Mustafa Umar – Islamic History 101 Lecture#14 Life of the Prophet
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So right now we're in the middle of
cold war. Right?
So now what's happening during this time, this
is going on for a few months.
The Quraysh
are, you know, threatening the Muslims. The Muslims,
the only way they're not fighting back physically
yet, but they're harassing these trade caravans and
they're collecting information
and they're making treaties
with other places. So it's kind of like
kind of like a game of chess or
like command and conquer where you go and
you try and grab as many, you know,
places as you possibly can. So now the
Muslims had concluded a few peace treaties already.
Intelligence,
about the activities of Quraysh is coming into
Madinah, and they know that, you know, they're
making the Quraysh take detours around whenever they
need to go to Syria. But the Quraysh
are not budging. They're not interested in making
any type of peace with the Muslims.
So a few clashes happened here and there
when the trade caravans were there, but nobody
was ever killed. Okay. So no one was
killed. Now we have an incident that takes
place. An incident which kind of changes things
a little bit. In the month of Rajab,
in the 2nd year after Hijra, the prophet
sent Abdullah ibn Jahsh
to a place called Nakla, which is very
close to Makkah,
around Makkah, and it was an intelligence mission
to gather intelligence. So there's several
several,
what do you call brigades
going around the entire Arabia all over the
place because Quraysh are all over the place
as well. So this is like
this is like a, you know, military game
that everyone is playing.
So this,
this brigade,
is on an intelligence mission, and they have
12 armed men. So there's 12 people
in that,
little small little army you can say. So
Abdullah,
he saw 4 noblemen from the Quraish. They
were returning back to Mecca.
Now his job was to do what?
Gather intelligence.
What does he do? He sees them and
he sees look there's only 4 people.
And,
you know, they're they're noble people, they're people
who probably, you know, had fought the Muslims
in the past, had tortured them, whatever it
was. And he said, you know what? This
is a perfect opportunity
to attack them. Now it's against the prophet
orders, he goes ahead and he attacks them
anyways. Now the one of the other problems
was not only did he attack them, it
was the last day of the month of
Rajab.
K? And the month of Rajab is one
of the 4 sacred months,
which even the pagan Arabs at that time,
they were still observing,
these 4 months
kind of, you know, whatever they felt like
it. But generally, they were observing these 4
months and not there are not supposed to
be any fighting in these 4 months. But
these people are technically protected. This happened to
be the last day. Right? So no one's
supposed to be fighting in this point in
time. But, he decided
to go, you know, to take his own
orders whatever it was. He decided to attack
anyways. Perhaps,
maybe he didn't realize
that there was one day left in Rajab
and he thought it was the next day.
Who knows? Now Allah knows best what exactly
happened but
he attacked.
When he attacked, he killed a man by
the name of Abdullah,
Umar ibn al Hagrami.
Okay. He was a noble man. They captured
2. Remember there's 4 of them. They killed
1, Umar ibn al Hadrami,
number they captured 2 people, and the 4th
guy he escaped.
Meaning that he went and told the Qurays,
look what happened. These Muslims intercepted us, they
attacked us, they killed one of our guys,
and they captured 2 of them.
So,
Abdullah ibn Jahsh, he goes back to Madinah,
and he shows the prophet look look what
I did. The prophet was really upset with
him. He said, I did not order you
to do this.
So everyone among all the Muslims, they were
all upset at him because he violated the
orders. The prophet
released the 2 prisoners,
gave them all their belongings back, and sent
them back to Mecca and freed them. He
said, we did not order you to do
this, and you did this on your own.
And now the Quraysh, what were they looking
for? They were looking for some kind of
excuse. Right? Something which would give them the
edge that to justify
attacking,
Medina anyways. So now they have two excuses.
1, the Muslims actually attacked
a small little tiny group of people, and
there's a noble man there.
Number 2, he attacked in the sacred month
of Rajab.
And now he's going around and telling everyone,
look, you know what? The, you know, the
Muslims, they violated Rajab and look what they
did and all of that as if the
Quraysh had never violated Rajab. What they used
to do at that time is whenever they
felt like I think we talked about this.
