Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ and the Departure for Tabūk

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧The hill of farewell

Everyone has heard the name Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ; almost no one realizes it is an actual place. A thaniyyah is a hill or mound, and wadāʿ means goodbye. North, northeast, of the Prophet's ﷺ Mosque there was a rise to which the families of any northbound caravan would walk alongside their travellers, embracing and wishing them well, until they reached it; there the families stopped, and from its top they waved as the caravan went on. The mound of the waving of goodbye.

❧Ṭalaʿa al-badru, not the Hijrah

And here the shaykh corrects what he calls the biggest misconception Muslims hold about the Sīrah. The beloved poem طَلَعَ الْبَدْرُ عَلَيْنَا مِنْ ثَنِيَّاتِ الْوَدَاعِ / وَجَبَ الشُّكْرُ عَلَيْنَا مَا دَعَا لِلَّهِ دَاعٍ was not sung at the Hijrah. It is geographically impossible: Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ is north, and on the Hijrah he came from Qubāʾ, from the south. "The full moon has risen upon us from the passes of al-Wadāʿ" means he is coming from the north. And it is impossible in content too: at the Hijrah most of the city was not yet Muslim, whereas on the return from Tabūk the whole city was. The poem belongs to the return from Tabūk, when the women and children and all the people came out singing.

The shaykh notes this was his own research: the paper he wrote for his Sīrah class in Madinah in 1997 was a study of the chains of Ṭalaʿa al-badru. Like most of the Sīrah the narrations have missing links, which is no scandal, since the Sīrah was never preserved with the rigour of the legal ḥadīth, and it is reported in al-Bayhaqī's Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwah and al-Ḥākim's Mustadrak. Bukhārī preserves only that they came out to Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ: one of the Companions, remembering it as a child, said "I was one of the children who ran out to Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ to welcome him."

❧Ordering the army

Having passed the mound, the Prophet ﷺ halted and reorganized the whole force, assigning battalions, appointing a commander over each subdivision and giving each its banner, al-Wāqidī in his Maghāzī spends pages on which tribe had which leader. The shaykh notes the competence: a man who never attended a military academy, organizing the largest army Arabia had yet fielded. The reported thirty thousand he treats with healthy scepticism, but even fifteen thousand would make it the largest ever.

The divisions were made along tribal lines, and from this the shaykh draws a recurring point: Islam came to abolish unjust partisanship, but it does not obliterate the natural fact that people of one region, language or family feel an affinity, in battle it is convenient to stand beside the men you know. So too with nationality today: meeting someone from your town in a strange land, you feel a bond built on nothing but that, and there is nothing wrong with it so long as it is kept in healthy check, whatever the extremists say.

❧The return

He was gone some fifty to sixty days, two to three months. Coming back, he approached from the north, the children ran out to Thaniyyat al-Wadāʿ, and the city sang. He entered his mosque, prayed two rakʿahs, and began at once receiving those who had stayed behind, which is where the story of Kaʿb ibn Mālik resumes.