did not split his army and kept the cavalry concentrated. The Muhajirun and Ansar marched in the center, the allies from the newly pacified Najd tribes on the flanks.

Along the way several delegations from Tamim approached him. Sajaah, the prophetess from the Banu Yarbu, had raised her army but by now disbanded it again, in part because she had struck a curious pact with Musaylimah and then withdrawn to Mesopotamia. Maaliek ibn Nuwayrah had been killed in an earlier engagement by Khalid ﵁'s men, an affair that would later be reopened in Medina by ʿUmar ﵁. Khalid ﵁ kept moving forward. His orders were clear and time was pressing.

In al-Yamamah, Musaylimah waited with an army said to number forty thousand men. The Banu Hanifa were no weak tribe. They owned farmland, palm orchards, walled gardens that could serve as forts. Musaylimah had won them over with rhymed prose that resembled Quranic passages but was meaningless in content. “Yaa difdaʿu, binta difdaʿayni,” “O frog, daughter of two frogs.” No one in al-Yamamah had contradicted it aloud.

When Khalid ﵁ joined ʿIkrimah ﵁ and Shurahbil ﵁, the Muslim force numbered about thirteen thousand men. They pitched camp north of ʿAqraba, a plain north of the town of Hajr. Khalid ﵁ sent out a scout. The man was captured and brought before Musaylimah. Musaylimah spared his life, gave him a message, and sent him back. Khalid ﵁ read the message, tore it in two without a word, and gave the order to advance the next morning.

On the night before the battle, Khalid ﵁ walked through the camps. At every banner he stopped, spoke with the standard-bearer, and reminded him of a specific virtue of the Prophet ﷺ. At the banner of the Ansar he repeated the words from Surah at-Tawbah about those who believed, made hijrah, and strove. At the banner of the Muhajirun, Ubayy ibn Kaʿb ﵁ recited verses he had received from the Prophet ﷺ personally. The camp slept little that night. On the horizon, above the palm groves of Hajr, the glow of Musaylimah’s fires could be seen.

The morning broke clear and cool. Khalid ﵁ drew up his army in the traditional formation. A mixed center, Muhajirun and Ansar side by side under his own command. The right wing under Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁, the brother of ʿUmar ﵁. The left wing under Abu Hudhayfah ﵁ and his mawla Salim ﵁, the qari whom the Prophet ﷺ had recommended as one of the four from whom to learn the Quran.

Musaylimah’s army came forward on a broad front. The Banu Hanifa were numerous, trained, and they fought on their own ground. Their vanguard under Muhakkim ibn at-Tufayl, a field commander who in an earlier life had been a merchant in Hajr, hurled itself at the Muslim center.

The blow was heavier than anyone had expected. The Banu Hanifa spear-throwers inflicted losses on the first rank. Under the pressure the Muslim center wavered. The right wing under Zayd ﵁ held firm, but the left wing began to give way.

In this moment Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁ fell. He held the banner of the Muhajirun and refused to lower it even as the men around him fell. A Banu Hanifa fighter stabbed him in the side. He fell with the banner still in his hand. Salim, mawla of Abu Hudhayfah ﵁, saw it, ran to him, raised the banner, and died almost on the very spot where Zayd ﵁ had fallen. Abu Hudhayfah ﵁ himself was killed shortly afterward, crying out: “O bearers of the Quran, adorn the Quran with your deeds!”

The three standard-bearers of the center fell almost within a single instant. The Banu Hanifa had broken through Khalid ﵁'s first line at exactly the point where Musaylimah had heard the most about Muslim weakness. The banner of the Muhajirun lay in the dust. Then came Muhakkim’s second assault, and the Muslim line broke.

The Muslim line bent and broke. The center, left standing without its banner and without three of its commanders, staggered backward. What began as an ordered withdrawal became, on the left wing, a half rout. Units fell back to the camp they had pitched the previous evening at the edge of the plain. The Banu Hanifa vanguard took up the pursuit, with Muhakkim ibn at-Tufayl riding along the flank, shouting that this was the day al-Yamamah would trample the banner of Medina underfoot.

The Banu Hanifa fighters reached the first tents. They had not come merely to fight. They had come to plunder. The baggage tents of the Muhajirun were stormed. Goods were dragged away, provisions left out in the sun. Worse still, in a number of the tents were the women who had come with the army from Medina, and beside them several women of the Najd allies and children who had stayed in their mothers’ care.

Khalid ﵁'s wife, Layla bint Minhal, whom he had married shortly before the battle, was one of them. When a Banu Hanifa fighter flung the tent flap aside and burst in, she seized the tent pole, broke it off at the base, and rammed its pointed round head into his belly. Other women followed her example. They grabbed the poles, they grabbed cooking sticks, they grabbed whatever they could. One Banu Hanifa vanguardsman was pinned down by three women at once and killed with knives from their cooking gear. Another fled back through the tent opening with gashes across his back.

