Yamamah: the death of the huffaz

The world after the Prophet ﷺ

In the previous article we paused over the testimony of Aisha ﵂ concerning the manner in which the wahy descended upon the Prophet ﷺ, and we saw how the revelation was present in his person for as long as he drew breath. With his passing, on a Monday, 12 Rabi al-Awwal of the year 11 after the Hijra, that presence turned into memory. The last revelation was still fresh in the memory of the Companions ﵃, the last verse not yet bound into a single volume. It was, as Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ himself tried to deny in those first hours, a loss that seemed to tilt the world off its axis. Here the story of the age of revelation turns toward the compilation.

The next blow would fall not in Medina but in the interior, on a plain in central Najd where no Companion ﵁ had yet set foot. That plain was Yamamah.

But before the story moves to Yamamah, the world around it must come into view. The umma was young, not yet ten years old since the Hijra, not yet two years old since the farewell pilgrimage. The tribes of the peninsula had sworn oaths of allegiance to the Prophet ﷺ, not to a state. When the face that had received the oath no longer drew breath, that oath fell away in many hearts like a cloth slipping from a body.

From the western coast to the eastern oases the ridda broke loose. Some tribes refused the zakat. Others declared that they believed in Allah ﷻ but no longer in obedience to Medina. And a handful of tribes went further. They sought a prophet of their own. In Yemen Al-Aswad al-Ansi arose. Among the tribe of Asad Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid arose. Among the women of Banu Tamim Sajah appeared. And in the heart of Najd, in the oases of al-Yamamah, arose the man who would make the most dangerous and the most repugnant of all false claims. His name was Musaylimah ibn Habib of Banu Hanifa. He would go down in history as Musaylimah al-Kadhdhab, Musaylimah the Liar.

In Medina sat a man whom no one had expected to see in this position. Abu Bakr ﵁, gentle, lean, a trader in cloth, a friend of the Prophet ﷺ from before the revelation, now bore the weight of a community threatening to tear itself apart. The delegations of the apostate tribes came into Medina to negotiate. They offered: the salaat we will keep, the zakat we will abolish. Abu Bakr ﵁ refused every concession. He spoke the famous word that would be quoted down the centuries: by Allah ﷻ, if they were to refuse me a rope that they would have given to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, I would fight them for it.

The young umma stood on the threshold of its first civil war. And in that war a price would be paid that no one in Medina had fully foreseen. The price was not only blood. The price was memory.

Musaylimah the liar

Banu Hanifa was no small tribe. Their territory, al-Yamamah, lay some ten days’ journey east of Medina, a plain of date plantations and fortified gardens between Riyadh and the desert of the south. It was fertile land, rich land, and self-assured land. Banu Hanifa had never stood fully under the authority of Quraysh, never fully under the authority of anyone in the west. When the face of Medina fell away, the leaders of Banu Hanifa saw their moment.

Musaylimah was no stranger to the umma. He had come into Medina with a delegation of Banu Hanifa in the last year of the life of the Prophet ﷺ and had there already put forward his claim cautiously. He demanded half of the prophethood for himself. The Prophet ﷺ had rejected him and called him the liar before he had even fully unfolded his lie. But when Musaylimah returned to Yamamah, and when the news of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ reached him, unfold it he did.

He began to “reveal”. The verses that history has preserved from his lips are crude, shocking in their poverty compared to the Quran. He spoke of the frog that croaks in the water, of the elephant and what the elephant is, of the mill that grinds. They are pastiches, sound-imitations, crippled imitations of the rhythm of the mufassal surahs. Whoever reads them aloud beside a surah such as Ar-Rahman or Al-Qiyamah hears at once the difference between revelation and parody. But for Banu Hanifa, for a tribe that wanted its own prophet, the distance was great enough to overlook. They had their man. They had their claim.

