so he handed him the banner.’ *) (1), and he advanced toward the people, encountering them (2) after the dawn prayer. He killed six or seven of them, and the rest fled.

Allah Most High swore by the deed of the Commander of the Faithful, saying:

‘By the charging steeds that pant,’ and so on to the end of the surah (3).
[Surah al-Ādiyāt: 1]”

The response is as follows:

It should be said to him: Even the most ignorant person would say to you, “Show us the chain of transmission for this so that we may establish that it is an authentic report.” A scholar, however, would say to him (4): This campaign, together with what has been related about it, is the sort of falsehood recounted by street storytellers, who tell countless fabrications from the tales of Antara and al-Battāl. Although a brief account of Antara’s life did exist, as did a modest account of al-Battāl’s—namely, what happened to him during the Umayyad dynasty and his campaigns against the Byzantines—liars embellished these accounts until they filled entire volumes. The same is true of tales about rogues, such as Ahmad al-Danaf and al-Zaybaq al-Misrī. They also began recounting tales of their own invention about al-Rashīd and Jafar.

This campaign is of the same kind as those tales. No mention of it is known in any of the recognized works on the Prophet’s campaigns and biography among scholars. Nor was it mentioned by the leading authorities in this discipline, such as Mūsā ibn Uqba, Urwa ibn al-Zubayr, al-Zuhrī, Ibn Ishāq and his teachers, al-Wāqidī, Yahyā ibn Saīd al-Umawī (5), al-Walīd ibn Muslim, Muhammad ibn Āidh, or others. Nor is it mentioned in the hadith corpus, and nothing of the Quran was revealed concerning it.