Ali's Duel with Amr ibn Abd Wudd

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Despite gathering by far the largest army ever assembled against the Muslims, the Confederates suffered, and inflicted, remarkably few casualties over the course of the siege, a fact Dr. Qadhi frames as one of the clearest signs (āyāt) of the Battle of the Trench: roughly three or four dead among the Confederates and around six or seven among the Muslims (most from arrow fire across the trench), a fraction of the losses at Badr or Uḥud despite facing a force ten times the Muslims' number. He connects this directly to the Qur'ānic principle: "If you help Allah, He will help you and make firm your feet" (in tanṣurū Allāha yanṣurkum wa yuthabbit aqdāmakum).

Among the small handful of Confederate riders who managed to leap their horses across an undefended stretch of the trench was ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd, a senior Qurashī fighter famed for his ferocity, credited with several kills at Badr, wearing the red turban that signaled a readiness to fight to the death. Once across, he called out for single combat (mubārazah). ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, then in his mid-twenties, immediately volunteered; the Prophet ﷺ held him back twice, reminding him this was ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd, a veteran with decades of battle experience against ʿAlī's relative youth. Only on ʿAlī's third request did the Prophet ﷺ, moved by his persistence, permit him to go.

ʿAmr, recognizing ʿAlī as a boy he had watched grow up, tried to dissuade him, saying he had no wish to kill or harm him. ʿAlī answered simply that he had every wish to kill ʿAmr. Enraged, ʿAmr charged. In one account, the dust the two horses raised obscured the entire duel from onlookers, and the only sign that reached the watching armies of ʿAlī's victory was his takbīr rising from within the cloud of dust. In a fuller account, both men dismounted to fight on foot; ʿAmr's blow shattered ʿAlī's metal shield in half but was deflected in the same motion that let ʿAlī drive his own blade into ʿAmr's neck, a single, decisive exchange that ended the fight instantly.