standing. Had it not been for the Messenger of Allah’s ﷺ covenant with me—“Do not do anything until you return to me”—I would have killed him then and there with an arrow.

So I went back to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ while he was standing in prayer, wrapped in a patterned Yemeni cloak belonging to one of his wives, known as a marāḥil. When he saw me, he drew me to his feet and spread part of the cloak over me. He then bowed and prostrated while I remained beneath it, and when he ended the prayer I reported to him everything I had seen.

When the tribe of Ghatafān learned what Quraysh had done, they, too, packed up and headed home.

Allah the Exalted said: “Allah repelled those who disbelieved, in their rage; they gained no advantage. Allah spared the believers from fighting, and Allah is All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” (Qur’an 33:25)

All of this is related through al-Bakkaʾī from Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq.

Yūnus ibn Bukayr narrated from Hishām ibn Saʿd, from Zayd ibn Aslam, that a man said to Ḥudhayfah, “You kept company with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and were present with him.” He then recounted a report similar to that of Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb, concluding: “I began to tell the Messenger of Allah ﷺ about Abū Sufyān, and he kept laughing until I could see his molars.”

Mūsā ibn ʿUqbah related from Ibn Shihāb that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ fought at Badr in Ramadan of the year 2 AH, at Uḥud in Shawwāl of the year 3 AH, and at the Trench—the day of the Confederates and Banū Qurayẓah—in Shawwāl of the year 4 AH. ʿUrwah said the same, as transmitted by Ibn Luhayʿah from Abū al-Aswad: that it occurred in year 4 and that the trench episode was two years after Uḥud.

Qatādah, in the narration of Shaybān from him, stated: “The day of the Confederates was two years after Uḥud.” This is the definitive position, and the assertion of Mūsā and ʿUrwah that it was in year 4 is clearly mistaken. A similar view is found in the report of ʿUbayd-Allāh, from Nāfiʿ, from Ibn ʿUmar: “He presented me….”