Khalid ﵁ by now had ridden in among the fleeing men. He called them by their names. He reminded them of Uhud, of the second half of Hunayn, of the discipline the Prophet ﷺ had taught them after the first setback. He rode along the line, he struck shields with the flat of his sword, he roared that no man would fall back beyond the camp or he would run him through himself.

The rearguard held. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ fought in the rearguard with a few hundred men who had refused to flee, and gave the center time to form up behind the line of tents. Men who had lost their banners seized new cloths, tore their own cloaks into strips, and bound the strips to spear shafts. The women, still with the poles in their hands, formed a second line behind the men.

When Khalid ﵁ saw that his rearguard was withstanding the Banu Hanifa pressure, he gave no order for a counterattack. Not now. First he had to begin again. He dismounted, climbed onto a boulder at the edge of the camp, and called his commanders together. What he was about to ask of them, no field commander from Mecca had ever done before.

Khalid ﵁ stood on the boulder and spoke briefly. He ordered that the Muhajirun and Ansar would no longer stand intermingled. Every tribe would stand under its own banner. No Aws with Khazraj. No Banu Hashim with Banu ʿAdi. Every man among his own people, with his own sheikh.

The reason was psychological. In the chaos of an open battle no one knew who stood beside him. Under his own tribal banner every man knew the man to his left and right. Shame did its work. Whoever fled, fled before his own brothers and cousins. Whoever stood fast, stood fast for the men he had grown up with.

Khalid ﵁ drew up the lines anew. On the right now stood the Ansar, grouped under their own banners of Aws and Khazraj, with Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas ﵁ as their spokesman. Thabit ﵁ had that morning rinsed his long hair with henna and girded on his battle-grey hima, and he called to his companions: “By Allah, this is not how we fought with the Prophet ﷺ.” He meant the wavering of the line. With the heel of his foot he dug a pit in the ground and planted his feet in it, and swore that he would not leave that pit until the battle was over or he was killed.

In the center the Muhajirun regrouped under al-Bara ibn Malik ﵁, the brother of Anas ﵁, a man known for his strength and for the fact that the Prophet ﷺ had once said that if he swore something by Allah, Allah would fulfill it for him. He had been wounded during the first phase, but he stood in the second rank when Khalid ﵁ gave the command.

The Najd allies, Banu Tamim and the pacified tribes, were each given their own sector on the left wing. ʿAdi ibn Hatim ﵁, who had fought under Khalid ﵁'s standard in the earlier battles at Buzakhah, led a block of Tayy of his own. Khalid ﵁'s reorganization took less than an hour. He walked past every block, spoke of a specific virtue of the Prophet ﷺ, and reminded the men of what Abu Bakr ﵁ had told them in Medina before they set out.

On the other side, Musaylimah was told the victory was won. He believed the Muslim force was broken and gave his vanguard free rein to return to camp with the spoils. Muhakkim ibn at-Tufayl was less certain. He sent scouts, who reported that the line of tents was forming up again and that a new banner had risen in the center. He ordered his line to advance once more, but its organization was no longer what it had been in the morning.

Khalid ﵁ sounded the horn. The second assault was unlike the first. The tribal organization held. The Aws did not move before the Khazraj moved. The Banu Tamim kept contact with the Banu ʿAdi. Whoever looked back saw the faces of his uncles and his sons. No one gave way.

The Muslim center drove straight at the Banu Hanifa line. Al-Bara ﵁, the wound from the first phase still on his shoulder, led the vanguard. Beside him Abu Dujanah ﵁ swung the sword he had once received at Uhud from the Prophet ﷺ personally. The red hima around his forehead had been knotted afresh that morning.

The Banu Hanifa standard-bearer held the main banner high on a long spear shaft of cedar wood. He fell under a stroke of al-Bara ﵁'s sword, clean through shoulder and chest. The banner fell. A second man picked it up, a nephew of Muhakkim, and raised it above the line again. He fell under a second stroke, this time from an Ansari standing beside Thabit ﵁. The banner fell again, this time into a pool of mud, and no one in the Banu Hanifa vanguard reached out a hand to pick it up again.

That the main banner stayed on the ground was, for the Banu Hanifa, what the fall of a standard was for every Arab tribe: a sign that honor had been broken. The flanking wings began to waver. Muhakkim ibn at-Tufayl, who had directed this battle since morning and who knew his own men, saw that the open plain no longer served his line. He called his commanders together and gave the order he had hoped never to need.

