Miracles of Food and Water: The Fingers, the Feast, the Overflowing Udders

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The third category, miracles of food and water, is perhaps the largest by sheer number of narrations, and much of it we have already covered in the Sīrah: again and again a little food fed a multitude, and a little water sufficed a host.

❧Water from between his fingers

At al-Ḥudaybiyyah, when they ran out of water, the Prophet ﷺ placed his hands in what little remained and water gushed from between his fingers ﷺ like a fountain, and the people made wuḍūʾ. Anas ibn Mālik said in one version that over three hundred men performed wuḍūʾ from it. Al-Qurṭubī of Córdoba judged this greater than Mūsā's drawing water from a rock: water does, however rarely, come from within a rock, but never does it gush from flesh and bone.

❧Milk from dry udders

On the Hijrah the Prophet ﷺ and Abū Bakr passed a Bedouin woman's tent with an old animal long past giving milk; at his duʿāʾ its udders filled and overflowed. This had first happened with his foster mother Ḥalīmah: when he came to her, her camels and goats gave milk in abundance and their udders were always full, of his barakah. And a small quantity of food sufficed the whole army at Tabūk.

❧The feast of the Trench

The most famous, witnessed by the whole city: during the digging of the Khandaq, with supplies gone and hunger everywhere, Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh heard the weakness in the Prophet's ﷺ voice and had his wife slaughter their one small goat and knead their little flour, enough, he reckoned, for the Prophet ﷺ, Abū Bakr, and a few others. But the Prophet ﷺ stood and announced to the entire trench, يَا أَهْل الْخَنْدَق, "O people of the Khandaq, Jābir has prepared a feast (وَلِيمَة) for you!" He told Jābir not to let the bread be baked or the meat cooked until he came; then he ﷺ spat into the dough and kneaded it with his own hands. And in batches the whole army of some 1,400 came and ate their fill and left, and when they had finished there was more food than when they began.