The Battle of the Trench

The Battle of the Trench. After the battle of Uhud, Abu Sufyan and the other pagan leaders realized that they had fought an indecisive action, and that their victory.
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Battle of the Trench, al-Khandaq. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: After each of the three major military encounters with the Meccans, Muhammad and his followers manage to oust another of the three main Jewish tribes of Medina.

In the case of the last…. Muhammad is traditionally said to have been born in in Mecca and to have died in in Medina, where he had been forced to emigrate to with his adherents in He was a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. He traveled to Syria and then to central Arabia, seeking the prophet who, he…. It is the holiest of Muslim cities. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca, and it is toward this religious centre that Muslims turn five times daily in prayer.

All devout Muslims attempt a…. Biography according to the Islamic tradition. Help us improve this article! He woke up to discover he was on the back of a very strong Jewish warrior, having been foisted up. Jubayr grabbed the spade and hit him over the head, then ran off before the Banu Qurayza could respond.

It should not be assumed that Muslim women were completely passive throughout this siege either. Many of them provided the Muslims with food and other supplies, while others took part in the fighting. Abu-l-Muttalib was residing in the fort of Hasan b. She realised that if this man got back to the Banu Qurayza, he would tell them how weak the Muslims were. She asked Thabit to go down and kill him.

Undaunted, Safia descended the fort by means of a rope, snook up on the Qurazi and bludgeoned him to death with a club. Fortunately they were intercepted near Baqi al-Gharqad by a force led by Salama b. There was an exchange of arrows and several Muslims were wounded, yet ultimately the Jews decided to turn away, and Salama even tried to raid the Banu Qurayza forts instead, though one of his men was crushed by a millstone.

After this, it would seem that the Jews lapsed into passivity, awaiting a combined assault with the Meccans. The real action however was at the Trench itself. John Bagot Glubb thinks the houses of the Arabs were unassailable, and even if the allies had crossed the ditch, they would have been unable to take the city. During a later civil war in , a Syrian Muslim expeditionary force attacked Medina: The situation that developed was quite normal for many campaigns of this era: If one side was successful in these initial engagements, then they would usually be victorious, because the enemy would be demoralised, and would appear to be weak, as had happened to the Meccans at Badr.

Therefore, it was important for the Muslims to win, or at least to appear to win, each of these skirmishes. Otherwise they would face a massive assault by an enemy which outnumbered them three to one.

Realising their way into Medina was barred, the Meccan cavalry ranged up and down the trench trying to discover a way across, while there was sporadic arrow exchanges with the Muslims. This was a critical situation: The Muslims were mostly on foot and were slower than the enemy horse, and there was not enough of them to guard the whole length of the Trench.

If the Meccan cavalry got across in force before the slower Muslim infantry could arrive to defend these gaps, they would be able to outflank the Muslims and cut them to bits as they had at Uhud. In other words, Abu Sufyan was going to see how the fighting progressed, and if the Muslims were beaten in the initial skirmish, then a full-scale assault would ensue, which would be hard for the Muslims to hold against with the Trench already breached and their infantry outflanked.

A man of resolution and foresight, truth is the refuse of the successful. The main Muslim army was watching the fight, as were the Meccans. The two combatants circled each other, both armed with a sword and shield, and dust went up so no-one could see what was happening [83]. Indeed, so fast did the Meccans run away that Ikrima, son of the former Meccan leader Abu Jahl threw away his spear as he was fleeing, prompting Hassan b. Thabit to compose the mocking rhyme: Yet the Meccans returned to the attack.

Nevertheless, this engagement deterred the Meccans from a direct assault for another day and would have a significant psychological impact on the Meccans and their allies. Despite this, the Meccans maintained the siege. Their cavalry ranged up and down the trench day and night, trying to goad the Muslims to come out and fight, looking for weaknesses in the defences.

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The Muslims would drive them off with stones and arrows, but were unable to do any serious damage, and vice versa. To make matters worse for the Muslims, prevailing wind speed directions in that area probably favoured the Meccans in these archery exchanges, as the wind would come from the north. Though the arrows themselves could rarely kill a man, they could wound, leading to death. As a later Meccan poet would bemoan: This increasingly wore the Muslims down psychologically, and many became increasingly fearful.

