Khalid ibn al-Waleed
The undefeated general. Fought against the Muslims at Uhud, embraced Islam six years later, and never lost a single battle across more than a hundred engagements. Died in bed, weeping that he did not fall in battle.
- Lived
- c. 592 - 642 CE
- Read next
- Meaning of the name Khalid
Who was Khalid ibn al-Waleed? The undefeated general. Fought against the Muslims at Uhud, embraced Islam six years later, and never lost a single battle across more than a hundred engagements. Died in bed, weeping that he did not fall in battle.
Life
Khalid ibn al-Waleed was born into the Banu Makhzum, one of the most powerful clans of Quraysh, and raised as a warrior from boyhood. He fought against the Muslims at the Battle of Uhud, and his flanking manoeuvre turned near-victory for the Muslims into their most painful early defeat. He embraced Islam in 8 AH, shortly before the conquest of Mecca. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ gave him the epithet by which history remembers him: Sayfullah al-Maslul, "the Drawn Sword of Allah."
He commanded at Mu'tah, where he saved the Muslim army from annihilation against a Byzantine force ten times its size. He crushed the false prophet Musaylima at Yamama, the deadliest of the Ridda wars. He then led the lightning campaign against the Sasanian Empire, taking Hira and the Iraqi frontier. His forced march across the Syrian desert to reinforce the Muslim armies at Ajnadayn is still studied in military academies. At Yarmouk, over six days, he broke the last Byzantine field army in the Levant.
Umar removed him from command not because he had failed but because Umar feared the ummah would begin to trust in Khalid more than in Allah. Khalid accepted the demotion without a word of complaint and continued to serve. He died in Homs in his bed, and his last words, wept out in his final hour, were that he had a hundred wounds on his body but not one of them had killed him.
Stories
Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic sources and is told in longer form on its own page.
Mu'tah, and the nine swords of Khalid
Three thousand Muslims. A hundred thousand Byzantines. Three commanders killed in a single hour. The fourth was an untried convert named Khalid, and by nightfall he had broken nine swords in his hand.
Yamama, and the false prophet's garden of death
When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ died, half the tribes of Arabia turned away. In central Arabia, a man named Musaylima called himself a prophet and gathered forty thousand men against Islam. Khalid was sent to meet him. The garden into which the last of Musaylima's men retreated has been called the Garden of Death ever since.
The march through the Syrian desert, five nights without water
Umar had ordered Khalid to leave Iraq and reinforce the Muslim armies threatened in Syria. Between Khalid and Syria lay the Samawa desert, a stretch of waterless waste every guide knew was impassable to any army. Khalid took eight hundred camels, killed some of them along the way, and crossed it in five nights.