Muhammad: The Warrior Prophet

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Muhammad: The Warrior Prophet

If Muhammad had not been an innovative and accomplished military leader, Islam might not have survived the seventh century.

By Richard A. Gabriel

The long shadow of Muhammad stretches across centuries of strife to the present. Today an estimated 1.4 billion Muslims around the globe follow his teachings—the word of God as revealed to Muhammad and set down in the Koran—making Islam the world’s second-largest religion behind Christianity. But despite Muhammad’s remarkable accomplishments, there is no modern account of his life that examines his role as Islam’s first great general and the leader of a successful insurgency. Had Muhammad not succeeded as a commander, however, Islam might have been relegated to a geographic backwater—and the conquest of the Byzantine and Persian empires by Arab armies might never have occurred.

The idea of Muhammad as a military man will be new to many. Yet he was a truly great general. In the space of a single decade he fought eight major battles, led eighteen raids, and planned another thirty-eight military operations where others were in command but operating under his orders and strategic direction. Wounded twice, he also twice experienced having his positions overrun by superior forces before he managed to turn the tables on his enemies and rally his men to victory. More than a great field general and tactician, he was also a military theorist, organizational reformer, strategic thinker, operational-level combat commander, political-military leader, heroic soldier, and revolutionary. The inventor of insurgency warfare and history’s first successful practitioner, Muhammad had no military training before he commanded an army in the field.

Muhammad’s intelligence service eventually rivaled that of Byzantium and Persia, especially when it came to political information. He reportedly spent hours devising tactical and political stratagems, and once remarked that “all war is cunning,” reminding modern analysts of Sun Tzu’s dictum, “all war is deception.” In his thinking and application of force Muhammad was a combination of Karl von Clausewitz and Niccolo Machiavelli, for he always employed force in the service of political goals. An astute grand strategist, he used non*mili*tary methods (alliance building, politi*cal assassination, bribery, religious appeals, mercy, and calculated butchery) to strengthen his long-term position, sometimes even at the expense of short-term military considerations.

Muhammad’s belief in Islam and his own role as the “Messenger of God” revolutionized Arabian warfare and resulted in the creation of the ancient world’s first army motivated by a coherent system of ideological belief. The ideology of holy war (jihad) and martyrdom (shahada) for the faith was transmitted to the West during the wars between Muslims and Christians in Spain and France, where it changed traditional Christian pacifistic thinking on war, brought into being a coterie of Christian warrior saints, and provided the Catho*lic Church with its ideological justification for the Crusades. Ideology—whether religious or secular—has remained a primary component of military ventures ever since.

Muhammad forged the military instrument of the Arab conquests that began within two years of his death by bringing into being a completely new kind of army not seen before in Arabia. He introduced no fewer than eight major military reforms that transformed the armies and conduct of war in Arabia. Just as Philip of Macedon transformed the armies of Greece so his successor, Alexander, could employ them as instruments of conquest and empire, Muhammad transformed the armies of Arabia so his successors could use them to defeat the armies of Persia and Byzantium and establish the heartland of the empire of Islam.

Muhammad was first and foremost a revolutionary, a fiery religious guerrilla leader who created and led the first genuine national insurgency in antiquity that is comprehensible in modern terms, a fact not lost on the jihadis of the present day, who often cite the Koran and Muhammad’s use of violence as justification for their own insurgencies. Unlike conventional generals, Muhammad did not seek the defeat of a foreign enemy or invader; rather, he sought to replace the existing Arabian social order with a new one based upon a radically different ideological worldview. To achieve his revolutionary goals Muhammad utilized all the means recognized by modern analysts as characteristic of a successful insurgency in today’s world.

Although Muhammad began his struggle for a new order with a small guerrilla cadre capable of undertaking only limited hit-and-run raids, by the time he was ready to attack Mecca a decade later that small guerrilla force had grown into a large conventional army with integrated cavalry and infantry units capable of conducting large-scale combat operations. It was the first truly national military force in Arab history, and it was this conventional military instrument that Muhammad’s successors used to forge a great empire.

Muhammad’s rise to power was a textbook example of a successful insurgency, in all likelihood the first such example in antiquity. The West has been accustomed to thinking of the Arab conquests that followed Muhammad in purely conventional military terms. But the armies that achieved those conquests did not exist in Arabia before Muhammad. It was Muhammad’s successful unconventional guerrilla operations, his successful insurgency, that brought those armies into existence. The later Arab conquests, as regards both strategic concept and the new armies as in*struments of military method, were the consequences of Muhammad’s prior military success as the leader of an insurgency.