To make things worse, so constant were these skirmishes that the Prophet could not perform the usual prayers and rituals of his new community until after the sun had set. For a nascent religion like Islam, the standard rituals of 5 prayers a day were crucial for knitting them together into one cohesive whole ensuring group solidarity and their disruption was serious. While later Muslim historians, either during the Caliphal era and more contemporaneously, have tried to paper over divisions within the Muslim community, there was some serious issues which would come to the surface during these times.

It must be understood that these were not Islamic supermen, capable of enduring endless torments, worry and woe. These were thinking, human, family men, whose children, wives and dependents were only one mile away in Medina, and they were being threatened with massacre or rape at any moment, while their hard-earned property and lives were also on the line.

Awf were unwilling to assist in the defence of Medina altogether. The combination of this psychological endurance test, hunger, the severe cold, disruption of prayer routine, fear for the children and property, as well as the constant skirmishes may well have been too much for the Muslims. At this stage, it would have been easy for the whole system of alliances which Muhammad had painstakingly built up over the last couple of years to simply collapse of its own accord as different groups sought agreements with the Meccans.

The answer is simple: He dealt with problems of morale by maintaining a confident front.

So Muhammad answered this: According to Asim b. He inquired as to when they had ever paid the Ghatafan the date harvest before. He also inquired as to whether god had truly told Muhammad to make this decision: Let it decide the outcome! Yet it now seemed as if there would be an immediate assault on Medina from two sides by an overwhelmingly superior force as the Meccans pressurised the Banu Qurayza to assault Muhammad from one side while they attacked him from another.

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Faced with this threat, Muhammad realised that arms alone would not win the battle. He responded by careful political manoeuvring instead. Muhammad asked him to try to sow disunity within the alliance, with the hope that it might break up. Abd to demoralise the Jews. He proposed that the Banu Qurayza should therefore request for hostages from the Alliance leaders to ensure they stayed until they completely destroyed the Muslims. Then he repeated the story that he had related to Abu Sufyan, once again causing much concern and suspicion of the Banu Qurayza. The Jews proposed to Abu Sufyan that he should give them hostages, and sure enough Abu Sufyan refused, believing them to only want to lure some of his prominent men to their deaths.

This colourful story should be taken with a pinch of salt however. Many of the accounts may be apocryphal or at least exaggerated, and it may be possible that poor coordination, differing motives and communication finally helped to break the alliance and Muslim historians simply attributed the alliances collapse to the action of the Muslim community itself, rather than to chance.

In any event, the Muslims knew about none of this. On Saturday night, the night of the Jewish Sabbath, many Muslims were by now being affected by unusually cold weather conditions and were freezing, waiting in the trenches for the alliance assault. To assess the situation out at the Meccan camp, Muhammad called for a volunteer to go out and spy on them, but the men were too exhausted. Muhammad finally called out Hudhayfah. He inched his way over to the Meccan camp in total darkness and managed to blend in to the troops there. When Hudhayfah returned to the Muslim camp, the prophet waited tensely for his news.

The prophet threw the edge of a wrapper over him and blessed him several times. Then Hudhayfah told his story.

When he had gone to the Meccan camp, a massive cold wind was devastating the camp, and it would seem that this was what broke the Meccan siege for good. Muhammad is said to have stated that he was made victorious by the As-Saba the Easterly wind and by Ad-Dabur the Westerly wind.

We are not in a permanent camp, and the horses and camels are dying. The region is suffering drought, and the Banu Qurayza have broken their promise to us. Be off, for I am going! Abu Sufyan shamefully wanted to leave immediately, but was eventually prevailed upon to cover the retreat of the allied forces with Khalid Ibn Walid, the two arguing the rest of the way to Mecca.

Abu Sufyan wrote Muhammad a letter, promising by his gods to return and finish the job. Yet this did not happen. When it became clear the enemy were gone, the Muslims immediately went back to their homes and could not be summoned to return to their posts despite repeated entreaties, at which the prophet laughed. Nonetheless, this illustrates just how close they had been to cracking. It had been a near thing. The Prophet put down his arms and took a bath, but as the Islamic tradition states, the angel Gabriel came to him saying that he should not put his sword down but rather should finish his business with the Banu Qurayza, who without the Meccans were now dangerously exposed.