Musaylimah went further. He wrote Abu Bakr ﵁ a letter from Yamamah. From Musaylimah, messenger of Allah, to Abu Bakr, successor of the messenger of Allah. Peace be upon you. I am with you as a partner in the command. Half of the earth is for us, the other half for Quraysh, but Quraysh is an unjust people. Abu Bakr ﵁ had his scribe reply: From Abu Bakr, successor of the messenger of Allah, to Musaylimah the liar. Peace be upon whoever follows the guidance. The earth belongs to Allah ﷻ. He gives it in inheritance to whom He wills of His servants, and the good outcome is for the God-fearing.

The ink was not yet dry before an army was already being raised.

Khalid marches out

The ridda campaigns proceeded in phases. Abu Bakr ﵁ divided his available forces into eleven brigades, each under its own commander, each with its own target region. The heaviest assignment, the central assignment, went to the man whom the Prophet ﷺ himself had named the Sword of Allah ﷻ: Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁.

Khalid ﵁ marched first to Buzakha, broke the claim of Tulayha there, and forced the apostate tribes of Najd back into obedience. Only then did he turn to the east, toward the plain of Yamamah, where the heart of the revolt was beating. Banu Hanifa awaited him with an army that the sources count at between forty thousand and one hundred thousand fighters. Khalid ﵁ marched with thirteen thousand.

But it was not only numbers that counted. It was who walked among them.

When the word went out in Medina that Yamamah would be the decisive battle, the huffaz of the umma came forward out of their ranks. The huffaz, those who had learned the Quran in its entirety by heart under the direct supervision of the Prophet ﷺ. Those who carried the revelation not only in memory but in body: in the breath, in the movement of the tongue, in the pauses and the inflections that the Prophet ﷺ had taught them personally.

Al-Azami ﵀ notes something crucial about this group, and it is a detail that in later generations became almost a proverb. The qurra’, in their piety, were always in the front lines during battles and suffered greater losses than other soldiers. That was no coincidence, but policy and conviction at once: whoever carried the Quran carried the first responsibility, and those who were to show what it meant that the umma fought for the Book were precisely those who carried the Book within them. And so they walked in front, in every campaign and in every battle.

Khalid ﵁ looked over his troops and saw in the vanguard the faces he knew from the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ. Salim mawla Abi Hudhayfa ﵁ walked there. Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁, the elder brother of Umar ﵁, walked there. Abu Hudhayfa ibn Utba ﵁, one of the first Muslims, one of the migrants to Abyssinia, walked there. Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas ﵁, the orator of the Ansar, the man whom the Prophet ﷺ had appointed as his official speaker before delegations, walked there. Hundreds of others walked along, names that stand in later lists and names that history has lost.

The Quran-bearers walked first. That was their place.

The battle of the Garden of Death

The armies met each other on the plain of Aqraba, east of present-day al-Riyadh. The first day went badly for the Muslims. Banu Hanifa fought with the desperate discipline of a tribe defending home. Three times they broke the Muslim ranks. Khalid ﵁ saw the panic surging through his troops and did what he had done before: he restructured his army on the spot. He separated the Muhajirun and the Ansar from the tribal elements, placed each under its own banner, and appealed to their pride and their faith. Let each tribe today show what it is worth.

The second day was the slaughter. The huffaz, in the front line, fell like stalks of grain. Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁ seized the banner of the Muhajirun when its bearer fell and carried it onward. He called to his men that they should not bend, and he himself fell beneath the spears of Banu Hanifa. When the news later reached Medina, Umar ﵁ long refused to speak of it; it is related that he said: my brother has gone before me to two good things; he believed earlier, and he fell earlier as a shahid.

Abu Hudhayfa ﵁ and his freedman Salim ﵁ fought side by side. It is related that Abu Hudhayfa ﵁ cried out: O bearers of the Quran, adorn the Quran with deeds! Salim ﵁ carried the banner when the bearer before him fell. When it was called out to him that the enemy was making it too heavy, he answered that he would be a poor Quran-bearer if he were to yield. Both fell. Later narrators report that their bodies were found on the battlefield side by side, with the wounds on the front of their bodies.