Whenever they felt like, you know, they wanted
to attack somebody, they would go and substitute
1 month and say, okay. We're gonna break
this month, but we'll make it up in
another month. So the other month will become
sacred. We'll just go ahead and break this
one. Like, kind of playing games. Right? So
they would used to do this anyways.
So what happened?
The prophet, you know, returned returned the prisoners
back, but it was not enough. So the
Quraysh found the excuse that they were looking
for. They found one excuse that they were
looking for. So they began preparations to attack
Madinah because they wanted to avenge, supposedly avenge
this guy, Amir Al Khadurami.
So around the same time that all of
this is happening,
a large trade caravan that's led by Abu
Sufyan
was sent to Syria, and now it came
it's on its way back from Syria and
it has to cross through Madinah. So at
this time,
remember, Abu Sufyan is one of the leaders
of the Quraysh, one of the very important
people of Quraysh.
He had fortified his caravan with about 40
armed soldiers. So he is a very very
heavily guarded,
caravan.
The prophet, he
decides he's gonna set out himself on this
mission with 300 soldiers,
k, to go and attack this caravan that's
coming back from Syria.
And it's possible that he knew
it's possible that he knew that Madinah might
have been attacked as well because 300 soldiers
is a lot of soldiers to be taking
for a small caravan like this. So Abu
Sufyan received news
that, you know, these are these are intelligent
people by the way. These are not like
fools. So they're traveling through the desert, Abu
Sufyan while he's traveling, he knows it's a
Muslim territory coming up. So he sends out
scouts
to go in front of him to see
if anyone's coming, and he pays off some
random Bedouin people. So they see that the
Muslims have left. Somehow the news gets back
to him, Muslims are coming out to intercept
your caravan. What does he do? Now imagine
he's coming from Syria back. This is Madinah,
this is Mecca where he needs to reach.
He's coming back and the Muslims are going
up to meet him to intercept his caravan.
He immediately heads west.
What is west?
The sea. Right? So he heads west towards
the sea. Why? Is that a smart move?
You jump on a boat and you can
sail over. You're gonna be pretty much safe
by the sea and they have to you're
gonna drag them out towards the sea. So
in the meantime, while he was doing this,
he actually evaded the Muslim army. The Muslims
stopped pursuing him. They said he's already gone
too fast. Right? He's he traveled very, very
fast by day and by night.
The Quraysh had dispatched an army out to
Madinah.
Exactly what their intention was, was it to
protect the caravan only or was it to
actually attack the city of Madinah? It's very
difficult to see based upon the evidence that
we have with us. But one thing that
we know for sure is that these two
armies are gonna meet face to face. 300
Muslims
and a thousand people who are coming from,
who are coming from Mecca. Okay?
Okay. Let's continue. So now,
as soon as it was confirmed that look,
the Quraysh are coming, the prophet
decides to consult with his followers.
Should we pursue this caravan or should we
head back towards Madinah? They could have gone
all the way to the Red Sea and
just said we're going after Abu Sufyan or
should we go back towards Madinah and, you
know, deal let's deal with this army. You
have a choice. So they said, well, if
we if we leave this if we pursue,
what what's what might happen? They might attack
the city of Madina. So Abu Bakr and
Omar, they spoke up, both of them, and
they said, we're willing to pursue.
We're willing to go ahead and, you know,
pursue this army. The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam asked the same question again.
Right? He asked the same question again. So
now the question is, should we fight against
this 1,000 man army or not?
That's the question. K? Abu Bakr responds, let's
do it. Umar responds, let's do it. Now
here's the thing, where Abu Bakr and Umar
from?
From Mecca. Right? So now the prophet he
keeps on asking. He said, what do you
guys think? And the Makkans are saying, yeah.
Yeah. We're we're for it. So what no.
What do you guys think? We're for it.
He they they had realized he's not asking
the Makkhans. He's trying to ask the people
of Madinah. He wants to know what the
Ansar
have to say. Why? Because the Ansar are
the one who pledged that they would protect
the prophet
but the stipulation meant in the city.
If the city is attacked, right, so now
this battle may not take place within the
city necessarily.
It may take place outside of the city.