The Banu Qurayza found little mercy in their captors, and all the males were massacred, with the women and children being taken as slaves. Losses on both sides were extraordinarily light, because there was really no battle — or at least no physical battle. Like many campaigns of the premodern period, the Siege was really a war of manoeuvre as both sides sized up the other. It was a political and psychological battle of wits, manoeuvre and will, supply and intelligence. Yet it ultimately did not. It had a fundamental impact on the way the war went, despite the low casualties.

The break-up of the confederacy marked the utter failure of the Meccans to deal with Muhammad. As has been explained at the start of this book, alliances and tribes in this day and age were far more brittle than they were now, and setbacks could undermine them seriously. They had come expecting, if not an easy victory, at least glory, booty, and the destruction of a new power in their midst.

Instead, the Campaign had been a gigantic waste of time.

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It was hardly a rout, but it was no glorious victory, and in the religious-material-symbolic way that these tribes weighed things up, this counted for a lot. For Muhammad, this was a triumph, acting as a demonstration ground for all the other tribes that he could not be beaten. For a society which was in spiritual turmoil, looking for new ways to organise their society and new ways to look at the world, the wind and the failure of the alliance to crush Muhammad when they had had their boot on his throat was a clear indication that God was on the Muslims side.

This was especially when combined with similar events at Badr. During negotiations, individuals like Uyayna B. Another crucial factor in this process was the use of media. Most media throughout Arabia at this time was oral, and culture was dominated by poets as well as those who could whip up crowds into religious fervour: Yet Muhammad was also careful to use poets like Hasan b.

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Thabit to eulogise on each of the major military events in his life, and the events of the trench were no exception. But at the trench they had nowhere to go. If they lost, the movement would be destroyed. Winning at Badr did not stop the Meccans putting new armies in the field.

Not losing at the trench did. The name of this battle comes from the trenches that were dug around Medina to prevent the enemy attack. For this reason, the battle is also known as The Battle of al-Ahzab the groups or tribes. The Battle of the Trench differs from the previous battles in terms of politics, strategy and tactics. It was a battle fought not against a single and specific enemy, but was rather a defensive battle fought against all enemy groups in the Arabian Peninsula.

This battle is important due to the fact that the Jewish tribes, the Quraishis and the Arab tribes allied together in the realization that they could not defeat the Muslims alone. Prominent figures belonging to the Banu an-Nadir, such as Huyay ibn Ahtab and Sallam ibn Abu'l-Huqayq, who had settled in Khaybar after being expelled from Medina, called upon the Quraishis of Mecca and invited them to annihilate the Muslims together. An alliance was thus formed and they created a large army by allying with the surrounding tribes.

When the Prophet learned of this development, he conferred with his Companions on how to treat the threat. A Persian Companion, called Salman al-Farisi, advised digging a trench alongside Medina, which otherwise was open to cavalry attack. The Prophet also participated in the digging of the trench. The trench was completed in several weeks thanks to the great efforts of the Muslims.

According to the estimates of Muhammad Hamidullah, the trench was 5,5 km in length, 9 m in width, 4,5 m in depth. After the Muslims had finished digging the trench, the enemy units, led by Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, whose numbers were 10, or 12, , reached Medina and camped in a place to the north of Medina where the Battle of Uhud had earlier taken place.

The banner of the idolaters was carried by Uthman ibn Talha from the Banu Abduddar. The number of Muslim soldiers was about 3, Zayd ibn Haritha was the flagman for the emigrants while Sa'd ibn Ubada was the flagman of the Companions. The Prophet knew that they were outnumbered against this army and he decided to launch a defensive war, resisting the attack of the enemy against the city instead of facing the coalition in a pitched battle outside. He ordered that the women and children stay in the castles and fortresses. Prophet Muhammad built his headquarters on the edges of Mount Sal, facing the trench.

Thus they were defended by Mount Sal from behind.