He ordered a withdrawal to the walled garden east of Hajr. That was the palm orchard everyone knew had high stone walls and only one gate. There, they thought, they could break the Muslim assault, on ground that would shut out Khalid ﵁'s cavalry. The Banu Hanifa line bent. Some units fled in disorder, others withdrew in good order under the commands of their junior officers.

Khalid ﵁ sent his cavalry around the flanks and cut off the road to the town of Hajr. The only way out ran past the eastern palm orchards. The Banu Hanifa took that way out. It was the garden that in all the later traditions would be called “Hadiqat al-Mawt,” the Garden of Death. When Khalid ﵁ saw them withdrawing into it, he gave no order to storm the town. He ordered the garden surrounded. There Musaylimah would be, and there he had to die, or the Ridda would never end.

The garden lay on the eastern side of Hajr. A walled palm orchard of a few hundred meters in every direction, with a single wooden gate. Behind the walls several thousand Banu Hanifa warriors had withdrawn with Musaylimah. The gate was barred from within. The walls were too high to climb under enemy fire.

Khalid ﵁ surrounded the garden. He had shield barriers set up against the archers standing on the walls. The Banu Hanifa archers had spread themselves along the crest of the wall and shot down every Muslim who came within ten paces of the gate. Khalid ﵁ sent his own archers forward under cover of the shields, and within an hour the wall crest was swept clean. But the gate stayed barred, and behind it thousands waited.

He conferred with his commanders in a circle beyond bowshot. A siege could take days. Musaylimah would have time to seek reinforcements from the northern Banu Hanifa villages. ʿIkrimah ibn Abi Jahl ﵁ proposed battering the gate in with a ram, but the Banu Hanifa had burning oil and great stones ready above for precisely that scenario. Shurahbil ﵁ proposed attacking the wall in several places at once, but Khalid ﵁ pointed to the numbers: even if they managed to climb, they would drop inside in small groups and be cut down man by man.

The garden’s defense had to be broken soon, but none of the proposed tactics offered a way through. Khalid ﵁ looked at the wall, at the gate, at the palm crowns rising above the stone rim. He knew that in such a garden the paths between the palms were wide enough for two men abreast. Whoever got inside could open the gate from within. The problem was getting inside.

It was at that moment, when the silence of the council hung at its heaviest, that al-Bara ibn Malik ﵁ stepped forward. The other commanders stood looking at him in silence. What he was about to propose they did not yet know, but they knew who he was, and they knew he did not speak merely for the sake of speaking.

Al-Bara ibn Malik ﵁ stepped forward. His proposal was simple and terrifying. He asked the men to lift him on a shield and throw him over the wall. From the inside he would break the gate open.

Khalid ﵁ looked at him. He knew who al-Bara ﵁ was. He knew the hadith about him: that the Prophet ﷺ had said that if al-Bara ﵁ swore something by Allah, Allah would fulfill it for him. He knew the accounts from Khaybar, from Hunayn, from the battles where al-Bara ﵁ had fought at the front with an aggression men ten years younger could not keep up with. But the request was, in military terms, a death sentence. One man alone, inside a wall with thousands of enemies, with no reinforcement able to reach him within fifteen minutes — that was death.

Al-Bara ﵁ insisted. He offered no argument. He said only that he would go in. The Sahabah ﵃ around him tried to persuade him to give it up. He refused. He asked for his sword in his right hand, his dagger in his left. Six Sahabah ﵃ lifted him onto a broad war shield. Then they swung the shield twice back and forth and hurled him over the wall.

He landed inside, in the midst of defenders. The sources differ on how many he struck down before he reached the gate, but they agree on what he did. He fought his way through the first shield wall, with gashes across his arms and side, and reached the beam of the gate. He kept his footing long enough to knock the beam away and lift the locking bar.

The bar was heavy. It was of hardened wood, laid across two iron brackets. Al-Bara ﵁ heaved it up with the shoulder that still carried the wound from the first phase. He staggered, he held on, he pushed it upward. A Hanifi fighter came at him with a pike, and he knocked the pike aside with his dagger and drove it into the man’s throat. Then the bar fell onto the stones with a dull thud.

He pushed against the gate. It swung open. On the other side stood Khalid ﵁'s center, swords drawn, ready for the signal. When al-Bara ﵁ appeared in the opening, his whole body covered in blood, Khalid ﵁ shouted the command, and the Muslim assault poured through the gate into the garden like a floodwave. Al-Bara ﵁ himself, with more than eighty wounds as would later be counted, survived the day. He was carried out of the garden by his brother Anas ﵁ when the battle was over.

Inside the walls chaos broke loose. The Muslim assault poured in along the main path between the palms. The Banu Hanifa line fell apart into dozens of separate struggles among the trees. But in the center, ringed by his last bodyguard, stood Musaylimah. He was small of stature, with a sallow face, and he swung a short sword as if he did not know how long it had already been going on. His bodyguard was dwindling. Khalid ﵁'s men pressed in.

