When Muhammad died in 632 several Arabian groupings withdrew from the arrangement they had made with Medina. Muslim historiography calls the campaigns that followed the ridda, the apostasy, a term that assumes the arrangement had been a conversion rather than a treaty. Modern historians point out that some of the groups involved may have understood themselves to be ending a political agreement with a man who was now dead, not leaving a religion, and that the two readings are not always separable in the sources.
The Banu Hanifa were the hardest of them to break. Abu Bakr sent Khalid ibn al-Walid, and the decisive engagement was fought at Aqraba, in a walled garden that the sources afterwards called the garden of death. The Hanifa lost and Musaylima was killed in the fighting. The tradition gives the fatal blow to Wahshi ibn Harb, the same man who had killed Hamza at Uhud years earlier while fighting on the other side, a detail whose neatness invites caution.
The consequence that mattered ran in the opposite direction from the battle. Casualties among the men who carried the Quran in memory were heavy enough, the sources say, for Umar to press Abu Bakr to have the text written down and gathered before more of it was lost. On that account the collection of the Quran as a single written object begins with the campaign that ended Musaylima.