Deputation of Beni Hanîfa to the Caliph.
When the campaign was ended, Khâlid sent a deputation of the chief survivors to Abu Bekr, who received them courteously. ‘Out upon you!’ said he; ‘how is it that this impostor led you all astray?’ ‘O Caliph!’ they answered, ‘thou hast heard it all; he was one whom the Lord blessed not, nor yet his people;’ and they repeated to him some of the things he used to say. ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Abu Bekr, ‘Beshrew you! What kind of words are these? There is neither sense in them for good nor yet for evil, to have beguiled you thus, but a kind of strange fatuity.’ So he dismissed them to their homes.[60]
Many ‘Companions’ among the slain. Zeid, brother of Omar.
Among the killed we meet not a few names familiar to us in the annals of the Prophet’s life. The carnage amongst the Readers—those who had the Corân by heart—was so great, as to suggest to Omar the first design of collecting the sacred text, ‘lest any part should be lost therefrom.’ At the death of his favourite brother Zeid, who had shared with him the dangers of the first battles of Islam, Omar was inconsolable. ‘Thou art returned home,’ he said to his son Abdallah, ‘safe and sound; and Zeid is dead. Wherefore wast not thou slain before him? I wish not to see thy face.’ ‘Father!’ answered Abdallah, ‘he asked for martyrdom, and the Lord granted it. I strove after the same, but it was not given unto me.’ Such was the spirit of these Moslem warriors.
Khâlid marries Mojâa’s daughter.
Khâlid again signalised his victory by wedding a captive maid upon the field.[61] ‘Give me thy daughter to wife,’ he said to Mojâa, the prisoner who had so faithfully defended his bride in the hour of peril. ‘Wait,’ replied Mojâa; ‘be not so hasty. Thou wilt endamage thyself in the eyes of thy Chief, and me likewise.’ ‘Man, give me thy daughter!’ he repeated imperiously; so Mojâa gave her to him. When Abu Bekr heard of it, he wrote him a letter sprinkled with blood. ‘By my life! thou son of Khâlid’s father, thou art a pretty fellow, living thus at thine ease. Thou weddest a damsel, whilst the ground beneath the nuptial couch is yet wet with the blood of twelve hundred!’ The reproof fell lightly upon Khâlid. ‘This is the work,’ he said, as he read the epistle, ‘of that left-handed fellow,’ meaning Omar. The sentiment, however, was Abu Bekr’s own; but the ‘Sword of the Lord’ could not be spared.
We shall meet Khâlid next in Chaldæa, by the banks of the river Euphrates.
CHAPTER VIII.
CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE REBELS IN THE EAST AND SOUTH OF ARABIA.
A.H. XI. A.D. 632–3.
Campaigns in the east and south of Arabia. A.H. XI.
Having traced Khâlid’s victorious career from the north to the centre of Arabia, we shall now follow the Mussulman arms in their progress from Bahrein and Omân on the Persian Gulf, along the southern coast to Hadhramaut and Yemen, but more briefly than before, both because the authorities themselves are brief, and also because the interest of the story, apart from a few instructive incidents, centres mainly in the general result, that is, the reclamation of apostate Arabia.