Mercy, Masks, and a Mother's Necklace

The necklace arrives before the man does.

It comes wrapped in cloth, bundled with coins and whatever valuables Zainab could gather from her modest possessions in Makkah — the ransom for her husband, Abu’l As, taken prisoner at Badr. The companions who receive the payment begin sorting through it, and then someone notices it: a string of agate and gold, old but unmistakable, carrying the particular craftsmanship of a generation past. Word reaches the Prophet (peace be upon him), and when he sees it, the change in his face is visible to everyone in the room. This is the necklace that Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) used to wear — the one she had placed around her daughter’s neck on the day of Zainab’s wedding, as mothers have done since time immemorial.

For a moment, the aftermath of the greatest military victory in the young community’s history falls silent. The Prophet is not looking at a piece of jewelry. He is looking at a doorway into everything he has lost.

The Reckoning of Mercy and Justice

The Muslim army had departed the plains of Badr on Monday, the 20th of Ramadan, three days after the battle itself. Behind them lay the bodies of seventy Qurayshi dead and the smoldering wreckage of pagan Makkah’s sense of invincibility. Before them marched seventy prisoners of war — the living remnants of an army that had ridden out expecting annihilation and found it visited upon themselves instead.

But the march back to Madinah was not a simple triumphal procession. Two stops had to be made. At an open stretch of land between Badr and Madinah, two prisoners were separated from the rest and executed: An-Nadr ibn al-Harith and Uqba ibn Abi Mu’ayt.

Scholarly Note

Some scholars have noted that this may be the only instance in the entire Prophetic career in which prisoners of war were executed. Ibn Ishaq describes An-Nadr as “Shaytanun min Shayateen Quraysh” — a devil among the devils of the Quraysh. This characterization, while harsh, reflects the extraordinary nature of these two men’s crimes against the early Muslim community, which went far beyond ordinary opposition.

An-Nadr ibn al-Harith was no ordinary enemy. He was one of the few Qurayshis who had traveled abroad, having lived in the ancient city of Hira, capital of the Lakhmid dynasty in Iraq. He returned to Makkah carrying the legends and fables of the Persian kings — the same stories that would later be immortalized in Firdausi’s Shah Namah. When the Quran began to be revealed, An-Nadr positioned himself as its literary rival. Whenever people gathered to hear the Prophet recite, An-Nadr would call them away, offering his Persian tales as superior entertainment. Multiple Quranic verses reference his arrogance, including the chilling declaration attributed to him:

“I can reveal the like of what Allah has revealed.” — Referenced in Al-An’am (6:93)

He and Uqba had even traveled together to Yathrib to consult the Jewish scholars there, seeking trick questions to trap the Prophet — a mission that resulted in the revelation of Surah al-Kahf, with its accounts of the Sleepers of the Cave, Dhul Qarnayn, and the nature of the Ruh.

As for Uqba ibn Abi Mu’ayt, his record of personal cruelty was staggering. He was the man who had physically carried the rotting carcass of a slaughtered animal and dumped it on the Prophet’s back while he prostrated in prayer near the Ka’bah — an act so degrading that no grown man among the Quraysh dared intervene, and it fell to the young Fatimah to rush forward and remove the filth from her father’s shoulders. Uqba was also the one who had wrapped his own cloak around the Prophet’s neck and attempted to strangle him to death during prayer, prompting Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (may Allah be pleased with him) to intervene with the words that the Quran itself would echo:

“Would you kill a man because he says, ‘My Lord is Allah’?” — Ghafir (40:28)

When Uqba was brought forward for execution, he fell to his knees. The man who had shown no mercy when throttling the Prophet now begged for his own life. “Why me, out of all of them?” he cried. Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) answered plainly: “Because of your animosity to Allah and His Messenger.” Then Uqba made one final plea: “Who will take care of my children?”

The Prophet’s response was two words: An-Nar — the Fire.

Scholarly Note

Scholars offer two interpretations of this response. The first holds that the Prophet was telling Uqba he had far greater concerns than his children — namely, the Fire that awaited him. The second interpretation suggests that if his children followed his path of enmity toward Islam, they had already been led toward the Fire by their father’s example. Both readings appear in classical tafsir literature, and neither can be definitively preferred over the other.

The contrast was deliberate and instructive. Two men, out of seventy, were singled out — not as a general policy of execution, but as a precise message that not all enmity is equal. The remaining sixty-eight prisoners would receive treatment that had no precedent in the ancient world.

