The Well of Sorrow
A spear erupts through his chest, and with his last breath, Haram ibn Milhan smiles: 'I have won, by the Lord of the Ka'bah.'
3-4 AH · 625 – 627 CE
The spear enters between his shoulder blades and erupts through his chest. In that searing instant—the last heartbeat of consciousness before the world dissolves—Haram ibn Milhan does not scream in pain. He does not curse his killer. He looks down at the iron point protruding from his own body, slick with his blood, and a smile breaks across his face. His final words ring out across the camp: “Fuztu wa Rabbil Ka’bah”—“I have won, by the Lord of the Ka’bah.”
It is Safar, the fourth year of the Hijrah, and the Muslim community is about to suffer its darkest day since the founding of Madinah—a day that will see nearly eighty of its finest scholars, reciters, and preachers slaughtered in two separate acts of treachery. The wounds of Uhud have barely closed. The Prophet’s (peace be upon him) cheek still bears the scar where his own helmet rings were driven into his flesh. And now, within the span of a single night, word will reach him that the men he sent out as teachers of the Quran—the gentle, devoted men of the Suffah who filled their neighbors’ water buckets at night and stood in tahajjud until dawn—have been massacred to the last.
This is the story of Al-Raji’ and Bi’r Ma’una: twin catastrophes born from the same poison of betrayal, and the extraordinary faith that blazed brightest in the hour of its most brutal testing.
The Mission That Began It All
The chain of events begins not at a well or an ambush site, but in a valley called Arana, with a single man walking alone through hostile territory, a sword hidden beneath his cloak.
In the months following Uhud, intelligence reached Madinah that a Bedouin chieftain named Khalid ibn Sufyan al-Hudhali was assembling warriors from the Banu Hudhayl tribe for a surprise attack on the city. The Prophet dispatched Abdullah ibn Unais al-Juhani (may Allah be pleased with him) on a solitary mission to neutralize the threat before an army could form. It was a surgical strike—one man against a chieftain surrounded by guards—and it required divine guidance to succeed.
Abdullah asked a natural question: what does this man look like? The Prophet had never seen Khalid ibn Sufyan either, but he described him with a detail that could only have come through revelation: “When you see him, you will feel more terrified than you have ever been at anyone’s appearance.”
Abdullah took only his sword and headed for the valley. When he spotted the chieftain in the distance, the terror struck him exactly as described. “I had never been as frightened of anyone’s appearance as this man’s,” he later recounted. “I said to myself: Allah and His Messenger spoke the truth.”
Then something remarkable happened. As he approached, the time for prayer arrived. He could not stop. He could not turn toward the Qiblah. He could not prostrate. To pause was to lose the element of surprise and likely his life. So Abdullah ibn Unais made a decision no Muslim had ever made before: he prayed while walking, making gestures with his head for the bowing and prostration, his feet never breaking stride toward his target.
Scholarly Note
There is a textual variation in the sources regarding the companion’s name. Some narrations refer to him as Abdullah ibn Unais al-Juhani, while others mention Abdullah ibn Ulayis. Scholars have debated whether these represent variant transmissions of the same individual and mission, or two closely related operations. The prayer performed—later classified as one version of Salat al-Khawf (the prayer of fear)—is historically significant as the first recorded instance of this dispensation in Islamic history. Ibn Ishaq places the prayer at Dhuhr time, though other sources are less specific.
This act of ijtihad—independent legal reasoning—would later be validated and codified. It established a principle that reverberates through fourteen centuries of Islamic jurisprudence: when circumstances make normal worship impossible, the believer adapts rather than abandons. The door of sacred obligation does not close simply because the world grows dangerous.
Abdullah reached the chieftain, feigned interest in joining his forces, confirmed his identity, and when the moment was right—when Khalid ibn Sufyan was isolated from his guards, exactly as the Prophet had said he would be—he struck. The threat to Madinah was eliminated.
