The Breach of al-Hudaybiyyah: The Raid on Khuzaʿah
historicalShaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:
One clause of the Treaty of al-Ḥudaybiyyah, two years earlier, let either side, Quraysh or the Muslims, take any tribe into alliance, with the treaty's terms, including its ban on warfare, extending to that tribe. Many tribes duly attached themselves to one side or the other. Two of them matter here: Khuzāʿah, who joined the Muslims, and Banū Bakr, who joined Quraysh, old enemies now bound to opposite camps.
❧Who Are the Khuzaʿah
Khuzāʿah are one of the legendary classical tribes of Arabia, and their own history is about to be recited before the Prophet ﷺ, so it must be told. It was Khuzāʿah who long ago drove the tribe of Jurhum, the in-laws of Ismāʿīl عليه السلام, out of Mecca once Jurhum had grown corrupt and begun robbing the pilgrims, and Khuzāʿah then held the Kaʿbah for some three to four hundred years. Their chief was ʿAmr ibn Luḥayy al-Khuzāʿī, the very man who brought idolatry to the Arabs, returning from the ʿAmāliqah of Syria with the idol Hubal, which became the chief idol of Quraysh. (It was Hubal that Abū Sufyān invoked at Uḥud, أُعْلُ هُبَل, "Be exalted, Hubal!", to which the Prophet ﷺ answered, اللَّهُ أَكْبَر, Allāh is greater.) Khuzāʿah's rule ended when Quṣayy ibn Kilāb, the Prophet's ﷺ ancestor four generations up, married the daughter of the Khuzāʿī chief and, on the chief's death, wrested the Kaʿbah back for Quraysh. So the blood of Khuzāʿah runs in the Prophet ﷺ himself through Quṣayy's wife, and later ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, his grandfather, swore a ḥilf (a standing pact) with Khuzāʿah: that the two would stand as one against any who wronged either, generation after generation, as long as the sun rose over Mount Thabīr. Every one of these threads, the shared ancestor, the ḥilf, Khuzāʿah will pull on now, for the Arabs kept their genealogies and their pacts by heart.
❧The Night Raid at al-Watir
Khuzāʿah and Banū Bakr had feuded for a hundred years, one killing avenging another without end, until Islam forced a pause and al-Ḥudaybiyyah set them on opposite sides. Banū Bakr still nursed their unpaid blood-debts, and under the desert's law of survival, where tribes raided for camels and property, ideally sparing women and children, they resolved to strike. But they had a treaty to work around, so their nobles went to Quraysh for leave to make "just one raid." Quraysh not only agreed; some of their chiefs, among them Suhayl ibn ʿAmr and Ṣafwān ibn Umayyah, supplied weapons, almost certainly for a cut of the spoils, one of them scoffing that if they struck by night, Muḥammad ﷺ would never know. Thus armed and licensed, Banū Bakr fell on Khuzāʿah as they camped by the pond of al-Watīr, just outside the Ḥaram. The raid was meant to be quick, some camels, a death or two, but the alarm was raised, both sides fought, and a mini-massacre followed: more than twenty killed, a staggering toll for a small tribe. Worst of all, one fleeing man of Khuzāʿah reached the sanctuary and cried out that he was in the Ḥaram, إِلَٰهَكَ إِلَٰهَكَ, "Your God! Your God!", and his pursuer answered with blasphemy, "There is no God today," and cut him down inside the sacred precinct. It was a thing no one could keep hidden, and Allāh exposed them by it.
❧ʿAmr ibn Salim's Poem
The chief's spokesman, ʿAmr ibn Sālim al-Khuzāʿī, rode to Medina with forty men and stood before the Prophet ﷺ to recite a poem of extraordinary eloquence, a page long, preserved in Ibn Isḥāq and Ibn Hishām, in Arabic so ancient it must be translated even for Arabs. In it he pressed three claims: the common ancestor binding Khuzāʿah to the Prophet ﷺ, the ancient ḥilf of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, and their new bond under al-Ḥudaybiyyah, then the horror of the massacre, that they were slaughtered رُكَّعًا وَسُجَّدًا, bowing and prostrating, the Ḥaram itself no shield. Such a poem was how news travelled and how sympathy was won. The Prophet ﷺ was moved and answered, سَتُنْصَر, "You shall be helped, O ʿAmr ibn Sālim", and swore, "May Allāh never help me if I do not help the Banū Kaʿb," an Arabic idiom of absolute commitment, not to be read literally.
❧The Good Omen
As he spoke, a cloud rose on the horizon, and the Prophet ﷺ read it as a sign of Allāh's coming aid to Khuzāʿah. This is al-faʾl, the good omen: to read something positive, a cloud, a rainbow, an overheard الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ from a stranger who just got good news, as encouragement from Allāh, and to link it to Him alone, never to a charm or medallion, which would be shirk. We hold to no negative omens, no black cats, no unlucky days, no thunder as a "no" to a duʿāʾ, for the Prophet ﷺ said, يُعْجِبُنِي الْفَأْلُ, "Good omens please me" (Bukhārī).
❧The Ultimatum
A report graded mursal ṣaḥīḥ by Ibn Ḥajar adds that the Prophet ﷺ, true to his way of trying to avert bloodshed, first sent Quraysh an ultimatum: sever your alliance with Banū Bakr and pay the blood-money for Khuzāʿah's dead, or face war. Quraysh refused both. The diyah for more than twenty dead came to some two thousand camels, a fortune that would have all but ruined them, far beyond anything seen at Badr or Uḥud, and Banū Bakr, they said, were the last pagan tribe left to them; to cut them off was to stand alone. Their refusal shows how far the tide had turned: every other tribe of the Ḥijāz had Muslims among them, and Quraysh were nearly isolated.