The Battle of Khaybar

Khaybar was the northern power that had paid for the war against Madinah. Its chiefs had gone to Mecca after their own expulsion and put together the coalition that came to the Trench. Two years later the Prophet ﷺ went to settle it.

Sixteen hundred men marched, and the road chosen mattered more than the numbers: it brought the army in between Khaybar and Ghatafan. The oasis was rich enough to buy allies, and the camp at al-Rajiʿ sat squarely on the road those allies would have used.

The army arrived at night, and waited. It was his practice not to attack in darkness, but to listen at dawn for the call to prayer.

The reduction went sector by sector, and al-Natat was the first. Its two strong points were Ḥiṣn Naʿim and Ḥiṣn al-Ṣaʿb ibn Muʿadh.

Naʿim cost the most. Mahmud ibn Maslamah ﵁ was killed beneath its wall by a millstone rolled from the parapet. Al-Ṣaʿb held the sector’s granaries, and when it fell an army that had been living on very little ate properly for the first time in days.

This is the pattern of the whole siege: no single assault could take Khaybar, because Khaybar was not one place. Each fort had to be invested, breached and cleared before the next.

Al-Qamus was the strongest fort in the oasis and the seat of the house of Abi al-Huqayq — the family that had gone to Mecca to raise the confederates.

The standard had gone out twice without result. The Prophet ﷺ said he would give it in the morning to a man who loved Allah and His Messenger, and whom they loved, and who would not turn back. He gave it to ʿAli ﵁, whose eyes were sore, and spat in them, and they were healed.

Marhab came out before the gate chanting his own name, as champions did. ʿAli ﵁ answered him and he fell. The fort was taken that day.

With al-Natat and al-Shiqq cleared and al-Qamus fallen, only al-Katiba was left, holding al-Watih and al-Sulalim. Its people asked for terms rather than an assault, and got them.

They kept their lives and stayed on the land, working it and giving half the produce. That arrangement was new, and it mattered far beyond Khaybar: it became the model for how conquered farmland was handled for centuries afterwards.

The northern power that had paid for the war against Madinah was finished as a threat. Within weeks the Prophet ﷺ would enter Mecca itself on pilgrimage, unopposed.