He replied, “Yes.” The Messenger of Allah ﷺ then said, “Rise, Bilāl!”
Bilāl leapt up from beneath an acacia whose shade was no bigger than that of a bird and answered, “At your command and in obedience; my life be your ransom.”
The Prophet said, “Saddle my horse for me.”
Bilāl brought him two plain pads woven from palm-fiber, free of any luxury or excess. The Prophet mounted, and we travelled the whole day until we met the enemy. The two cavalry lines squared off, we engaged them, and the Muslims turned in retreat, exactly as Allah, Exalted is He, has described.
The Messenger of Allah ﷺ kept calling out, “O servants of Allah, I am the servant of Allah and His Messenger!”
Then the Messenger of Allah ﷺ dismounted. Someone closer to him than I told me that he took a handful of dust, flung it into the faces of the enemy, and declared, “May your faces be disfigured!”
Yaʿlā ibn ʿAṭāʾ relates: Their sons told us on the authority of their fathers that not one man remained whose eyes and mouth were not filled with dust. We also heard a ringing from the sky like the scraping of iron against a new basin, and Allah, Mighty and Majestic, routed them.
Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī records a similar version in his Sunan (1) through Mūsā ibn Ismāʿīl, from Ḥammād ibn Salamah.
Imām Aḥmad (2) said: ʿAffān narrated to us; ʿAbd al-Wāḥid ibn Ziyād narrated to us; al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥuṣayrah narrated to us; al-Qāsim ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd narrated to us, from his father, who said: ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd said, “I was with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ on the day of Ḥunayn. The people fled from him, but eighty men of the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār remained steadfast with him. We retreated on foot about eighty paces without actually turning our backs; upon these men Allah sent down tranquility.
“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ pressed forward on his mule, which suddenly balked and caused him to slip from the saddle. I said, ‘Mount, may Allah raise you!’ He replied, ‘Hand me a handful of dust.’ He threw it into their faces, and their eyes were filled with it. He then asked, ‘Where are the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār?’ I said, ‘Here they are.’ He said, ‘Call them.’ I called them, and they came with their swords in their right hands gleaming like shooting stars, and the idolaters turned and fled.” Aḥmad alone transmits this report.
Al-Bayhaqī (3) said: Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥāfiẓ informed us; Abū al-Ḥusayn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Tamīm al-Qanṭarī narrated to us; Abū Qilābah narrated to us; Abū ʿĀṣim narrated to us; ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṭāʾifī informed me, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿIyāḍ ibn al-Ḥārith al-Anṣārī, from his father, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ advanced against Hawāzin with twelve thousand men, and that on the day of Ḥunayn as many of the people of Ṭāʾif were killed as had been killed at Badr. He said, “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ took a handful of pebbles, cast them at our faces, and we were routed.” Al-Bukhārī also records this in his Tārīkh (4) but does not attribute ʿIyāḍ’s lineage.
Musaddad said: Jaʿfar ibn Sulaymān narrated to us; ʿAwf narrated to us; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, the client of Umm Burthun, narrated to us, from someone who witnessed Ḥunayn