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.

In the eighth year after the Hijra, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ sent a small army north to the fringe of the Byzantine world. A Muslim envoy had been murdered on Byzantine territory; the sending of this army was the response. The commander was Zayd ibn Harithah, the Prophet's freedman and adopted son. If Zayd fell, command was to pass to Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, cousin of the Prophet. If Ja'far fell, to Abdullah ibn Rawahah, the poet-companion of Medina. The army was three thousand men.

At Mu'tah, in what is now southern Jordan, the small Muslim force met a Byzantine army perhaps a hundred thousand strong, reinforced by Arab Christian tribes. The disparity was so total that the Muslim commanders paused. Should they retreat and send for reinforcements from Medina? Abdullah ibn Rawahah rose and answered: "By Allah, we are not fighting them with numbers or with weapons, we are fighting them with this religion Allah has honoured us with. Go forward. Either victory or martyrdom." They went forward.

Zayd took the banner. He led from the front. He was struck through with spears and fell. Ja'far ibn Abi Talib took the banner from his hand. Ja'far dismounted so that no thought of flight could enter his own mind, and he fought until his right arm was severed. He held the banner with his left. Then his left arm was severed. He held it, cradled to his chest, until he was cut down. His body was later found with more than seventy wounds, every one of them on the front. He was thirty-three years old. The Prophet ﷺ would later say Allah had given Ja'far two wings in Paradise in place of the arms he had lost.

Abdullah ibn Rawahah took the banner from Ja'far's body. He fought until he too was killed. Now the Muslim army stood on the field with three of its commanders dead and no successor named. The men turned to a warrior in their ranks who had accepted Islam only a few months before: Khalid ibn al-Waleed.

What Khalid did next has been studied in military academies for fourteen hundred years. He did not throw the exhausted Muslim army against a fresh Byzantine line. Under cover of the night he reorganised his men. He shifted the vanguard to the rear and the rear to the vanguard. He moved troops from the right flank to the left flank and from the left flank to the right. When dawn came and the Byzantines looked across the field, they saw entirely different banners in every position. They concluded that Muslim reinforcements had arrived in the night. In a duel of morale with an army of a hundred thousand, Khalid had already won.

He engaged, disengaged, engaged again, and by the second day extracted his army in an orderly retreat, having inflicted heavy casualties and lost, by the counts of the classical historians, only a dozen men beyond the three commanders. He brought most of the three thousand home. It was one of the most extraordinary military feats in the history of pre-modern warfare.

When Khalid arrived back at Medina and the ummah wept for Zayd and Ja'far and Abdullah, the Prophet ﷺ received Khalid and said, of the man who had commanded him at the last: "A sword from among the swords of Allah." Sayfullah al-Maslul. That epithet stayed with Khalid for the rest of his life, and after.

Ja'far's brother was Ali ibn Abi Talib. Ja'far's father, Abu Talib, had raised the Prophet as an orphan. When word of Ja'far's death came, the Prophet went to Ja'far's house and picked up Ja'far's small son Abdullah, kissed him, and wept. That night, the Prophet ordered food prepared for Ja'far's family, saying that they were too grieved that day to prepare their own. Fourteen hundred years later, in some households, food is still sent to a mourning family in imitation of that Sunnah.

What the story teaches

Mu'tah is remembered as a defeat that was not a defeat. It is the story of a small force meeting an impossible one, of three commanders falling in a single day, and of a fourth commander so gifted that he turned the survival of an army into a legend. But the deeper current in the story is this: the Muslim army at Mu'tah went forward not on the calculation that they could win, but on the calculation that whether they won or died, they had already succeeded. The distinction is theological, not tactical. It is the operating principle of every Muslim who ever stood in a place from which retreat looked reasonable.