Quraysh Return
A year after Badr, Quraysh came north with three thousand men to avenge their dead, the profits of the escaped caravan funding the army, their women marching with drums at the rear — Hind bint ʿUtbah, whose father had fallen to the champions at Badr, foremost among them. The Prophet ﷺ inclined to defend from within the city; a party of eager young believers who had missed Badr pressed for open battle, and he put on his armour. When they repented of their insistence, he gave them a sentence that became a principle of prophethood: “It is not for a prophet, once he has put on his armour, to take it off until God judges between him and his enemy.”12
On the march, ʿAbdullāh ibn Ubayy — the hypocrite grandee — turned back with three hundred men, a third of the army. Seven hundred Muslims camped in the night and took position at dawn with the mountain of Uḥud at their backs. On a low hill guarding their only open flank, the Prophet ﷺ posted fifty archers under ʿAbdullāh ibn Jubayr, with an order the sources record in absolute terms: do not leave this place, though you see the birds snatch us — whether we win or are slaughtered — until I send for you.13
The Turning
The morning went to the Muslims: the Makkan line buckled, their standard-bearers fell one after another, and the enemy camp lay open. Then the archers on the hill, seeing the rout and the spoils, argued down their commander and left their post — and Khālid ibn al-Walīd, commanding the Makkan horse and watching that hill all morning, wheeled his squadrons around the mountain's flank and fell on the Muslim rear. Victory disintegrated into chaos. A cry went up that Muḥammad ﷺ was slain; men fled, men despaired, and a few — like Anas ibn al-Naḍr, who ran forward saying, “What will you do with life after him? Rise and die on what he died on!” — fought to the death where they stood; more than eighty wounds were counted on his body.14
The Prophet ﷺ himself was struck down in the melee — a helmet-ring driven into his cheek, his lip split, a tooth broken — and a knot of companions shielded him with their bodies up the mountainside; Abū Dujānah bent over him taking arrows in his back; Ṭalḥah's hand was maimed for life. Seventy of the believers were martyred that day. Ḥamzah, the lion of Badr, was killed by the javelin of Waḥshī, an Abyssinian slave promised his freedom for it — and Hind mutilated his body. Standing over his uncle, the Prophet ﷺ wept as he had wept for no one.125
The Lesson Written in the Qur'an
Quraysh, unable or unwilling to press their advantage against the mountain, proclaimed their revenge settled and withdrew. The next morning the Prophet ﷺ — wounded, his dead unburied a day — summoned every man who had stood at Uḥud and marched them south to Ḥamrāʾ al-Asad, on the enemy's road home: a demonstration that the community was unbroken, and Quraysh kept marching.12
Nearly sixty verses of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān descended upon the wound of Uḥud, and their burden is remarkable: not triumphalism, not despair, but anatomy — of disobedience, of love of the world, of rumour and panic, of what a community owes its Prophet and its dead. “God fulfilled His promise to you when you were routing them by His permission — until you flinched, and disputed the command, and disobeyed after He had shown you what you love.”6 Uḥud entered the Muslim imagination for all time as Badr's necessary counterpart: the day the community learned that the promise of God is conditional on discipline, and that the Prophet ﷺ, too, was mortal.62