At the northern side of the garden stood Wahshi ibn Harb ﵁ with his javelin in hand. He was the freed Habashi slave who had once, at Uhud, killed Hamzah ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib ﵁, when he was not yet a Muslim, on the orders of Hind. After the conquest of Mecca he had accepted Islam. The Prophet ﷺ had accepted him, but had asked him not to show his face to him again, because the sight brought back the memory of Hamzah ﵁.

In the years that followed, Wahshi ﵁ had carried one wish somewhere deep inside. He wanted to kill, with the javelin that had killed Hamzah ﵁, the worst enemy of the Muslims, and so weigh the balance anew. He knew that nothing he did in this life would bring Hamzah ﵁ back. But he hoped, in his own later words, that Allah ﷻ would count this second deed against the first.

In the garden of Hajr he saw Musaylimah standing, surrounded by his last bodyguards, near a palm tree with a split trunk. He waited for his moment. He felt the javelin in his hand again, the wood he had gripped decades earlier for Hamzah ﵁. He waited until Musaylimah let his guard drop for an instant. He raised his arm.

He threw.

The javelin struck Musaylimah in the side. At almost the same moment, Abu Dujanah Simak ibn Kharasha ﵁, the man who had once received the famous sword from the Prophet ﷺ at Uhud, cut his way through the last bodyguard and struck Musaylimah with the sword clean across the neck. Musaylimah fell.

Both men later claimed the killing blow. Wahshi ﵁ pointed to the javelin, which still stood lodged in the side. Abu Dujanah ﵁ pointed to the neck wound. Tabari ﵀ records both accounts without choosing between them. Wahshi ﵁ himself said, years later when someone asked him about it, that he hoped Allah ﷻ would count the second deed against the first, and that it did not matter to him whom history was made to remember.

An old woman watching from her rooftop in Hajr cried out, when she saw Musaylimah fall: “The ameer al-mu’minin of the Banu Hanifa has been killed, by a black slave!” She meant Wahshi ﵁. A turn of history that was cited in every later commentary as proof of Allah’s justice.

With Musaylimah’s death the last resistance broke. The Banu Hanifa, though still numerous, laid down their weapons. Khalid ﵁ stopped the fighting at once. He sent heralds through the garden with the order: whoever lays down his weapon receives amaan.

But what had happened in the garden before Musaylimah fell was described in the sources as the bloodiest single struggle of the Ridda. Seventy Sahabah ﵃ fell within it. Among them Abu Dujanah ﵁, who shortly after his blow against Musaylimah was struck in the back by a spear. His body was found with his red hima still knotted around his forehead, the emblem he had worn in every battle since Uhud. Thabit ibn Qays ﵁ fell beside his standard with his feet still in the pit he had dug. When his body was recovered, his coat of mail had been given to a fugitive, an event that would later appear to his widow in a well-known dream vision.

Among the seventy Sahabah ﵃ were at least forty huffaz of the Quran, men who had memorized its pages under the Prophet ﷺ himself. Their deaths were the direct occasion for ʿUmar ﵁ to propose to Abu Bakr ﵁ that the Quran be collected, a proposal that, after initial hesitation from the khalifah, was carried out by Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁.

The counting of the dead took long. On the Muslim side about twelve hundred men fell, among them the seventy Sahabah ﵃ inside the garden and roughly a thousand more tribesmen of the Banu Tamim and other pacified Najd tribes. On the Banu Hanifa side about ten thousand men fell on the battlefield and in the garden. The survivors, under the leadership of Mujaaʿ ibn Marara, a Hanifi noble of earlier standing who now asked for amaan, surrendered. He arranged a peace treaty with Khalid ﵁ and later gave him his daughter in marriage, a political bond that would still draw criticism in Medina under ʿUmar ﵁.

Khalid ﵁ had the seventy Sahabah ﵃ buried in mass graves, side by side, with their blood and their weapons. No ghusl. No kafan. They were shuhada and the shuhada are not washed. Their names were recorded in a register and sent to Medina with the first courier. When Abu Bakr ﵁ read the register, he wept. But he gave the order to press on to Bahrain and then to the south, for the Ridda was not yet over.

With the battle of al-Yamamah, Musaylimah’s movement ended. The greatest of all the false claimants fell with it. For the rest of the Arabian peninsula the message could no longer be missed. The khalifah of Medina forgave the zakat refusers who returned, and defeated everyone who chose the sword. Khalid ﵁ rested nine days in the palm orchards of Hajr, then turned his standard to the northeast, toward the borders of the realm of Kisra.