Khalid ibn al-Walid's Campaigns Against the Rebel Tribes

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Ridda Wars were a series of campaigns waged by Abu Bakr, the first caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, to suppress rebellions across Arabia in the year following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. Several Arabian tribal confederations renounced their allegiance to Medina, refused to continue paying zakat to the new caliphate, or rallied instead to rival claimants to prophethood, most prominently Musaylima in the Yamama region, threatening within months the unity Muhammad had spent his own lifetime building across the peninsula.

Abu Bakr's general Khalid ibn al-Walid led the decisive campaigns of the war, defeating Musaylima's forces at the Battle of Yamama in 632 and restoring Medina's authority across the whole of the peninsula within roughly a year of Muhammad's own death. The consolidation ended organized tribal resistance to Medina's rule entirely and freed the caliphate's armies, still under Khalid's own field command, to begin the Muslim conquests into Iraq and Syria almost immediately after Yamama's decisive outcome. Musaylima's own defeat at Yamama, where Khalid's forces broke his numerically larger following after hard fighting, was the single costliest engagement of the whole war and the one later tradition remembers as its decisive turning point.