The Spring of Tabūk and the Prophecy of Greenery

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The expedition's most prominent name is Ghazwat Tabūk, and it comes from the Prophet ﷺ himself. Muʿādh ibn Jabal narrated (in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim) that on the march they were combining Ẓuhr with ʿAṣr and Maghrib with ʿIshāʾ, until the Prophet ﷺ said: "Tomorrow, God willing, you will reach the spring of Tabūk (ʿAyn Tabūk), and you will not reach it until well into the day, so let no one touch its water until I come." (ʿAyn means a small spring, not a well.)

❧The miracle of the water

The Companions had run out of water and were desperate with thirst. When they reached the spring they found only a trickle left, like the strap of a sandal, dried down by the summer heat, and two men had already got there before them. The Prophet ﷺ asked, "Have you touched its water?" They said yes, and he rebuked them, with words Muʿādh, out of adab, would not repeat, saying only that he said "what Allāh willed him to say," for the Companions were no tale-bearers. Then he had them gather what little water there was into one place, washed his hands and face in it, and the water gushed forth until the whole army, perhaps twenty thousand, drank their fill. The army had nearly died of thirst; at ʿAyn Tabūk they were saved, and so the expedition took the spring's name.

"It will become gardens." Then he ﷺ said, "O Muʿādh, it may be that if you live long enough you will see this place become a land of greenery and gardens." At the time Tabūk was a bare desert oasis where no one lived, yet today, exactly as foretold, it is one of the largest cities in Arabia, capital of the north, green with trees and gardens: another of the fulfilled prophecies of the Prophet ﷺ.