So are we willing to go and fight
this army outside of the city or do
we stay in the side of the city
and only wait because you promised that it's
only gonna be when it's inside the city.
That's what was kind of understood. So one
of the,
one of the leaders
who represented the Ansar, he understood that the
prophet was asking this question. So he responded
and he says, oh messenger of Allah, you
do whatever you like. We're with you. He
says, I swear by Allah, if you wanted
to cross the sea and you jump inside
the sea, we would jump in right behind
you. Whatever you wanna do, we're 100% with
you and his statement represents the other Ansar
as well. He was one of the leaders
of the Ansar. So this is exactly what
the prophet was looking for. As soon as
he got confirmation that the Ansar are agreeing
and they're gonna be in as well, they
said, okay.
Fine. We're willing to, you know, fight outside
the city as well if we have to.
Then the prophet decides, okay. Fine. We're gonna
march to Badr. Okay. So they decide we're
gonna march to a place called Badr.
So now what happens?
Badr is about is a village about 80
miles from Medina. So it's quite quite quite
distant from Medina, and Badr is a place
where there's a trade fair that's held every
year. So there are people who are going
to Badar. People don't really live there, maybe
few Bedouins or something like that, but it's
a place where people gather generally.
But this time of the year nobody pretty
much is in Badar. Maybe a few, you
know, you know, Bedouins or something like that.
So they decided that we're gonna meet at
Badr because it's a it's a near Badr
because it's a strategic location. So while the
prophet was going towards Badr,
they stopped at a certain location.
Now one of the companions,
Habab ibn al Munzir, he asked a question
and he said,
oh messenger of Allah, did Allah command you
to stop here? And the prophet said no.
He said then my advice is we stop
over there, we keep on moving, we find
the largest well and we camp over there.
So what we can do is we get
the water and we cut the water,
supply off from from the enemy. This will
be a much better strategic,
you know, move. The prophet, what did he
do? Did he say, hey. I'm the prophet.
You don't tell me what to do.
No. He said
immediately, okay. Let's move the army, and he
moved. Which shows you what? Number 1, it
shows you that people would ask the prophet,
is this revelation? And if it's not
revelation, okay, you know what? Here is my
advice. And the prophet used to take the
advice from other people and even he used
to consult other people. Even though he's the
prophet himself.
So he accepted this as a very important
lesson is that when we try to teach
Islam very authoritatively, you say no questions allowed
or no advice or we don't want to
hear what your feedback is or something like
that. If people are giving feedback to the
prophet,
then who are we to think that, you
know, we're gonna be above something like that?
So they decided based upon his suggestion to
relocate to where the wells were.
Now
before the Quraysh arrived, the Quraysh have 1,000
people and they're on their way to,
this area of Madinah, and now they know
that the Muslims have camped in Badr. So
before they arrived, there's some discussion.
What should we do now? We got a
1,000 people. Okay?
The
caravan of Abu Sufyan is safe. They received
the message. Abu Sufyan is in the west
towards the sea.
They're not pursuing him anymore. What should we
do? Now
here's the thing.
Should we go to war? Should we not
go to war? There was a group of
people amongst the Quraysh who did not wanna
go to war
because there were several reasons. Right? Because remember
the economic boycott?
Not everyone was for it. And in fact,
later on people started standing up and saying
we did we never agreed to this in
the first place. Well, the same thing happened
in this case that there were many people
who are reluctant to go to war with
the Muslims. What were some of the reasons?
Number 1,
many of the people were direct family members
of the Muslims. So that means that they
would be going to war with their own
family. Even though they didn't like Islam, they
did not wanna go to war with their
own family. They did not wanna kill try
to kill their own family members. So that
was one of the reasons. The second reason
is that the caravan was safe. And they
said, you know what? We came out to
go and attack Medina, we had this caravan
issue, but the caravan is safe. Let's just
leave it. Let's just let's just go back
home. Number 3,
one of the leaders of Mecca
offered to pay the blood money for Amr
ibn Khadrami. He says, I will personally
pay the blood money for this guy that
was killed.
So all of the revenge that you guys
want for this one guy who was killed
and everything, I will take it upon myself.
