The Battle of Hunayn

Two weeks after Mecca fell, Hawazin and Thaqif gathered under Malik ibn ʿAwf to fight the new power before it settled.

Twelve thousand marched out to meet them: ten thousand who had taken Mecca, and two thousand Meccans who had been Muslims for a fortnight. It was the largest force the Prophet ﷺ had ever led, and a man in the ranks said aloud that they would not be beaten today for want of numbers. The Qurʾan afterwards named that sentence as the reason the day began the way it did.

Malik had put his men into the valley ahead in the dark, and brought their families and herds up behind them so that nobody would think of running. His older advisers told him it was a mistake.

The column entered the valley in the last of the dark, moving downhill in file — the worst possible formation to be caught in, and the only one the ground allowed.

The archers on both slopes shot into the head of it together, and then Hawazin came down on the flanks. The front turned back into the rear, and an army of twelve thousand came apart in a few minutes.

The two thousand new Meccans ran first. Some of them said things as they ran that showed exactly how new their Islam was.

He did not move. He was on his white mule going forward into the noise while the army streamed past him the other way, saying: I am the Prophet, this is no lie; I am the son of ʿAbd al-Muttalib.

About eighty men stayed with him. Al-ʿAbbas ﵁, who had a very great voice, was told to call the Ansar — and then to call the men of the tree, the ones who had given their pledge at al-Hudaybiyah.

They came back through the valley answering him by name, cutting their way to the voice. The battle re-formed around that spot, and once it re-formed Hawazin had nothing left to do but break.

Hawazin broke, and their camp at Awtas fell with everything in it: six thousand captives, twenty-four thousand camels and forty thousand sheep by the count in the sources. What was left of Thaqif shut itself inside the walls of Taʾif, and the army followed them there within days.

Then a Hawazin delegation came to al-Jiʿranah and appealed to the Prophet’s ﷺ own foster kin among the Banu Saʿd — he had been suckled among them as a child, and their claim was made on that.

He returned every captive, and asked the army to give up its shares to do it. The army did. It is the largest single act of manumission in the Seerah, and it was done by request rather than by order.