When Abdullah returned, the Prophet saw him approaching and said, “May your face be successful”—recognizing the outcome before a word was spoken. He gifted Abdullah a staff and made a promise that carried the weight of eternity: “This shall be a sign between me and you on the Day of Judgment.” Abdullah never let that staff leave his side. In peace and in war, in the house and on the road, it remained with him. When he died, he left a single instruction in his will: bury the staff with me in my grave.
The Trap at Al-Raji’
The elimination of Khalid ibn Sufyan sent shockwaves through the Banu Hudhayl. Their chieftain was dead, and they wanted revenge—but not the kind that risks open battle. Instead, they devised something far more insidious. They contacted two smaller tribes, Udhal and Qarra, and paid them to execute a deception.
The plot was simple and devastating: members of Udhal and Qarra would travel to Madinah, profess their conversion to Islam, and beg the Prophet to send Quran teachers back with them. They knew the Muslim community’s deepest instinct—the longing to share their faith, to teach the Book of Allah to anyone who asked. They weaponized that generosity.
The delegations arrived in Madinah and made their request. The Prophet selected between seven and ten companions, most likely ten, under the leadership of Asim ibn Thabit (may Allah be pleased with him), a warrior-scholar who had distinguished himself at Uhud. These were not soldiers being sent to fight. They were teachers being sent to teach. They carried the Quran in their hearts and trust in their guides.
When the group reached the well of Al-Raji’, one hundred armed warriors from the Banu Hudhayl emerged from the hills and surrounded them. Ten men against a hundred. The teachers realized in an instant that they had been betrayed.
They scrambled to the top of a small hill and drew their bows—the only weapon effective at range. But bows and arrows against a hundred men can only delay the inevitable. The attackers called up to them: surrender, and we will not harm you. We give you our word.
Asim ibn Thabit knew better. He knew that a particular pagan woman named Sulafa bint Sa’d had sworn a terrible oath: she would drink wine from his skull. Her husband had fallen to Asim’s arrows at Uhud, and she had placed a bounty of one hundred camels on his head. Surrender meant not just death but desecration.
So Asim made his stand and his prayer. He called out to Allah: “I protected Your religion in the daytime—now protect my body at night.” Then he fought. He loosed arrows until his quiver was empty. He thrust with his spear until the shaft snapped. He swung his sword until the blade went dull. And then, as was inevitable when ten face a hundred, he fell.
What happened next belongs to the realm of the miraculous—what Islamic theology calls karamat, extraordinary divine favors granted to the righteous who are not prophets. When the warriors rushed to claim Asim’s body and collect Sulafa’s bounty, a swarm of wasps descended upon them, stinging anyone who approached. They waited for nightfall, knowing the insects would disperse in the dark. But when dusk came, something impossible occurred: a torrent of water surged from nowhere—no rain had fallen, there was no river in the area—climbed the hill where Asim’s body lay, swept it up, and carried it away into the distance.
To this day, no one knows where Asim ibn Thabit is buried. Allah took care of his burial Himself.
Karamat: Divine Favors for the Righteous
The events surrounding Asim’s body illustrate the Islamic concept of karamat—supernatural occurrences granted by Allah to righteous believers who are not prophets. Unlike mu’jizat (miracles given to prophets as proof of their prophethood), karamat are not performed at will and do not serve as evidence for a prophetic claim. They are understood as divine gifts, signs of Allah’s pleasure with a servant’s sincerity.
The distinction matters theologically. A prophet’s miracle is a public proof that demands recognition. A karamah is a private grace—often witnessed by others, but not intended as a call to follow the recipient. Asim did not summon the wasps or the flood. He simply asked Allah for protection, and Allah answered in a manner that defied every natural expectation.
The seerah contains multiple instances of karamat in this single episode: the protection of Asim’s body, and as we shall see, the appearance of grapes for Khubayb in a season and place where no grapes existed. These events are affirmed in mainstream Sunni theology as authentic manifestations of divine care, distinguishable from both prophetic miracles and sorcery by their context, their source in sincere faith, and their alignment with divine will rather than human manipulation.
