Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 267-338

A Form-Critical Analysis of  
the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Stories:  

Tribal, Ideological, and Legal Incentives  
behind the Transmission of the Prophet’s Biography*

Ehsan Roohi
Independent Scholar

Abstract 

Due to their heavy reliance on late, contradictory, and tendentious literary sources, scholars of 
formative Islam have always been in danger of taking as authentic evidence what is mere literary 
topos. Adopting a form-critical methodology that includes both classic and “new” approaches to the 
accounts of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna expeditions, this article strives to reveal the literary devices 
deployed in the sources and to demonstrate the motivations behind their utilization. It will argue, 
using the classic form-critical method, that reports about the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna raids reflect far 
more about the circumstances of their composition and redaction than about first/seventh-century 
Arabia. Motivated by second/eighth-century tribal feuds, many components of these narratives owe 
their existence to later modifications and adornments that were retrojected to the time of the Prophet 
Muḥammad. We shall, furthermore, see that by the third/ninth century, when tribal motivations 
ceased to be amongst the prime socio-political exigencies of the time, new incentives emerged for the 
transmission of these narratives, which can be uncovered through implementation of “new” form 
criticism.

Introduction

At a date not far removed from the Meccans’ resounding victory at the Battle of Uḥud, 
when morale amongst the infant Islamic community is poor, and privation and the 
menace of foreign aggression is about to bring the denizens of Medina to their knees,1  

* This article benefited immensely from the insightful comments of the anonymous UW reviewers,  
to whom I owe deep gratitude.

1.  On the tumultuous period following the Battle of Uḥud see al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, ed. Marsden Jones 
(Beirut: Aʿlamī, 1989), 1:342; Walid Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme in the Story of Khubaib 
b.ʿAdiyy and the Related Poems,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 21, no. 1 (1958): 15–30, at 

© 2022 Ehsan Roohi. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, 
which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long 
as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



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two simultaneous dramas, known as the massacres of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna, strike 
a crippling blow to the already vexed adherents of the emerging creed in the Arabian 
Peninsula. Dispatched by the Prophet to promulgate the cause of Islam in Najd, two 
contingents of “pious” Companions fall victim to the adversaries’ perfidy, are seized by 
them, and then slaughtered or brought into captivity. This is a succinct narration of the 
incidents as reported in the vast corpora of Islamic historiographical and exegetical sources, 
where the memory of the expeditions’ participants, through deployment of hagiographical 
embellishments, has been held in profound reverence.2 As laudable and extraordinary 
as the narrated destiny of these supposed “holy bands” may appear, the actual course of 
events does not seem to have diverged considerably from the mundane realities of the time.

Appraising the relevance of Muslim narrative sources for the historical reconstruction 
of the rise of Islam has long been a challenge to modern scholars.3 Whereas the Islamic 
faith emerged, according to some, “in the full light of history,”4 for others first/seventh-
century Arabia is largely, if not entirely, terra incognita.5 Radical theories aside, a growing 
understanding seems to have now been shaped about the problematic nature of our sources, 
which, so it is often opined, may be of some use as direct historical testimonies, but with 
which one is bound to deal with due caution.6 It would seem, then, that the sīra literature 
is yet regarded as “an indispensable source”7 for the study of “the historical Muḥammad” 
and that a significant number of scholars still hold that they can “work” with the traditional 
material,8 formidable though it might be: to this end, differing critical methodologies have 

24; Meir Jacob Kister, “The Expedition of Biʾr Maʿūna,” in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A. P. 
Gibb, ed. George Makdisi, 337–57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 355.

2.  On the wide range of the sources in which these stories feature, see below. 
3.  See, for instance, Harald Motzki, “The Question of the Authenticity of Muslim Traditions Reconsidered: 

A Review Article,” in Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. H. Berg, 211–57 (Leiden: Brill, 
2003); Herbert Berg, “Competing Paradigms in the Study of Islamic Origins: Qurʾān 15:89–91 and the Value of 
Isnāds,” in Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. H. Berg, 259–90 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Gregor 
Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read, in collaboration with and translated 
by Shawkat M. Toorawa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 9–12; Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and 
the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 50–56; Sean W. Anthony, 
Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, CA: University of California 
Press, 2020), 1–21.

4.  Ernest Renan, “Muhammad and the Origins of Islam,” in The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, ed. Ibn 
Warraq, 127–66 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 128.

5.  Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1977), 3; John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation 
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), x. 

6.  J. N. Mattock, “History and Fiction,” Occasional Papers of the School of Abbasid Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 
80–97, at 97; See also Fred M. Donner, “Muhammad und die frühe islamische Gemeinschaft aus historischer 
Sicht,” Asiatische Studien 68, no. 2 (2014), 439–51; idem, “Early Muslims and Peoples of the Book,” in Routledge 
Handbook on Early Islam, ed. H. Berg, 177–93 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 189.

7.  Anthony, Muhammad, 7.
8.  According to Crone’s oft-quoted sentence, “One can take the picture presented [in Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrat rasūl 

Allāh] or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it” (Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of 
the Islamic Polity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 4). Her view was nonetheless called into 



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been expounded. While the practitioners of these methods have, albeit not to the same 
degree, an awareness of the source-critical challenges, one fundamental flaw has been 
likely to adversely affect the results of all such critical, let alone naïve, approaches to the 
traditional biography of the Prophet.9 This is the fact that scholars are often in danger 
of taking as authentic evidence what is a mere literary topos, a pitfall to which one is 
particularly prone when having to redeem the historical realities from the faḍāʾil material. 

The sīra nabawiyya genre seldom narrates the incidents it relates outside the framework 
of the individual in question’s “virtues” (manāqib/faḍāʾil) and/or “vices” (mathālib), and 
when it does, the narration is notoriously tainted with discrepancies and inaccuracies, 
chronological and otherwise. The significance of the issue of faḍāʾil may well be symptomatic 
of fierce rivalries of whatever kind that were taking place at various stages in the collection 
and compilation of the Prophet’s biography.10 A tradition circulated by a political, tribal, 
or confessional faction to burnish its own image would have engendered rival traditions 
disseminated by the opposing party,11 with the natural repercussion being the proliferation 
of literary commonplaces and parallel faḍāʾil motifs. One may venture to say that the early 
tradents’ endeavor to preserve “what really happened” was demonstrably feeble, if indeed 
it was, for some of them, ever an aim. The anecdotes contained in the sīra should then be 
 
 

question by later scholarship; see, for example, the “promising approaches to uncovering historical facts about 
Muḥammad” (in spite of the serious “limits” thereof) in Andreas Görke, “Prospects and Limits in the Study of the 
Historical Muhammad,” in The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour 
of Harald Motzki, ed. N. Boekhoff-van der Voort, K. Versteegh, and J. Wagemakers, 137–51 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 
Despite its serious problems, the accounts of the sīra have been utilized, at least as supporting evidence, even 
by some “skeptical” scholars. See, for example, Stephen J. Shoemaker, “Muḥammad,” in Routledge Handbook on 
Early Islam, ed. H. Berg, 49–64 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 59, who holds that the juxtaposition of the Qurʾān, 
non-Muslim sources, and the biographical traditions can be a promising line of approach in the quest for “the 
historical Muḥammad.”

9.  For an overview of these methodologies, see Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings 
of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998), 5–31; On the academic debate between the 
representatives of “sanguine” and “skeptical” scholarship, see Stephen J. Shoemaker, “In Search of ʿUrwa’s 
Sīra: Some Methodological Issues in the Quest for ‘Authenticity’ in the Life of Muḥammad,” Der Islam 85, no. 
2 (2011): 257–344; Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki, and Gregor Schoeler, “First-Century Sources for the Life of 
Muḥammad? A Debate,” Der Islam 89, no. 2 (2012): 2–59. It is not within the purview of the present study, it 
should be stressed, to treat, let alone to settle, any aspect of these vexing controversies. Instead, this article aims 
to re-address some form-critical methodologies and to urge caution about the abundance of literary devices 
in our narrative sources, points that seem to have been overlooked by different modern biographers of the 
Prophet, regardless of the degree of their skepticism or sanguinity about the sīra. 

10.  For the traces in the sīra of political, sectarian, and legal disputes, see Isaac Hasson, “Contributions à 
l’étude des Aws et des Ḫazraǧ,” Arabica 36, no. 1 (1989): 1–35, at 25; Robert Hoyland, “Writing the Biography 
of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions,” History Compass 5 (2007): 1–22, at 3–4; Shoemaker, “In 
Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra,” 337–8.

11.  Michael Lecker, “The Death of the Prophet Muḥammad’s Father: Did Wāqidī Invent Some of the 
Evidence?,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 145, no. 1 (1995): 9–27, at 11; Gautier H. 
A. Juynboll, “Shu‘ba b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 160/776) and his Position Among the Traditionists of Baṣra,” Le Muséon 111, 
no. 1–2 (1998): 187–226, at 193. 



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treated with due circumspection, with an acute consciousness of the literary devices they 
might contain and the motivations behind their utilization.12 

Adopting a form-critical approach to our narrative sources, the present article strives to 
demonstrate (inter alia) what wide-reaching ramifications the tribal and sectarian rivalries 
might have had on the historiography of formative Islam. It is fitting, then, to first provide 
brief introductory notes on form criticism, including the classic and “new” approaches. 
Concerned with a text’s formal features, classic form criticism (Ger. Formkritik)13 is a 
modern exegetical method that rests on the working premise that behind each narrative 
unit of a given text lies an oral “form” (Form) and a “social setting” (Sitz im Leben). In 
addition to the synchronic assessment of a text, a form critic’s task is to peruse “the history 
of form” (Formgeschichte), viz., to diachronically analyze the different redactional stages 
undergone by the narrative.14 Form criticism approaches, thus, a historical report from the 
vantage point of parsing its building blocks. Though not always a simple job, the “lines of 
cleavage” between the narrative’s (once independent) subunits are often recognizable in 
the Islamic traditional material, thanks to the tradents’ use of isnāds15 and schemata (in the 
form of transitional formulae).16 Mention should be made, too, of “new” form criticism that, 
unlike its traditional counterpart, is not concerned with Sitz im Leben,17 but with Sitz in der 
Literatur (“setting in literature”), concentrating on the narrative as it stands before us.18 

12.  On the significance of topoi and their underlying motivations, see Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 
267–8; Albrecht Noth, “Iṣfahān-Nihāwand: A Source-Critical Study of Early Islamic Historiography,” in The 
Expansion of the Early Islamic State, ed. Fred M. Donner, 241–62 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 253.

13.  While the German word Formgeschichte has been translated by some as “form criticism,” certain recent 
studies, particularly those followed by Richter (who deserves the credit “for being the first scholar to offer 
terminological and methodological clarity”), rendered Formgeschichte as “form history.” According to Richter, 
“Formgeschichte (‘form history’) proceeds mainly diachronically [but] form criticism is strictly synchronic”; 
see Johannes P. Floss, “Form, Source, and Redaction Criticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. 
J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, 591–614 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 596. On rendering “form 
criticism” as Formkritik, see Marvin A. Sweeney, “Form Criticism: The Question of the Endangered Matriarchs in 
Genesis,” in Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Petersen, ed. 
Joel M. LeMon and Kent Harold Richards, 17–38 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 18. On the use of 
the terms “Formgeschichte” and “Gattungsforschung,” respectively, by Dibelius and Gunkel as equivalents for 
“form criticism,” see Samuel Byrskog, “A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel 
Community and Beyond,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 98, no. 1–2 (2007): 1–27, at 3. 

14.   Marvin A. Sweeney, “Form Criticism,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament Wisdom, Poetry and Writings, 
ed. Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns, 227–41 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 227; idem, “Form 
Criticism: The Question of the Endangered Matriarchs,” 17; Floss, “Form, Source, and Redaction Criticism,” 592, 
596; Michael Graves, “Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus: The Methodology of John Wansbrough through the 
Lens of Biblical Studies,” Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association 1 (2016): 47–92, at 48.

15.  Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 4
16.  Albrecht Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study, 2nd ed., in collaboration 

with Lawrence I. Conrad, trans. Michael Bonner (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994), 174–7.
17.  The term was coined by Gunkel, see, for instance, Hermann Gunkel, “Die Grundprobleme der israelitischen 

Literaturgeschichte,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 27 (1906): 1797–1800.
18.  Martin J. Buss, “Goals and Processes of the ‘New’ Form Criticism,” in The Book of the Twelve and the 

New Form Criticism, ed. Mark J. Boda, Michael H. Floyd, and Colin M. Toffelmire, 305–9 (Atlanta, GA: Society of 



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Deconstructing the accounts of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna expeditions, one discerns 
distinct formal subunits within the reports that each possess their own generic character19 
and setting. We shall see that these stories share a high number of similar literary motifs 
that serve to aggrandize or, rather, vindicate the members of these sariyyas (expeditions). 
Furthermore, some episodes of the former story have salient parallels in the narratives of 
other historical events occurring during the Umayyad caliphate. One must then cast one’s 
net wider and examine not only the  accounts of the expeditions themselves, but certain 
isolated records scattered here and there in the immense body of the Islamic tradition.20 
This will no doubt render our task more daunting, but the result will probably be more 
reliable, for we are more likely to be able to distinguish a historically tenable narrative 
from a patchwork of topoi in this way. A similar line of approach has already been pursued 
by Noth who, in a seminal article, expounded the view that traditions concerning the 
conquest of Iṣfahān and Nihāwand are made up of individual “narrative motifs which can be 
separated as easily as they have been joined together.” He further observed that the motifs 
shaping these stories appear elsewhere in the same or a differing order.21 

Following in the footsteps of form critics in Islamicist circles, and drawing upon the 
rich and extensive body of literature in the sphere of biblical form criticism, the present 
article seeks to scrutinize the historiographical implications conveyed by formal assessment 
of the sources. To this end, the formal similarities between the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna 
narratives, and parallel motifs found in accounts of the former event and the records 
of Umayyad-era movements, will be addressed. Implementing the classic form-critical 
approach, it shall subsequently be demonstrated that rivalries between various tribes  
(be they minor clans of the Aws and the Khazraj, or larger tribal entities like the Quraysh 
and the Anṣār) dramatically affected the way in which our narratives were constructed. As 
is customary in form-critical practice, the diachronic evolution of the expeditions’ reports 
will then be investigated. Though analysis of the “original” tradition and life-setting of the 
al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna (viz., the classic form-critical approach) is the primary concern of 
this study, the “new” form-critical method will also be brought to bear on the al-Rajīʿ and  
 

Biblical Literature, 2015), 306; Colin M. Toffelm, “Sitz im What? Context and the Prophetic Book of Obadiah,” in 
The Book of the Twelve and the New Form Criticism, ed. Mark J. Boda, Michael H. Floyd, and Colin M. Toffelmire, 
221–44 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 224. For the supplementary discussion see below, the 
section on “The Massacre Narratives in their Broader Contexts: ‘New’ Form Criticism.”

19.  As noted by Wilson, the terms “form” (Form) and “genre” (Gattung) are quite frequently used 
interchangeably by form critics; see Robert R. Wilson, “New Form Criticism and the Prophetic Literature: The 
Unfinished Agenda,” in The Book of the Twelve and the New Form Criticism, ed. Mark J. Boda, Michael H. Floyd, 
and Colin M. Toffelmire, 311–22 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 313. However, some used these 
words in a different sense; see Sweeney, “Form Criticism: The Question of the Endangered Matriarchs,” 18. In 
the present essay, the terms have been deployed interchangeably.

20.  Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 18–19.
21.  Noth, “Iṣfahān-Nihāwand,” 246–9. The same contention has been propounded in Lawrence I. Conrad, 

“The Conquest of Arwād: A Source-Critical Study in the Historiography of the Early Medieval Near East,” 
The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: Problems in the Literary Source Material, ed. Averil Cameron and 
Lawrence I. Conrad, 317–401 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992), 386–98. 



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Biʾr Maʿūna accounts, and the stories’ functions within the context of the Muslim literary 
collections (ḥadīth or otherwise) will be probed in the final section of the article.

 
Parallels between the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Expeditions

Below is a comparative analysis of the narrative motifs (Erzählmotive) that constitute 
the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna accounts. It will be shown that contained in these reports are 
certain transferrable motifs and hagiographic topoi that, strung together, make up our 
extant tales.22 The accounts that are quoted below are drawn from the compilations of the 
foremost maghāzī authorities,23 including (but not exclusive to) Ibn Isḥāq (hereinafter IS), 
Mūsā b. ʿUqba (MU),24 Maʿmar b. Rāshid (MR), and al-Wāqidī (Wq),25 in which the massacre 
stories with similar Erzählmotive, analogous wordings and roughly the same narrative plot 
quite often appear.26 

22.  An example of a useful case for form-critical practice in the domain of biblical studies is “the Endangered 
Matriarchs” story in Gen 12, 20, and 26, in which three separate stories have been shaped by similar Erzählmotive, 
narrating a tale in which a patriarch (Abraham/Isaac) passes his wife (Sarah/Rebeka) off as his sister. See 
Klaus Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-Critical Method, trans. S. M. Cupitt (New York: 
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 112–15. Also see the formal similarities between the major tellings of the prophet 
Shuʿayb’s tale in John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, with 
foreword, translations, and expanded notes by Andrew Rippin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 21–3.

23.  The compilations of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767) and two of his contemporaries, Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 153/770) 
and Mūsā b. ʿUqba (d. 141/758), are the earliest biographies of the Prophet. Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra have come down 
to us in several redactions, noteworthy amongst which is that of Ibn Hishām (d. 218/834). Maʿmar’s maghāzī 
has survived in the recension of his student, ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām (d. 211/827). Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s work has 
been preserved in later quotations (see the following note). These first, Abbasid-era compilers of the Prophet’s 
biography, along with their successor, al-Wāqidī, based themselves on materials, many (but not all) of which 
were transmitted from the late-Umayyad authorities, most particularly ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr (d. 94/713) and Ibn 
Shihāb al-Zuhrī (124/742); see Josef Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors, trans. 
and ed. Lawrence Conrad (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2002).

