The March to Khaybar
historicalShaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:
❧THE TIMING
Ibn Isḥāq places Khaybar in Muḥarram of 7 AH; al-Wāqidī says Ṣafar or Rabīʿ al-Awwal, easily reconciled if the campaign began in Muḥarram and ended in Ṣafar. Imam Mālik and al-Zuhrī say Muḥarram of the sixth year, but they counted the Hijrah calendar from a year earlier, so their sixth year is the standard seventh. The striking point: barely two weeks after returning from al-Hudaybiyyah, the Prophet ﷺ was already moving, with the Quraysh neutralized by treaty, Khaybar was the only threat left in central Arabia, and he wasted no time.
❧BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELVES
Around 1,600–1,700 men marched. Their spirits were so high that they shouted the takbīr and tahlīl at the top of their voices, until the Prophet ﷺ said: O people, be gentle with yourselves (اِرْبَعُوا عَلَى أَنْفُسِكُمْ), the One you are calling upon is not deaf; He hears you and sees you, and He is nearer to you than your jugular vein.
❧WHAT KHAYBAR WAS
Khaybar lies about 230 kilometers north of Medina, lush, fertile land sitting atop great underground water currents, one of the largest date-producing regions of Arabia, populated entirely by Jewish tribes. Its name is traced variously to an Amalekite ancestor, to a Hebrew word for fortress, or to an Arabic root meaning fertile. It was not a single city but a constellation of fortresses, at least eight or nine named in the books of sīrah, likely more, arranged in two halves separated by hours of marching, each fortress housing its own mini-tribe of a few hundred souls behind walls the Arabs had no weapons to breach.
❧AN EVIL MORNING FOR THOSE WHO WERE WARNED
The Prophet ﷺ camped the night away from Khaybar and marched before Fajr. At dawn the farmers came out with their plows and baskets, and, seeing the army, fled back screaming that Muḥammad and his army had arrived. That cry itself betrayed their guilty conscience: they knew what they had done and from whom retribution would come. As they sealed their gates, the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed: Allāhu Akbar, Khaybar is destroyed (اللَّهُ أَكْبَر، خَرِبَتْ خَيْبَر)! Whenever we descend upon a people's field, evil is the morning of those who were warned (وَإِنَّا إِذَا نَزَلْنَا بِسَاحَةِ قَوْمٍ فَسَاءَ صَبَاحُ الْمُنْذَرِينَ).