Three Survivors, Three Destinies
The battle at Al-Raji’ killed all but three of the Muslim teachers. Surrounded and exhausted, Khubayb, Zayd, and Abdullah ibn Tariq (may Allah be pleased with them all) accepted the enemy’s promise of safety and descended the hill.
The moment they reached level ground, their captors seized them and bound them like animals—ropes lashed tight, bodies slung onto carrying poles. Abdullah ibn Tariq saw it immediately. “This is the first sign of treachery,” he said. “They never intended to give us security.”
Abdullah made his choice. He refused to walk. He refused to march. He refused every command. He knew exactly what his defiance would bring, and he chose it anyway. His captors, finding him useless as a prisoner, killed him on the roadside.
Scholarly Note
Abdullah ibn Tariq’s deliberate refusal to cooperate, knowing it would result in his death, raises an important jurisprudential question. Islamic scholars have noted that this is not considered suicide (which is categorically forbidden), because the fatal act was carried out by the enemy, not by Abdullah himself. He chose to resist rather than submit to captivity and likely torture, and the precedent established here—alongside the choices of Asim and others—demonstrates that in such extreme circumstances, both fighting to the death and surrendering are permissible options. The individual’s circumstances and judgment determine which path is more appropriate, and all who acted sincerely are considered rewarded.
Khubayb and Zayd were taken alive—not out of mercy, but out of greed. Living prisoners could be sold to wealthy Qurayshi families in Makkah who had personal scores to settle. Khubayb had killed a man of the Banu Harith at the Battle of Badr; they purchased him for execution. Zayd had been among the group that killed Umayyah ibn Khalaf, the former master of Bilal ibn Rabah (may Allah be pleased with him); Safwan ibn Umayyah purchased him to avenge his father.
Both men knew they were being kept alive only long enough to be publicly executed. And both, in their final days, demonstrated a quality of character that stunned even their captors.
Khubayb: Nobility in Chains
Khubayb’s captivity among the Banu Harith produced moments of such moral clarity that even the woman who held him prisoner could not help but testify to his character.
He was starving—they were not feeding him, not honoring any code of treatment for prisoners. Yet his captor later swore that she saw him eating from a bunch of fresh grapes while chained in his cell, in a season when there were no grapes anywhere in Makkah. It was sustenance from Allah—another karamah for a man whose faith never wavered.
Then came the incident with the child. Khubayb had asked for a razor to clean himself before his execution—he wanted to meet Allah in a state of purity, his body washed, his hair trimmed according to the Sunnah. As he sat with the blade in his hand, a toddler from the household crawled over to him and settled in his lap. The mother saw her baby next to a condemned man holding a razor and screamed in terror.
Khubayb looked up, genuinely bewildered. “Do you think I would harm this child?” he asked. “By Allah, I would never do such a thing.”
The mother later testified: “I have never seen any prisoner more noble than him in his character and his manners.” Here was a man hours from execution, starved, chained, holding the one weapon that could have given him a final act of vengeance—and the very thought of harming an innocent child was an insult to his dignity. This was what faith looked like when stripped of everything but itself.
When the time came, Khubayb asked permission to pray two units of prayer. He prayed them with deliberate calm, then turned to his executioners and said: “Were it not that you would think I am being cowardly, I would have prayed longer. But I do not want you to think I am afraid of death.”
Khubayb thus established a practice that would endure in Islamic tradition: the prayer of the condemned. Any Muslim facing execution is encouraged to pray two units of prayer before meeting their Lord—a Sunnah born not in comfort but in chains, not in a mosque but on a killing ground.
Zayd: A Love Beyond Comprehension
Zayd’s execution was turned into a public spectacle. The Quraysh made a festival of it—a day of celebration, a communal act of vengeance against the religion that had humbled them at Badr. The leaders of Makkah gathered to watch.
It was Abu Sufyan who posed the question that would echo through centuries of Islamic memory. Standing before the bound and bleeding Zayd, he asked: “I ask you by Allah—tell me the honest truth. Don’t you wish right now that Muhammad was in your place and you were safe with your family and children?”