24.  Throughout this study, various reports from Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s lost sīra have been gleaned and cited from 
later works, e.g., Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ʿUyūn al-athar, Imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, al-Iṣāba, and al-Iktifāʾ. This is not, however, 
to endorse the ascription of all of the material found under Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s name in later sources (despite 
the fact that recent studies have shown that a remarkable portion of the material attributed to him is not 
“fictitious”; see Gregor Schoeler, “Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s Maghāzī,” in The Biography of Muhammad. The Issue of the 
Sources, ed. H. Motzki, 67–97 [Leiden: Brill, 2000]). The inclusion of the accounts allotted to Mūsā b. ʿUqba in our 
analysis is just to ensure as comprehensive an analogy as possible between the earliest narratives of the al-Rajīʿ 
and Biʾr Maʿūna massacres, while acknowledging that some of these reports may not be authored by Mūsā b. 
ʿUqba. This, nevertheless, in no way changes the main results of the present essay’s formal analysis. 

25.  The translations given throughout this essay from the works of Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī are from, 
respectively, Guillaume and Faizer. Very slight alterations are at times introduced to the texts for the sake of 
clarity. Furthermore, when an analogous narrative motif occurs in various sources, Guillaume’s translation of 
Ibn Hishām’s recension of Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra is quoted, but the works of other historiographical authorities are 
likewise cited and their notable variants with Ibn Isḥāq’s text are mentioned.

26.  The same criteria for the comparison of historical accounts have also been adopted in previous 
studies; see Ehsan Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore: A Literary Approach to the Sīra’s Narratives of 
Political Assassinations,” Der Islam 98, no. 2 (2021): 425–72, at 428; Jens Scheiner, Die Eroberung von Damaskus: 
Quellenkritische Untersuchung zur Historiographie in klassisch-islamischer Zeit (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 7–8. 



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1. The Arrival of the Tribal Deputies in Medina

Both stories open with the respective tribal delegations arriving at Medina and expressing 
their enthusiasm to embrace Islam. Beneath the veneer of the envoys’ apparently heartfelt 
sincerity lies, however, a subterfuge to lure the Muslims into a place in which they are to be 
caught in an ambush.27 

a) al-Rajīʿ: After Uḥud a number of ʿAḍal and al-Qāra28 came to the apostle (IS: qadima 
ʿalā rasūl Allāh rahṭ min ʿAḍal wa-l-Qāra, MU: inna nafaran min ʿAḍal wa-l-Qāra 
qadimū ʿalā rasūl Allāh, Wq: fa-qadima sabʿat nafar min ʿAḍal wa-l-Qāra). They said 
that some of them had already accepted Islam and they asked him to send some 
of his companions (IS, MU, Wq: fa-ibʿath maʿanā nafaran min aṣḥābika) to instruct 
them in religion, to teach them to read the Qurʾān, and to teach them the laws of 
Islam.29 

b) Biʾr Maʿūna: Abū Barāʾ ʿĀmir b. Mālik b. Jaʿfar,30 “the Player with Spears,” came to 
the apostle in Medina (IS, MU31, Wq: qadima Abū Barāʾ ʿ Āmir b. Mālik b. Jaʿfar mulāʿib 
al-asinna ʿalā rasūl Allāh, MR: jāʾa mulāʿib al-asinna ilā al-nabī bi-hadiyya). The 
apostle explained Islam to him and invited him to accept it. He said: “O Muḥammad, 
if you were to send some of your companions to the people of Najd (IS, Wq: law 
baʿathta rijālan [Wq: nafaran] min aṣḥābika, MU: ibʿath maʿī man shiʾta min rusulika, 
MR: fa-ibʿath ilā aḥl Najd man shiʾta) and they invited them to your affair, I have 
good hopes that they would give you a favorable answer.32

27.  Both stories, as we shall see below, have another recension in which there is no mention whatsoever of 
the proselytizing character of the mission.

28.  The North Arabian ʿ Aḍal and al-Qāra tribes belonged to al-Hūn b. Khuzayma, a branch of the Muḍar tribal 
confederation. They were parts of the so-called Aḥābish, the traditional allies of the Quraysh, and had close ties 
with Mecca. They were also on friendly terms with the Hudhayl tribe; see W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at 
Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 88.

29.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, trans. Alfred Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 426; Ibn 
Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, ed. Muṣṭafā al-Saqqā, Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī, and ʿAbd al-Ḥafīẓ Shalabī (Beirut: Dār 
al-Maʿrifa, 1971), 2:169; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:354. See also Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s account in al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil 
al-nubuwwa, ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Qalʿajī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1985), 3:327.

30.  Abū Barāʾ was the chief of the ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa tribe, a branch of the Hawāzin, which was a prominent 
subdivision of the Northern Arabian federation of Qays ʿAylān b. Muḍar. ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa’s territory extended 
from the west of the Turaba oasis to the uplands south of the Riyadh–Mecca road (W. Caskel, “ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa,” 
in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. [Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009]).

31.  Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s words are the same ones that appear in Ibn Isḥāq’s and al-Wāqidī’s versions, though 
there is a minor variation in the word order.

32.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 433–4; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:169; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, Kitāb al-Maghāzī, trans. 
Sean W. Anthony (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 108; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:346. See Mūsā b. 
ʿUqba’s report in al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:343.



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2. The Nomads’ Treacherous Assault on the Muslim Party

The stories proceed with the Muslims departing from Medina and a surprise raid being 
launched on them en route at a watering place. As for al-Rajīʿ, the tribe of Hudhayl33 (or a 
branch thereof called Liḥyān, at whose instigation the members of ʿAḍal and al-Qāra come 
to Medina) set an ambush for the Prophet’s Companions, while in the case of Biʾr Maʿūna, 
it is Abū Barāʾs nephew, ʿĀmir b. Ṭufayl, who devises the fiendish plot against the Muslims.

a) al-Rajīʿ: The band got as far as al-Rajīʿ, a watering place of Hudhayl. There they 
(ʿAḍal and al-Qāra) betrayed them and summoned Hudhayl against them (IS, MU: 
fa-istaṣrakhū ʿ alayhim Hudhaylan, Wq: fa-istaṣrakhū ʿ alayhim aṣḥābahum al-ladhīna 
baʿathahum al-Liḥyāniyyūn). While they were off their guard sitting with their 
baggage (IS, MU: fī riḥālihim) suddenly they were set upon by men (IS: ghashūhum), 
with swords in their hands, so they took their swords to fight them.34 

b) Biʾr Maʿūna: The Muslims went on until they halted at Biʾr Maʿūna watering place. 
When they alighted at it, they sent Ḥarām b. Milḥān with the apostle’s letter to the 
enemy of God, ʿĀmir b. Ṭufayl. When he came to him, he rushed at the man and 
killed him before he even looked at the letter. Then he tried to call out the Banū 
ʿĀmir against them (IS, Wq: istaṣrakha ʿalayhim Banī ʿĀmir, MU: fa-istanfara Banī 
ʿĀmir, MR: fa-istajāsha ʿalayhim ʿĀmir b. Ṭufayl Banī ʿĀmir), but they refused to do 
what he wanted, saying that they would not violate the promise of security which 
Abū Barāʾ had given these men. Then he appealed to the tribes of Banū Sulaym35 (IS, 
Wq: fa-istaṣrakha ʿalayhim qabāʾil min Banī Sulaym, MU: fa-istanfara lahum ʿĀmir 
b. Ṭufayl Banī Sulaym, MR: fa-istajāsha ʿalayhim Banī Sulaym) and they agreed and 
came out against them and surrounded them (IS: ghashū al-qawm) as they were 
sitting with their baggage (IS: fī riḥālihim). Seeing them, they drew their swords and 
fought to the last man.36

33.  The North Arabian tribe of Hudhayl belonged to the Khindif subdivision of the Muḍar. Their territory 
was in the Ḥijāz, the area located to the north and east of Mecca, and they were closely connected with the 
Quraysh. See Kirill Dmitriev, “Banū Hudhayl,” in Encyclopedia of Islam THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 
2017).

34.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 426; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:170; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:355; see Mūsā b. 
ʿUqba’s account in al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:343. 

35.  The Sulaym tribe was a branch of Qays ʿAylān b. Muḍar. The Banū Sulaym’s territory was in the vicinity 
of the road between Mecca and Medina, and this caused the inhabitants of both cities to establish good relations 
with the Sulaym. The lands of the Banū ʿĀmir lay on the Sulaym’s southern border. See the chapter “Tribes 
in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia,” in Michael Lecker, People, Tribes and Society in Arabia around the Time of 
Muḥammad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 30. 

36.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 434; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:185; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:347; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, 
al-Maghāzī, 108–10. See Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s account in al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:343; Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Iṣāba fī 
tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1995), 6:172.



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3. The Fate of the Participants

The fate of those who are killed is narrated at some length in each story. We hear in 
this section of intrepid warriors who refrain from succumbing to the enemies and yearn to 
embrace martyrdom.

a) al-Rajīʿ: Marthad b. Abī Marthad, Khālid Bukayr, and ʿĀṣim b. Thābit said: “By God, 
we will never accept an undertaking and agreement from a polytheist.” (IS: wa-llāhi 
lā naqbalu min mushrik ʿ ahdan wa-lā ʿ aqdan abadan). According to al-Wāqidī, “ʿĀṣim 
b. Thābit, Marthad, Khālid b. Abī Bukayr, and Muʿattab b. ʿUbayd refused to accept 
their (i.e., the adversaries’) protection and their security” (fa-abaw an yaqbalū 
jiwārahum wa-lā amānahum). ʿĀṣim b. Thābit then said, “I swear that I will never 
accept the protection of a polytheist” (Wq: innī nadhartu allā aqbalu jiwār mushrik 
abadan, MR: ammā ana fa-lā anzilu fī dhimmat kāfir).37

b) Biʾr Maʿūna: Having killed all the Companions, narrates al-Wāqidī, the Banū ʿĀmir 
told al-Mundhir b. ʿAmr, the Muslims’ commander: “If you wish, we will protect 
you.” He replied, “I will never submit nor accept your protection (Wq: lā aqbalu 
lakum amānan) unless you bring me to the place of Ḥarām’s killing38 and then free 
me from your protection (Wq: bariʾa minnī jiwārukum).” They protected him until 
they brought him to the place of Ḥarām’s death, and then released him from their 
protection (Wq: bariʾū ilayhi min jiwārihim), and he fought them until he was killed.39 

4. The Martyrs’ Last Words

Having found themselves in the face of certain death, the warriors pray to God to convey 
their message to the Prophet. 

a) al-Rajīʿ: The polytheists raised Khubayb on the wood (to crucify him), and when 
they had bound him he said, “O God, we have delivered the message of Thy apostle, 
so tell him tomorrow what has been done to us (IS: Allāhumma innā qad ballaghnā 
risālat rasūlika fa-ballighhu al-ghadāt mā yuṣnaʿu binā).” According to al-Wāqidī, 
Khubayb said: “O God, there is no one here who will take your Messenger greetings 
from me, so please convey my greetings to him.” (Allāhumma innahu laysa hāhunā 
aḥad yuballighu rasūlaka minnī al-salām fa-ballighhu anta ʿannī al-salām).40

37.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 426; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:170; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Maghāzī, 60; al-Wāqidī, 
Kitāb al-Maghāzī, trans. Rizwi Faizer (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1:173; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:355.

38.  Al-Mundhir aspired, so the story says, to die where Ḥarām’s blood spilled on the ground.
39.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:348; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:170.
40.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 428; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:173; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:360; al-Wāqidī, 

al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:176. Here, Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s wording is analogous to al-Wāqidī’s, see Ibn Sayyid 
al-Nās, ʿUyūn al-athar fī funūn al-maghāzī wa-l-shamāʾil wa-l-siyar, ed. Ibrāhīm Muḥammad Ramaḍān (Beirut: 
Dār al-Qalam, 1993), 2:62.



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b) Biʾr Maʿūna: As reported on the authority of Anas b. Mālik,41 the last words of the 
participants of Biʾr Maʿūna are to be found in some sīra and ḥadīth compendia 
presented in the following form: “O God, deliver from us to our Prophet our 
message that we have met You, and we are pleased with You and You are pleased 
with us.” (Allāhumma balligh ʿannā nabiyyanā annā qad laqaynāka fa-raḍaynā ʿanka 
wa-raḍayta ʿannā).42

5. Divine Revelation concerning the Victims 

Once the Prophet’s emissaries are slain, he is made aware of their death and their last 
words by a revelation. The Prophet then announces lugubriously to his entourage that the 
members of the sariyya have met a tragic end, and were cut into pieces at the hands of the 
deceitful Najdī tribes.

a) al-Rajīʿ: Mūsā b. ʿUqba says: “It is alleged (zaʿamū) that the messenger of God—
seated in the gathering of his Companions on the day in which Khubayb and Zayd 
b. al-Dathinna were killed—said: “Peace be upon you,” the Quraysh killed Khubayb 
(Khubayb qatalahu Quraysh).” Al-Wāqidī’s report runs as follows: “Usāma b. Zayd 
related to me from his father that the Messenger of God was seated with his 
Companions, when a faint overcame him just as when he is inspired by a revelation. 
Then we heard him say, ‘And peace unto him and God’s blessings.’ Then he said, ‘This 
is Gabriel who brings me greetings from Khubayb.’”43

b) Biʾr Maʿūna: Not long following the Prophet dispatching an envoy to Banū ʿĀmir,  
he ascended the pulpit, praised God, and lauded Him, saying: “Your brothers met the 
polytheists and they cut them to pieces, and none of them survived.”44

 

41.  Anas b. Mālik, a member of the Najjār subdivision of the Khazraj, was allegedly the last Companion of 
the Prophet to die, in Basra in 93/712. Anas’ purported life span covers the entire first century AH, making 
him a key figure on whose authority Prophetic traditions have been reported. His name frequently occurs in 
traditions with Baṣran isnāds, the Anṣār-favoring material in particular. See Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Encyclopedia 
of Canonical Ḥadīth (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 131; idem, “Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj,” 206.

42.  According to some accounts, these words (that occur in the sources with certain variants) were allegedly 
once part of the Qurʾānic text, but were eventually abrogated; see al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:350; Ibn Saʿd, 
al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, ed. Muḥammad ʿ Abd al-Qādir ʿ Aṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1990), 3:390; Ibn Ḥanbal, 
Musnad (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1969), 1:416; Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, n.d.), 6:45; Ibn ʿAsākir, 
Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, ed. ʿAlī Shīrī (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1415 AH), 26:104. See also the doubts expressed by 
Juynboll as to the authenticity of these traditions in Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “The Qurrāʾ in Early Islamic History,” 
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 16 (1973): 113–29, at 128–9.

43.  See Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s account in al-Maqrīzī, Imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Namīsī 
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999), 13:273; Ibn Sayyid al-Nās, ʿUyūn, 2:62; al-Kalāʿī, al-Iktifāʾ fī maghāzī 
rasūl Allāh wa-l-thalātha al-khulafāʾ, ed. Muḥammad ʿAlī Bayḍūn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2000), 1:407. 
See also al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:176.

44.  al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:344; al-Ḥākim al-Nīsābūrī, al-Mustadrak ʿalā al-ṣaḥīḥayn, ed. Yūsuf ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 
al-Marʿashlī (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 2:111.



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6. A Parallel “Virtue” Tradition

From the viewpoint of the earliest authors and audiences of the sīra, the narratives’ 
apogee was the episodes in which they could relate or hear the heroic tales of Islam’s 
“golden age,” where the image of the Companions was adorned with innumerable faḍāʾil 
traditions. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the remarkably analogous accounts 
of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna are also alike in the way in which their martyrs are exalted.  
Our stories have episodes in which the protagonists’ corpses vanish in a miraculous fashion; 
one “ascends to the sky,” the other is “swallowed up by the earth.”

a) al-Rajīʿ: After a period of imprisonment in Mecca, Khubayb b. ʿAdī is taken out by 
the Meccans to al-Tanʿīm and is crucified there. Purportedly sent by the Prophet to 
take down Khubayb’s crucified body, ʿ Amr b. Umayya is the supposed narrator of the 
following account: “I came to the cross to which Khubayb was bound, frightened that 
someone might see me, climbed up it, and untied Khubayb. He fell to the ground, 
and I withdrew a short distance. Then I turned round, and I could not see a trace 
of Khubayb; it was as though the earth had swallowed him up (ibtalaʿathu al-arḍ).” 
The account concludes, “And no trace of Khubayb has appeared up to this time  
(lam yudhkar li-Khubayb rimmatan ḥattā al-sāʿa).”45 

b) Biʾr Maʿūna: The episode of the Biʾr Maʿūna story that is of interest to us here is a 
faḍīla narrated about ʿĀmir b. Fuhayra, the mawlā of the first caliph, Abū Bakr. The 
person into whose mouth the tradition puts the virtues of ʿĀmir b. Fuhayra is none 
other than his slayer, Jabbār b. Salmā. ʿĀmir, who is killed by Jabbār’s spear, ascends, 
much to his murderer’s astonishment, to the sky, and it is his marvelous ascension 
to the heavens that convinces Jabbār to convert to Islam. Al-Wāqidī’s account also 
stresses that “the angels have concealed [ʿĀmir’s] dead body”46, and Ibn Saʿd assures 
us that his corpse was never found (lam tūjad juththatahu), just as with the body of 
Khubayb b. ʿAdī.47 

7. Banū Nawfal, the Driving Spirit behind the Massacre

We have seen so far that the turn of the fourth year of the Islamic era witnessed two 
almost simultaneous disasters befalling the Muslims. The sources aver that two proselytizing 
groups of Companions were entrusted at roughly the same time the similar task of preaching 
 

45.  al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 7, Foundation of the Community, trans. W. Montgomery Watt 
and M. V. McDonald (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 146–7; al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:332; 
Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 4:139; Ibn al-Athīr, Usd al-ghāba fī maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1989), 1:599; Ibn 
Ḥajar, al-Iṣāba, 2:226. See also Sean W. Anthony, Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle: Umayyad Crucifixion in Its 
Late Antique Context (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2014), 38.

46.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:170: al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:353; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat 
Dimashq, 4:344.

