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.

In the year 13 AH, the Muslim armies in the Levant were in serious trouble. They faced Byzantine forces gathering to expel them from newly-conquered Syria. Khalid ibn al-Waleed was at the time deep in southern Iraq, having just taken Hira and pushed into the Sasanian frontier. Abu Bakr sent him an order: leave Iraq, march to Syria, and save the Muslim armies there.

Between Khalid and Syria lay a stretch of waterless desert called the Samawa. Every camel-guide in Arabia knew it. It could be crossed in short bursts by small parties, but it could not be crossed by an army with its own baggage train, its wounded, its slaves and its livestock. There was no water for five days in any direction. The classical texts say the standard advice was: an army does not cross the Samawa.

Khalid asked his guide, a Christian Bedouin named Rafi ibn Umayrah al-Ta'i, whether it could be done. Rafi answered: not by an army. Not by a hundred men. Perhaps by a very small party moving very fast. Khalid asked him: what if we could carry our water with us? Rafi answered: you would need a marvel to carry enough water for that many men. Khalid ordered his men to gather the strongest camels of the army, more than a hundred of them, to withhold water from them for a day, and then to drink until their bellies were full. Their mouths were then tied shut with cords so they could not chew cud and lose the water. Every camel became a walking water-flask.

They marched by night to save the water. On the fourth night Rafi, the guide, went blind from exhaustion and could no longer see the stars. He said to Khalid: I cannot see the way. Khalid asked: what marker did you use in your youth on this crossing? Rafi answered: I remembered a lote tree, isolated, on a rise. Khalid ordered his scouts to spread out into the dark. They found the lote tree. They found the way. On the morning of the fifth day, the vanguard of Khalid's army came out of the desert into cultivated country. The Byzantine commanders had no scouts positioned to warn them. Khalid arrived in Syria from a direction they thought impossible.

Within weeks he had linked up with the Muslim armies at Ajnadayn and, later that same year, at Yarmouk. Yarmouk, over six days, broke the last Byzantine field army in the Levant. Byzantine Syria never rose again. Islam's northern frontier moved to the Taurus mountains and stayed there for nine hundred years.

Rafi the guide told the story of the crossing for the rest of his life. He said: no man could have done what Khalid did. He was moved through the desert by something not of the desert.

What the story teaches

The march through the Samawa is a story about the limits of the impossible. Every guide knew the desert could not be crossed by an army. Khalid did not deny their expertise. He accepted it and then asked whether the constraint could be re-engineered. He turned camels into water. He marched by night. He listened when his blind guide gave him one remembered detail from a childhood memory, and he spread his scouts to find a single tree in a starless dark. What looks in retrospect like a marvel was assembled out of very ordinary careful decisions. That, too, is a form of trust in Allah, and the classical Muslim scholars have long noticed the pattern: tawakkul (reliance on Allah) is not the absence of tying your camel; it is the presence of tying your camel and then walking on.