88 No god but God
inched closer to each other, Muhammad refused to fight until
attacked. Even as the fighting began—in traditional Arab fashion,
with hand-to-hand combat between two or three individuals from
both sides, at the end of which the field was cleared of corpses and
another set of individuals chosen to fight—Muhammad remained on
his knees, waiting for a message from God. It was Abu Bakr who, hav-
ing had enough of the Prophet’s indecisiveness, finally urged him to
rise and take part in the battle that, despite Muhammad’s reluctance,
had already begun.
“O Prophet of God,” Abu Bakr said, “do not call upon your Lord
so much; for God will assuredly fulfill what he has promised you.”
Muhammad agreed. Rising to his feet, he finally called upon his
small band of followers to trust in God and advance in full against the
enemy.
What followed was a fierce skirmish that Francesco Gabrieli has
called “hardly more than a brawl.” A brawl it may have been, but when
the fighting stopped and the battlefield was cleared of bodies, there
was little doubt as to who had come out on top. Astonishingly,
Muhammad had lost only a dozen men, while the Quraysh were thor-
oughly routed. News of the Prophet’s victory over the largest and
most powerful tribe in Arabia reached Yathrib long before the victors
did. The Ummah was ecstatic. The Battle of Badr proved that God
had blessed the Messenger. There were rumors that angels had
descended onto the battlefield to slay Muhammad’s enemies. After
Badr, Muhammad was no longer a mere Shaykh or a Hakam; he and
his followers were now the new political power in the Hijaz. And
Yathrib was no longer just an agricultural oasis, but the seat of that
power: the City of the Prophet. Medina.
Badr had essentially created two opposing groups in the Hijaz:
those who favored Muhammad and those who remained loyal to the
Quraysh. Sides were chosen. Clan representatives from throughout
the Hijaz flooded into Medina to ally themselves with Muhammad,
while at the same time a rush of Qurayshi loyalists abandoned Medina
for Mecca. Interestingly, many of these loyalists were Hanifs who had
refused to convert to Muhammad’s movement despite its connection
to “the religion of Abraham,” primarily because their Hanifism neces-
sitated allegiance to the Ka‘ba and its keepers, the Quraysh.