47.  Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 3:174; Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-Muḥabbar, ed. I. Lichtenstadter (Beirut: Dar al-Āfāq 
al-Jadīda, n.d.), 183; al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1996), 1:194.



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Islam in an identical geographical region, Najd. Both parties are attacked en route at a 
watering place and die the deaths of martyrs. In addition to this, the diction and narrative 
schemes of the tales are very much alike. But there is more to this analogy. The authors/
compilers of the sīra reports want us to believe that both incidents involve a specific clan of 
the Quraysh, namely the Banū Nawfal,48 as their instigators. As regards al-Rajīʿ and its most 
dramatic occurrence, viz., Khubayb’s crucifixion, the sources unequivocally state that the 
“rationale for his murder” was his killing al-Ḥārith b. ʿĀmir of Nawfal, an act that prompted 
the latter’s fellow-tribesmen to wreak vengeance upon Khubayb.49 Akin to this situation 
are the circumstances surrounding the Muslims’ massacre at Biʾr Maʿūna. Here, we have 
again an implacable opponent of Islam from Nawfal, Ṭuʿayma b. ʿAdī, whom Muslims kill at 
Badr. This induces his kinsmen, his maternal uncle (Anas b. ʿAbbās al-Sulamī) in particular, 
to exact revenge on the Muslims by launching an onslaught against the members of Biʾr 
Maʿūna.50 The tradition’s claim concerning the Banū Nawfal having been culpable in the 
two allegedly simultaneous tragedies is not impossible, but there are hints that what is 
at work here is not a reoccurrence of a similar situation in two separate incidents, but a 
literary topos tout court. Although it is the very “logic behind the plot of Khubayb’s death 
and the cruelty of his executioner,”51 the attribution of al-Ḥārith b. ʿĀmir’s murder to 
Khubayb b. ʿAdī is wholly at odds with the maghāzī scholars’ consensus that the latter was 
not present at Badr, and that it was another Khubayb, the son of Īsāf, who was responsible 
for al-Ḥārith b. ʿĀmir’s murder.52 As Arafat has convincingly argued, Khubayb b. ʿAdī is a 
historically obscure figure with a murky background whom Ibn Saʿd does not even deem 
worthy of an entry in his biographical compendium.53 The sīra’s Khubayb b. ʿAdī is, in fact, 
more of a mythical hero than a historical character. If he is not remembered, as seems 
entirely credible, as performing a role in the expedition of Badr, the Banū Nawfal’s supposed 
retaliatory actions at al-Rajīʿ and their complicity in killing Khubayb would then become a 
dubious motivation in the al-Rajīʿ story, which merely serves to promote Khubayb to the 
stature of a renowned warrior and to impart more drama into his anecdote.54

48.  Banū Nawfal was a clan of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh. According to the classic Islamic genealogies, 
Nawfal was the brother of Hāshim, the Prophet’s great-grandfather. Despite this family link, Banū Nawfal 
was reportedly present in the Quraysh’s anti-Islamic measures, including the boycott of Banū Hāshim. See W. 
Montgomery Watt, “Nawfal,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009).

49.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 35. 
50.  See Kister, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” 350–4; Michael Lecker, The Banū Sulaym: A Contribution to the Study of Early 

Islam (Jerusalem: Institute of Asian and African Studies, 1989), 174.
51.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 35.
52.  See Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 20; Anthony, Crucifixion, 35; Nicolet Boekhoff-van 

der Voort, “The Raid of the Banū Hudhayl: Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī’s Version of the Event,” in Analyzing Muslim 
Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī Ḥadīth, ed. H. Motzki et al., 305–83 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 367. 

53.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 19.
54.  Nawfal’s supposed role in al-Rajīʿ has been accepted as historical in Kister, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” 356. 



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8. The Chronology of the Massacres

The “lateness and artificiality”55 that runs through the entire sīra’s chronology seems 
also to frustrate any attempt at the precise dating of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna raids. 
But the dates of these events are of interest to us from a historiographical perspective, as 
they give us an idea, tentative as it may be, of the kind of concerns and criteria based on 
which the chronology of the Prophet’s maghāzī came to be standardized by the medieval 
sīra scholars.56 The al-Rajīʿ incident is explicitly stated by al-Wāqidī to have taken place in 
Ṣafar of 4/625, but there are competing accounts at play. Khubayb was reportedly brought 
to Mecca in the sacred month of Dhū al-Qaʿda 4/625 and was crucified when the sanctified 
months had passed, which means that his incarceration lasted no longer than a couple of 
months. The Liḥyān expedition, a retaliatory raid purportedly launched by the Prophet 
himself to take vengeance for the martyrs of al-Rajīʿ, is dated to 6/627. The account of 
this incident claims, however, that Khubayb was still imprisoned in Mecca at the time 
of this sariyya, adding that when the Prophet arrived at al-Ghamīm, the Quraysh said 
that “Muḥammad only came to al-Ghamīm to get Khubayb.”57 According to al-Wāqidī, the 
Liḥyānīs’ onslaught on the members of al-Rajīʿ was itself a punitive measure due to fact 
that a Companion of the Prophet had assassinated the chief of Liḥyān, Sufyān b. Khālid. 
Al-Wāqidī conflictingly assigns Sufyān’s murder to fifty-four months AH, while he himself 
places al-Rajīʿ at thirty-six months AH.58 The chronology of al-Rajīʿ, as can be seen, is 
anything but apparent, though amidst this chronological mess one date was of obvious 
appeal for the sīra scholars: the assertion that Muḥammad got the news of both events 
on the same night (fī layla wāḥida).59 In line with this claim are a number of reports that 
the Prophet cursed the Liḥyān together with the Sulaym. The account of the Prophet’s 
curse on the Muḍar and the Sulaym is a well-known episode of the Biʾr Maʿūna story.60  
That some, though not certainly all, of our reports include the Liḥyān in the tribes cursed 
by the Prophet signifies later attempts to show the simultaneity of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna. 

55.  Shoemaker, “In Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra,” 261. See also Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die ältesten 
Berichte über das Leben Muḥammads: das Korpus ʿUrwa ibn Az-Zubair (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2009), 
291–2; Pavel Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” in Routledge Handbook on Early Islam, ed. H. Berg, 66–78 (New York: 
Routledge, 2017), 76.

56.  See, in this respect, J. M. B. Jones, “The Chronology of the Maghāzī: A Textual Survey,” Bulletin of 
the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 2 (1957): 245–80, at 258–9; Rizwi Faizer, “Muhammad and 
the Medinan Jews: A Comparison of the Texts of Ibn Ishaq’s Kitāb Sīrat Rasūl Allāh with al-Waqidi’s Kitāb 
al-Maghāzī,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 463–89, at 471.

57.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 2:263. See Jones, “The Chronology of the Maghāzī,” 276, where he 
astutely observes that the Liḥyān expedition’s account is nothing but “a curious patchwork of themes.” 

58.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:354 and 2:531. 
59.  al-Wāqid, al-Maghāzī, 1:360, appears to be the sole early attestation of this claim which has subsequently 

been repeated in later sources; see al-Samarqandī, Tafsīr, ed. ʿUmar ʿAmrī (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1416 AH), 3:424; 
Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 2:40.

60.  See Meir Jacob Kister, “O God, Tighten Thy Grip on Muḍar,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of 
the Orient 24, no. 3 (1981): 242–73; Uri Rubin, “Muhammad’s Curse of Muḍar and the Blockade of Mecca,” Journal 
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31, no. 3 (1988): 249–64.



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This artificial synchronization, preferred by al-Wāqidī, appears to be yet another attempt 
by the traditionists to make the al-Rajīʿ incident all the more analogous to the massacre 
of Biʾr Maʿūna, to assign to the martyrs of each expedition an equal share of the Prophet’s 
grief, and finally, to render the overall picture all the more poignant and dramatic. 

The above comparative assessment of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna’s accounts has crucial 
implications. The virtually identical narrative lines, the analogous circumstantial details, 
and the correspondences in the wording of the two stories can hardly be regarded, even 
by the most credulous readers, as mere coincidences. It is by no means tenable that an 
entirely similar catastrophe happened to concurrently dispatched “holy bands” and that 
the Prophet received the news of both massacres on the same night. Be that as it may, 
it is worth attempting to delve deeper into the process of, and the impetus behind, the 
formation of the parallelism in these accounts, for the light it sheds on the Sitz im Leben 
of the Prophet’s traditional biography, and on the way in which our literary sources are to 
be treated. Before proceeding to the historical background of these stories, however, it is 
necessary to deal with the marked resemblance that one of the aforesaid stories, al-Rajīʿ, 
bears to the accounts of certain rebellious movements of the Umayyad caliphate.

Parallels between the al-Rajīʿ Massacre and Umayyad-era Movements

For no other figure involved in the al-Rajīʿ incident do we have such a great bulk of faḍāʾil 
accounts as we do for Khubayb b. ʿAdī.61 Nonetheless, the traditions about his virtues and 
sufferings, as Arafat observes, are of a legendary character, consisting as they do of a series 
of pious attempts at “virtually canonizing Khubayb.”62 What deserves closer inspection in 
this respect is the fact that Khubayb’s maudlin tale is a mélange of hagiographic motifs 
that are not specific to his story but are also deployed broadly elsewhere, for example 
in the accounts of the insurrections and tribulations of Umayyad-era rebels, including  
(but not limited to) such (pro-)ʿAlid figures as Ḥujr b. ʿAdī, al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī, and Zayd b. ʿAlī 
b. al-Ḥusayn. These similarities have not gone entirely unnoticed in previous scholarship, 
receiving passing mention in the works, for instance, of Arafat and Keshk.63 However, the 
analogies made therein are not exhaustive.64 Arafat draws attention to only one parallel 
between the Khubayb and al-Ḥusayn stories, while Keshk offers a brief comparison of the 
analogous episodes in the accounts of Khubayb and Ḥujr b. ʿAdī; neither scholar mentions 
the other motifs shared by Khubayb’s martyrology and certain accounts related to various 
politico-religious dissidents during the Umayyad caliphate. We need thus to draw a more 
 
 

61.  Cf. Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 18; Anthony, Crucifixion, 37. ʿĀṣim b. Thābit 
occupies the second place.

62.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 19. 
63.  Ibid., 23; Khaled Keshk, “The Historiography of an Execution: The Killing of Ḥujr b. ʿAdī,” Journal of 

Islamic Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 1–35, at 12–13.
64.  This is despite the fact that both articles present insightful hints concerning the motifs that Khubayb’s 

story share with the accounts of the (pro-)ʿAlid revolts.



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comprehensive comparison between these narratives. This is undertaken in the remainder 
of this section.

1. The Final Prayer of the Martyr

The first noteworthy parallel is found in the episode of Khubayb’s imprisonment, 
where his story betrays apparent correspondences with that of Ḥujr b. ʿAdī. Ḥujr, a fervent 
partisan of the fourth caliph, ʿAlī, is renowned for having fomented an insurrection against 
Muʿāwiya. The rebellion proved ill-fated and was quelled by Muʿāwiya’s governor in Kufa, 
Ziyād b. Abīhi, who subsequently sent Ḥujr and his adherents to Marj ʿAdhrāʾ, where, 
after a period of incarceration, Ḥujr was sentenced to death.65 Khubayb and Ḥujr are thus 
alike in being held in captivity for a short period, at the end of which they are executed. 
A more significant similarity, touched upon by Donner and discussed at more length by 
Keshk, appears in the moment of the protagonists’ execution, when they both seek solace 
in praying to God, asking the executioner to allow them to pray two rakʿas.66 The parallel 
becomes all the more overt when, taking into account that “Ḥujr’s words to his executioners 
[are] exactly the same as those of Khubayb,” both hurriedly finish the prayer and say: “Were 
it not that they might think I was afraid, I would have taken more time with them [i.e., the 
two rakʿas of prayer].”67 Keshk seems to have taken it as axiomatic that the hagiographical 
elaboration of Ḥujr’s account has its roots in Khubayb’s martyrology,68 but, as we shall argue 
later, the nature of Khubayb’s story does not permit one to make such firm assertions. 
Anyhow, whether Khubayb’s story inspired or was inspired by Ḥujr’s, there is no doubt 
about the existence of sectarian rivalries at the turn of the first Islamic century, mirrored in 
the identification of the first person to pray two rakʿas before martyrdom (rakʿatayn ʿinda 
al-qatl).69 And it is interesting to note that the traditionist Ibn Sīrīn (d. 110/728), in a blatant 
act of reconciliation, contends that these two rakʿas were prayed by Khubayb and Ḥujr 
(ṣallāhumā Khubayb wa-Ḥujr wa-humā fāḍilān).70

2. The Performance of Miracles during the Imprisonment

Khubayb’s preternatural qualities are redolent of the miracles our sources allot to Ḥujr. 
While in captivity in the house of a woman called Māwiyya, Khubayb is once seen by her 

65.  Gerald R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661–750 (London: Routledge, 
2002), 41; Andrew Marsham, “Public Execution in the Umayyad Period: Early Islamic Punitive Practice and Its 
Late Antique Context,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 11 (2011): 101–36, at 128.

66.  Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 271; Keshk, “The Historiography of an Execution,” 12–13. 
67.  Ibid. 
68.  Ibid., 13.
69.  See Ibn Abī Shayba, al-Muṣannaf, ed. Saʿīd al-Laḥḥām (Beirut: n.p., 1409 AH), 8:340; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj 

al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. Asʿad Dāghir (Qumm: Dār al-Hijra, 1409 AH), 3:3; Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿāb 
fī maʿrifat al-aṣḥāb, ed. Muḥammad al-Bajāwī (Beirut, 1992), 2:441; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 2:43. 

70.  Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab fī taʾrīkh Ḥalab, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1988), 5:2111; 
Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Thaqafī, al-Ghārāt, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Ḥusaynī Urmawī (Tehran: Anjuman-i Athār-i Mellī, 
1353 AH), 2:814.



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“with a bunch of grapes in his hand as big as a man’s head from which he was eating.”  
“I did not know,” says the astonished Māwiyya, “that there were grapes on God’s earth 
that could be eaten (at that time).”71 On the day of his execution, Khubayb is reported to 
have asked Māwiyya to lend him a razor to cleanse himself before death (ataṭahharu bihā 
li-l-qatl).72 She sends her son to give Khubayb the razor but suddenly gets apprehensive 
lest Khubayb kill her son in revenge. She hastens towards them and finds the boy sitting 
on the prisoner’s thigh. Khubayb lets the lad go, however, assuring the woman that “in his 
religion, treachery is not lawful.”73 The tradition tends likewise to exalt the imprisoned Ḥujr 
by recounting his deeds of piety. Khubayb and Ḥujr do not merely resemble one another 
in their being depicted as paragons of virtue, but also in regard to “purification” (ṭahāra) 
as a key element in the glorifying traditions woven around these early Islamic martyrs.74  
During his imprisonment, we read, Ḥujr becomes ritually impure. He asks his jailer to 
give him his ration of drinking water to perform ghusl (the ritual ablution) (aʿṭinī sharābī 
ataṭahharu bihā). The latter refuses, saying: “I fear you might perish from thirst, and then 
Muʿāwiya would kill me.” Ḥujr then prays to God, and He sends forth a rain cloud, providing 
Ḥujr with the water he needs for the ghusl.

Aside from the common episodes centered upon the notion of ṭahāra in the narratives 
of Khubayb and Ḥujr’s incarceration, the miracle-working character of Khubayb also bears 
strong parallels to the protagonists of certain stories outside the corpus of Shīʿī martyrology. 
Similar to Khubayb’s case, an imprisoned person eating of heavenly sustenance occurs 
in accounts about the messianic claimant of Marwānīd Syria known as the Shepherd 
(al-rāʿī), who initiated “a movement among Syro-Mesopotamian Jewry during the caliphate 
of Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik.”75 The life and career of the Shepherd has recently been 
subject to an in-depth examination by Sean Anthony, which he conducted using, among 
other sources, a report of the no longer extant Kitāb al-Maqālāt of Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq (d. 
after 249/864), preserved in Bayān al-adyān, a Persian heresiography authored by Abū 
al-Maʿālī al-ʿAlawī (writing ca. 485/1092). Amongst the miracles ascribed to the Shepherd, 
we read that after he was thrown in Damascus’ prison (ū rā dar Damishq be zendān 
kardand), “every day there would fall near him sustenance” (har rūz be nazdīk-e ū khūrdanī  
yāftand).76 This is a reflection, as Anthony notes, of “a similar miracle attributed to the  

71.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 428; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:175.
72.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:172. 
73.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:175.
74.  On Khubayb remaining in the “state of purity” till his martyrdom, see David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.
75.  Sean W. Anthony, “Who Was the Shepherd of Damascus? The Enigma of Jewish-Messianist Responses 

to the Islamic Conquests in Umayyad Syria and Mesopotamia,” in The Lineaments of Islam: Studies in Honor 
of Fred McGraw Donner, ed. P. Cobb, 21–59 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 21. On Khubayb and the shepherd eating from 
“sustenance of an unknown origin,” see ibid., 29.

76.  Abū al-Maʿālī al-ʿAlawī, Bayān al-adyān, ed. ʿAbbās Iqbāl Āshtiyānī, Muḥammad Taqī Dāneshpazhūh, 
and Muḥammad Dabīr Siyāqī (Tehran: Enteshārāt-e Rūzana, 1997), 75. The translation is quoted from Anthony, 
“Who Was the Shepherd of Damascus?,” 27.