So don't worry all of that's gonna be
gone. So that he says don't worry about
that. But what ended up happening
is the louder voices
among the warmongers, the people who just, you
know, who wanna speak loud and who wanna
accuse other people of being wimps and all
of that, they started accusing other people you're
a wimp and you know you're a coward
and this and that. Their voices went out
they decided we're gonna go to war no
matter what. Now there were some people who
were still reluctant.
So the Zuhra clan, they didn't care what
Quraysh said. They said we don't care. We
don't care what you think, what you decide.
We're leaving anyway. So one of the clans,
Zuhrah, they decided we're leaving anyways. We offered
to pay you know, the the people offered
to pay the pay the blood money and
you're refusing it. We're out of here. We
all have nothing to do with this, so
they left. The Hashem,
which is the clan of the prophet from
from his family, they also were not really
you know, they were very reluctant as well,
but they got pressured into doing it in
as well. Being called cowards and family honor
and all of that stuff, they ended up
fighting as well.
So now if you look the Quraysh, they
were fully armed. A 1,000 men,
most of them had armor and they had
a 100 horses.
Horses travel faster than camels. It's very important
in war and they have armor. So they
either have chain mail or they have actual
metal on their body. If you have armor,
imagine you're fighting with armor someone who doesn't
have armor. You're more likely to take on
at least like 5 or 10 people more
than you would normally be able to take
on head, you know, if the other person
didn't have any armor. The Muslims had 300
soldiers,
very ill equipped, and they only had 2
2 horses. So we're talking about a very,
very ill equipped army. Okay? Now before the
battle began, some things happened. One, it started
to rain. And this is from Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala and it's mentioned in the Quran.
So what did it do? It gave the
Muslims the opportunity to clean themselves, to perform
wudu, maybe take a bath or whatever it
is. And for the Quraysh, it caused them
more distress because it was slowing them down
because they were still traveling. It's getting muddy
for them. It's very difficult for them. Also,
the Muslim army was overcome by sleep. And
this is something that normally you're really excited
or something you can't sleep. But Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala gave them some help in the
form that they fell asleep. Meaning that they're
gonna be rested for battle now. The other
enemy is gonna be what? Tired. They're just
traveling very difficult for them, and they're not
gonna have access to water when they get
there. So the Muslims were fresh in the
morning.
Everyone was sleeping
until dawn, until the morning time, except one
person,
the prophet salallahu alaihi wa sallam. And he
stayed awake all night and he kept praying
and praying to Allah for victory so much
so that Abu Bakr woke up and he
said, you know, oh, messenger of Allah, this
is enough. This is sufficient. You know, everything
is gonna be fine. So he saw how
much the prophet wasalam was praying and he
was feeling,
you know, sad for him. So the next
morning, the 2 armies
are ready to face each other. It's the
month of Ramadan.
The verses of fasting had already been revealed,
so the Muslims were fasting as well. And
this is over a year after migrating to
Madinah. So the prophet he arranged the ranks
of his army, and he made sure each
and every single soldier,
was in position.
Where are we right now? Okay. We're here.
Okay. So he made sure that the soldiers
were in position.
Okay. And now the
the the battle begins with 3 duels.
So this is the way it used to
work. Oftentimes there would be a symbolic fight
before the actual battle begins. Now who are
the people who are fighting?
Hamza, Ali, and Ubaidah are the 3 Muslims
who are fighting, and they're fighting who? They're
fighting the relatives of Amr al Hadarami because
he was the one who was killed. So
their their relatives of Amr, they step forward
and they say, we are here for vengeance
of Amr, which is interesting because some people
say the battle of Badr was only about
the caravan, it was not about revenge for
this guy. Then why would all three members
of his family step forward, right, to duel?
So they step forward to duel
and the prophet sends out Hamza, sends out
Ali, and sends out Ubaydah. They start fighting
1 on 1.
All 3 of the Quraysh are killed off.
Ubaydah is injured himself, and he ends up
dying later on from the wound. But Ali
and Hamza they they take care of, their
own 2 guys.