This aspect of Muhammad’s military life as a guerrilla insurgent is likely to strike the reader as curious. But if the means and methods used by modern military analysts to characterize insurgency warfare are employed as categories of analysis, it is clear that Muhammad’s campaign to spread Islam throughout Arabia fulfilled all of the criteria. One requirement for an insurgency is a determined leader whose followers regard him as special in some way and worthy of their following him. In Muhammad’s case his own charismatic personality was enhanced by his deeply held belief that he was God’s Messenger, and that to follow Muhammad was to obey the dictates of God himself.
Insurgencies also require a messianic ideology, one that espouses a coherent creed or plan to replace the existing social, political, and economic order with a new order that is better, more just, or ordained by history or even by God himself. Mu*hammad used the new religious creed of Islam to challenge basic traditional Arab social institutions and values as oppressive and unholy and worthy of replacement. To this end he created the ummah, or community of believers, God’s community on earth, to serve as a messianic replacement for the clans and tribes that were the basis of traditional Arab society. One of Mu*hammad’s most important achievements was the establishment of new social institutions that greatly altered and in some cases completely replaced those of the old Arab social order.

Successful insurgencies also require a disciplined cadre of true believers to do the work of organizing and recruiting new members. Muhammad’s revolutionary cadre consisted of the small group of original converts he attracted in Mecca and took with him to Medina. These were the muhajirun, or emigrants. The first converts among the clans of Medina, the ansar, or helpers, also filled the ranks of the cadre. Within this revolutionary cadre was an inner circle of talented men, some of them later converts. Some, like Abdullah Ibn Ubay and Khalid al-Walid, were experienced field commanders and provided a much-needed source of military expertise. Muhammad’s inner circle advised him and saw to it that his directives were carried out. These advisers held key positions during the Prophet’s lifetime and fought among themselves for power after his death.
Once Muhammad had created his cadre of revolutionaries, he established a base from which to conduct military operations against his adversaries. These operations initially took the form of ambushes and raids aimed at isolating Mecca, the enemy’s main city, and other trading towns that opposed him. Only one in six Arabs lived in a city or town at this time; the others resided in the desert, living as pastoral nomads. Muhammad chose Medina as his base of operations because of its strategic location. Medina was close to the main caravan route from Mecca to Syria that constituted the economic lifeline of Mecca and other oases and towns dependent upon the caravan trade for their economic survival. Medina was also sufficiently distant from Mecca to permit Muhammad a relatively free hand in his efforts to convert the bedouin clans living along the caravan route. Muhammad understood that conversions and political alliances with the bedouins, not military engagements with the Meccans, were the keys to success.

Insurgencies require an armed force and the manpower to sustain them. It was from the original small cadre of guerrillas that the larger conventional army could be grown that would ultimately permit the insurgency to engage its enemies in set-piece battles when the time and political conditions were right. Muhammad may have been the first commander in history to understand and implement the doctrine later espoused by General Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam as “people’s war, people’s army.” Muhammad established the belief among his followers that God had commandeered all Muslims’ purposes and property for His efforts and that all Muslims had a responsibility to fight for the faith. Everyone—men, women, and even children—had an obligation for military service in defense of the faith and the ummah that was the community of God’s chosen people on earth. It is essential to understand that the attraction of the Islamic ideology more than anything else produced the manpower that permitted Muhammad’s small revolutionary cadre to evolve into a conventional armed force capable of large-scale engagements.

The rapid growth of Muhammad’s insurgent army is evident from the following figures. At the Battle of Badr (624 ce), Muhammad could only put 314 men in the field. Two years later at Second Badr, 1,500 Muslims took the field. By the 628 battle at Kheibar, the Muslim army had grown to 2,000 combatants. When Muhammad mounted his assault on Mecca (630) he did so with 10,000 men. And at the Battle of Hunayn a few months later the army numbered 12,000 men. Some sources record that Muhammad’s expedition to Tabuk later the same year was composed of 30,000 men and 10,000 cavalry, but this is probably an exaggeration. What is evident from the figures, however, is that his insurgency grew very quickly in terms of its ability to recruit military manpower.

Like all insurgent armies, Muhammad’s forces initially acquired weapons by stripping them from prisoners and enemy dead. Weapons, helmets, and armor were expensive items in relatively impoverished Arabia, and the early Muslim converts, drawn mostly from among the poor, orphaned, widowed, and otherwise socially marginal, could ill afford them. At the Battle of Badr, the first major engagement with an enemy army, the dead were stripped of their swords and other military equipment, setting a precedent that be*came common. Muhammad also established the practice of requiring prisoners to provide weapons and equipment instead of money to purchase their freedom. One prisoner taken at Badr, an arms merchant, was forced to provide the insurgents with a thousand spears to obtain his freedom. Muhammad eventually had enough weapons, helmets, shields, and armor to supply an army of 10,000 for his march on Mecca.

Muhammad’s ability to obtain sufficient weapons and equipment had an important political advantage. Many of the insurgency’s converts came from the poorest elements of the bedouin clans, people too impoverished to afford weapons and armor. By supplying these converts with expensive military equipment, Muhammad immediately raised their status within the clan and guaranteed their loyalty to him, if not always to the creed of Islam. In negotiations with bedouin chiefs he made them gifts of expensive weaponry. Horses and camels were equally important military assets, for without them raids and the conduct of operations over great distances were not possible. Muhammad obtained his animals in much the same manner as he did his weapons and with equal success. At Badr the insurgents had only two horses. Six years later at Hunayn Muhammad’s cavalry squadrons numbered 800 horse and cavalrymen.