Zayd’s answer came without hesitation, without calculation, without anything left to gain or lose in this world:
“By Allah, I would rather die like this than that the Prophet receive a thorn prick where he is sitting right now.”
Abu Sufyan stepped back. He was a man who understood power, who had led armies and negotiated treaties, who knew how loyalty worked among the tribes of Arabia. But this was something beyond his frame of reference. He turned to the crowd and said words that even he could not suppress:
“I have never seen any leader more beloved to his people than Muhammad is to his companions.”
This was not Muslim testimony. This was the observation of an enemy commander, spoken in public, at the execution of a Muslim prisoner. And it was not the first time a non-Muslim had made such an observation, nor would it be the last. The love the Companions bore for the Prophet was so visible, so visceral, so far beyond the ordinary bonds of tribal loyalty, that it testified to something the Quraysh could not explain within their own worldview.
The Well of Ma’una: Seventy Scholars in the Desert
The catastrophe at Al-Raji’ was still unknown in Madinah when the second and far greater disaster was set in motion. According to al-Waqidi, news of both tragedies reached the Prophet on the same night. To understand the scale of what happened at Bi’r Ma’una, one must first understand the opportunity that seemed to present itself.
A chieftain named Abu al-Bara’ Amir ibn Malik, one of the most respected elders of Najd—the vast interior of the Arabian Peninsula, north of the Hijaz—visited Madinah. He was impressed by Islam. He did not convert, but he made an extraordinary offer: send your preachers to Najd, and I will guarantee their safety. My word is respected among all the tribes. Your teachers will be protected.
The potential was staggering. Najd was larger than the Hijaz. Its population was enormous. If even a fraction of its tribes accepted Islam, the entire political and spiritual landscape of Arabia would be transformed. The Prophet sensed Abu al-Bara’s sincerity—and Abu al-Bara’ was sincere. He genuinely believed his protection would hold.
The Prophet selected seventy companions for the mission. Seventy. To grasp the magnitude of this number, consider that the entire Muslim fighting force at Uhud had been seven hundred. He was sending ten percent of his available men—and not warriors, but the cream of the scholarly class. Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him) later described them: they were known for their Quran recitation, their night prayers, their quiet charity. They were the men of the Suffah—the devoted scholars who lived in the mosque, who had no homes of their own, who spent their days in service and their nights in worship. They would go out at night to fill the water buckets of the Ansar families, then return to the mosque to sleep on the bare ground.
These were the men the Prophet entrusted with the mission to Najd. And these were the men who would never return.
The Betrayal
What Abu al-Bara’ did not foresee was the ambition and hatred of his own nephew, Amir ibn Tufayl. This was a man who had once attempted to negotiate his acceptance of Islam on the condition that the Prophet share—or eventually cede—political authority to him. When the Prophet refused, Amir ibn Tufayl’s pride curdled into active hostility.
When the seventy companions reached the well of Ma’una and sent Haram ibn Milhan (may Allah be pleased with him) as an envoy to Amir ibn Tufayl with a letter of introduction and an invitation to Islam, the chieftain did not even read the letter. He made a gesture—some coded signal to one of his men—and a spearman ran up behind Haram and drove his weapon through the companion’s back.
The treachery was threefold. Haram was a messenger, and messengers were inviolable by the unanimous custom of every tribe in Arabia. He carried the protection of Abu al-Bara’, a more senior chieftain whose word Amir ibn Tufayl had no right to override. And the killing was done by stealth—a coward’s strike from behind, without warning or declaration.
But Haram ibn Milhan’s response transformed his murder into testimony. As the spear point emerged from his chest and his blood poured onto the sand, his face lit with joy. His words—“Fuztu wa Rabbil Ka’bah,” “I have won, by the Lord of the Ka’bah”—carried such shocking conviction that, according to the sources, at least one witness was so shaken that he eventually sought out the Muslims and embraced Islam. Who declares victory at the moment of their own death? What kind of faith makes a man smile as his life drains away?
