Battle of the Trench

In 627 a large coalition led by the Quraysh of Mecca marched on Medina to destroy the community of Muhammad and his followers. The Muslims defended the town by digging a trench across its open northern approach, and after a siege of two to three weeks, with very few deaths on either side, the besiegers withdrew. Known in Arabic as al-Khandaq (the Trench) or al-Ahzab (the Confederates), the episode was a turning point in the conflict between Medina and Mecca. Almost all detail comes from the later Muslim biographical (sira) and hadith literature, compiled long after the events.

After leaving Mecca, the Muslims had fought the Quraysh at the Battle of Badr in 624 and at Uhud in 625, where they were defeated. Early in 627, according to the traditional accounts, leaders of the Banu Nadir, a Jewish tribe earlier expelled from Medina and now based at Khaybar, travelled to Mecca to build an alliance against Muhammad. They also recruited nomadic tribes of Najd, offering the Ghatafan half of Khaybar's harvest. The resulting army, led by Abu Sufyan, is usually estimated at around 10,000 men, though figures vary from about 7,500 to over 12,000.

Warned by riders of the Khuza'a tribe, Muhammad consulted the Medinans. On the advice, the sources say, of Salman the Persian, they chose to dig a trench where the town was open to attack, mainly on the north, since rocky ground, groves and fortified houses protected the other sides. The work took six days, during a near-famine, and crops were harvested early to deny them to the enemy. The defenders numbered about 3,000. The word khandaq itself comes from Persian, and some historians think the tactic reached Arabia from the Persian world.

The confederates, used to open warfare, could not get their horsemen across the ditch, and night attempts also failed. For two to three weeks the two sides traded insults, verse and arrows across it. Reported deaths were very low, around five or six among the defenders and three among the attackers.

According to the sira accounts, the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe of Medina bound by an agreement with Muhammad, were persuaded by the Banu Nadir leader Huyayy ibn Akhtab to side with the attackers, exposing Medina's southern side. Morale in the town fell as food ran short and the nights grew cold.

The traditional accounts describe Muhammad opening secret talks to buy off the Ghatafan with part of Medina's date harvest, an offer the Medinan leaders rejected, but which still sowed suspicion. A respected tribal leader, Nu'aym ibn Mas'ud, who had secretly become a Muslim, then set the Qurayza and the Meccans against each other by warning each that the other would betray it. Each refused the other's demands, and amid hunger and violent cold winds that wrecked their camp, the confederates withdrew in the night.

The Muslims then besieged the Banu Qurayza, who surrendered after 25 days. According to the traditional accounts, Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, a leader of the Aws, the Qurayza's allies, was chosen to judge them, and ruled that the men be killed and the women and children enslaved. Ibn Ishaq, the earliest surviving biographer, writing more than a century later, gives the number of men executed as between 400 and 900. Many scholars doubt his figures, and some argue that only prominent men were executed. Interpretations of the episode differ, some emphasising the tribe's perceived breach of its pact and others the harsh customs of war at the time.

The failure of their largest effort cost the Quraysh much of their standing and their Syrian trade, and strengthened Muhammad's position in Medina. The historian W. Montgomery Watt suggested that some Meccans now began to consider accepting Islam. Within three years Mecca itself came under Muslim control in the Conquest of Mecca.

The siege falls between our 600 and 700 maps. The 600 map shows Arabia, in what is now Saudi Arabia, beside the Byzantine and Sasanian empires; by 700 the region lay within a caliphate that had expanded far beyond Arabia.