Ghazwat Dhat ar-Riqa': Salat al-Khawf, the Assassination Attempt, and the Night Watch

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Ghazwat Dhāt ar-Riqāʿ was fought against the Bedouin tribe of Ghaṭafān, a large and morally unrestrained tribe from the north known for raiding and highway robbery, and later hired as mercenaries by the Quraysh at the Battle of al-Aḥzāb. Learning of a planned raid, the Prophet (ﷺ) led out roughly 700 men in a preemptive show of force; the two sides camped in sight of each other for a week or two, but Ghaṭafān chose not to engage, and no actual fighting took place. (There is scholarly disagreement on the exact dating of this expedition, Ibn Isḥāq places it here, shortly after Uḥud, while Bukhārī and others place it after Khaybar; the hadith of Jābir discussed below is one of the pieces of evidence cited for the earlier dating.)

❧THE REVELATION OF ṢALĀT AL-KHAWF

It was during this expedition that Allah revealed the procedure for Ṣalāt al-Khawf (the prayer of fear), a method of praying in shifts when an army cannot safely stand down all at once. As described in Q 4:102, one group prays with the imām while the rest keep watch and remain armed, then the groups switch, so that the full congregation completes the prayer without ever leaving the camp undefended at once. The imām prays the complete prayer throughout while each group in turn joins him for a portion of it.

❧THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

On the return march, during the customary midday halt in the desert heat, the Companions scattered to find whatever shade they could and fell asleep, exhausted, including the Prophet (ﷺ) himself under a tree. A Ghaṭafānī Bedouin named Ghawrath, tracking the army and reportedly paid by his tribe to kill the Prophet (ﷺ), saw his opportunity: he walked undetected through the sleeping camp, took the Prophet's (ﷺ) own sword from where it hung nearby, and drew it to wake him. He demanded to know if the Prophet (ﷺ) feared him; the Prophet (ﷺ) answered plainly that he did not, and when pressed further, in one version asking "who will save you from me?", replied simply, "Allah." At that word Ghawrath began trembling and dropped the sword. The Prophet (ﷺ) picked it up and turned the same question back on him. Ghawrath, disarmed and afraid, asked him to "be the better of the two" and show the mercy he himself had intended to withhold. The Prophet (ﷺ) forgave him outright, without condition. Ghawrath did not accept Islam but promised never to fight the Muslims again, and returned to his people declaring, "I have come from the best of mankind." The Companions, woken by the Prophet's (ﷺ) call once the danger had passed, had slept through the entire episode.

❧THE NIGHT WATCH OF ʿABBĀD AND ʿAMMĀR

A separate incident from the same expedition: ʿAbbād ibn Bishr and ʿAmmār ibn Yāsir were assigned to guard the camp overnight against further probing by Ghaṭafān. ʿAbbād took the first watch while ʿAmmār slept, and stood in prayer, absorbed, by one account, in reciting Sūrah Yūsuf. A hidden Ghaṭafānī archer fired an arrow that struck him; he pulled it out and continued his recitation without breaking his prayer. A second arrow struck him the same way. Only when he felt close to fainting did he finally wake ʿAmmār, who asked why he had not woken him sooner. ʿAbbād explained he had not wanted to interrupt his recitation, and that he would rather have died completing the sūrah than abandon a post entrusted to him by the Prophet (ﷺ), the duty of guarding the army outweighing even his own desire for that manner of death.