The Secret March: Sealing the Destination

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

With nothing resolved, the Prophet ﷺ announced a great expedition and called every able man to it, when the leader summons the people individually it becomes farḍ ʿayn, an obligation on each capable man, giving them a week or so to settle their affairs. But he did not say where. Word spread of a huge campaign to an unknown destination, and he withheld it even from his closest confidants, Abū Bakr and ʿĀʾishah.

It is related that in that week Abū Bakr asked his daughter, "Did you hear the Prophet's ﷺ call? Where is he bound?" ʿĀʾishah, though she was packing his very provisions, answered, وَاللَّهِ مَا أَدْرِي, "By Allāh, I do not know." Not for lack of trust, but because a secret told even to one trusted soul leaks, however innocently, until the whole town has it. Such secrecy is hardly matched anywhere in the Sīrah.

To seal it further, Ibn Saʿd records in his Maghāzī that the Prophet ﷺ sent a small scouting party of eight men north, toward Syria, as a decoy, plausible enough since Muʾtah was fresh and Tabūk would follow the next year, so that people assumed the army was headed that way, while Mecca lay to the south. Only at the eleventh hour, quite literally the day before the march, did he reveal the truth: we are going to Makkah.

And it was here that one of the famous Companions fell into the gravest error of his life: on hearing the destination he wrote a secret letter to the people of Makkah, warning them to prepare. His name was Ḥāṭib ibn Abī Baltaʿah, and why he did it, and why the Prophet ﷺ spared him, is a long story rich in fiqh and ʿaqīda, left here at its cliffhanger.