Then after that the battle immediately starts. Family
members were fighting each other. Arrows are going
back and forth, swords are going back and
forth clanging,
Horses are running. Horses are falling down. Imagine
there's a full on battle taking place.
And the details
of some of the incidents that took place,
Insha'Allah, will be discussed in the class on
companions of the prophet and how they fought
and who did what and who killed who
and all of that stuff.
So we're not gonna get into the the
details of exactly what happened in the battle,
but what ended up happening was even though
the Muslims were physically outnumbered, with the help
of Allah, they managed to overcome the Quraysh
army and the Quraysh army began to retreat.
How many people were killed out of a
1000?
Out of a 1000 people, 70
idolaters were killed, 70 of the Quraysh were
killed and another 70 were taken prisoner. How
many Muslims were killed that day?
14.
14 Muslims.
Okay? And most of the leaders that day
were killed including some of the really, really
bad ones like Abu Jahl and those type
of people. Okay?
Now what happens? This is the battle. Post
war conduct, and then we'll try and finish
this.
If you wanna look at
war
and you wanna look at the morality of
the people who are fighting,
there's 2 things you need to look at.
Not just 1. There's 3 things you need
to look at. Number 1,
what are the reasons for going to war?
Are they good reasons or bad reasons?
Number 2,
how do you conduct yourself during war?
And number 3, how do you conduct yourself
after war with those prisoners?
What do you do with them? How do
you deal with them? How do you you
clean up the rest? How do you, you
know, reconstruct in case it's some kind of
in modern war or whatever it is? So
that's where you can tell what kind of,
you know, people
we're dealing with here. So the prisoners of
war under the Muslims, they were handcuffed and
they were put under the charge of different
Muslim soldiers. Now the prophet ordered that they
be treated and they be fed well.
The first order command was they have to
be taken care of properly.
Some companions took this so like
so to heart that they even treated their
prisoners better than they would treat themselves. So
for example, it's been narrated
that some of them were given bread while
the Muslims themselves ate dates. Now it's known
in that society
bread was superior to dates because dates were
cheaper, it's it's it's it's, you could just
pick it up. I mean, Madinah is full
of dates. Bread takes time, you have to
cook it, you have to grind it, you
have to pick up the stuff, you know,
get it prepared and all of that. So
they were giving them the better food
than even they themselves were getting, and that's
how they used to deal with prisoners. They
were even given better clothes to wear than
they themselves were wearing. Sometimes they would give
them brand new garments to wear. So after
the prisoners and the Muslims returned to Madinah,
Umar, he recommended that all these captives be
put to death.
We should kill all these prisoners of war.
Now what's his reasoning? It's it's not it's
not a bad reasoning if you think about
it. The prisoners of war, if you get
rid of them or you ransom them or
you send them back to Mecca, they're just
gonna come and fight you again,
and they're gonna try and kill you again.
It's not over. Their hostility has not ended.
So he says, let's kill
them. But Abu Bakr's suggestion and some other
companions, they suggested that, no. We should ransom
these prisoners of war since one, many of
them are family members, number 1. So we
don't want to kill off the family members.
And Umar said, look, it doesn't matter family
or no family, you you take care of
them. Abu Bakr said, no. No. Family members,
you don't want to kill them. Number 2,
we could get some of that money from
ransom and we could use that to help
build our, you know, state, build our defense,
all of these
things. So the prophet
decided to accept Abu Bakr's advice. The rich
prisoners were ransomed. The ones who had a
lot of wealth, they were ransomed. We got
money out of them. The ones who couldn't
buy their ransom,
they were given the opportunity. If you're literate,
you teach 10 children or 10 Muslims how
to read and write, we'll get you free.
So that means that the focus on education
that they had, we want Muslims to become
literate. We want Muslims to learn. You teach
them, we'll give you freedom if you just
do the service. They could have put them
as indentured servants or something like that, they
didn't.
So in Mecca, what was happening? The Quraysh
are furious. The Quraysh are mourning over the
people who had died. So the Quraysh are
they were already hated the Muslims,
now they hate the Muslims even more. And
imagine morning ceremonies and people are, you know,
at that time they used to rip their
clothes in mourning. They would scream, they would
rip like some Muslims unfortunately do, which we're
not allowed to do. They would rip their
clothes, they would scream why and start getting
upset and all of these things. You know,
they had they had emotions of sadness and
anger mixed together. So they're really really upset,
and they promise we're gonna have revenge.
