ARAB S: IMMIGRANTSwere followed by an army of six thousand men under Sa'd ibn AbI
Waqqa~ from Madina, which was reinforced by a force of two thou-
sand Yamani Arabs. Estimates of the size of the Muslim regular army
at the Battle of Qadisiyya vary from about seven thousand to ten
thousand;4 but judging by the casualties they are said to have suffered
and by the number of veterans who settled at Kufa and Basra after-
wards, bedouin auxiliaries must have increased the size of this army
to at least thirty-five thousand men.S After the fall of Mada'in in 637,
this army was billeted in the houses vacated by the Persians who had
fled from the city,^6 but this settlement was not permanent. Contingents
were sent to Jalula' and Takrit, and then, in 638, most of the army
returned to the Euphrates and founded the city of Kufa.7 Those,who
had been assigned houses in Mada'in by Sa'd took off the doors and
brought them to Kufa, where they put them on their new houses.^8
The military nature of this migration and settlement meant that it
involved many more men than women and children from the penin-
sula, although some tribal contingents which joined the Muslim army
in Iraq brought their dependents along with them. The earliest ref-
erence to dependents with the Muslim army occurs in the context of
the Battle of Buwayb (probably in the fall of 635), when the women
and children were left behind in the camp.9 The two thousand YamanI
Arabs whom 'Umar sent to reinforce Sa'd also brought their women
and children,lo and, in 636, when Sa'd began to march against Mada'in,
the dependents and baggage were left behind at Atiq.ll The BajIla and
the Nakha' had more women than any other groups at Qadisiyya.
There were one thousand single women with the BajIla and seven
hundred single women among the Nakha'. Most of them married the
veterans of Qadisiyya who belonged to other tribes or clans.^12
4 Abii Yiisuf, Kharai, p. 45; Baladhuri, Futu~, pp. 255-56; Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2236.
5 According to Dinawari (Akhbar at-piwal, p. 125), Sa'd was sent to Iraq with an
army of 20,000 men and was joined there by the forces of Jarir al-Bajali and Muthanna.
Arabic tradition estimates the Muslim casualties at Qadisiyya at 8,500 (Tabari, Ta'rlkh,
I, 2337-38), and thirty thousand veterans of Qadisiyya settled at Kufa while another
five thousand settled at Basra. M. Hinds, in "Kufan Political Alignments and Their
Background in Mid-Seventh Century A.D.," lJMES 2 (1971), 352, estimates the max-
imum number of Arabs at Qadisiyya at thirty thousand.
6 Scher, "Histoire nestorienne," n(2), 628; Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2451.
7 Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2451; Ya'qiibi, Ta'rlkh, n, 171.
8 Guidi, Chronica Minora l, I, 31; n, 26; Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2497.
9 Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2197.
10 Ibid., I, 2218.
11 Ibid., 1,2419.
12 Ibid., I, 2363-64.