Digging the Trench Begins, and the First Food Shortage

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Following Salmān al-Fārisī's suggestion to dig a defensive trench around the exposed side of Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ took direct charge of the logistics himself. According to a report in Ibn Saʿd, he personally walked the land and demarcated the line the trench would follow, then assigned each group of Companions its own portion to dig.

From the very first days of digging, a food shortage set in, a detail the classical Sīrah sources record without ever explaining its cause. Dr. Qadhi offers his own reasoning, noting Allah knows best: the siege fell in winter, when no fruit was being harvested and the community had to rely entirely on existing stores; the Muslims had no advance warning that they would face a prolonged siege and so had not stockpiled food; and with every able body occupied in digging, ordinary trade and commerce, through which food would normally have been secured, came to a halt.

Numerous reports describe the resulting hardship. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī records that the Companions sometimes had nothing but dried barley mixed with oil to eat, a mixture that, by their own account, gave off a bad odor they simply had to tolerate. Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh narrates that at other times they had nothing but date pits to eat. In one report, Jābir describes the Prophet ﷺ digging alongside them when his shirt rode up, revealing a stone tied tightly against his stomach, a customary practice at the time to blunt the physical pangs of hunger, which the Prophet ﷺ had done quietly, without anyone's knowledge, until the moment of manual labor exposed it.