Medina—and they kept pressing them until Qurayzah broke the treaty and joined the confederates. These mighty confederate forces assembled, outnumbering the Muslims several times over. The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, placed the women and children in Medina’s fortified towers, which resemble castles, and did not move them elsewhere. He positioned the Muslims with their backs to Salʿ—the mountain near Medina to the west and north—and placed a trench between himself and the enemy. The enemy had surrounded them from the upper and lower approaches. Such was their bitter hostility that, had they gained power over the believers, they would have inflicted the most devastating harm upon them.
In the present incident, this enemy formed a coalition of Mongols, other Turkic peoples, Persians, Arabized peoples, and others from the various groups of apostates, as well as Armenian and other Christians. This enemy encamped beside the Muslims’ lands, wavering between advancing and holding back, despite the small number of Muslims confronting them. Their aim was to seize the land and annihilate its inhabitants, just as those earlier forces had encamped around Medina facing the Muslims.
The siege of the Muslims in the year of the Trench lasted, according to one account, twenty-odd nights; according to another, twenty nights. This enemy crossed the Euphrates on the seventeenth of Rabīʿ al-Ākhir, and the beginning of