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Qurʾānic Mary,”77 which has likewise been assigned to the Syrian pseudo-prophet of ʿAbd 
al-Malik b. Marwān’s caliphate, al-Ḥārith b. Saʿīd.78

3. Echoes of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī’s Martyrology in the Story of Khubayb

In an illuminating case of detection, Arafat noticed a similar poetic composition found in 
Khubayb and al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī’s martyrological tradition. Castigating Khubayb’s murderers 
for their nefarious deeds, the poet asks: “What would you say if the Prophet speaks to you 
when the loyal angels are in the horizon?”79 An analogous poem, preserved by al-Ṭabarī, 
was reportedly recited by a Hāshimī woman after al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom, on the occasion 
of his family’s arrival in Medina. “What would you say if the Prophet says to you,” the 
woman asks, “‘What have you done – you who are the last of peoples – with my relations 
and my family, after my death?’ Among them are captives and bloodstained dead.”80 Both 
excerpts of poetry are instances of censure directed against evildoers, reminding them of 
their tremendous guilt and the turmoil of the Day of Judgment in which the Prophet is 
to ask them about their wrongdoings. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the former 
poem’s first hemistich (i.e., mādhā taqūlūna in qāla al-nabī lakum) is a verbatim repetition 
of the latter. As shown by Arafat, the first poem exhibits flagrant signs of late origin and 
secondary status, foremost among which is the verse’s insinuation that, unlike the actual 
circumstances at the time of the al-Rajīʿ raid, the Prophet is dead and has to interrogate 
the executioners about their villainous acts only on the Day of Judgment.81 One may assume 
that the incongruity in the verse stems from the poet being inspired by the material at his 
disposal on al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom, which was composed years after the Prophet’s death. 

There is further evidence, which has gone unmentioned by Arafat, that substantiates his 
shrewd, though passing, remark on the existence of shared motifs in Khubayb’s story and 
the Shīʿī martyrological heritage. Al-Ṭabarī reports, on the authority of Jābir al-Juʿfī, that in 
his final moments, al-Ḥusayn approaches the Euphrates River to quench his intense thirst, 
but, all of a sudden, he is struck by the enemy’s arrow and blood gushes out from his mouth. 
He then raises his hands, beseeches God to bring down wrath upon his adversaries, and 
says: “O God! Count their number, kill them one by one, and do not let one of them remain 
on the earth” (Allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan wa-uqtulhum badadan wa-lā tadhar ʿalā al-arḍ 
minhum aḥadan).82 The last words supposed to have been uttered by Khubayb are almost 
identical with al-Ḥusayn’s prayer. He says: “O God! Count their number, kill them one by 
one, and let none of them escape” (Allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan wa-uqtulhum badadan 

77.  Ibid. 29.
78.  S. W. Anthony, “The Prophecy and Passion of al-Ḥāriṯ ibn Saʿīd al-Kaḏḏāb: Narrating a Religious 

Movement from the Caliphate of ʿAbdalmalik ibn Marwān,” Arabica 57 (2010): 1–29, at 1.
79.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 22. See the verse in Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:177. 
80.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 23. The poem is to be found in al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 

ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm (Beirut: Dār al-Turāth, 1967), 5:467; al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:221; 
al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 3:68.

81.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 23. 
82.  al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:201; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 5:449; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:470.



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wa-lā tughādir minhum aḥadan).83 The similarities between these invocations of divine 
retribution are very striking, but there is more to the curses of Khubayb and al-Ḥusayn.  
The sources relate in vivid detail the fates of the bystanders in the al-Rajīʿ and Karbalāʾ 
incidents, on whom divine punishment is said to have been inflicted. Muʿāwiya b. Abī 
Sufyān, who was allegedly present at Khubayb’s crucifixion, is said to have been thrown 
on the ground by his father from fear of Khubayb’s curse (daʿwat Khubayb). Abū Sufyān 
believed, we are told, “if a man is cursed and is thrown to one side, the curse will pass over 
him.”84 Having attended Khubayb’s execution, Saʿīd b. ʿĀmir al-Jumaḥī, governor of Ḥimṣ 
under the second caliph, is reported to have had a fainting spell whenever he remembered 
the martyr’s tragic death.85 No less than seven individuals are mentioned by name in 
al-Wāqidī’s account as either fearfully fleeing or concealing themselves somewhere in fear 
of Khubayb’s curse, one of whom says: “By God, I did not think that Khubayb’s prayer would 
miss any one of them (the Meccans),”86 (mā ẓanantu an tughādira daʿwat Khubayb minhum 
aḥadan). As regards al-Ḥusayn, there is similarly an impressive number of individuals who 
are said to have perished in fulfillment of al-Ḥusayn’s curse.87 He is reported as cautioning 
ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥurr that “By God, those who hear our wailing (wāʿiya) and do not 
help us will perish.”88 Elsewhere al-Ḥusayn is quoted as exhorting some of his entourage,  
“Leave here lest you hear my wailing (wāʿiya), for he who hears our wailing without 
answering and helping us will be thrown into the fire.”89 One may then speak of a parallelism 
in the sources, that of wāʿiyat al-Ḥusayn vis-à-vis daʿwat Khubayb. And it is significant that 
hearing the martyr’s curse, in both cases, would be accompanied by evil consequences for 
passive bystanders.90 

4. The Crucifixion Episode 

One recognizes in the climax of Khubayb’s lachrymose narrative, the crucifixion episode, 
some motifs that are by no means characteristic of his story, but also occur elsewhere, for 

83.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:173; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:359; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Maghāzī, 62; al-Bukhārī, 
Ṣaḥīḥ (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1981), 5:12; Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 2:294; Boekhoff-van der Voort, “The Raid of the Banū 
Hudhayl,” 362.

84.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 428. Also see al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:359.
85.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:173–4; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:359–60. 
86.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:175.
87.  On al-Ḥusayn’s curses see, for instance, al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 5:45; Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Maqātil 

al-ṭālibiyyīn, ed. Aḥmad Ṣaqr (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 117.
88.  al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 5:407. 
89.  al-Ṭūsī, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl (Rijāl al-Kishshī), ed. Ḥasan Muṣṭafawī (Mashhad: 

Mashhad University Press, 1409 AH), 114. A similar tradition is found in Ibn Bābawayh, al-Amālī (Tehran: 
Ketābchī, 1376 AH), 137. 

90.  Admittedly, the notion of the duʿāʾ maẓlūm (“the call of the oppressed”) is a general martyrological 
theme (Cook, Martyrdom, 22) and cannot be linked exclusively to Khubayb and al-Ḥusayn. However, the fact 
that the curses of these martyrs (Allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan …) are almost identical in diction signifies a 
stronger connection between these stories than the mere utilization of the theme of al-duʿāʾ al-maẓlūm.



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example in the crucifixion account of the renowned Shīʿī rebel, Zayd b. ʿAlī (d. 122/740).91 
The latter is said to have been crucified facing the direction of the Euphrates. The next 
morning, however, his cross (khashabatahu) was reportedly found facing toward the qibla, 
and this event occurred several times (mirāran).92 In a similar vein, the qibla’s direction is a 
prominent element in the narrative of Khubayb’s crucifixion, which has it that the Meccan 
polytheists directed the crucified Khubayb towards “where he came from” (min ḥaythu 
jāʾa). He then said, “Regarding your turning my face away from the qibla (ammā ṣarfukum 
wajhī ʿan al-qibla), indeed God says: Wherever you turn is God.”93 According to a rival 
account, the Meccans faced him in a direction other than the qibla, but his body turned 
miraculously towards the qibla, and this was to happen several times (mirāran) until they 
let him remain in the direction of the qibla.94 

As observed by Anthony, the “miraculous shift of the cross” bearing a martyr is similarly 
attested in Armenian accounts of the martyrdom of David of Dwin (d. 703/705), whom 
the Umayyads crucified.95 David was a former Muslim soldier by the name of Surhān who 
“apostatized” upon his arrival at Armenia and became a Christian. His cross is reported 
to have been “raised facing south,” or, as Anthony and Sahner plausibly posit, toward 
the qibla.96 As David’s Vita puts it,97 “the cross, which was facing south, turned to the east 
(viz., the Christian direction of prayer). This miraculous sign was shown to the believers 
and unbelievers, so that the power of Christ might be manifest.”98 The miraculous turn of 
the martyr’s corpse is then a topos functioning as a proof for the supremacy of the creed 
for which the martyr lays down his life, and as such, it could – and did – readily appear in 
different martyrological traditions.

The attempt by the martyr’s fellow rebels or co-religionists to take down his body is 
another oft-repeated motif in different crucifixion accounts. The crucifixion site in the 
martyrological accounts of Khubayb and Zayd is reported as having been guarded by a 
number of men in order to thwart the people from taking the martyr’s crucified corpse 

91.  Zayd, the great-grandson of the fourth caliph, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, led an insurrection against the Umayyad 
caliphate that gave rise to the formation of the Zaydiyya sect. His revolt broke out during the caliphate of 
Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik and was crushed by the governor of Iraq, Yūsuf b. ʿUmar al-Thaqafī. Zayd’s decapitated 
body remained crucified in the kunāsa of Kufa for six years, Wilfred Madelung, “Zayd b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn,” 
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009); Anthony, Crucifixion, 46–51.

92.  Ibn ʿ Asākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 19:479; Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab, 9:4050; Anthony, Crucifixion, 
48.

93.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:176.
94.  See Ibn Ḥajar, al-Iṣāba, 2:227, who quotes ʿAbd al-Dāʾim b. al-Marzūq al-Qayrawānī (d. after 467/1074).
95.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 59. Anthony detects the appearance of this motif in the martyrologies of David and 

Zayd, but does not refer to the similar episode in Khubayb’s story. 
96.  Ibid.; Christian C. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the 

Muslim World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 250.
97.  The Life of David, or the so-called Passion of David of Dwin, was written “shortly after the martyr’s 

death” in 703/705 (ibid., 93). David’s story features also in the Armenian history written by John Catholicos (d. 
ca. 925). On David and his Vita, see Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of 
Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2002), 370–3. 

98.  Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 676.



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down from the cross. ʿAmr b. Umayya al-Ḍamrī is said to have tried, though eventually 
in vain, to take down the body of Khubayb, whose khashaba was surrounded by guards 
watching over him (ḥawluhu ḥaras yaḥrusūnahu).99 Zayd’s body is likewise reported to 
have been kept under surveillance (ʿalayhi ḥaras yaḥrusūnahu) lest his body be stolen. 
Like ʿAmr b. Umayya, Dāwūd b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbbās allegedly attempts to take down 
Zayd’s corpse, but he is ultimately forced to withdraw due to the intervention of the Kufan 
governor’s forces (khayl).100 

To conclude, Khubayb’s narratives are comprised of a general body of hagiographic 
motifs that not only appear elsewhere in the Islamic (including the Shīʿī) tradition, but 
feature in the Christian martyrologies as well. It goes without saying that this kind of 
material is sorely problematic for the purpose of positivist historical enquiry.

Beneath the Surface of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Narratives: Classic Form Criticism 

The point-for-point correspondence between certain episodes of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr 
Maʿūna stories, and the former’s considerable similarities with the reports of Umayyad-era 
insurrections, undoubtedly demand an explanation other than chance. The immediate 
question arising is which individual or faction could be responsible for putting these stories 
in circulation and what the motivation was behind the literary borrowing between these 
stories. 

Shared Episodes in the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Accounts: Literary Form and Life-Setting 

A fundamental step in Formkritik is to determine our narratives’ form.101 The al-Rajīʿ and 
Biʾr Maʿūna stories attained significance and popularity as they mirrored the norms and 
concerns of the community in which they were generated. To appropriately determine the 
narratives’ form would, therefore, be a useful guide to our tales’ life-setting.102 As shown 
by Wansbrough, the sīra nabawiyya encompasses some of Andre Jolles’ “simple forms” 
(einfache Formen), each of which is characterized by a specific “mental disposition”103 
(Geistesbeschäftigung) and “verbal gesture” (Sprachgebärde).104 To take two pertinent 
examples: The “legend” (Legende) reflects the need for heroic ideals and models, with its 
mental disposition being imitatio (emulation of shining moral and spiritual examples), 
and its verbal gesture being the typical constituents of saints’ Vitae, for example, 
torture instruments, a heavenly voice, etc. Another form, “saga” (Sage), is the result of a 
 

99.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:170; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:544; al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:336.
100.  al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:234, 256; Akhbār al-dawla al-ʿAbbāsiyya, ed. A. A. Duri and ʿ Abd al-Jabbār 

al-Muṭṭalibī (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1391 AH), 232. Notably, the crucified body of Mītham al-Tammār (the date 
seller) is said to have been stolen and subsequently buried by his fellow date sellers (Anthony, Crucifixion, 55).

101.  George W. Coats, “Genres: Why Should They Be Important for Exegesis,” in Saga, Legend, Tale, Novella, 
Fable: Narrative Forms in Old Testament Literature, ed. George W. Coats, 7–15 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 9.

102.  Graves, “Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus,” 56.
103.  Or “motive” in Wansbrough’s rendering (idem, The Sectarian Milieu, 33).
104.  Ibid., 4; Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” 69.



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preoccupation with family, tribe, and blood kinship, with its characteristic Sprachgebärde 
being, for instance, the issue of inheritance.105 

However, classifying a narrative under such common generic taxonomies is not always 
a straightforward practice. Aside from the morphological criteria, there are subtler factors 
that must likewise be taken into consideration (of particular significance among which is 
the abovementioned Geistesbeschäftigung).106 The task becomes all the more challenging in 
the discipline of Islamic historiography, where the character of the sīra’s Sitz has brought 
about a situation in which the genres are not always neatly demarcated.107 Thus, we see 
that a not insignificant portion of the miracles (the distinguishing feature of Legende in 
Jolles’ definition) are recounted with the purpose of promoting familial and/or tribal glory.  
This holds true for both the miracles performed by the Prophet to show a Companion’s 
merits and the miracles performed by the Companions themselves. Naturally, such faḍāʾil 
tales are quite often replete with episodes featuring “the abolition of the boundary between 
the supernatural and the natural,”108 and they fully adopt the verbal gesture of Legende, 
but in doing so the mental disposition of imitatio is either absent or very tenuous. Rather, 
Geistesbeschäftigung of clan and consanguinity remains dominant in many of these 
faḍāʾil materials.109 The sīra’s “extensive use of the basic form of the saga,”110 along with 
the frequent occurrence of “family accounts” in the Prophet’s biography,111 have been 
stressed in previous scholarship. And this is the very point of which we should not lose 
sight when we want to categorize the sīra’s reports (including the ones having supernatural 
sub-narratives) under the customary typology of narrative forms.

Tellingly, the accounts of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna expeditions gravitate also toward 
Sage, these narratives’ inclusion of miraculous scenes and virtue materials notwithstanding. 
As we shall see, both internal and external evidence testifies that the issue of family and 

105.  See André Jolles, Simple Forms, trans. Peter J. Schwartz (London: Verso, 2017), 19–67. On Legende see 
also Edgar V. McKnight, What is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1969), 24.

106.  John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20, at 1–2; 
Rolf Knierim, “Review of The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-Critical Method, by Klaus Koch,” 
Interpretation 24 (1970): 243–8, at 247; Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition, 151; Sweeney, “Form Criticism: 
The Question of the Endangered Matriarchs,” 22. Also, see in this regard, Martin J. Buss, Biblical Form Criticism 
in its Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 15–16.

107.  On the “overlapping, or intersecting genres” in the Islamic literary tradition, see Nancy Khalek, “‘He 
Was Tall and Slender and His Virtues Were Numerous:’ Byzantine Hagiographical Topoi and the Companions of 
Muhammad in Al-Azdī’s Futūḥ al-Shām,” in Writing “True Stories:” Historians and Hagiographers in the Late 
Antique and Medieval Near East, ed. A. Papaconstantinou, M. Debié, and H. Kennedy, 105–23 (Turnhout: Brepols, 
2010), 110.

108.  Dan Ben-Amos, Narrative Forms in the Haggadah: Structural Analysis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana 
University, 1967), 87. Also cited in Anthony J. Saldarini, “‘Form Criticism’ of Rabbinic Literature,” Journal of 
Biblical Literature 96, no. 2 (1977): 257–74, at 270–1.

109.  See Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore,” 435–9.
110.  Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 33; Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” 71. 
111.  Michael Lecker, “The Assassination of the Jewish Merchant Ibn Sunayna According to an Authentic 

Family Account,” in The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald 
Motzki, ed. N. Boekhoff-van der Voort, K. Versteegh, and J. Wagemakers, 181–96 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).



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tribe was integral in relaying the pious deeds of these stories’ martyr-Companions, whose 
heroic feats were invoked, years after their death, by their offspring during the polemically 
charged tribal mufākharas in the squares of Medina. Let us start with the hints within the 
text itself. As is the case with a sizable fraction of the sīra, the detailed tribal affiliations of 
our narratives’ dramatis personae are introduced at the outset of the tales. It is possible, 
therefore, to see Khubayb and ʿĀṣim b. Thābit’s episodes, for example, as Khubayb and 
ʿĀṣim’s Sagen. There is nonetheless more to it than that. The explicit references to the 
matter of tribe and consanguinity are palpable enough in our reports that they do not 
escape the notice of even a half-acquainted modern reader (as opposed to the first-century 
Medinan audiences, who deeply breathed the atmosphere of a tribally segmented society). 
Thus, in an episode of the Biʾr Maʿūna account, Anas b. Mālik narrates the laudable Sage 
of his uncle (khāl), Ḥarām b. Milḥān, and elsewhere there are ample clues in the story 
that render it a Sage of the larger tribal group of Anṣār (known also as “Sons of Qayla”).112  
We shall now turn to the historical evidence on our stories’ Sitz that argues in favor of their 
identification as Sage. 

As Juynboll has demonstrated, “most traditions brought into circulation by certain 
traditionists in early Islam prompted contemporary or later traditionists, who were the 
adherents or, the case so being, adversaries of the former, to proliferate their own, more or 
less closely related, traditions.”113 As regards the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna narratives, real-life 
tribal rivalries have gone hand in hand with the proliferation of faḍāʾil motifs in the domain 
of historiography. What we have here, as will be argued, is a case of back-projection into 
the Prophet’s history of faḍāʾil traditions by members of the Aws (more precisely, the ʿAmr 
b. ʿAwf subdivision) and the Khazraj (more specifically, the Banū Najjār branch) to bolster 
their claim of superiority in the formative period of Islam.114 

Members of the Aws and the Khazraj tribes constituted, as Arafat has observed, the 
majority amongst the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna expeditions, respectively.115 The most famous 
martyrs of al-Rajīʿ, i.e., Khubayb and ʿĀṣim b. Thābit, upon whose characters the sources’ 
glorifying traditions almost exclusively centered, belonged to ʿAmr b. ʿAwf.116 Similarly, as a 

112.  See below in this section.
113.  Juynboll, “Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj,” 193.
114.  The Aws and the Khazraj were two major Medinan tribal groups that were called Banū Qayla (after 

their eponymous mother) in pre-Islamic times, but were designated as the Anṣār (“the helpers”) following 
Muḥammad’s immigration to Medina. On the Aws’ and the Khazraj’s subdivisions, see Watt, Muhammad at 
Medina, 154; Michael Lecker, Muslims, Jews, and Pagans: Studies on Early Islamic Medina (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 
5, 7. 

