would tell them, “People of the countryside and of the towns, have you never heard of raqīq al-ʿaysh¹—the delicacies of a comfortable life?” They would answer, “Indeed.” The others would then say, “Well, this is raqīq al-ʿaysh,” and from that day they called those loaves raqqāq, whereas before the Arabs had known them only as al-qurā².
Saʿif ibn ʿUmar³ relates—from ʿAmr ibn Muḥammad, from al-Shaʿbī, from someone who transmitted it from Khalid—that the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, on the Day of Khaybar granted the people as nufal the bread, the stew⁴, and the roasted meat, and that they ate nothing else besides that, keeping none of it in reserve⁵.
Everyone⁶ who fell in the engagement at Ullays belonged to a town called Amghīshiyah⁷. Khalid therefore turned toward it, ordered it to be demolished, and took possession of what it contained. They found inside it enormous booty, which he divided among the fighters; each horseman, after receiving his bonus share, took one thousand five hundred in addition to what had already come to him earlier.
Khalid then dispatched to al-Ṣiddīq the glad tidings of victory together with the khums—the one-fifth of the wealth and captives—in the care of a man named Jandal of Banū ʿIjl, an unfailing guide. When Jandal delivered the message and discharged the trust, al-Ṣiddīq praised him and rewarded him with a slave-girl taken from among the captives. Abu Bakr then declared, “People of Quraysh, your lion has pounced upon the lion—and has bested him over his cubs⁸! Women have proved incapable of bearing the like of Khalid ibn al-Walid.” [And Abu Bakr—may Allah be pleased with him—spoke the truth.]
Many further exploits befell Khalid in various regions—so numerous that one tires of recounting them—yet he never flagged nor wearied, weakened nor grieved; rather, with every passing day his power, determination, rigor, and nobility only increased. Allah has left such a man as a source of honor for Islam and its people, and of humiliation for disbelief and the dispersal of its ranks.
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Khalid then marched on and encamped at al-Khawarnaq and al-Sadīr⁹ near al-Najaf, sending out detachments here and there to besiege the fortresses of—