Amr ibn Sa'da's Honest Escape

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

On what turned out to be the final night of the siege, a Muslim sentry, Muḥammad ibn Maslamah, heard someone leaving the fortress and called out to identify him. The man answered that he was ʿAmr ibn Saʿdā, one of the very few of Banū Qurayẓah who had publicly refused to go along with the tribe's betrayal, having declared from the start that he would never break faith with Muḥammad ﷺ. Sensing the tribe was about to surrender and no longer feeling bound to their fate, ʿAmr chose this moment to leave.

Muḥammad ibn Maslamah, faced with a real decision in the dark of night, detain him, report him, or let him go, chose to let him pass, saying only a brief prayer asking Allah's forgiveness for his own leniency. ʿAmr made his way into Madinah, stayed the night, and vanished the next morning; what became of him afterward was never recorded. When the Prophet ﷺ later heard the story, he did not rebuke Muḥammad ibn Maslamah, instead remarking that ʿAmr was a man Allah had saved because of his honesty, even though he had never accepted Islam and remained, to the end, one of the tribe's own. Dr. Qadhi points to this episode as clear evidence that Banū Qurayẓah's punishment targeted their specific act of collective treachery, not their ethnicity or their religion as such: the one member of the tribe who had refused that treachery was spared entirely, without ever converting.