In fact,
I don't know if I mentioned this part
or not. In fact, some of them, Abu
Sufyan was one of the few leaders who
survived.
His form of revenge, he, you know, he
had to make a show because he's like
the new leader now. All the big leaders
were killed off. Abu Sufyan now is like
one of the big leaders of Koresh now.
So he makes a show and he says,
I'm not gonna take a bath
until we get our revenge. That's how like,
you know,
what's the lack of a better term, how
* bent they were
on getting revenge. Imagine you're saying, I'm not
gonna shower for months
until I get revenge just to show people
how meaning it's gonna happen right now. Right?
Really really,
you know, dedicated people.
Right? So the news of, the Muslim victory
started spreading throughout Arabia and everyone started thinking,
wow,
the Muslims, this new little group of people
defeated the Quraish.
Remember of Quraish's,
status
throughout Arabia.
So
before this most of the Arabs, what did
they think? They thought Islam is like this
new phenomenon, it's like a new fad that
people are into it and it's just gonna
die out probably, you know, small little groups
come here and there. Other Arabs were thinking
you know, we're gonna just watch them carefully.
You know, let's see if they can beat
their enemies and if they can be victorious
in a in the minds of a lot
of people, if this is the last prophet
like he claims to be, then he has
to be victorious.
Right? So we're just gonna wait till he
wins
to see whether he's a true prophet or
not, and if he wins, that means he
really was the last prophet. But a lot
of Arabs were waiting, and now that they
see this, the mentality is starting to change.
Oh,
this guy means business, like this is really
happening. He's he didn't just die off like
some other guy or something like that. So
they started realizing that Muslims were a force
to be reckoned with. They were a power
to be recognized.
So they're so not only did Arabia start
recognizing them, the Muslim self confidence started increasing.
They're not gonna be the punching bags, and
they're not gonna be the people who are
gonna be tortured by Quraysh anymore. Now their
status has changed completely. And inshallah, we're gonna
leave it,
at that. Any questions?
Yes. The verses were revealed
in the context about whether or not, they
should have taken ransom or whether they should
have put the prisoners to death, but there's
actually a difference of opinion among scholars of
tafsir of how to interpret that. Did it
mean that they should have actually taken Omar's
opinion or should they actually does it mean
that their intention was primarily wealth and money?
Because had it been if you take the
first opinion,
it means that,
the prophet
was incorrect in his decision, but Allah allowed
that decision to remain. The problematic part is
that Allah wouldn't have allowed it to remain
if it wasn't intended to be that way.
So it was more the intention that people
had like, the other Muslims had at that
time than it was that they picked the
wrong verdict.
So there's 2 interpretations that scholars give. I
know the first one is more prevalent and
more common, but there's a second interpretation of
of those verses as well.
Yes. Yes. There are there are Muslims remaining
in Mecca still.
They were supposed to migrate, but they didn't.
Yes. Yes. They are more prone, but but
at the same time, the fact that they're
staying, perhaps some of them are secret Muslims,
and some of them are well protected by
their family.
So they're they're Muslim, but they're still staying
so they're protected by their family. So not
all of them are being necessarily tortured. The
the reason why this the ones who stayed
in Mecca, right, they had something to gain.
That's why they stayed in Mecca. So they're
protected.
They have a lot of wealth, and they
have
some clout. So they were actually they were
ordered. The migration was a command. Every Muslim
has to migrate out of Mecca. Not every
Muslim
obeyed the prophets in this, but they remain
Muslims at the same time.
And they might they migrated later. Some of
them migrated later. The battle. Were there angel
yes. They were angels in the battle of
Badr, and they were helping the Muslims as
well. Who's the name? Exactly. Exactly. There's a
revelation that came. Those who did not migrate,
the prophet has no no. Meaning, there's no
we can't protect you. We don't have a
responsibility
towards you if you don't migrate.
Yes. Okay? So inshallah, we'll convene next week
inshallah.