Salim mawla Abi Hudhayfa ﵁ was no ordinary hafiz. The Prophet ﷺ had named four men by name from whom he had commanded the Quran be learned. Salim ﵁ was one of them. Learn the Quran from four: from Ibn Mas’ud, from Salim mawla Abi Hudhayfa, from Mu’adh ibn Jabal, and from Ubayy ibn Ka’b. Two of those four would survive Yamamah. Two would not. Salim ﵁ fell here.

Thabit ibn Qays ﵁, the orator of the Ansar, perfumed himself, wrapped his kafan around his waist, and stepped out of the line to walk alone toward a wall of Banu Hanifa. He fell shortly afterward, with his armor still on. Later narrations tell that a man appeared in a dream to another and pointed out the place where his armor had been left behind; Abu Bakr ﵁ acknowledged the story and the armor was recovered. But Thabit ﵁ himself was left behind in the earth of Yamamah, far from Medina, far from the grave of the Prophet ﷺ that he had visited so often.

The battle shifted when Banu Hanifa withdrew into a walled date garden that they had prepared as a last refuge. It was a square of high walls, with one gate, filled with dense palm trees. Seven thousand of their fighters withdrew inside, and with them Musaylimah. Outside the wall stood Khalid ﵁ with an army that did not know how to get in.

Then a man stepped forward whose name never sits easily in history. Al-Bara ibn Malik ﵁, the brother of Anas ibn Malik ﵁, a man known for his extraordinary courage and his fervor. He asked his fellow fighters to place him in a shield on a long pole and throw him over the wall to the inside. They hesitated, for it was almost certain death. He insisted. They lifted him up and threw him over. He landed among the fighters of Banu Hanifa, fought his way to the gate, killed the guards, and opened it from within. The army of Khalid ﵁ streamed inside.

What followed in that garden gave it its name. Hadiqat al-Mawt. The Garden of Death.

In the melee an Abyssinian fighter sought his target. His name was Wahshi ibn Harb. Many years earlier, at the Battle of Uhud, Wahshi, then still a slave, had with a spear killed the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ: Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib ﵁, the Lion of Allah ﷻ. Wahshi had accepted Islam after the Conquest of Mecca and had said of it that he hoped Allah ﷻ would through his hand bring down the worst man of his time, as He had through his hand brought down the best man when he was still an unbeliever. In the Garden of Death he saw his chance. He threw the same spear with which he had killed Hamza ﵁. Musaylimah fell, struck clean through. An Ansari from the troops finished the work. The false prophet was dead.

But the price was counted on the battlefield before the wall, and in the garden itself, and in the names that would not come back again.

A generation of bearers falls

The sources differ greatly on the exact number, and that difference is itself a part of the story. The most cited figure is seventy huffaz, but the tradition contradicts itself: some chains name three hundred, others four hundred, five hundred, up to seven hundred dead among the Companions ﵃ in total, with the Quran-bearers within them as the most heavily struck group. Al-Azami himself names no figure; he notes only that the qurra’ suffered greater losses than other soldiers, and that is no rhetorical sentence but a sober demographic observation, for the pious walked in front, and those walking in front fell first.

A later passage in Al-Azami notes that many among the huffaz subsequently fell as shahid on the fields of Yamama and Bi’r Ma’una, and the full details of their names are, in most cases, lost to history. That is perhaps the heaviest sentence, for it says not only that they fell, but that their names fell with them. Whatever number one holds to, whether it is the seventy of most narrations or the higher figure of other chains, the core remains the same: a considerable part of the hearts that carried the Book in full stopped beating that day, and the umma by no means knows all their names.

The names that have been preserved form a list that in later generations was read out with a shudder.

Salim mawla Abi Hudhayfa ﵁. Freed slave, one of the four Quran-bearers whom the Prophet ﷺ had named by name. Imam of the first Muhajirun in Quba before the Prophet ﷺ reached Medina. A man whose piety Umar ﵁ used as a measure for himself.

Zayd ibn al-Khattab ﵁. Elder brother of Umar ﵁. Become Muslim earlier than Umar ﵁. Bearer of the banner of the Muhajirun in the Garden of Death.