115.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 16, 28. Arafat, however, generally speaks of the 
preponderance of the Aws and the Khazraj in these expeditions and does not refer specifically to Najjār and 
ʿAmr b. ʿAwf. Moreover, he asserts that “the group [sent to al-Rajīʿ] included none from the Khazraj,” which is at 
odds with the traditional material, for only one member of the Khazraj, i.e., Zayd b. al-Dathinna, was reportedly 
among the participants of this expedition. On him, see Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:170; Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿāb, 
2:553; Ibn Ḥazm, Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1983), 375. 

116.  The great reverence shown by the tradition towards ʿĀṣim b. Thābit likely has much to do with his 
family relations with prominent political figures. He was the maternal uncle of ʿĀṣim b. ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and 
the latter was the maternal ancestor of the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Ibn al-Athīr, Usd al-ghāba, 



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glance at the biographical sources reveals, the members of the Banū Najjār were noticeably 
more numerous amongst the participants in the Biʾr Maʿūna raid.117 It has been reported 
that: “For no other Companions of his did the Prophet lament as he did for the people 
of Biʾr Maʿūna (aṣḥāb Biʾr Maʿūna).”118 The pronounced pro-Najjārī/Khazrajī tendency of 
this tradition comes to light when one takes into account the overwhelming numerical 
preponderance of the Najjār (and the Khazraj in general) at the day of Biʾr Maʿūna. 
Moreover, of the Companions whose alleged great exploits are recounted in the reports of 
Biʾr Maʿūna, two Khazrajīs, namely Ḥarām b. Milḥān (of the Najjār) and al-Mundhir b. ʿAmr 
(of the Sāʿida with maternal kinship with the Najjār119) take centre stage. The virtues of the 
so-called qurrāʾ (reciters) who were slain at Biʾr Maʿūna have been reported in various sīras 
and ḥadīth collections on the authority of Anas b. Mālik, himself a Najjārī, who held these 
qurrāʾ, most particularly his uncle (khāl), Ḥarām b. Milḥān, in great esteem.120 Having been 
raised to the status of saint-like figures, the qurrāʾ are described in the following terms: 

When it was evening they would gather on a side of Medina, studying together and 
praying, until it was dawn. They would gather fresh water and firewood and bring it 
to the rooms of the Messenger of God. Their families thought that they were in the 
mosque, while the people in the mosque thought that they were with their families.121 

The other participant of Biʾr Maʿūna to be highly venerated in the tradition is al-Mundhir 
b. ʿAmr, to whom the Prophet is said to have given the epithet al-muʿniq li-yamūt,  
“The quick to seek death (viz., martyrdom).”122

It should be clear by now that the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf and Banū Najjār played the most active 
part at al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna respectively, or, at any rate, the tradition tended to single 
them out for extravagant praise. We may reasonably assume, therefore, that later tradents 
from these tribes would have incorporated similar faḍāʾil motifs into their al-Rajīʿ and 

3:11; al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 1:428; Ibn Ḥazm, Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 152; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:253; 
Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, 129). ʿĀṣim b. ʿUmar’s mother, Jamīla bt Thābit is reported to 
have divorced ʿUmar and married a man from her own clan (Ḍubayʿa b. Zayd of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf) named Yazīd b. 
Jāriya. ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz seems to have been on good terms with some of his maternal kin from Ḍubayʿa 
b. Zayd, as he appointed ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Yazīd b. Jāriya (i.e., the maternal brother of ʿĀṣim b. ʿUmar) as the 
qāḍī of Medina (Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:62; Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb [Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1984], 
6:267). 

117.  As far as this author was able to count in various biographical compendia, there were fourteen Najjārī 
participants at Biʾr Maʿūna. They can be said to have clearly outnumbered the members of other tribes viz., 
Nabīt of the Aws (with three participants), Sāʿida of the Khazraj (one), Zurayq of the Khazraj (four), ʿAmr b. ʿAwf 
of the Aws (two, including a member and a client), and the Muhājirūn (four). While this reckoning makes no 
claim for exhaustiveness, it sufficiently demonstrates the numerical majority of the Najjār (and also the Khazraj 
in general) in comparison with other tribes at Biʾr Maʿūna.

118.  Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 3:111; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Maghāzī, 110. See also al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:345.
119.  See Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 15. 
120.  Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 3:270; Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Maghāzī, 110; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 3:390; Muslim, 

Ṣaḥīḥ, 6:45.
121.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:169. 
122.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:184; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:348. 



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Biʾr Maʿūna accounts to articulate the notion that their tribal background was no less 
praiseworthy than that of their rivals. Remarkably, the tribally motivated concoction of the 
analogous “virtue” material in the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories is not a mere supposition 
implied by the sources, as there is direct evidence that one of the Companions to whom the 
accounts of these expeditions ascribe spectacular feats and great miracles is in fact the very 
figure whose name is invoked elsewhere in the context of Aws–Khazraj, Anṣār–Quraysh, and 
Muḍar–Yemen,123 disputations and mufākharas, where each tribal entity strives to eulogize 
their ancestors, and in doing so, to substantiate their superior status at the dawn of Islam. 
Undoubtedly, this kind of representation by the traditionists of the past was in line with, 
and hence deeply tinged by, their contemporary needs and concerns. Put another way, one 
of the manifestations of sectarian feuds at the time of the sīra’s collection and compilation 
(the late first and early second centuries of the Islamic era) was the attribution by differing 
factions of extraordinary faḍāʾil to their progenitors and bragging about these alleged 
virtues in the face of the opposing party. Perusal of these mufākhara materials is revealing 
in terms of the elucidation of the true nature of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories. It is 
reported that: 

The Aws and the Khazraj boasted over one another (iftakharat al-Aws wa-l-Khazraj). 
The Aws said, “From us is Ḥanẓala b. Abī ʿĀmir, the one washed by the angels (ghasīl 
al-malāʾika), and from us is the one protected by the wasps (man ḥamathu al-dabr, 
i.e.,ʿĀṣim b. Thābit),124 and from us is the one at whose death the throne shook (Saʿd b. 
Muʿādh) and from us is the one whose testimony was equivalent to the testimonies of 
two men (Khuzayma b. Thābit).” The Khazraj then said, “From us are the four men who 
collected the Qurʾān during the lifetime of the Prophet: Ubayy b. Kaʿb, Muʿādh b. Jabal, 
Zayd b. Thābit, and Abū Zayd.”125 

The symbolic scene of the Aws’ invocation of, among others, ʿĀṣim b. Thābit in front of 
their arch-rivals, the Khazraj, contains a valuable clue as to the significance for the Aws of 
this figure in the context of their rivalries with the Khazraj.126 It is worth highlighting that 

123.  The Islamic genealogists categorize the Arabs as the sons of Ismāʾīl (northerners) and the sons of 
Qaḥṭān (southerners). The latter group was also referred to as al-Yamaniyya (Yemenis). Of the northerners, the 
most prominent subdivision was the progeny of one of Ismāʾīl’s descendants named Muḍar. The Qaysiyya, the 
descendants of Qays, one of Muḍar’s offspring, also received specific attention in the sources, see Patricia Crone, 
“Were the Qays and Yemen of the Umayyad Period Political Parties?” Der Islam 71, no. 1 (1994): 1–57, at 2.

124.  He is reported as saying in his last moments, “O God, I defended your religion from the first light, so 
protect my flesh at the end of the day.” In fulfillment of his aspiration, God sends a swarm of wasps to prevent 
the polytheists from getting access to his body; see al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:174.

125.  This tradition appears with minor variants in al-Ṭabarānī, al-Muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. Ḥamdī ʿAbd al-Majīd 
(Beirut: 1404 AH), 4:10; Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿāb, 1:382; Ibn al-Athīr, Usd al-ghāba, 5:128; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh 
madīnat Dimashq, 16:368.

126.  There is ample evidence that the pre-Islamic Aws-Khazraj feuds endured well into the Islamic period; 
see Hasson, “Contributions à l’étude des Aws et des Ḫazraǧ,” 29–31. See also Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb 
al-Aghānī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, n.d.), 3:29, where the renowned singer of the Umayyad period, 
Ṭuways (d. 92/711), is said to have renewed by his provocative verses the hostilities between the Aws and the 
Khazraj. It is by no means surprising, then, that such a drawn-out conflict would have left its vestiges on the 



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among the Companions mentioned in this tradition, both the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf and Najjār have 
two representatives. ʿĀṣim and Ḥanẓala belonged to the former, and Ubayy b. Kaʿb and Zayd 
b. Thābit were from the latter.127 No doubt, these invocations were intended to resonate 
with, and had a clear meaning for, their contemporary Medinan audiences. 

Some genealogical remarks would be useful here to explicate the tribal interests behind 
the aggrandizement of ʿĀṣim and Ḥanẓala, and also Khubayb. ʿĀṣim b. Thābit belonged to 
the Ḍubayʿa b. Zayd clan of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf. Of the same clan was Ḥanẓala al-Ghasīl, who was 
also ʿĀṣim b. Thābit’s maternal uncle.128 Given the prominence of matrilineal ties in Arabian 
society,129 it is easy to see why the names of ʿĀṣim b. Thābit and Ḥanẓala al-Ghasīl came to 
be so firmly associated with each other in the tradition. The renowned Anṣārī poet of the 
Umayyad period, al-Aḥwaṣ (d. ca. 105/723), who was of ʿĀṣim b. Thābit’s progeny,130 boasts 
in a poem of his “father” (i.e.,ʿĀṣim) “whose flesh the wasps protected” and of his “uncle” 
(khāl) “who was washed by the angels.”131 Tellingly, ʿĀṣim b. Thābit’s wife was of the Banū 
Jaḥjabā, a clan of the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf, of which Khubayb was a member.132 Due to the bonds 
of kinship on both the maternal and paternal side, ʿĀṣim b. Thābit’s offspring had ample 
reason to extol ʿĀṣim and Khubayb, leaving us with an image of saintly martyrs whose 
historical characters have been buried underneath the overlays of pious inventions. 

What renders the hypothesis of the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār rivalry all the more tenable is 
the fact that the parallelism in the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories is not the sole example of 
these tribes’ vying with one another in the realm of literature. There are more instances of 
ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār polemics, including their both claiming one and the same “virtue” for 
their own tribe. The identification of the mosque alluded to in Q 9:108 (“the mosque founded 
upon god-fearing”), as Lecker aptly notes, has provoked considerable controversy amongst 
“the Aws and Khazraj, or perhaps more specifically, the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf and the Najjār.”  
The mosque in question, according to the “Aws/ʿAmr b. ʿAwf claim,” is the Qubāʾ mosque, 
 

historiography of formative Islam. 
127.  On ʿĀṣim and Ḥanẓala’s lineage, see, for example, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿāb, 2:779, and Ibn al-Athīr, 

Usd al-ghāba, 1:543; and on Ubayy and Zayd, see Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿāb, 1:65, and Ibn al-Athīr, Usd al-ghāba, 
2:126. 

128.  See Ibn Ḥazm, Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 333.
129.  On the somewhat undervalued “significance of matrilineal kinship and marital links,” see Asad Q. Ahmed, 

The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Ḥijāz: Five Prosopographical Case Studies (Oxford: Prosopographica et 
Genealogica, 2011), 12–13. See also Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 273, who observes that “the material on which 
we are dependent was written down at a time when the patrilineal system had superseded the matrilineal, and 
that the writers therefore tend to exaggerate the patrilineal features.” 

130.  He was ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿĀṣim b. Thābit; see Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat 
Dimashq, 32:198; al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 4:411; Ibn Qutayba al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarā, 
ed. Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2006), 1:509. On him see also Everett K. Rowson, “The 
Effeminates of Early Medina,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93, at 686–92. 

131.  al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 4:411; al-Bakrī, Muʿjam mā istaʿjam, ed. M. al-Saqqā (Beirut: ʿ Ālam al-Kutub, 
1403 AH), 2:642. 

132.  Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 3:352; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 32:198. On the “closely-knit” clan of 
Banū Jaḥjabā, see Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 162.



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while on the basis of the “Khazraj/Najjār contention” it is none other than “the Mosque of 
the Prophet, which was on Khazrajī soil.” 133 

The roots of the controversy that shrouds the evidence concerning the leadership of the 
Anṣār at the battle of al-Ḥarra must likewise be sought in ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār antagonism. 
It is not coincidental that while certain accounts mention ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥanẓala al-Ghasīl 
 (of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf) as commanding the Anṣār, other reports speak of Muḥammad b. ʿAmr b. 
Ḥazm (of Najjār) as having been the Anṣār’s commander.134 

The final, and perhaps most vivid, exemplification of deep-seated ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār 
rancor lies in the bitter accusation of complicity in the murder of ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān leveled 
by ʿAmr b. ʿAwf against the Najjār. Particularly noteworthy in this respect are the elegies 
on ʿUthmān, allegedly recited by Ḥassān b. Thābit, the famous poet of the Banū Najjār.135 
In one of these poems, he rebukes his own tribe, the Najjār, for their treachery against 
ʿUthmān and expressly lauds the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf for “fulfilling their vow” (awfat Banū ʿAmr 
b. ʿAwf nadhrahā wa-talawwathat ghadran Banū al-Najjār).136 The historical background 
of the poem is of great importance. The reason for Ḥassān praising ʿAmr b. ʿAwf and 
lampooning his own tribe is their supposed role in the circumstances surrounding the 
assassination of the third caliph. During the siege of ʿUthmān, it is reported that al-Zubayr 
sent his client to the caliph to inform him of his loyalty and that of the Banū ʿAmr b. ʿAwf 
towards the caliph, and of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf’s consent to defend ʿUthmān against the besiegers.  
The attackers, however, killed ʿUthmān before the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf arrive.137 The rebels are said 
to have broken the siege and reached the caliph through the house of ʿUthmān’s neighbor, 
ʿAmr b. Ḥazm (of the Najjār).138 In another poem, Ḥassān addresses Zayd b. Thābit, the 
“chief of Banū al-Najjār,” and asks him to protect his people from committing a grievous 
sin (viz., the caliph’s murder).139 Arafat adduces a persuasive body of evidence that calls the 

133.  Lecker, Muslims, Jews, and Pagans, 79. 
134.  As for ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥanẓala, see al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 5:324; al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh (Beirut: 

Dār Ṣādir, n.d.), 2:251; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:49; Gernot Rotter, Die Umayyaden und der Zweite Bürgerkrieg 
(680–692) (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1982), 47. On Muḥammad b. ʿAmr b. Ḥazm, 
see Ibn Ḥibbān, Kitāb al-Thiqāt (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, n.d.), 5:347; Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb 
al-tahdhīb, 9:329. On the contradictory nature of the evidence on the Anṣār’s leadership at the battle of al-Ḥarra, 
see Lecker, Muslims, Jews, and Pagans, 111.

135.  Ḥassān b. Thābit is the most famous of several Companions reputed for their poetic career. While 
traditionally known as Muḥammad’s “poet laureate,” Ḥassān had reportedly attained considerable fame already 
during the Jāhiliyya, composing panegyrics for the Lakhmid and Ghassānid kings. See Walid Arafat, “Ḥassān b. 
Thābit,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009).

136.  Walid Arafat, “The Historical Background to the Elegies on ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān,” Bulletin of the School of 
Oriental and African Studies 33, no.1 (1970): 276–82, at 277; Ḥassān b. Thābit, Dīwān, ed. W. Arafat (London: E. J. 
W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1971), no. CLVII; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 39:542. 

137.  Arafat, “The Historical Background,” 281; Wilfred Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of 
the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 105.

138.  Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh al-Madīna al-munawwara, ed. Fahīm Muḥammad Shaltūt (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1410 
AH), 4:1279; al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 5:591; Arafat, “The Historical Background,” 281; Madelung, The 
Succession, 128, 374. 

139.  Arafat, “The Historical Background,” 277.



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ascription of these poems to Ḥassān into question. According to Arafat, the forger betrays 
his ulterior intentions when he forgets “how illogical it would be for Ḥassān to slander his 
own tribe so viciously on such feeble grounds, to praise an Awsite clan without a very good 
cause.”140 It is almost certain that the panegyric poetry in praise of the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf is not 
recited by the Najjārī Ḥassān, but by a forger from ʿAmr b. ʿAwf, who shows his hand by the 
fulsome admiration he expresses for his own clan. This artificial glorification of the ʿAmr b. 
ʿAwf by Ḥassān is likewise discernable in the narratives of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna, which 
are embellished by a large number of Ḥassān’s tragic elegies on Khubayb, a man of ʿAmr b. 
ʿAwf with no kinship to the poet, but contain only “one line in one poem” in lamentation of 
al-Mundhir b. ʿAmr, a man from the Khazraj who was Ḥassān’s maternal cousin.141 

The true provenance of the elegies on ʿUthmān is unveiled by a vituperative poem 
composed by al-Aḥwaṣ, ʿAmr b. ʿAwf’s famous poet. He says: “Do not be moved with pity 
for a Ḥazmī if you see poverty in him or even if the Ḥazmī has been thrown into the fire.  
Those who pricked the mule of Marwān at Dhū Khushub, the invaders of ʿUthmān’s house.”142 
Thus the very allegation of treachery that (Pseudo-)Ḥassān makes against the Banū Najjār 
(more specifically against the Ḥazmīs) is the central thread of al-Aḥwaṣ’ satiric verse.  
This does not seem to leave room for doubt that the severe reprimand that the Najjār 
receive in the elegies on ʿUthmān is to be attributed to a forger from the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf,143 
who simply put his words into the mouth of the prestigious poet of the Banū Najjār, Ḥassān 
b. Thābit.144 

140.  Ibid., 282. 
141.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 19.
142.  al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 29, Al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī: A.D. 763–786/A.H. 146–169, trans. 

