26 DESTINY DISRUPTED
the Meccan emigrants faced: how to support themselves now that they had
lost their goods and businesses.)
After a year of these raids, the Meccans decided to raise the stakes. A
thousand of them strapped on weapons and marched out to finish off the
upstarts. The Muslims met them with a force of three hundred men at a
place called Badr and defeated them soundly. The Qur'an mentions the
battle of Badr as proof of Allah's ability to decide the outcome of any bat-
tle, no matter what the odds.
Before Badr, some of the bedouin tribesmen had worked for merchants
in Mecca as contract bodyguards. After Badr, these tribes began to switch
sides. The growing solidarity of the Muslim community in Medina began
to alarm the Jewish tribes. One of the three renounced the Pact of Medina
and tried to instigate an uprising against Mohammed and a return to the
pre-Islamic status quo, but the uprising failed, and this tribe was expelled
from Medina.
Now the Quraysh really did have cause to worry. Instead of eliminating
Mohammed, it looked like they might have dug themselves the beginnings
of a hole. In the year 3 AH, they decided to overwhelm the Muslims while
they still had the numbers. They tripled the size of their army, heading for
Medina with three thousand men. The Muslims could scratch up only 950
warriors. Again, they would be outnumbered three to one-but after Badr,
how could this matter? They had the only asset that mattered: Allah was
on their side.
The second of Islam's three iconic battles occurred at a place called
Uhud. At first the Muslims seemed to be winning again, but when the
Meccans fell back, some of the Muslims disobeyed one of Mohammed's
explicit orders: they broke ranks and spilled across the field in a chaotic
rush to scoop up their share of booty-at which point the Meccans
struck from behind, led by Khaled bin al-Walid, a military genius who
later converted to Islam and became one of the Umma's leading generals.
The Prophet himself was wounded at Uhud, seventy Muslims were
killed, and many of the rest fled. The Umma survived, but this battle
marked a bad defeat.
These seminal battles of Islamic history were so small-scale, measured
against most real wars, that they barely qualify as battles. Each one, how-
ever, was incorporated into Muslim theology and vested with meaning.