Abu Hudhayfa ibn Utba ﵁. Son of Utba ibn Rabi’a, one of the leaders of Quraysh who had fallen at Badr against the Muslims. Abu Hudhayfa ﵁ had turned against his father for the faith, had gone with the first Muhajirun to Abyssinia, and had raised Salim ﵁ as his freedman and as his foster son. Father and son in the faith fell together in the garden.

Thabit ibn Qays ibn Shammas ﵁. The speaker of the Ansar. The man who spoke on behalf of Medina before the delegations of Quraysh and the Arabs. His voice, which had so often sounded in the mosque, fell silent here.

And beside these four lie the others, the dozens whose individual biographies have been erased by time. Hearts that carried the full text of the Book within them, chains of transmission each received directly from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ, voices that would never again recite the Quran in the mosque of Medina after isha. Whether they were seventy or more, no narration makes the loss lighter.

When the news reached Medina, a silence fell over the city that no one could remember since the day of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ himself. The women wept in the houses. Abu Bakr ﵁ received the survivors in the mosque. Umar ﵁ walked among the returned fighters and asked after his brother Zayd ﵁; when he received the answer, he turned away and spoke with no one else that day.

But Umar ﵁ had one thought, which grew heavier as the hours passed. He had already had it before the survivors came into Medina. He had had it as soon as the first news of the number of the dead reached him. And that thought gave him no more rest.

Umar ﵁ sees what others do not

Not everyone sees the same thing when disaster comes. Some see loss, and remain with that loss. Others see beyond the loss, and see what the loss means for what still must be preserved. Umar ﵁ always belonged to the second group. He was the man who in the year of the Hijra had proposed to begin the Islamic calendar at the Hijra, not at the birth of the Prophet ﷺ and not at the first revelation, because the Hijra was the moment of separation that gave meaning to everything before it and everything after it. He thought in structures. He thought in what the umma would need after him.

In the days after Yamamah Umar ﵁ went to Abu Bakr ﵁ in his house. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, the young man who would later write the whole story down for history, was not present at that first conversation, but Abu Bakr ﵁ later told him exactly what had been said, and Zayd ﵁ preserved it.

Abu Bakr ﵁ would later say to Zayd ﵁ that Umar ﵁ did not stop repeating these words, in different wordings, in ever new formulations, until Allah ﷻ had reconciled his heart with the idea, and he had come to the same opinion as Umar ﵁.

That is the whole conversion of a successor to the Prophet, summarized in one sentence. By Allah ﷻ, it is a good thing. A simple sentence. No theological treatise, no long exposition. But in that sentence lay a weighty claim: that an act which the Prophet ﷺ had not performed was not thereby forbidden, and that an act which served the umma was not thereby unlawful. It was, in a sense, the birth of a principle that would run through the whole of later Islamic jurisprudence: that necessity opens new paths not trodden before, provided they do not go against what has been revealed.

Abu Bakr ﵁ did not hesitate out of weakness. He hesitated out of piety. How can I do what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did not do. It was the question of a man who knew that he stood in the shadow of someone whose steps were perfect. But Umar ﵁ showed him that some steps could only be taken after that shadow. It was no disobedience to the path. It was the continuation of the path into a terrain that the Prophet ﷺ himself had not needed to enter, because he was there.

The turning point

It was not only Yamamah that weighed, but above all what Yamamah foretold.

Khalid ﵁ marched on after the Garden of Death further to the east, to the oasis of al-Hasa, while other brigades brought Bahrain, Oman and Yemen under authority. The ridda war was the last internal war of the umma in its original form, but it was no pause, for immediately afterward the campaigns to the north began, toward the borders of the Byzantines and the Sasanians. At Bi’r Ma’una a group of at least forty Quran-bearers had already, years earlier, still under the Prophet ﷺ, been slaughtered in an ambush. What if such a thing were to happen again, and again, and again, at a pace in which Yamamah proved not the exception but the rule?