Hugh Kennedy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 125. The poem is attested likewise in 
al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 1:54; Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh al-Madīna, 4:1279.

143.  Some (though not all) of the sources maintain that these verses belonged originally to a poet of Tamīm 
whose poem Ḥassān ascribed to himself (tanaḥḥala); see, for example, Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 
39:542. However, it is hardly credible that a Tamīmī poet would have engaged in polemical controversies 
between the Medinan tribes. This is hardly what one would envisage as regards Arabian tribal society. Given 
that these verses tally perfectly with the late first-/seventh-century satiric poems recited by a member of ʿAmr 
b. ʿAwf to denigrate the Banū Najjār, it makes much more sense to attribute them to a later source belonging to 
the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf tribe.

144.  On the traces of professional forgeries in the sīra’s poems, attributed to various early Islamic figures, 
including Ḥassān, see Walid Arafat, “An Aspect of the Forger’s Art in Early Islamic Poetry,” Bulletin of the School 
of Oriental and African Studies 28, no. 3 (1965): 476–82, at 478; idem, “The Historical Significance of Later Anṣārī 
Poetry – I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29, no. 1 (1966): 1–11. Towards the end of his 
review of the edition of Ḥassān b. Thābit’s Dīwān edited by Arafat, Kister offers some critical hints on Arafat’s 
assessment of Anṣārī poetry. While Kister’s criticism is on the whole justifiable, one of the points he raises 
deserves comment. He asserts that “a poem that contains boasting with regard to the ancestors of the Anṣār 
does not necessarily indicate that the poem is forged” (Meir Jacob Kister, “On a New Edition of the Dīwān of 
Ḥassān b. Thābit,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39 [1976]: 265–86, at 284–6). A priori, 
there would seem to be no reason to impugn Kister’s contention. However, this essay’s negative observations, 
along with some recent critical studies on tribal/family accounts, appear to offer no room for charitable reading 
of the tribal and family traditions in general, and of the Anṣārī poetry in particular; see, for instance, Shoemaker, 
“In Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra,” 337–8, and Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore,” 425–72, esp. 454–64.



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Worth pondering here is the fact that al-Aḥwaṣ was on decidedly acrimonious terms 
with Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad b. ʿAmr b. Ḥazm, the qāḍī and governor of Medina.145 Al-Aḥwaṣ 
is said to have frequently expressed his invective against Ibn Ḥazm by calling him “Ibn 
Ḥazm b. Fartanā” (Fartanā was reportedly a prostitute during the pre-Islamic era),146 and 
Ibn Ḥazm is reported to have given al-Aḥwaṣ one hundred lashes, poured oil on his head, 
and paraded him in humiliation before the populace of Medina. The antagonism between 
al-Aḥwaṣ and his “inveterate enemy,” Ibn Ḥazm, reached its climax when the latter sent 
al-Aḥwaṣ into a five-year exile on the Red Sea island of Dahlak, at the end of which Caliph 
Yazīd II pardoned him due to the intervention of al-Zuhrī, the well-known partisan of the 
Umayyads.147 This conflict appears to have had far-reaching consequences and to have 
continued unabated up until the caliphate of al-Manṣūr. A Medinan deputation received 
by al-Manṣūr in Baghdad is said to have included “a young man of the descendants of ʿAmr 
b. Ḥazm” who brings his complaint to the caliph, saying, “O Commander of the Faithful, 
al-Aḥwaṣ recited a poem about us148 and we were deprived of our wealth sixty years ago 
because of it.” Al-Manṣūr orders him to read the poem and is finally persuaded to return 
the estates of the Banū Ḥazm.149 In reviling the Banū Ḥazm for their alleged involvement 
in ʿUthmān’s murder, al-Aḥwaṣ can be said to have looked at the past from the viewpoint 
of the present. As a historical testimony, al-Aḥwaṣ’s verses are, then, more informative 
about the sectarian strife of the late first/seventh century than the first half of the century. 
Similarly, it seems highly likely that these very same ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār polemics can be 
seen in the formation of the parallel virtue motifs that are projected back to the events of 
the Prophet’s era, the raids of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna.

Though initially intended as Aws–Khazraj polemics, the invocation of the martyrs of 
al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna and description of their extraordinary merits transcended the 

145.  A descendant of the Companion ʿAmr b. Ḥazm, who was faced with the charge of treachery against 
ʿUthmān, Abū Bakr b. Ḥazm was the qāḍī of Medina during the caliphate of Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik. When ʿUmar 
b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz succeeded to the caliphate, he appointed Abū Bakr as governor. On this figure, see Antoine 
Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers Abbassides (v. 
72–193/692–809) (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 310; Steven C. Judd, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-minded 
Supporters of the Marwānid Caliphate (London: Routledge, 2014), 153–4; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:335–6; and Ibn 
Ḥazm, Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 348. 

146.  See Michael Lecker, “ʿAmr ibn Ḥazm al-Anṣārī and Qurʾān 2,256: ‘No Compulsion is there in 
Religion’,” Oriens 35 (1996): 57–64, at 58; al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 4:419.

147.  Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” 687; Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet, 56; 
Ibn ʿ Asākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 32:208; al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 4:427. It is probably not accidental that 
the same al-Zuhrī, as recent research has demonstrated, had the leading role in the dissemination of the al-Rajīʿ 
story: see Juynboll, Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 718; Boekhoff-van der Voort, “The 
Raid of the Banū Hudhayl,” 305–82. After all, the narratives of al-Rajīʿ were an important part of the ancestral 
pride of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf, with whom the caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz had family ties. It is not hard to envisage 
that the ardent supporter of the Umayyads, al-Zuhrī, would have been behind the admiration of the Umayyad 
caliph’s maternal kin. On al-Zuhrī’s adherence to the Umayyads, see Michael Lecker, “Biographical Notes on 
Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī,” Journal of Semitic Studies 41, no. 1 (1996): 21–63; Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir, 73–6; 
Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, 132–7.

148.  i.e., the above-quoted poem accusing them of ʿUthmān’s murder
149.  al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh (trans. Kennedy), 29:125.



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boundaries of intra-Medinan tribal disputes, gaining special prominence in the wider 
polemical context, the Anṣār–Quraysh and Muḍar–Yemen mufākharas. Despite the active 
part they played during Muḥammad’s days, the Anṣār never achieved political power 
comparable to that of the Quraysh in the decades after the Prophet’s death.150 It was only in 
the realm of the ḥadīth and the sīra that the Anṣār strove to secure their share of glory.151 
It is reported, via Baṣran isnāds,152 that no single Arabian tribe (ḥayyan min aḥyāʾ al-ʿArab) 
had more martyrs than the Anṣār, of whom seventeen were slain at the day of Uḥud, 
seventeen at the day of Biʾr Maʿūna, and seventeen at the day of Yamāma.153 To substantiate 
their claim to leadership of the Islamic community after the Prophet’s death, the Anṣār 
purportedly boasted in the Hall (saqīfa) of the Banū Sāʿida of their most influential figures, 
amongst whom are numbered the names of “the one whose flesh the wasps protected” 
and “the one washed by the angels.”154 It is these very martyrs whose names are invoked 
in a gathering held in Caliph al-Saffāḥ’s palace, where the members of Muḍar and Yemen 
enumerated their ancestor’s glorious feats.155

Shared Episodes in Accounts of al-Rajīʿ and Umayyad-era Movements: Literary Form and 
Life-Setting 

As is the case with the great bulk of the sīra material, the narratives of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr 
Maʿūna are of a heterogonous nature, with each portion being of its own provenance and 
having its own ulterior motives.156 The parallelism between al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna, and in 
ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār polemics discussed so far pertains to the first half of the al-Rajīʿ story, 
viz., prior to Khubayb’s captivity. The imprisonment of Khubayb is something of a turning 
point in the al-Rajīʿ narratives, as from this point onwards, the story bears many more 
parallels with reports of Umayyad-era revolts than the account of Biʾr Maʿūna. From Arafat’s 

150.  Aside from some notable examples like Zayd b. Thābit and Muḥammad b. Maslama, the number of 
Anṣār who enjoyed great political prominence or had close ties to the Qurashī ruling circle was demonstrably 
exiguous. Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad b. ʿAmr b. Ḥazm, the grandson of the Companion ʿAmr b. Ḥazm, was the 
first among the Anṣār to be appointed as governor (Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet, 41). The 
scarcity of the Anṣār among those whose names are reported as Medinan estate owners in the Umayyad era is 
bitterly ironic, and perhaps equally striking is that when we sporadically hear of an Anṣārī’s land ownership, it 
is in the context of such staunch partisans of the Umayyads as Abū Bakr b. Ḥazm, whose landholding is known 
to us only in the context of the confiscation of his estates by al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik; see Harry Munt, “Caliphal 
Estates and Properties around Medina in the Umayyad Period,” in Authority and Control in the Countryside: 
From Antiquity to Islam in the Mediterranean and Near East (Sixth-Tenth Century), ed. A. Delattre, M. Legendre, 
and P. Sijpesteijn, 432–63 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 435. 

151.  See Juynboll, “Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj,” 206; Arafat, “The Historical Significance of Later Anṣārī Poetry – I,” 
1–3. 

152.  On Basra as the “bulwark of Anṣār-supported traditions” see Juynboll, “Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj,” 212.
153.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:350; al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, 5:38; al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:277. 
154.  al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-Ridda, ed. Y. al-Jubūrī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1990), 45.
155.  Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 16:105. On the antagonism between Muḍar and Yemen, see 

Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam, 53–55, 73–76; Crone, “Were the Qays and Yemen of the Umayyad Period 
Political Parties?”.

156.  Cf. Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” 66.



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standpoint, it was Shīʿī or Shīʿī-sympathizer traditionists “who saw the parallel between the 
killing and crucifixion of Khubayb and the sufferings of the various descendants of ʿAlī.”157 
But, as already shown here, the narrative motifs that fashion Khubayb’s tale have parallels 
outside the corpus of the Shīʿī tradition. One cannot, therefore, assign a specific role to 
the Shīʿīs for “canonizing” the Anṣārī martyr, Khubayb. Furthermore, it has been pointed 
out that parallelism in the genre of faḍāʾil, which means the attribution of one and the 
same “virtue” to different individuals, is shaped mostly in polemical milieus. It is highly 
implausible, therefore, that a Shīʿī narrator would have utilized the very martyrological 
motifs used of al-Ḥusayn and Zayd b. ʿAlī (with their extreme sensitivity in Shīʿī eyes) to 
embroider the story of Khubayb. 

There is evidence to the effect that the faḍāʾil of both Anṣārī and Shīʿī martyrs were 
sometimes recounted in polemical milieus, central in which was the issue of ancestral 
pride.158 For example, al-Aḥwaṣ is reported to have once been in Sukayna bt al-Ḥusayn’s 
presence when they heard the chanting of the adhān (call to prayer). When the muʾadhdhin 
said: “I testify that Muḥammad is the Messenger of God,” she started boasting about 
her illustrious pedigree, which prompted al-Aḥwaṣ to praise his forefather and uncle, 
i.e.,ʿĀṣim b. Thābit and Ḥanẓala al-Ghasīl (fakharat Sukayna bi-l-nabī fa-fākharahā bi-jaddihi 
wa-khālihi).159 This makes it clear that the mental preoccupation behind the ʿĀṣim-
venerating episode of the al-Rajīʿ story is consanguinity and blood relationship, and that 
one may safely speak here of ʿĀṣim’s Sage (despite the abundance in his story of miraculous 
happenings). 

Of note in this context is also a piece of evidence preserved by al-Ṭabarī. According to 
him, when Zayd b. ʿAlī’s head was brought to Medina, an Anṣārī poet recited in front of it: 
“O violator of the covenant, rejoice in what has brought you disaster! You have violated 
the trust and the covenant. You are steeped in wrongdoing. Satan has broken faith over 
what he promised you.”160 Therefore, the correspondence between Khubayb’s heart-rending 
tale and the (pro-)ʿAlid rebels’ tragic dramas seems to owe its existence, pace Arafat,  
to pro-Anṣārī tradents, not to the “Shīʿītes or narrators with Shīʿī tendencies.”161 Given the 
wide cluster of common themes used by Muslim and non-Muslim sects to “lionize their 
martyred heroes,”162 it would seem safer to suppose that the literary character of the Anṣārī 

157.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 30.
158.  Though the pro-ʿAlid leaning was discernable amongst the Anṣār as early as the Rāshidūn caliphate, 

they were in no way unanimous in backing the ʿAlids. On the Anṣārīs who did not give their allegiance to ʿAlī, 
see Maya Yazigi, “ʿAlī, Muḥammad, and the Anṣār: The Issue of Succession,” Journal of Semitic Studies 53, no. 2 
(2008): 279–303, at 302.

159.  al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, 4:417. Even if we tend not to take the anecdote’s finer points of detail at 
face value, the wider context that the account takes for granted, i.e., the Shīʿī–Anṣārī polemical encounter, 
sounds historical.

160.  al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 26, The Waning of the Umayyad Caliphate: Prelude to 
Revolution, A.D. 738–745/A.H. 121–127, trans. Carole Hillenbrand (Albany, NY: State University of New York 
Press, 1989), 52.

161.  Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic Theme,” 30.
162.  Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam, 251. Also see in this respect, Khalek, “‘He Was Tall and Slender,’” 



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martyr of the al-Rajīʿ story has its provenance in the martyrological materials which were 
in vogue equally amongst non-Muslims and Muslims, including (but not exclusively) the 
Shīʿīs. 

A Diachronic Assessment of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Accounts

The oral tales of those massacred at al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna, as recounted in the quarters 
of Medina by the events’ contemporaries, seem to have little to do with the elaborate 
written accounts of the second/eighth- and third/ninth-century biographers of the 
Prophet. The analysis of the historical evolution of a narrative is one of form criticism’s 
essential functions, for which some criteria have been postulated. It is conventionally 
presumed, for instance, that the more concise texts are the earlier ones.163 Additionally, 
more archaic recensions are often assumed to be profane in character, leaving more 
questions unanswered, more critical points unexplained, and more problematic matters 
exposed. Eventually, though, the equivocal points are elucidated, and problematic facts 
are glossed over in more recent texts in response to changing life-settings and emerging 
ideological or apologetic needs.164 

It is noticeable that both the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories underwent a metamorphosis 
from utterly mundane accounts to highly embellished hagiographies and martyrologies. 
For both expeditions, there are two rival depictions of the event at work—one calling the 
participants mere scouting contingents (ʿuyūn) and the other introducing them as “holy 
bands” dispatched for proselytizing purposes. The former version of both stories appears to 
be the archaic stratum of our extant material. Regarding al-Rajīʿ, the account attributed to 
ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr simply states that “the Messenger of God sent the companions of al-Rajīʿ 
as spies to Mecca to inform him of the Quraysh. They went towards al-Najdiyya until they 
reached al-Rajīʿ, where the Banū Liḥyān confronted them.”165 This report fulfills virtually 
all the criteria: it is truly succinct and demonstrably mundane, and must be very close to 
the “original” story. Here, there is no mention whatsoever of the martyrs’ extraordinary 
feats, nor do we even hear of the mere idea of their proselytizing mission or the mendacious 
ʿAḍal and al-Qāra, let alone Khubayb’s miracles and pietistic deeds.166 ʿUrwa’s account is also 

105–23.
163.  See Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition, 126; Graves, “Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus,” 55. 

However, this is not always the case with the Islamic literary tradition: see Pavel Pavlovitch, “Dating,” in The 
Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith, ed. D. W. Brown, 113‒32 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 
2020), 122–3.

164.  Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. W. L. Jenkins (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster 
Press, 1972), 227–8; Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–36: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis, MN: 
Augsburg, 1985), 161; Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition,122–7; Graves, “Form Criticism or a Rolling 
Corpus,” 55.

165.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:173. See also Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Maghāzī, 60, where the 
members of the expedition are said to have been spies. 

166.  On the archaic style of a portion of the traditions ascribed to ʿUrwa, see Andreas Görke, “Prospects and 
Limits,” 145–6. On the “matter-of-fact” fashion of ʿ Urwa’s epistles, see Görke and Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte, 
287.



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opaque in many respects, noteworthy among which is the actual reason behind Hudhayl’s 
deep hostility towards the Muslims. Our earlier evidence’s silence notwithstanding, 
al-Wāqidī avers that in slaying the Muslims at al-Rajīʿ, the Hudhalīs actually took vengeance 
for their leader, Sufyān b. Khālid, who had been assassinated at the Prophet’s instigation. 
Here, the historically questionable murder of Sufyān b. Khālid167 functions as a pseudo-
cause to explain what earlier versions of the al-Rajīʿ massacre left unresolved. But the hasty 
and superficial link al-Wāqidī created between the massacre of al-Rajīʿ and the assassination 
of Sufyān b. Khālid (which seems to be grounded on nothing beyond the mere common 
Hudhalī affiliations of the actors of two entirely separate stories) placed him, as we have 
seen, in an obvious predicament, eventuating an overt inconsistency in his chronology of 
the Prophet’s expeditions. 

