The Confederacy
The storm of the fifth year was assembled by the exiled leaders of Banū al-Naḍīr — a Jewish tribe expelled from Madīnah after a treacherous plot against the Prophet's ﷺ life. From Khaybar, Ḥuyayy ibn Akhṭab and his companions rode to Makkah and around the tribes, stitching together the greatest coalition Arabia had seen: Quraysh and their allies, Ghaṭafān bought with the promise of Khaybar's date harvest — some ten thousand men converging on an oasis that could field three thousand.12
Against them the Prophet ﷺ accepted the counsel of Salmān al-Fārisī, the Persian freedman: dig. Madīnah's flanks were walled by lava fields and fortress-houses; across the open north the Muslims cut a trench too wide to leap and too deep to climb, in six days of frozen, hungry labour. The Prophet ﷺ dug with them, dust covering his chest, chanting with the diggers. To those days belong two of the sīrah's touchstones: the stone that Jibrīl's — that his ﷺ — pickaxe split with three flashes, in which he was shown the palaces of Persia, Byzantium, and Yemen while his men could not walk to the market for fear; and the meal of Jābir, a lamb and a measure of barley meant in secret for four or five, to which the Prophet ﷺ, overhearing, invited the whole thousand — and they ate, the ḥadīth in al-Bukhārī insists, until they left it more than it was.31
The Siege
The confederates arrived expecting a battle and found a ditch — “a stratagem,” they complained, “the Arabs have never known.” The siege settled into weeks of arrow-fire, probing, cold, and fear; a handful of horsemen who forced a narrow point were met by ʿAlī, who cut down their champion ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd in single combat. Then came the heavier blow: Ḥuyayy ibn Akhṭab talked Banū Qurayẓah — the last Jewish tribe inside Madīnah, holding its exposed southern rear and bound by the covenant — into repudiating their pact. The Qur'an fixes the hour: “eyes swerved and hearts reached the throats.”41
The unravelling began with one man. Nuʿaym ibn Masʿūd of Ghaṭafān, secretly a Muslim, came to the Prophet ﷺ and was told: “War is deception; do what you can to divide them.” Trusted by both sides, Nuʿaym persuaded Qurayẓah to demand hostages from Quraysh before striking, and warned Quraysh that Qurayẓah would demand hostages only to hand them over — and the fragile coalition began devouring itself. Then, on a night of bitter cold, a wind out of the desert flattened the confederates' tents, overturned their pots, and put out their fires. Abū Sufyān raised the siege in the dark. “Now,” said the Prophet ﷺ, watching them go, “we raid them, and they will not raid us.” He was never attacked again.15
Banū Qurayẓah
The reckoning with Banū Qurayẓah followed at once: a twenty-five-day siege of their fortresses ended in surrender. At their own request, judgment was given not by the Prophet ﷺ but by their old ally Saʿd ibn Muʿādh of Aws — dying, as it proved, of a wound from the Trench. Saʿd judged by the terms treachery in war carried in that age — and, as scholars have long noted, by the very sentence of the Torah's own law of siege: the fighting men were executed, the women and children spared, the property divided. It is the severest episode of the sīrah, and the earliest sources report it without embarrassment as the wartime judgment of a betrayed covenant, upon a tribe that had chosen the invaders while the invaders stood at the wall.67
With the Trench, the war's character changed forever. Quraysh had spent their full strength and every ally they could buy, and had not so much as crossed the ditch. The Qur'an marked the watershed: “God turned back the disbelievers in their rage; they attained no good.”4