The reasoning of Umar ﵁ was therefore not only reactive but preventive. He looked not only back at the fresh graves at Aqraba, but ahead at the hundreds of graves that would still be dug in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, in Persia, and he realized that every shahid who would fall on those fields would carry a piece of the living memory with him, and every voice that would depart would break a link.

Here lies the turning point. Until this day the umma had relied on a twofold basis: the written and the remembered. The Prophet ﷺ had, for every verse he received, called a scribe to record it on parchment, bones, leather or pieces of palm leaf. At the same time hundreds of Companions ﵃ had learned verses or surahs by heart, and a few dozen the whole. The written material lay scattered in houses, in mosque corners, in private collections. It was authentic, was dictated by the Prophet ﷺ himself, was often checked by him. But it was not bundled. It was not in one volume. It was not one master copy.

As long as the huffaz lived, that was no problem. The memory filled the gaps in the writing, and the writing confirmed the memory. The two threads were woven into each other.

Yamamah showed that the memory-thread could be cut through by spears. The body of a hafiz was mortal. The memory of a community is mortal when it depends on individuals. As long as those memories still lived, there was time. But the time was shrinking.

What the Prophet ﷺ had not done now became necessity, not because he had forgotten anything, but because his living presence itself was the bundle. The Quran was present during his life in his person, for he was the living reference: when there was doubt about a verse, one came to him, and when there was doubt about the order of verses within a surah, he gave the placement. He was the bound Mushaf in flesh and blood.

Now that Mushaf in flesh had died. And the shadow-Mushaf, the scattered writing and the scattered memory, had to be replaced in flesh and blood by something new: a real volume, on genuine material, assembled under strict conditions, with witnesses and with verification.

Abu Bakr ﵁ came in the end to see it as clearly as Umar ﵁ had seen it. He needed only someone to find the words. And once he had found them, he needed someone to do the work.

A young man is called

He sent for Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁.

Zayd ﵁ was in that year somewhere in his mid-twenties. He had been eleven years old when the Prophet ﷺ came into Medina, and already as a child had been presented to the Prophet ﷺ as a boy who had by then learned sixteen surahs by heart. He had learned Hebrew and Syriac at the request of the Prophet ﷺ, so that the Prophet ﷺ could have correspondence with Jewish and Christian tribes read by someone he trusted. Because he lived near the mosque, he was regularly called as soon as wahy descended, and he recorded the verses as they were revealed. Al-Azami therefore counts him among the most visible scribes of the Prophet ﷺ. He had, moreover, been present at the last recitation of the Quran that Jibril ﵇ did with the Prophet ﷺ in the last Ramadan of his life.

They were precisely the qualifications that Abu Bakr ﵁ would later, when Zayd ﵁ demurred, name one by one. Five qualifications: youth and energy, impeccable character, intelligence, prior experience in writing down revelation, and presence at the last Jibril recitation.

But when Zayd ﵁ entered the house of Abu Bakr ﵁ that afternoon, he knew nothing of that list. He knew only that the caliph and Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ were sitting together, and that this rarely meant good news in these weeks. Umar ﵁ was the first to address him. Abu Bakr ﵁ explained why he had been called. What they were asking. What the occasion was. What the burden was that they wished to give him.

Zayd ﵁ himself later told the scene with the words in which he described his own resistance. He spoke them with the honesty of a man who does not try to seem better than he had been.

So it is recorded by al-Bukhari, in the chapter Jami’ al-Qur’an of his Sahih, on the authority of Zayd ﵁ himself.

Zayd ﵁ hesitated for the same reason that Abu Bakr ﵁ had initially hesitated. How can we do what the Prophet ﷺ did not do. It was no laziness, no fear of the amount of work, no uncertainty about his own ability. It was piety. It was the weight of the thought that he, a young man of his mid-twenties, would be charged with an act that would be unique in the history of the umma.

