Ghazwat al-Ghāba

Ghazwat al-Ghāba, also and more commonly known as Ghazwat Dhū Qarad after the watering-place to which the pursuit extended, was an expedition led by the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ in the year 6 AH/627 CE in pursuit of a raiding party of the tribe of Ghaṭafān that had fallen upon the milch-camels of the Prophet ﷺ pasturing outside Madīnah. The raiders drove off the camels, killing the man who guarded them and carrying off his wife; the alarm was raised, and a swift pursuit recovered the greater part of the herd. The expedition is remembered chiefly for the conspicuous valor of Salama ibn al-Akwaʻ, whose lone chase checked the raiders until the Muslim horsemen came up.

The milch-camels of the Prophet ﷺ were kept at pasture in a place called al-Ghāba, a wooded tract not far from Madīnah, under the care of a man and his wife. A party of horsemen of Ghaṭafān, led by ʻUyayna ibn Ḥiṣn al-Fazārī according to the reports, raided the pasture at dawn, killed the keeper of the camels, took his wife captive, and drove the herd away toward their own country. The first to learn of the raid was Salama ibn al-Akwaʻ of the tribe of Aslam, who had gone out early and, seeing the raiders making off with the camels, raised a great cry of alarm that carried to Madīnah, and then set off alone in pursuit.

Salama, a man of remarkable swiftness of foot, gave chase on his own, harrying the raiders with his arrows as he ran, shooting and falling back and shooting again in the manner of a skirmisher, so that he checked their flight and turned back a number of the camels before help arrived. By his own long account, preserved in the collections, he kept up the pursuit, calling out his name and his lineage in challenge, until he had recovered much of the herd and pressed the raiders hard, harassing them through the day until the horsemen of the Muslims came up behind him.

The Prophet ﷺ, hearing the alarm, mustered his Companions and rode out in pursuit, the horsemen going ahead under their leaders while the Prophet ﷺ followed with the main body. The Muslim riders overtook the rear of the raiders at Dhū Qarad, a watering-place toward the country of Ghaṭafān, where there was a brief clash; some of the raiders were slain and the rest scattered, abandoning the camels they still drove. The greater part of the herd was recovered, though the raiders escaped with a portion, and the captive woman, by one account, made her escape and returned upon one of the Prophet’s ﷺ own camels.

It was on this occasion that the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have praised Salama ibn al-Akwaʻ, declaring that he was the best of their footmen as he had shown himself that day, and granting him a double share of the spoils, the share of a horseman and the share of a foot-soldier, for the valor he had displayed on foot. The Prophet ﷺ halted at Dhū Qarad for a day and a night, dividing among his men the camels that had been recovered and a portion of other spoil, before returning to Madīnah, the whole expedition having occupied but a few days.

The sources differ somewhat as to the date of the expedition, most placing it in the year 6 of the Hijra, a few days before the Prophet ﷺ set out for al-Ḥudaybiya, while some accounts place it earlier; the divergence is connected with the order of events in that crowded period. The military scale of the action was small—a swift raid and a swifter pursuit—but the recovery of the camels and the rout of the raiders displayed the readiness of the community to answer a sudden attack, and the speed with which the Prophet ﷺ and his men responded was remembered as a measure of their vigilance.

Among the incidents preserved from the expedition is the death of one of the Muslims, and the slaying of one of the raiders by Abū Qatāda, who covered the slain man with his cloak; and the account of the woman who had been taken captive and who vowed, were she delivered, to sacrifice the camel upon which she rode, a vow the Prophet ﷺ set aside, for the camel was his and no man may fulfill a vow in what he does not own or in disobedience to God. These reports, gathered about the central narrative of the pursuit, were preserved in the collections alongside the celebrated account of Salama.

In the sīra tradition, Ghazwat al-Ghāba, or Dhū Qarad, is remembered as the swift expedition of pursuit in which the raiders of Ghaṭafān were overtaken and the camels of the Prophet ﷺ recovered, and above all as the day of Salama ibn al-Akwaʻ, whose lone valor the Prophet ﷺ praised and rewarded. Slight though it was in the scale of its fighting, the expedition holds its place among the maghāzī as an instance of the vigilance of the early community and of the courage of a single man, set in the year that led to the Treaty of al-Ḥudaybiya and the turning of the community toward Makkah.

## References

1 L. Veccia Vaglieri, “Dhū Ḳarad,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 2:223. 2 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-jihād wa-al-siyar,” bāb ghazwat Dhī Qarad, no. 1806–1807. 3 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-maghāzī,” bāb ghazwat Dhī Qarad, nos. 4194–4196. 4 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 486–87. 5 Al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. Marsden Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 2:537–49.6 Ibn Saʻd, Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 2:81–82. 7 Muhammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 8, The Victory of Islam, trans. Michael Fishbein (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 53–55. 8 W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 39–40.