An insurgency must be able to sustain the popular base that supports the fighting elements. To accomplish this, Muhammad changed the ancient customs regarding the sharing of booty taken in raids. The chief of an Arab clan or tribe traditionally took one-fourth of the booty for himself. Muhammad decreed that he receive only one-fifth, and even this the chief took not for himself but in the name of the ummah. Under the old ways individuals kept whatever booty they had captured. Muhammad required that all booty be turned in to a common pool where it was shared equally among all combatants who had participated in the raid. Most important, Muhammad established that the first claimants on the booty that had been taken in the name of the ummah were the poor and the widows and orphans of the soldiers killed in battle. He also used the promise of a larger share of booty to strike alliances with bedouin clans, some of whom remained both loyal and pagan to the end, fighting for loot rather than for Islam.
The leader of an insurgency must take great care to guard his authority from challenges, including those that come from within the movement itself. Muhammad had many enemies, and he was always on guard against an attempt upon his life. Like other leaders, Muhammad surrounded himself with a loyal group of followers who acted as his bodyguard and carried out his orders without question. For this purpose he created the suffah, a small cadre of loyal followers who lived in the mosque next to Muhammad’s house. Recruited from among the most pious, enthusiastic, and fanatical followers, they came from impoverished backgrounds. The suffah members spent much of their time studying Islam. They were devoted to Muhammad and served not only as his life guard but also as a secret police that could be called upon at a moment’s notice to carry out whatever task Muhammad set for them, including assassination and terror.

No insurgency can survive without an effective intelligence apparatus. As early as when Muhammad left Mecca in 622, he left behind a trusted agent, his uncle Abbas, who continued to send him reports on the situation there. Abbas served as an agent-in-place for more than a decade, until Mecca itself fell to Muhammad.

In the beginning Muhammad’s operations suffered from a lack of tactical intelligence. His followers were mostly townspeople with no experience in desert travel. On some of the early operations Muhammad had to hire bedouin guides. As the insurgency grew, however, his intelligence service became more organized and sophisticated, using agents-in-place, commercial spies, debriefing of prisoners, combat patrols, and reconnaissance in force as methods of intelligence collection.

Muhammad himself seems to have possessed a detailed knowledge of clan loyalties and politics within the insurgency’s area of operations and used this knowledge to good effect when negotiating alliances with the bedouins. He often conducted advance reconnaissance of the battlefields upon which he fought. In most cases his intelligence service provided him with sufficient information as to the enemy’s location and intentions in advance of any military engagement. We have no knowledge of exactly how the intelligence service was organized or where it was located. That it was part of the suffah, however, seems a reasonable guess.

Insurgencies succeed or fail to the degree that they are able to win the allegiance of great numbers of uncommitted citizens to support the insurgency’s goals. Muhammad understood the role of propaganda and went to great lengths to make his message public and widely known. In a largely illiterate Arab society, the poet served as the major conveyor of political propaganda. Muhammad hired the best poets money could buy to sing his praises and denigrate his opponents. He issued proclamations regarding the revelations he received as the Messenger of God, and remained in public view to keep the vision of the new order and the promise of a heavenly paradise constantly before the public. He also sent missionaries to other clans and tribes to instruct the “pagans” in the new faith, sometimes teaching those groups to read and write in the process. Muhammad understood that the conflict was between the existing social order with its manifest injustices and his vision of the future, and he surpassed his adversaries in spreading his vision to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Arab population.

Terrorism seems to be an indispensable element of a successful insurgency, and it was no less so in Muhammad’s case. He used terrorism in two basic ways: First, he ensured discipline among his followers by making public examples of traitors and backsliders. In Muhammad’s day the penalty for apostasy in Islam was death. He also ordered some of his political enemies assassinated, including poets and singers who had publicly ridiculed him. When his armies marched into Mecca, for example, Muhammad’s suffah set about hunting down a list of old enemies marked for execution. Second, Muhammad used terrorism to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies on a large scale. In the case of the Jewish tribes of Medina, Muhammad seems to have ordered the death of the entire Beni Qaynuqa tribe and the selling of their women and children into slavery, though he was later talked out of it by the chief of one of his allies. On another occasion, again against a Jewish tribe of Medina, he ordered all the tribe’s adult males, some nine hundred, beheaded in the city square, the women and children sold into slavery, and their property distributed among his Muslim followers. Shortly after the conquest of Mecca, Muhammad declared “war to the knife” against all those who remained idolaters, instructing his followers to kill any pagans they encountered on the spot. His ruthlessness and brutality served to strengthen his hand with opponents and allies alike.

Muhammad’s use of terrorism does not detract from Islam as a religion any more than the history of the Israelite military campaign to conquer Canaan detracts from Judaism. Over time the violent origins of religions are forgotten and only the faith itself remains, so the founders of the creeds come to be remembered as untouched by the violence of the historical record. In Muhammad’s case the result has been to deemphasize the military aspects of his life and his considerable military accomplishments as Islam’s first great general and the inventor of the theory and practice of insurgency. (...)
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