Amir ibn Tufayl knew he had crossed a line from which there was no return. One dead messenger would bring consequences; he needed to eliminate all seventy witnesses. He sent urgent messages to the surrounding tribes, calling them to join his attack. Most refused—they knew Abu al-Bara’ had granted protection, and they would not violate it. But three sub-tribes—Usayyah, Ra’l, and Dhakwan—agreed to join him.
Four hundred to five hundred warriors descended on the well of Ma’una. The seventy companions had not come armed for battle. They carried no armor, no war equipment. They were preachers carrying copies of the Quran, not soldiers carrying swords. They fought with whatever they had, and one by one, they fell. Every single one of them was killed except for three.
Ka’b ibn Zayd was left for dead beneath a pile of bodies, wounded and unconscious. He would survive, make his way back to Madinah, and live to fight at the Battle of Khandaq two years later, where he would finally receive the martyrdom that had been deferred at Ma’una.
The other two survivors, Amr ibn Umayyah and al-Mundhir ibn Muhammad (may Allah be pleased with them), had been away from camp on an errand. Returning, they saw vultures circling in the sky above the campsite—the universal herald of death. They stopped and debated what to do.
Amr argued for returning to Madinah to bring the Prophet the news and seek reinforcements. Al-Mundhir, the Ansari, refused. “I will not leave the place where my companions were killed,” he said. “And I will not be the man who lives to tell the story of their deaths while they received the honor of martyrdom.”
Both men walked back into the killing ground. Al-Mundhir was killed, as he wished. Amr, by some turn of fate—perhaps Amir ibn Tufayl wanted a messenger to carry the terror back to Madinah, perhaps he claimed the right to free a captive—was released. Allah granted each man what his heart had sought: martyrdom for the one who craved it, survival for the one who felt the urgency of bearing witness.
Scholarly Note
On his return journey, Amr ibn Umayyah encountered two men from the tribe of Banu Amir traveling in the opposite direction. Unaware that these individuals carried a letter of protection from the Prophet himself, and believing them to be members of the hostile tribe that had just massacred his companions, Amr killed them both. When he reached Madinah and the Prophet learned what had happened, the Prophet took full responsibility and paid the blood money (diyah) to the victims’ families. This incident illustrates the Islamic principle that individuals cannot be held collectively guilty for the crimes of their tribe—these two men had no part in the massacre and were under the Prophet’s own protection. It also demonstrates that even in the aftermath of devastating treachery, justice must be maintained and mistakes must be rectified.
A Prophet’s Grief
The night the news arrived—both Al-Raji’ and Bi’r Ma’una, according to al-Waqidi, on the same night—the Prophet’s grief was unlike anything the community had witnessed. At Uhud, the loss had been seventy men in the chaos of open battle. Here, nearly eighty of the finest believers had been slaughtered through cold-blooded treachery—not in war, but while carrying the Quran to people who had asked for it.
These were personal losses. The Prophet had chosen each of the seventy himself. He knew their names, their recitation, their habits of worship. Anas ibn Malik’s own uncle was among the dead. The men of the Suffah—the community’s spiritual heart—had been all but annihilated.
For one full month, the Prophet performed qunut in every single prayer—Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha. Five times a day, after rising from the final ruku’, he raised his hands and supplicated against the tribes of Dhakwan, Ra’l, Banu Lihyan, and Usayyah. He asked Allah to avenge the blood of the innocent and to hold accountable those who had violated every code of honor the Arabs knew.
As for Amir ibn Tufayl, the architect of the massacre, the sources record that he was afflicted with a form of leprosy that began under his arm and spread across his entire body. His skin rotted. His mind deteriorated. His own people—the very tribesmen he had led—abandoned him. He died alone in the desert, a crazed pariah, consumed by the disease that consumed his flesh. The Prophet had made du’a against him; there was no shelter from that supplication.
And Abu al-Bara’, the sincere chieftain whose protection had been so brutally violated? The sources do not record the exact moment he learned what his nephew had done, but the betrayal tore the tribal alliances of Najd apart and set in motion consequences that would unfold for years to come.
