The Siege of Taʾif

Thaqif had watched what happened at Mecca and had no intention of repeating it. The gates were shut before the army arrived, with stores for a year inside and archers on the parapet who could shoot further than the besiegers could answer.

This is the shape of a siege the Muslims had not fought before. Khaybar’s forts were reduced one by one because they were separate; Taʾif was a single walled town with a garrison that had no reason to come out.

The first camp was set too close and men were hit on the first day. The Prophet ﷺ moved it back out of bowshot, to the ground where the mosque at Taʾif was later built.

Salman al-Farisi ﵁, who had given the counsel of the trench at Madinah three years earlier, advised a mangonel. It was built and worked against the wall — the first siege engine in the Muslim record.

A testudo of hides was pushed up to the base so men could work at it underneath. Thaqif poured heated iron down onto it and drove them out from under it.

The siege settled into the thing sieges become: neither side able to finish it, one side inside with a year of food and the other outside in the open.

After some weeks he took counsel and decided to leave. Nawfal ibn Muʿawiyah put it plainly: the fox is in its hole, and if you stay you will get it, and if you leave it it will do you no harm.

The army was disappointed and asked him to invoke against Thaqif. He said instead: O Allah, guide Thaqif, and bring them.

They came the next year of their own accord and accepted Islam. The town that had stoned him twenty years earlier — when he walked there alone, at the lowest point of his life, looking for anyone at all who would listen — entered without a siege. It is the one siege of the Seerah that was not carried, and the only one that did not need to be.