Why Tabūk? A Test and a Command From Allāh

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Tabūk fell in Rajab of the 9th year, six months after the Siege of Ṭāʾif, roughly late July or early August in our calendar, which explains the heat. But why did it take place? After teaching the Sīrah many times the shaykh has found no fully satisfying classical answer, and offers his own conclusion.

❧The reports, weighed

Ibn ʿAsākir (via al-Baghawī and Ibn Kathīr) reports that the Jews goaded the Prophet ﷺ to go to Syria, "if you are truly a prophet, go to al-Shām, the land of the prophets and of the gathering", hoping to be rid of him, and that Sūrat al-Isrāʾ 17:76 refers to this. This cannot be right: no Jews remained around Medina; the Prophet ﷺ would not fall for so crude a trick; and al-Isrāʾ is a Makkan sūrah, unrelated to Tabūk. A second report (al-Haythamī) claims the Romans were massing 40,000 troops, summoned by the Ghassānid chief on a false rumor of the Prophet's ﷺ death, but the isnād is weak, and Rome had no reason to send a legion against Arabs it never cared to conquer. A third, a Ghassānid threat itself, has some faint support: during the month the Prophet ﷺ withdrew from his wives, ʿUmar's first thought on hearing alarming news was "Has the king of Ghassān attacked?"; and the Ghassānids had aided the northern massacres and Muʾtah, where Jaʿfar died. Yet even this begs the question: why go in July, when no enemy would campaign in that heat, and the harvest was ripe?

❧The shaykh's conclusion: a test

There appears to have been no immediate threat at all. The most logical answer is that Tabūk was a direct command from Allāh to test the believers, an order not to be questioned. Ibn Kathīr and al-Baghawī lean this way from Sūrat al-Tawbah 9:123: قَاتِلُوا الَّذِينَ يَلُونَكُم مِّنَ الْكُفَّار, "fight those disbelievers near to you"; al-Ṭabarī says this verse commanded the Prophet ﷺ, once done with the Arabs, to turn north to the Romans. Sūrat al-Tawbah, revealed almost entirely during Tabūk, and so blunt in its call to qitāl that it is also named Sūrat al-Qitāl, presses the point as nowhere else: مَا لَكُمْ إِذَا قِيلَ لَكُمُ انفِرُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ اثَّاقَلْتُمْ إِلَى الْأَرْض (9:38), the threat of punishment and replacement (9:39), انفِرُوا خِفَافًا وَثِقَالًا (9:41), and the exposure of the hypocrites who found the journey too hard (9:42). Al-Wāqidī notes the Prophet ﷺ, uniquely, did not conceal his destination but openly summoned every able man, even from Makkah, for Tabūk was farḍ ʿayn on every healthy adult male, not voluntary like Badr.

❧A caution on the verses

These are the very verses the jihadist groups cut and paste onto their own causes. A verse binds absolutely only to the occasion of its revelation; applied elsewhere it carries a "may or may not apply." These came down for Tabūk, no one may lift "go or Allāh will punish you" and pin it to a campaign of their choosing. The likely purpose of the test was to raise the Companions' ranks, prove their īmān, and steel them for the conquests to come after the Prophet's ﷺ death, for this was his last ghazwah. They passed it, and so no battle was even needed.