The Abrogated Verses and the Theology of Naskh al-Tilawah
One of the most theologically significant aspects of the Bi’r Ma’una tragedy is the Quranic response it elicited. According to authentic narrations in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Allah revealed verses regarding the martyrs of Bi’r Ma’una—verses that were recited as part of the Quran for a time before being abrogated in recitation (naskh al-tilawah), though their meaning remained valid.
Fragments of these verses survive in hadith literature. Among them: “Convey to our brothers that we have met our Lord, and He is pleased with us, and we are pleased with Him.” The concept of naskh al-tilawah—that Allah may reveal a verse, have it recited for a period, and then lift its recitation while preserving its content through hadith—is a recognized phenomenon in Quranic sciences, though it is relatively rare and has generated extensive scholarly discussion.
This incident is one of the clearest historical contexts for such abrogation, and it underscores a profound theological point: the martyrs of Bi’r Ma’una were so beloved to Allah that He spoke of them directly in revelation, communicating their joy in the afterlife to the grieving community they had left behind.
The Sunnah of Qunut and the Lessons of Loss
The practice of qunut—the supplication performed during prayer in times of communal calamity—finds one of its strongest precedents in the Prophet’s response to Bi’r Ma’una. Anas ibn Malik narrated that after the massacre, the Prophet would stand in the final rak’ah, after rising from ruku’, and raise his hands in supplication for the martyrs and against the tribes that had betrayed them.
This practice carries a direct instruction for every generation of Muslims: when the ummah suffers, the response is not merely political or military. It is liturgical. It is woven into the very fabric of prayer. The qunut is a communal cry to Allah, offered in the most sacred act a Muslim performs, acknowledging that ultimate justice belongs to Him alone.
The twin tragedies also illuminate a truth about prophetic knowledge that is both humbling and clarifying. The Prophet could describe Khalid ibn Sufyan’s appearance without ever having seen him. He could direct Abdullah ibn Unais to the exact valley where the chieftain would be vulnerable. Yet he sent seventy of his best men into an ambush he did not foresee. What Allah chose to reveal, He revealed. What He withheld, no human being—not even the most beloved of creation—could access.
“Say: None in the heavens and the earth knows the unseen except Allah.” — Al-Naml (27:65)
This is not a diminishment of the Prophet’s station. It is a testament to the nature of divine wisdom: Allah reveals what serves His purpose, when it serves His purpose. The loss at Bi’r Ma’una was not a failure of prophetic foresight. It was a divine decree that chose the best of the believers for the honor of martyrdom—a two-way street, as the scholars note, in which the community’s earthly loss was the martyrs’ eternal gain.
The Character That Endures
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Al-Raji’ and Bi’r Ma’una is not the tactical lessons or the jurisprudential precedents, but the portraits of human character that emerge from the wreckage. Asim, who fought until every weapon broke and then entrusted his body to Allah. Khubayb, who held a razor and a baby and chose mercy over vengeance. Zayd, who preferred his own agonizing death to a thorn prick on the Prophet’s finger. Abdullah ibn Tariq, who refused to take a single step as a captive. Al-Mundhir, who walked back into certain death rather than be the man who merely told the story. Haram ibn Milhan, who saw his own blood and called it victory.
These were not superhuman beings. They were men who had learned the Quran in the mosque of Madinah, who had filled water buckets for their neighbors, who had slept on the bare ground of the Suffah. What made them extraordinary was not their circumstances but their certainty—the unshakeable conviction that what lay beyond death was more real, more permanent, and more beautiful than anything this world could offer or threaten.
The Prophet mourned them for a month. Then he lifted his hands from qunut and turned to face the challenges that remained. The treachery of Bi’r Ma’una had exposed the fragility of diplomatic agreements in a lawless landscape. It had also revealed that closer to home, within the walls of Madinah itself, another treaty was about to be broken—this time by the Banu Nadir, whose plot against the Prophet’s life would soon force a reckoning of a different kind. But before that confrontation, the community would pause to tend to the quieter, more intimate bonds that held it together: bonds of marriage, of family, of the gentle human architecture that sustains a people through their darkest seasons.
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