The Battle of Uhud

Mecca's defeat at Badr in the previous year had cost Quraysh several of its leading men, and in the following year it raised a force reckoned by tradition at around three thousand, considerably larger than the army sent to Badr, under the command of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb. It marched on Medina rather than waiting to be raided again. Muhammad, after consultation, chose to meet the Meccan force in open ground near Mount Uhud, a low ridge just outside the city, rather than withstand a siege inside Medina itself, a decision tradition records as taken against his own preference and in deference to the younger men who wanted to fight.

Before the battle, Muhammad posted a company of archers, numbered in the sources at about fifty, on a low hill overlooking the Muslim position, with explicit instructions to hold it regardless of how the battle went, so that the Meccan cavalry could not use the position to turn the Muslim flank. Roughly a third of the force that had set out from Medina, under Abdullah ibn Ubayy, withdrew before the fighting began, reducing the Muslim army that actually engaged to around seven hundred men against the much larger Meccan force. The debate over where to meet the Meccan force divided Muhammad's companions: some favored remaining inside Medina and letting a siege exhaust the larger army, while others, many of them younger men who had missed the fighting at Badr, pressed to meet Quraysh in the open. Muhammad set aside his own preference for the defensive plan and led the force that marched out to Uhud.

The battle opened well for the Muslims, and the Meccan line began to give way. Seeing the apparent victory, most of the archers left their post on the hill to join in gathering the spoils of the retreating Meccan camp, against the order they had been given. Khalid ibn al-Walid, commanding the Meccan cavalry on the flank, saw the hill exposed and led his horsemen around it to strike the Muslim force from the rear, turning an apparent victory into a rout. Muhammad himself was struck and wounded, losing a tooth and suffering a cut to his face, and for a time a rumor spread through the field that he had been killed. His uncle Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the champions of Badr, was killed in the fighting, and his body was mutilated afterward by Hind bint Utbah, whose father had died at Badr.

Quraysh did not press the advantage into an assault on Medina itself, and withdrew after the battle, so Uhud registered as a serious reversal rather than a decisive Meccan victory. The Quran addresses the defeat at length in Surah Al Imran, treating the archers' abandonment of their post as the cause of the reversal and framing the whole episode as a test of the community's discipline rather than evidence against its cause. Modern historians generally follow the broad shape of the traditional account while noting, as with Badr, that its troop figures come from within the Islamic historical tradition rather than an outside record.