But Abu Bakr ﵁ and Umar ﵁ held firm. They convinced him as Umar ﵁ had convinced Abu Bakr ﵁, with the reasoning of necessity, with the logic of the lost huffaz, with the point that if he would not do it, it would simply not be done, for no other candidate united the required qualities to the same degree. They did not stop answering until Allah ﷻ had opened my breast to the same matter, Zayd ﵁ would later say, in the same way in which He had opened the breast of Abu Bakr ﵁ and Umar ﵁ for it.

Three hearts, then, in a chain. First that of Umar ﵁, who saw the necessity. Then that of Abu Bakr ﵁, who possessed the authority. Then that of Zayd ﵁, who would do the work. Three men who each had felt the same resistance, each the same weight, and each the same surrender.

Zayd ﵁ accepted. He walked out of the house of Abu Bakr ﵁ with a task that literally no one before him had had. He had to compile the Quran. He had to find verses that stood on pieces of palm leaf, verses that stood on white stones, verses that stood on pieces of leather, verses that stood on the shoulder blades of camels. He had to question the huffaz who still lived. He had to design a methodology stricter than any experience in his young life had handed him. And he had to do all of that with a reliability that the umma could forever accept as binding.

In the next article we follow him at work. We will see how Abu Bakr ﵁ and Umar ﵁ sat down at the gate of the mosque and issued the rule that no verse would be accepted by Zayd ﵁ without two witnesses who could confirm that the Prophet ﷺ had had it recorded in their presence. We will see how Bilal ibn Rabah ﵁ walked through the streets of Medina with the call that whoever possessed a verse in writing should report to the mosque. We will see how the first suhuf were born, in the hands of a man who had said that even moving a mountain would have weighed lighter.

The Quran-bearers who had fallen in the Garden of Death, whether they were seventy or more, would not be the last. But through what they had that day compelled in their dying, what they had carried could no longer die with a single body.

The umma still had its Book in memory. It stood on the point of getting it into a volume as well.

What Yamamah taught the umma

Before we let Zayd ﵁ set to his work, it is worth pausing a while longer on the plain of Aqraba and asking what the battle, beyond the loss, taught the young community.

First, Yamamah showed that faith without structure is fragile. The umma had hundreds of huffaz, but no list of who they were, no register, no deliberate distribution of the Quran-bearers over different theaters. When they marched en masse to one front, one battle could wipe out a disproportionate part of the collective memory. That the umma afterward decided on a written master copy was not only a religious decision but also an organizational coming of age. The young state learned that the protection of the highest good must not be left to chance.

Second, Yamamah brought the relationship between sunna and necessity into sharp focus. What the Prophet ﷺ had not done was not automatically forbidden. What became necessary through a change of circumstances could legitimately be undertaken, provided it remained within the bounds of the revelation and with the consent of those who knew the revelation best. That is no small theological finding. It is the source from which much of Islamic jurisprudence would later draw when it stood before new situations.

Third, Yamamah showed what the difference is between the Quran and its imitations. Musaylimah had written verses that he called revelation, but when his following disappeared, his verses disappeared with them, for no community carried them forward and no memory found them worth preserving. The Quran, by contrast, had, precisely when its bearers fell in great numbers, a community that was ready to risk everything to preserve it. That difference is, in the words of later scholars, a sign in itself.

And fourth, and perhaps the most moving, Yamamah taught the Companions ﵃ that the Quran had to be served in a manner that suited what it was, not preserved as a treasure is preserved in a chest, but preserved as a living body is cared for: by many, with overlap, with witnesses, with love and with methodology. The suhuf that Zayd ﵁ would compile in the months after this task were not merely written parchments, but the result of a community that had learned to take its own vulnerability seriously.

That is in the end the answer to every insinuation that the collection of the Quran was a theological intervention after the fact, an attempt to pin down something fluid to the taste of power. The sources draw precisely the opposite. The occasion was a fallen vanguard on a plain in Najd, the weighing happened between two men who both first hesitated out of piety, and the execution was entrusted to a young scribe under conditions stricter than what the need strictly required. It was, from beginning to end, a sober and documented response to a military disaster, no manipulation of the text but a safeguarding of it.

In the next article we see that community at work.