Prisoners in the Prophet’s House

The Prophet returned to Madinah and dispersed the prisoners among those who had captured them, issuing a single command that would reshape the ethics of warfare:

“Treat them with kindness” (Istausu bihim khayra).

The companions obeyed with a literalism that astonished the captives themselves. Abu Aziz ibn Umayr — the brother of the great companion Musab ibn Umayr — later testified that every time his Ansari captors sat down to eat, they gave him the bread and meat while keeping only dates and water for themselves. “I would try to put the bread back in front of them out of sheer embarrassment,” he recalled, “but they would take it and place it before me again.” This was not performed for show. It was the natural consequence of a direct prophetic command internalized by men who believed their obedience would be weighed on the Day of Judgment.

The most senior prisoners — the chieftains of the Quraysh — were housed in the Prophet’s own home. Foremost among them was Suhail ibn Amr, one of the most powerful men in Makkah, the same figure who would later negotiate the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah on behalf of the Quraysh. He sat in a corner of the Prophet’s dwelling, hands bound, a prisoner of war sleeping under the same roof as the commander who had defeated him.

There is a moment of raw humanity recorded here that illuminates the world these people inhabited. Sawda bint Zam’a (may Allah be pleased with her), the Prophet’s wife, had been away from home when the prisoners arrived. She rushed back, burst through the door, and there in the corner she saw Suhail ibn Amr — the great chieftain of her people — sitting bound and humiliated. Before she even registered the Prophet’s presence beside her, something ancient and tribal surged up from within her. “Ya Aba Yazid!” she cried, using his honorific. “You surrendered like this? Why didn’t you die an honorable death rather than live as a prisoner?”

The Prophet’s voice cut through her outburst: “You are encouraging him to fight against Allah and His Messenger?”

Sawda was mortified. “Ya Rasulallah,” she said, “by Allah, I lost all sense of where I was. When I saw him sitting like that, I could not control myself.” The Prophet accepted her apology and never raised the matter again — a small act of mercy within the household that mirrored the larger mercy being extended to the prisoners themselves.

The Ransom System and the Value of Literacy

The ransom for the prisoners was not a flat rate. Each captive was assessed according to his means — the wealthy paid more, the poor paid less, and the destitute were released without payment at all. This sliding scale reveals a sophisticated understanding of economic justice that predated modern concepts of proportional assessment by over a millennium.

The case of Al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s own uncle, is particularly instructive. Al-Abbas claimed he had no money to pay his ransom of four thousand dirhams — the highest amount levied. The Prophet responded by describing, in precise detail, money that Al-Abbas had secretly buried and the exact instructions he had given his wife Umm al-Fadl about distributing it among their sons in the event of his death. Al-Abbas was stunned: “I swear by the One who sent you with the truth — no one knew about this except me and her.” He paid in full, and was additionally required to cover the ransoms of his two nephews, Aqeel and Nawfal.

Al-Abbas later said that this incident was the occasion for the revelation of a Quranic verse:

“O Prophet, say to those in your hands of the captives: If Allah knows any good in your hearts, He will give you something better than what was taken from you, and He will forgive you. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” — Al-Anfal (8:70)

Years later, Al-Abbas would testify: “I wish the Prophet had taken more from me, because what Allah gave me in return was far greater than what was taken.” He went from those twenty silver coins to owning twenty thriving businesses.

Perhaps the most celebrated detail of the ransom system, authentically reported in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, is that prisoners who had no money but were literate could earn their freedom by teaching the children of the Ansar to read and write. In a society where literacy was not valued, the Prophet placed education above silver — a statement about civilizational priorities that echoes across fourteen centuries.

The Birth of Nifaq

The first person to bring news of Badr to Madinah was Zayd ibn Haritha (may Allah be pleased with him), riding the Prophet’s own she-camel, al-Qaswa — a living credential that everyone in the city would recognize. Zayd entered Madinah crying out Allahu Akbar and reciting the names of the Qurayshi dead: Shayba ibn Rabi’a, Umayyah ibn Khalaf, Abu Jahl. It was a roll call of every powerful name in Arabia.

The believers erupted in joy. But another group — those who had been hedging their bets, waiting to see which way the wind would blow — began whispering among themselves. “Zayd has gone mad,” they muttered. “Muhammad has been killed, and Zayd has stolen his camel and gone delirious.” They simply could not believe that a ragtag community of emigrants and farmers had annihilated the military elite of the most powerful city in the Hijaz.

Ironically, the identical reaction occurred in Makkah when the first survivors straggled home with the news. Both sides found the outcome literally unbelievable.