The crucifixion of Khubayb also deserves particular attention. As emphasized by previous 
scholarship, the crucifixion did not appear in al-Zuhrī’s account of Khubayb’s execution, 
which says merely that the Meccans “killed him (qatalahu).”168 This stands in stark contrast 
to Ibn Isḥāq’s “acute focus on the details and narratives of Khubayb’s death.”169 In his 
Crucifixion and Death, Anthony sets out to appraise the authenticity of the reports of early-
Islamic crucifixions, whose “most vivid example” is the case of Khubayb. The sīra’s source-
critical problems, however, do not allow Anthony to reach a firm conclusion. Though seeing 
in the sīra “a wealth of archaic data” and assigning the reports of Khubayb’s crucifixion to 
“the earliest, initial strata of the genre,” Anthony concedes the possibility of “anachronistic 
embellishments in the Khubayb story.” Khubayb’s tale, he says, tallies with the “normative 
descriptions” of crucifixion as detailed by late-Umayyad and early-Abbasid jurists. Not 
only do the finer minutiae of the story of Khubayb’s death sound highly suspicious, but the 
sources do not permit Anthony to acknowledge even the historicity of “the raw ‘fact’” of 
Khubayb’s crucifixion.170 

The form-critical analysis undertaken in the present essay may allow us to make 
a somewhat more confident contention concerning the historical value of reports of 
Khubayb’s crucifixion. It has been argued that the accounts of Khubayb’s imprisonment 
and death are an amalgamation of the motifs found in the stories of the insurrections that 
happened during the Umayyad caliphate. That the crucifixion episode, the apex of Khubayb’s 
story, does not feature in the version of al-Zuhrī cannot be a fortuitous coincidence.  
The construction of the al-Rajīʿ story was an ongoing process of augmentation, commencing 
in the form of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr’s matter-of-fact account, to which significant additions 
were subsequently made over the course of time. It is not unexpected, then, that the 
crucifixion motif made its way to Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra after the death of al-Zuhrī in 124/742,171 

167.  See Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore,” 458–9.
168.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 36; Boekhoff-van der Voort, “The Raid of the Banū Hudhayl,” 372.
169.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 36.
170.  Ibid., 37.
171.  And most probably before Ibn Isḥāq left his native Medina at the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate 

(given the Medinan/pro-Anṣārī character of the al-Rajīʿ story).



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the year preceding Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik’s (r. 105-125/723–43) death.172 Turning to look at 
the historical circumstances during the time of and immediately following al-Zuhrī’s death 
would be revealing, as the events occurring in this period might have been mirrored in the 
al-Rajīʿ story. 

Hishām’s two-decade-long reign witnessed a considerable number of insurgents’ 
crucifixions. The Qadarī heretic Ghaylān of Damascus was crucified sometime between 
115/733 and 117/735.173 Zayd b. ʿAlī met a similar fate a couple of years later.174  
Zayd’s rebellion against the Umayyads’ authority was remarkable enough to end up even in 
non-Muslim sources. Agapius of Manbij and Elias of Nisibis allot a very terse entry to Zayd’s 
revolt, but the event receives more detailed treatment in the Syriac Chronicle of 1234 in 
which, aside from the chronological hints, we hear of the disloyalty of Zayd’s entourage (ḥaḏ 
men aylēn d-sām ʿammeh tanway lā ʿaḏreh) and the disgraceful nature of the Umayyads’ 
deed of slaying a man who was a descendant of their own Prophet (men šarbṯēh da-nḇīyā 
dīlhun Muḥammad).175 Moreover, according to the Chronicle of Zuqnīn, it was during 
Hishām’s caliphate that an imposter (maṭʿyānā) named Severus176 appeared in the West (arʿā 
d-maʿrḇā) and seduced many Jews. This false messiah is reported to have been crucified by 
the consent of the caliph at the hands of his former supporters who “made him suffer all 
kinds of tortures and injuries (koll šendē wa ulṣānē).”177 Some other well-known rebels 
were crucified in the period between the caliphate of Hishām’s successor, al-Walīd b. Yazīd  
(r. 125-126/743-744), and the end of Umayyad dynasty in 132/750. Yaḥyā b. Zayd, Judayʿ b. 
ʿAlī al-Kirmānī, and the Khārijī rebel Abū Ḥamza are but certain noteworthy examples.178  
To this list we may add David of Dwin who, though being crucified some twenty years before 
the beginning of Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik’s caliphate, is nonetheless of particular concern to 

172.  That is perhaps why the narratives of Khubayb’s crucifixion tallies precisely with “the trending 
normative descriptions in the discussions of crucifixion in Islamic legal discourse” (Anthony, Crucifixion, 36).

173.  Anthony, Crucifixion, 76.
174.  Zayd’s crucifixion has variously been dated by the chroniclers between 120/738 and 122/740 (al-Ṭabarī, 

Taʾrīkh, 7:160; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:251; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 3:206), and al-Zuhrī’s death is reported to have 
been in 124/742 (Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, Taʾrīkh [Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1995], 231; al-Balādhurī, Ansāb 
al-ashrāf, 10:48; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt, 5:356).

175.  Agapius of Menbij, Kitāb al-ʿunwān, ed. and trans. Alexander Vasiliev (Turnhout: Brepols, 1912), 509; 
Elias of Nisibis, Eliae Metropolitae Nisibeni, opus chronologicum, ed. E. W. Brooks and J. B. Chabot (Paris: 
n.p., 1909–10), 2:168; J. B. Chabot, Chronicon ad annum 1234, CSCO 81 (Paris: L’Académie des Inscriptions et 
Belles-lettres, 1920), 1:312. Theophilus of Edessa’s lost chronicle seems to have been the ultimate source of this 
account; see Robert Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in 
Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 235. On “the moral impact” of the 
killing of Zayd as a descendant of Muḥammad, see Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law 
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 72. 

176.  He has been identified by Anthony with the above-mentioned Shepherd of Damascus (Anthony, “Who 
Was the Shepherd of Damascus?,” 46).

177.  J. B. Chabot, ed., Incerti auctoris Chronion Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, CSCO 91 (Louvain: 
Peeters, 1927), 2:174; Amir Harrak, trans., The Chronicle of Zuqnīn Parts III and IV, A.D. 488–775 (Toronto: 
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 164. 

178.  Ibn Ḥabīb, al-Muḥabbar, 484; Marsham, “Public Execution in the Umayyad Period,” 135–6.



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us in that his crucifixion account (like that of Zayd b. ʿAlī) had strikingly similar motifs to 
Khubayb’s martyrology.179 

It is plausible that, inspired by the numerous crucifixions of the rebels of the time, the 
(pro-)Anṣārī tradents incorporated the crucifixion episode into the story of the historically 
obscure Khubayb. The participation of Khubayb in the Battle of Badr and his killing of 
al-Ḥārith b. ʿĀmir (and hence the very “rationale for [Khubayb’s] murder”) is extremely 
dubious, as is the “raw” fact of his crucifixion. By contrast, the crucifixions of the famed 
rebels of the Umayyad time are undoubtedly historical. It makes sense thus to assume 
that these dissidents’ destiny was a source of inspiration for the crucifixion episode in the 
story of the enigmatic Khubayb. Naturally, the ornate account of Khubayb’s crucifixion was 
unlikely to have appeared in the report of al-Zuhrī, who died right at the time, or rather 
shortly after, some of these tragic events were unfolding. Some time would have had to 
pass such that the traditionists, now seeing the late-Umayyad crucifixions in retrospect, 
recognized these incidents as fitting for the elaboration of the story of al-Rajīʿ. The pious 
endeavors of the (pro-)Anṣārī tradents blossomed, therefore, in Ibn Isḥāq’s recension of 
Khubayb’s narrative.

The accounts of Biʾr Maʿūna seem to have likewise gone through a process of modification 
and elaboration, changing from a more mundane portrayal to an ideologically embellished 
report. The Muslim party sent by Muḥammad is said, in some portrayals of the event, to 
have been “his spy in Najd” (ʿaynan lahu fī ahl Najd).180 The later versions, however, elevate 
these ʿuyūn above the level of ordinary people, representing them as a group of divinely 
chosen individuals, with the appellation of qurrāʾ, who spend the whole night in prayer and 
provide fresh water for the Prophet at dawn, without any of their contemporaries being 
aware of their great spiritual eminence.181 It is in the same spirit of embellishment that 
the number of Biʾr Maʿūna’s victims is rounded up to forty/seventy, as are the numbers 
of the Anṣārī martyrs in the battles of Uḥud and Yamāma. As opposed to these “appealing 
numbers,”182 Muqātil b. Sulaymān’s “demonstrably ancient” account speaks of twenty-seven 
martyrs at Biʾr Maʿūna.183 These aggrandizing endeavors pertain to a period wherein the 
members of the Aws and the Khazraj had long ceased to be of political prominence and had 
nothing to be proud of except the genuine and fictitious glories of their ancestors.184 

179.  According to Sahner, “there is strong internal evidence that the biography [of David] was written shortly 
after the martyr’s death,” viz., not too remote from the time when the foregoing late-Umayyad crucifixions had 
taken place. Sahner argues plausibly that various factions “had recourse to the same hagiographic motifs in 
order to lionize their martyred heroes” (see Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam, 93, 251).

180.  al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:343; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 26:101; Kister, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” 340.
181.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:347; Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 3:235; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 26:102.
182.  See Lawrence I. Conrad, “Seven and the Tasbīʿ: On the Implications of Numerical Symbolism for the 

Study of Medieval Islamic History,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31 (1988): 42–73.
183.  Juynboll, Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth, 291. See also al-Samarqandī, Tafsīr, 3:423, where eighteen 

of the Anṣār and Muhājirūn are said to have been dispatched to Najd; and Ibn Ḥabīb, al-Muḥabbar, 118, where 
the author gives the number of the participants as twenty-six from the Anṣār and four from the Muhājirūn.

184.  Arafat assigns, rightly it seems, the genesis of the Anṣār aggrandizing traditions to the period following 
the battle of al-Ḥarra (Arafat, “The Historical Significance of Later Anṣārī Poetry – I,” 1). 



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One of the main alterations introduced in the course of time to the Biʾr Maʿūna story 
concerns the presence of the Muhājirūn in this expedition, a point that the tradition takes 
pains to repudiate. Of Muhājirūn participation at Biʾr Maʿūna there is not a word in some 
early sīra compendia, and when this point finally appears in al-Wāqidī’s account, it is 
emphatically rejected by the author who insists that “only the Anṣār were with the raid.”185 
Notwithstanding the tendency on the part of the sīra scholars to gloss over or reject the 
participation of the Muhājirūn (most particularly Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ) in Biʾr Maʿūna, their 
presence in the sariyya is confirmed in the tafsīr sources. The account given in the sīra 
avers that ʿAmr b. Umayya and a certain Anṣārī did not accompany the main group and 
“were with the camels at pasture.”186 The tafsīr counter-tradition includes Saʿd among those 
who “lost their camel” (aḍalla baʿīran lahum) and “lagged behind” their fellow-Muslims.187 
The statement “leaving behind” in this context must be taken as a euphemistic alternative 
for “fleeing.” As Kister puts it, “Later collections of the maghāzī preferred not to mention 
the version claiming that Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, the first who shed blood for the cause of Islam, 
the hero of al-Qādisiyya, did not take part in the battle of Biʾr Maʿūna but saved his own life, 
while the other Companions died the death of martyrs.”188 When it comes to Saʿd’s part at 
Biʾr Maʿūna, we are likely dealing with a literary topos that is found in similar form in the 
account of the raid of Nakhla, in which he and ʿUtba b. Ghazwān are reported to have “left 
behind” the main party and “lost their camel” (aḍalla baʿīran lahumā).189 Saʿd’s “numerous 
progeny” who left us with a range of “family accounts” on him could be responsible for 
whitewashing the character of their forebear.190

The Massacre Narratives in their Broader Contexts: “New” Form Criticism

The traditional biblical form criticism which was propounded in roughly the middle of the 
twentieth century later underwent fundamental alterations, culminating in what has now 
been termed “new” form criticism.191 As opposed to “old” form criticism’s preoccupation 
with Sitz im Leben, the “new” approach is concerned with Sitz in der Literatur (“setting in 
literature”), focusing on the text as it lies before us.192 To offer an example: while certain 
versions of the “Ancestress of Israel in Danger” story in Genesis have been classified, on 
account of their exaltation of YHWH and divine assistance, as Legende according to the 
classic form-critical method,193 “new” form criticism contends that “the pentateuchal 

185.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī (trans. Faizer), 1:173.
186.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 434; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:347.
187.  Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, ed. ʿAbd Allāh Maḥmūd Shaḥāta (Beirut: Dār al-Turāth, 1423 AH), 1:458; 

al-Ṭabarānī, Tafsīr (Irbid: Dār al-Kitāb al-Thaqāfī, n.d.) 2:367. 
188.  Kister, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” 357.
189.  al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:17; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 1:602.
190.  See Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 7. 
191.  Wilson, “New Form Criticism and the Prophetic Literature,” 311.
192.  Buss, “Goals and Processes of the ‘New’ Form Criticism,” 306; idem, The Changing Shape of Form 

Criticism: A Relational Approach (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 191. 
193.  Sweeney, “Form Criticism: The Question of the Endangered Matriarchs,” 22. 



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narrative [including the “Endangered Matriarch” story] at large must be recognized 
generically as a saga,” as it concentrates on “the formation of the people of Israel.”194

In a similar vein, the formal character of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories may be 
determined, on the basis of a “new” form-critical approach, by taking into account the 
broader literary contexts in which these narratives feature. In other words, whereas tribal 
feuds played a pivotal part in the formation of narratives of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna 
expeditions, from the late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries onwards the 
issue of clan and consanguinity ceased to be the main incentive behind the dissemination 
of these stories. The accounts of these incidents feature in a wide spectrum of sources 
(including the sīra nabawiyya, tafsīr, ḥadīth, and fiqh compendia) with variegated editorial 
policies and concerns on the part of the actual authors in whose compilations the massacre 
reports have been preserved. In what follows, we shall take a look at the wider contexts of 
the massacre accounts in different genres of Islamic religious literature, and identify the 
narratives’ formal character and the motivations behind their transmission.

1. The Articulation of the Notion of Martyrdom

Amongst the major impetuses behind the narration in later Muslim collections of 
massacre stories were the inclusion of moving martyrdom episodes, which abound with 
flattering portrayals of the martyr-Companions as exempla of both temerity and piety.195 
As committed and God-fearing Muslims, the martyrs are frequently said to have abstained 
from accepting the polytheists’ protection, and to have passionately craved martyrdom.196 
The narratives of al-Rajīʿ include the martyrology of Khubayb, in which many “classical 
elements” of martyrdom are unmistakably observable.197 Likewise, the theme of martyrdom 
is central in the reports of Biʾr Maʿūna, to extent that this massacre is one of the historical 
events to which “the most famous and often-cited verse (on the concept of martyrdom),”198 
Q 3:169–70,199 has been attributed by the exegetical sources.200 Additionally, the story of Biʾr 
Maʿūna appears in certain ḥadīth collections under martyrdom-related rubrics (e.g., Bāb 
Faḍl al-shahāda and Bāb al-Shahīd),201 which shows how integral a theme martyrdom is to 

194.  Ibid., 25.
195.  On the significance of “the Companions as military and spiritual heroes,” see Khalek, “‘He Was Tall and 

Slender,’” esp. 106, 108. 
196.  See above, part three of the section “Parallels between the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Expeditions.”
197.  David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, 22.
198.  Ibid., 18.
199.  “Think not of those who are slain in Allāh’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the 

presence of their Lord; They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allāh. And with regard to those left behind, who 
have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they 
(cause to) grieve.” The translation is by Yūsuf ʿAlī. 

200.  See, for instance, al-Qurtubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1985), 
4:268; al-Thaʿlabī, al-Kashf wa-l-bayān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Thaqāfī, 1422 AH), 3:201.

201.  ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī, al-Muṣannaf, ed. Ḥabīb al-Raḥmān al-Aʿẓamī (Beirut: al-Majlis al-ʿIlmī, 1972), 
5:267; Ibn Ḥibbān, Ṣaḥīḥ, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʿūt, (Beirut: n.p., 1993), 10:508.



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this story. All such attestations of the massacre reports in Islamic compendia stem from 
the mental disposition of imitatio.202 In this context, thus, our stories should be categorized 
generically as Legende.

2. The Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwa Material in the Massacre Reports

The stories of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna were also appealing for tradents on account of the 
supernatural tales and miraculous happenings whose ultimate function was the veneration 
of Islam and the verification of Muhammad’s prophetic status. This kind of material belongs 
to the category of “The Signs of Prophecy” (aʿlām/dalāʾil al-nubuwwa). Episodes such 
as the awe-inspiring ascension of ʿĀmir b. Fuhayra’s body to the sky, Khubayb eating of 
heavenly sustenance, the miraculous disappearance of his body, and the protection of ʿĀṣim 
b. Thābit’s corpse by “a swarm of wasps,” rendered the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories 
as perfect materials for the authors of the dalāʾil al-nubuwwa compilations.203 Here, once 
more, the stories can be classified as Legende. 

3. The Massacre Reports and the ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān Genre

“The Sciences of the Qurʾān” (ʿulūm al-Qurʾān) is another genre within Islamic literature 
in which the story of Biʾr Maʿūna appears. The account of the qurrāʾ slaughtered at Biʾr 
Maʿūna was much adopted by the authors of ʿulūm al-Qurʾān and tafsīr collections, serving 
as evidence in favor of the existence in the Prophet’s time of people who knew the Qurʾān  
(or some part thereof) by heart (ḥamalat al-Qurʾān).204 Furthermore, the Biʾr Maʿūna 
massacre and the verses supposedly revealed on that occasion but which failed to find a 
place in the final codex are commonly adduced for the articulation of the concept of the 
Qurʾānic verses’ abrogation (naskh), i.e., the phenomenon of the supersession of earlier legal 
norms by means of more recent revelations.205 The text adopts then the formal character of 
“case” (Kasus), which is concerned with norms and values.206 

4. The Biʾr Maʿūna Massacre and the Legal Controversies Surrounding the Qunūt

The Biʾr Maʿūna story was of special interest for Muslim scholars in the context 
of legal discourse over the permissibility or otherwise of the qunūt in the daily prayer.  
In this context, the narrative functions generically as a Kasus whose Geistesbeschäftigung 
is weighing actions against norms. One discerns heated discussions among the advocates of 
different schools as to in which (if any) prayer is the qunūt mandatory, where this practice 

202.  On Companions as “figures worthy of pious emulation,” see Khalek, “‘He Was Tall and Slender,’” 107.
203.  See al-Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 3:345; Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī, Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ed. Muḥammad Rawwās 

Qalʿajī and ʿAbd al-Barr ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Nafāʾis, 1986), 1:506–15; al-Maqrīzī, Imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, 13:271.
204.  al-Zarkashī, al-Burḥān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1410 AH), 1:336; al-Suyūṭī, al-Itqān fī 

ʿulūm al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī), 1:254.
205.  al-Farsī, al-Ḥujja li-l-qurrāʾ al-sabʿa (Beirut: Dār al-Maʾmūn li-l-Turāth), 2:201; al-Suyūṭī, al-Itqān, 1:665. 

See also John Burton, “Abrogation,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–6).
206.  Jolles, Simple Forms, 124–44.



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should be placed in the prayer (before or after the rukūʿ), what is the content and wording 
of the qunūt, and so on.207 Muhammad’s alleged cursing of the slayers of the Biʾr Maʿūna 
martyrs in the qunūt of his morning prayers provides a possible precedent for the Islamic 
community, and has thus occupied an important place in the qunūt-related debates in 
Islamic fiqh and ḥadīth literature.208

5. The Biʾr Maʿūna Massacre and the Expedition against the Banū al-Naḍīr

Perhaps most telling in the context of the present article’s critical analysis of the sīra 
nabawiyya is the way in which the massacre reports are situated in the wider narratives of 
Muḥammad’s life. By the end of the second/eighth century many of the sīra’s audiences, 
based upon the “orthodox” version of the Prophet’s biography, must have shared the 
conviction that the expulsion from Medina of the Jewish tribe of Banū al-Naḍīr occurred 
in the immediate aftermath of the Biʾr Maʿūna massacre, and that these two events were 
closely related. During the course of his flight from the watering place at Biʾr Maʿūna to 
Medina, according to Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī, ʿAmr b. Umayya al-Ḍamrī kills two men 
of the Banū Kilāb (of Banū ʿĀmir). The Prophet departs for the Banū al-Naḍīr’s territory, 
requesting their assistance for the payment of the Kilābīs’ blood money, for the Banū 
al-Naḍīr were confederates of the Banū ʿĀmir. The Naḍrī Jews allegedly attempt in vain to 
assassinate Muḥammad (by throwing a stone at him from the top of their forts),209 and the 
latter lays siege to their fortresses and expels them from Medina.210 As vividly as Ibn Isḥāq 
and al-Wāqidī’s “orthodox” accounts remember the affair of Biʾr Maʿūna as related to Banū 
al-Naḍīr’s fate, the connection was in no way self-evident during and before al-Zuhrī’s time. 

Schöller argues, on the basis of tafsīr materials, that at a certain stage of the collection 
of the Prophet’s biography, possibly at the end of the first Islamic century, there existed an 
account of a joint conflict between the Prophet and the Medinan Jews (yawm Qurayẓa wa-l-
Naḍīr) which Schöller designates the “Qurayẓa-cum-Naḍīr” episode. Of this “unorthodox” 
recension of the Prophet’s confrontation with the Jews of Medina a remnant is noticeable 
in the report of al-Zuhrī, who relays that the Jews of al-Naḍīr asked Muḥammad to attend 
a meeting in the company of thirty of his entourage, debating there with the Jewish rabbis 
(who were also thirty in number). The Jews hatch a plot to assassinate the Prophet, who gets 
wind of their treachery through a Jewish woman from al-Naḍīr. Subsequently, Muḥammad 
besieges the strongholds of al-Naḍīr, and then of the Qurayẓa (which implies that the latter 
played some part in the treason), summoning them to the conclusion of a non-agression 
pact with him. The Qurayẓa agree, but the Banū al-Naḍīr refuse and enter into an armed 

207.  For useful overviews on the issue and the sources in which these controversies appear, see Kister, 
“Muḍar,” 267–72; Najam I. Haider, “The Geography of the Isnād: Possibilities for the Reconstruction of Local 
Ritual Practice in the 2nd/8th Century,” Der Islam 90, no. 2 (2013): 306–46, at 329–36.

208.  Kister, “Muḍar,” 267–8.
209.  This is a ubiquitous topos in the reports of the Prophet’s conflicts with the Medinan Jews: see Marco 

Schöller, Exegetisches Denken und Prophetenbiographie: eine quellenkritische Analyse der Sīra-Überlieferung 
zu Muḥammads Konflikt mit den Juden (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 266. 

210.  Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:190; al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:363–5.



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conflict with the Prophet, which results in their defeat and exile.211 According to Schöller, 
al-Zuhrī’s report (which is confirmed by that of Mūsā b. ʿUqba) preserves vestiges of the 
archaic Qurayẓa-cum-Naḍīr recension. And it is noteworthy that neither version speaks 
whatsoever of the connection between the Biʾr Maʿūna and Banū al-Naḍīr expeditions.212  
In sum, the “orthodox” account of Banū al-Naḍīr may be said to be characterized by several 
main features: the murder by ʿAmr b. Umayya al-Ḍamrī of the Kilābī men following the Biʾr 
Maʿūna massacre, the Prophet’s seeking help from the Jews as regards the blood money, and 
the extremely dubious casus belli for the al-Naḍīr expedition, namely the ubiquitous topos 
of “throwing a stone” to kill the Prophet.213 Seen in this light, the historical framework 
assigned to the Biʾr Maʿūna incident is of key significance for the authors of Muḥammad’s 
“orthodox” biography to achieve their aim of separating the Prophet’s expeditions against 
the Qurayẓa and the Banū al-Naḍīr by an interval of two years.214 

Conclusion 

Reading the sīra with intense cognizance of the literary tools used and the impetus 
behind their deployment carries negative implications for the historicity of the accounts. 
To recapitulate the results, we have observed that there is a close correspondence between 
the accounts of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna massacres, and that the former story comprised 
a wide array of hagiographic motifs shared by many medieval sources, Muslim and 
non-Muslim alike. The close similarities between the massacre reports have their roots 
in the tribal feuds between the ʿAmr b. ʿAwf of the Aws and the Najjār of the Khazraj. 
Significantly, the parallelism in the accounts of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna is not the sole 
manifestation of ʿAmr b. ʿAwf–Najjār polemical encounters. The quintessential example 

211.  On the Qurayẓa-cum-Naḍīr episode and its residues in later accounts, see Marco Schöller, “Sīra and 
Tafsīr: Muḥammad al-Kalbī on the Jews of Medina,” in Biography of Muḥammad: The Issue of the Sources, ed. 
H. Motzki, 18–48 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 28–34; idem, Exegetisches Denken, 273–4. Rizwi Faizer, “Expeditions and 
Battles,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–6), leans in the same direction. 
It is interesting to note that some faint echoes of the Qurayẓa-cum-Naḍīr episode are yet audible even in the 
poems quoted by Ibn Isḥāq, which, inconsistent with his prose material, assign the calamity befalling on the 
Qurayẓa and the Naḍīr to Saʿd b. Muʿādh, otherwise known to be the protagonist only of the Qurayẓa incident: 
“O Saʿd, Saʿd of B. Muʿādh, for what befell Qurayẓa and Naḍīr (limā laqiyat Qurayẓa wa-l-Naḍīr).” See Ibn Isḥāq, 
Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 713; Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:273. See also in this respect, Barakat Ahmad, Muḥammad and the 
Jews: A Re-examination (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979), 92.

212.  Schöller, “Sīra and Tafsīr,” 33. 
213.  Interestingly, the cause of war between the Prophet and the Jewish tribe of Banū Qaynuqāʿ is yet 

another topos, that of the sexual harassment by the Jews of a (Muslim) woman (Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra, 2:48; 
al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:176), the occurrence of which was also reportedly the casus belli for the first battle 
of the so-called sinful wars (ḥurūb al-fijār): see Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 1987), 145; Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 258.

214.  Schöller suggests (not implausibly) that multiplying the incidents in the Prophet’s life (here the 
separation of the Qurayẓa and Naḍīr expeditions) might have been connected to the rise of different legal views 
on such “vital” matters as “practices of warfare and sharing the booty” (Schöller, “Sīra and Tafsīr,” 42). If this 
interpretation is correct, then the mental disposition behind placing the Biʾr Maʿūna–Naḍīr episode in their 
present context is that of norms, which corresponds to the form Kasus.



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of these tribes’ hostile confrontation in the domain of literature is to be found in Pseudo-
Ḥassān’s elegies on ʿUthmān, in which a versifier with categorical bias in favor of ʿAmr b. 
ʿAwf carries out a severe verbal assault on the Banū Najjār. As far as can be gleaned from 
the sources, the descendants of the main actors of al-Rajīʿ had the leading role in chastising 
the Banū Najjār for their purported culpability in the caliph’s murder. Worth recalling 
is the trenchant satire of al-Aḥwaṣ (the descendant of ʿĀṣim b. Thābit, and Khubayb’s 
fellow-tribesman on the maternal side) against the Najjār on account of their treachery 
(ghadr) against ʿUthmān. Given this active presence of the progeny of al-Rajīʿ victims in 
hostile encounters with the Najjār, it is entirely conceivable that they themselves would 
have been behind the significant literary borrowing from the faḍāʾil motifs found in the 
Biʾr Maʿūna story. After all, the descendants of a person have the strongest motivation for 
extolling their ancestor,215 and the descendants of the al-Rajīʿ martyrs were no exception. 
Thus, it seems that we can speak of a period of antagonistic activities on the part of ʿAmr 
b. ʿAwf (in the realm of literature) against the Najjār,216 culminating in the dissemination of 
poems regarding the Najjār’s complicity in ʿUthmān’s assassination and in the formation of 
parallelism between the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna accounts. In the latter case, the forgers of 
ʿAmr b. ʿAwf did their best to include in the al-Rajīʿ story the very faḍāʾil material of which 
the Banū Najjār were so proud. By the third/ninth century, when tribal motivations ceased 
to be amongst the prime socio-political exigencies of the time, new incentives emerged 
for the transmission of our narratives, which we have unfolded through assessment of the 
literary contexts in which the massacre accounts appear.

Form-critical analysis points once more to the fact that traditional Islamic material must 
be treated, as Noth propounds, as the combination of discrete Erzählmotive transferable 
from one framework to another.217 This entails adopting “an all-encompassing view of 
the forms and biases of early Islamic tradition as a whole in order to assess accurately 
even one” event.218 Due probably to the “preliminary character” of Noth’s source-critical 
studies, his detection of literary topoi was limited, for the most part, to the futūḥ traditions.  
As it turned out, the subsequent corpus of scholarship that owed its inspiration to Noth’s 
Quellenkritische Studien remained mostly as limited in agenda as Noth’s original endeavors, 
and no comprehensive attempt has been made to identify the literary commonplaces in 
the sīra nabawiyya.219 In his Narratives of Islamic Origins, Donner stresses the usefulness 

215.  See Lecker, “The Assassination of the Jewish Merchant Ibn Sunayna,” 181–96; Chase F. Robinson, 
“History and Heilsgeschichte in Early Islam: Some Observations on Prophetic History and Biography,” in History 
and Religion: Narrating a Religious Past 68, ed. Bernd-Christian Otto, 119–50 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 
131; Michael Cook, “Muḥammad’s Deputies in Medina,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 1–67, at 42. 

216.  The termini of this period cannot be precisely established, but it must have coincided with al-Aḥwaṣ’ 
(d. ca. 105/723) professional career as the well-known poet of Medina, so roughly the last quarter of the first 
Islamic century. 

217.  Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 109; Noth, “Iṣfahān-Nihāwand,” 246–7.
218.  Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 18.
219.  On the studies that were preoccupied with the literary analysis of the futūḥ accounts see, for example, 

Thomas Sizgorich, “‘Do Prophets Come with a Sword?’ Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early 
Islamic World,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 993–1015, esp. 995, 1005–7; Chase F. Robinson, 



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A Form-Critical Analysis of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Stories  •  307

of “a comprehensive catalog of topoi” to assess early Islamic akhbār but, adds Donner, 
“little further work on this task has been undertaken since Noth’s preliminary listing.”220 
Unfortunately, the “comprehensive catalog” proffered by Donner more than two decades 
ago seems to be still lacking, at least inasmuch as the biography of the Prophet is 
concerned.221 

As they stand, the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna stories are “undifferentiated reports” with 
“no genuine relation to any particular historical event.”222 The narratives are archetypal 
depictions of failed deputations and, as such, must be taken with a grain of salt. Relevant 
in this context is the account of the deputation of Ṭayyiʾ, comprised of many elements 
which feature in the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna accounts: (I) arrival of tribal deputation, 
(II) daʿwa (summons to Islam) made by the Prophet, (III) his premonition that the chief of 
Ṭayyiʾ, Zayd al-Khayl, might die of the Medina fever, (IV) the deputy departing with a letter 
documenting a land grant, (V) Zayd’s being overcome by fever at a watering place in Najd, 
and (VI) his poetic last words. Readers with more positivistic leanings may nonetheless 
be inclined to go beyond mere historiographical assessment of the sīra, venturing to 
reconstruct the general outlines of events. After all “[a] topos may very well have a basis 
in fact, for it is often the case that a topos was once securely anchored to real historical 
referents.”223 A possible reconstruction in the case of the Biʾr Maʿūna event would be that 
the expedition may have commenced following the Prophet’s daʿwa, an offer to embrace 
Islam which, according to Noth/Conrad, “may very well correspond to reality.”224 However, 
the sariyya’s participants were undoubtedly not proselytizers, but envoys to convey the 
Prophet’s letter (documenting land grant to Abū Barāʾ?), a mission Ḥarām b. Milḥān failed 
to successfully accomplish and for which he was killed by ʿĀmir b. Ṭufayl.225 Lecker is 
of the opinion that geography, or more accurately the proximity of the Sulaym’s gold 
mine to Biʾr Maʿūna, could be important to a proper understanding of the expedition. 
Muḥammad’s letter to Abū Barāʾ, according to this interpretation, may be seen as a 
document intended to secure for Abū Barāʾ the contested rights over Maʿdan Banī Sulaym.226  

“The Conquest of Khūzistān: A Historiographical Reassessment,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African 
Studies 67, no. 1 (2004): 14–39, at 30; Khalek, “‘He Was Tall and Slender,’” 118. 

220.  Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 267.
221.  Donald P. Little, “Narrative Themes and Devices in al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-maghāzī,” in Reason and 

Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought, ed. Todd Lawson, 34–44 (London: I. 
B. Tauris, 2005), 35, already highlights the necessity of the project of cataloging the topoi. On the limited scholarly 
attempts at identifying the topoi in the Prophet’s biography see, for instance, Donner, Narratives of Islamic 
Origins, 269, 271; Lawrence I. Conrad, “Theophanes and the Arabic Tradition: Some Indications of Intercultural 
Transmission,” Byzantinische Forschungen 15 (1988): 1–44, 17; Robinson, “History and Heilsgeschichte,” 141. 

222.  Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 148.
223.  Ibid., 109. See also Nicola Clarke, The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London: 

Routledge, 2012), 2.
224.  Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 165.
225.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 434.
226.  Michael Lecker, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” in Encyclopedia of Islam THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011).



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All this said, there is no infallible methodological path from topoi to historical realities,227 
and any historical reconstruction undertaken on the basis of literary topoi, including the 
one proposed here, remains hypothetical in nature.

However, thanks to the approach pursued in this study, we are on firmer ground when it 
comes to separating historical realities from literary topoi in the stories of al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr 
Maʿūna. Hitherto assumed as authentic, such elements of the stories as the religious nature 
of the expeditions, the crucifixion of Khubayb (and presumably his very incarceration228), 
the supposed part played by the Banū Nawfal in the al-Rajīʿ incident, and the simultaneity of 
the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna events all seem to be highly dubious, not to say pure invention.229 
Our sources for the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna raids reflect far more about “the circumstances 
of [their] composition and redaction” than about first/seventh-century Arabia.230 Motivated 
by the second/eighth-century tribal feuds, many components of these narratives owe their 
existence to later modifications and adornments that were retrojected to the time of the 
Prophet. Should form-critical analysis be extended to encompass other anecdotes of the 
sīra, we might be able to discover more and more later accretions engendered not only by 
tribal discord, but also by disputations of other kinds, e.g., political, religious, and legal.231 
Though this method yields, by its nature, results that narrow the margins of our knowledge 
about the rise of Islam, it remains an indispensable tool for historians of this period who 
often have to rely heavily, if not exclusively, on literary sources between which and the 
events they purport to narrate lies a yawning abyss of a century or so in which eyewitness 
accounts, if they existed at all, would have been contaminated by a gamut of distortions and 
falsifications.232 

227.  Noth, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 114; Conrad, “Arwād,” 322; Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” 73.
228.  The story of the Hudhalīs selling their captives as slaves to the Meccans is a famous pre-Islamic theme 

whose occurrence in the al-Rajīʿ account is in danger of being a topos, particularly when one takes into account 
the stereotypical character of Khubayb’s story as a whole. See Crone, Meccan Trade, 106; Kirill Dmitriev, “Banū 
Hudhayl,” in Encyclopedia of Islam THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Nathaniel Ashton Miller, 
“Tribal Poetics in Early Arabic Culture: The Case of Ashʿār al-Hudhaliyyīn” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 
2016), 172.

229.  See Kister, “Biʾr Maʿūna,” 342; Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 34; Arafat, “The Development of a Dramatic 
Theme,” 15; Jones, “The Chronology of the Maghāzī,” 267, where al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna are considered roughly 
simultaneous; Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 33, where the mission is taken as a proselytizing one; Kister, “Biʾr 
Maʿūna,” 356, where Nawfal’s role at al-Rajīʿ is accepted as a historical fact; and Keshk, “The Historiography of 
an Execution,” 13, where the author assigns the primary status to Khubayb’s story vis-à-vis Hujr’s.

230.  Pavlovitch, “The Sīra,” 66. See also Ilkka Lindstedt, “‘One People to the Exclusion of Others’ – Recategorized 
Superordinate Identity in the Medinan Community,” in The Study of Islamic Origins: New Perspectives and 
Contexts, ed. Mette Bjerregaard Mortensen et al., 325–76 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021), 335, who treats the 
sīra, “for the most part, as part of the social (and mythic) memory of the burgeoning Muslim community.”

231.  It is worth stressing that this method does not automatically prove the whole sīra spurious, but enables 
us to separate the wheat from the chaff.

232.  Cf. Conrad, “Seven and the Tasbīʿ,” 42.



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