But while Makkah’s disbelief curdled into grief and rage, Madinah’s skeptics faced a different calculus. When the truth became undeniable — when the Prophet himself rode into the city with seventy prisoners in tow — the remaining pagans of Madinah understood that the old order was finished. There was no explicit command to abandon idol worship, but the social reality had shifted irreversibly. One by one, the last polytheists converted. And with their conversion, a new phenomenon entered Islamic history: nifaq — hypocrisy.

There had been no hypocrites before Badr. There was no need for hypocrisy when Islam appeared weak and vulnerable; opponents could simply oppose it openly. But now that Islam was demonstrably ascendant, outward opposition became costly. The solution, for those whose hearts refused what their lips professed, was to wear the mask of faith while working to undermine it from within.

The chief architect of this strategy was Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salool. He had been the most powerful chieftain of the tribes of Yathrib — the Aws and Khazraj had been on the verge of crowning him their supreme leader when the Prophet’s arrival upended everything. For two years, Abdullah ibn Ubayy had watched his political ambitions dissolve. Now, hearing Zayd’s proclamation of victory, he uttered a sentence that revealed everything: “It appears that the matter has now been settled.”

He meant: I will never be king. And so he outwardly embraced Islam — an embrace that the Quran itself would later expose as hollow. His story, and the story of the munafiqun he led, would become one of the most consequential subplots of the Madinan period, culminating in the devastating slander of Aisha bint Abi Bakr (may Allah be pleased with her) known as the Incident of the Necklace. But all of that lay in the future. For now, the mask was donned, and the community had acquired an enemy it could not see.

Khadijah’s Necklace

It is against this backdrop of triumph and emerging treachery that the story of Abu’l As and Zainab unfolds — a story that is, at its heart, about the cost of faith measured in the currency of love.

Abu’l As ibn al-Rabi’ was the Prophet’s son-in-law, married to his eldest daughter Zainab (may Allah be pleased with her). His mother was Hala, the sister of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, making him Zainab’s cousin. The marriage had been arranged in the days before prophethood, when the two families were simply kin bound by affection and proximity. Abu’l As was, by all accounts, a loving and honorable husband. He never prevented Zainab from practicing Islam, even as he himself remained a pagan. At this point in the timeline, the Quranic verses of Surah al-Mumtahanah — which would later prohibit Muslim women from remaining married to disbelievers — had not yet been revealed. The marriage continued in a painful liminal space: a believing wife and an unbelieving husband, bound by genuine love, separated by the deepest possible theological divide.

Abu’l As had fought at Badr on the side of the Quraysh and been captured. When the ransom arrived from Makkah, it included everything Zainab could gather — including that necklace. The Prophet, visibly moved, made a request rather than a command to those who held Abu’l As: if they were willing, could they release him without taking this particular item? No one would refuse the Prophet’s intercession. Abu’l As was freed.

But there was a condition, agreed upon privately: Abu’l As would send Zainab to Madinah. His ransom was not silver. It was the Prophet’s own daughter.

A Woman Falls from a Camel

Abu’l As kept his word. He could not bear to escort Zainab himself — the humiliation of personally handing his wife over was more than his pride could endure — so he entrusted the journey to his brother Kinana. But Kinana, perhaps overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment, made a critical error: he loaded Zainab onto a camel and began leading her out of Makkah in broad daylight.

Rumors had already been circulating. Hind bint Utba, the wife of Abu Sufyan, had visited Zainab with an offer that dripped with false sweetness: “I’ve heard you may be leaving. If you are, come to me first — I’ll help you pack. Women know what women need better than men do.” Zainab sensed the trap — Hind wanted to know the departure date so it could be prevented — and declined.

But daylight departure was impossible to conceal. Word spread through Makkah like fire through dry brush, and a posse of Qurayshi men gathered to stop Zainab from leaving. Among them was Habbar ibn al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib. As the mob surrounded Kinana and the camel, Habbar thrust his spear at the animal. The camel reared violently upward, and Zainab — who was pregnant — was thrown from a height of fifteen feet onto the hard ground.

She began to bleed immediately. The child she carried — a grandchild of the Prophet — was lost in the miscarriage that followed. Some sources indicate that the injuries Zainab sustained in this fall contributed to her early death several years later. She would be the first of the Prophet’s daughters to die in his lifetime.

Kinana, to his eternal credit, leapt in front of Zainab with his sword drawn and his bow strung. “I swear by Allah,” he declared, “anyone who approaches me will taste my blade. Every one of you knows how good a marksman I am.” The mob hesitated. No one wanted to die over this.

The standoff was broken by Abu Sufyan himself, who rode in and took command of the situation with the political acuity that would define his career. He dispersed the crowd, then turned to Kinana with cold pragmatism: “You acted foolishly. Did you expect us to let you parade the Prophet’s daughter out of Makkah in broad daylight? Take her back. Wait until the talk dies down. Then send her quietly, in the middle of the night. We have no reason to keep this woman here.”

And so it happened. Days later, under cover of darkness, Kinana delivered Zainab to the two companions the Prophet had stationed outside the city. She arrived in Madinah wounded, grieving, and no longer carrying the child that had been growing within her.

The Curious Afterlife of Habbar ibn al-Aswad

The man who caused Zainab’s miscarriage — Habbar ibn al-Aswad ibn al-Muttalib — later accepted Islam and was forgiven. But the threads of his story extend in an extraordinary direction. His grandson accompanied Muhammad ibn Qasim in the Muslim conquest of Sindh in 712 CE. Generations later, around the third century of the Hijrah, Habbar’s descendants established an independent dynasty in what is now Pakistan — the Habbarid dynasty — which ruled over Sindh and Makran for over two hundred years. They founded cities, minted coins, and governed a territory that stretched across the lower Indus valley. The dynasty eventually fell to the Fatimid Ismailis, who established their own presence in Multan and Mansura — a presence whose echoes can still be traced in the Ismaili communities of the subcontinent today.

It is one of history’s stranger ironies: the man who caused the Prophet’s grandchild to perish in a Makkan roadside became, through the mysterious workings of divine decree, the ancestor of Muslim rulers on the banks of the Indus River.

Joy and Grief on the Same Day

There is one more story from these days that must be told, because it contains a truth that the Prophet’s entire life was designed to teach.

As Zayd ibn Haritha rode into Madinah crying Allahu Akbar, one man heard the takbir from a particular location: the cemetery of Baqi’. Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with him) heard it at the precise moment he finished burying Ruqayyah, the Prophet’s daughter and his own wife. She had fallen ill during the Prophet’s absence and died before his return. Uthman had stayed behind from Badr specifically to care for her — the Prophet himself had commanded it and counted him among the participants of Badr despite his absence.

So the greatest joy the Muslim community had ever known arrived on the same day as its deepest private grief. The household that deserved the most celebration was the household visited by death. Ruqayyah was the first of the Prophet’s daughters to die — though the exact order of his daughters’ births remains a matter of scholarly discussion. What is certain is that on the day the Muslim world changed forever, the Prophet lost a child.

It is as if the message embedded in the timing was itself a revelation: Do not mistake this world for the final abode. The Prophet himself had taught that every person carries a long list of ambitions and desires, and before the list is complete, death draws a line through it. On the day of Badr, that teaching was inscribed in his own flesh.

Uthman would later marry Umm Kulthum, another of the Prophet’s daughters — earning him the title Dhun-Nurayn, the possessor of two lights. But that is a story for another time.

The World After Badr

The Battle of Badr remade the political map of western Arabia. The Muslims were no longer refugees clinging to survival in an unfamiliar city. They were a sovereign power that had defeated the mightiest military force in the region. The Quraysh, for their part, were shattered — not merely in military terms, but psychologically. The list of their dead read like a directory of the Arabian aristocracy. Their prisoners had been treated with a generosity that shamed them. And within their own city, the double standards that had always characterized their behavior were now impossible to ignore: the same Quraysh who had raged when a Muslim killed a man during the sacred month of Rajab said nothing when Abu Sufyan kidnapped an elderly Ansari pilgrim named Sa’d ibn Nu’man from the sacred precincts of Makkah itself, holding him hostage until his own son Amr was released without ransom.

But the most consequential change was invisible. Inside Madinah, the mask of hypocrisy had been fitted over the faces of men who would spend the next decade working to destroy the community from within. Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salool had calculated the odds and chosen survival over sincerity. The age of nifaq had begun.

And somewhere between Makkah and Madinah, a wounded woman rode through the desert night, carrying in her body the injuries that would eventually claim her life, and carrying in her memory the image of a necklace that had once rested against her mother’s throat — a mother who had believed when no one else did, who had spent her fortune so that the truth could survive, and whose love still moved her husband to visible tears years after her death.

The road ahead would bring more battles, more betrayals, and more grief. But it would also bring the young martyr Haritha ibn Suraqa, whose mother would come to the Prophet with the most human of all questions: Where is my son now? That story, and the community’s jarring transition from chasing a caravan to facing an army, awaits in the next chapter.