Before the war can be understood, the order it broke must be understood, for the Arabs of the sixth century carried in their unwritten law a calendar of peace that descended, in its kernel, from the rites of Ibrahim (peace be upon him). Four months of the year, the Arabs held sacred: Dhu al-Qa'dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and al-Muharram in succession, and Rajab standing alone. In those months the tribes laid down their blood-feuds; the market flowed; the pilgrim walked unarmed through the country of his enemies; and the great fairs of the season, above all Ukaz, gathered the tribes for trade and poetry and the settlement of disputes in the shade of a truce that even the idolaters did not dare to name lightly. It was a law without a state, held in honor by the common conscience of a people who had no common government, and the wonder of the historian is not that it was sometimes broken but that it held at all. The Lord of the House, who had taught the father of the Arabs to call the months of the pilgrimage, had left their shadow upon the memory of his descendants, and the sanctity of those months would be sealed, in the fullness of time, by the Book itself.
The war of the present event is the story of that sanctity's most famous violation. Ibn Ishaq, as Ibn Kathir transmits him, states the essentials: the Sacrilegious War raged in the years of the Prophet's ﷺ youth, and it was named Fijar because the two great parties, Kinanah and Qays Aylan, acted as though the sacred month, in which fighting was forbidden, were open before them for slaughter. Ibn Hisham, in the recension that carried Ibn Ishaq's work to later generations, sets its outbreak in the Prophet's ﷺ fourteenth or fifteenth year, transmitting the notice from Abu Ubayda the grammarian, from Abu Amr ibn al-Ala, the two masters of the Arabic tongue. Al-Mubarakpuri in the Sealed Nectar agrees with the earlier figure: the Prophet ﷺ was hardly fifteen, he writes, when the Sacrilegious Wars broke out between Quraysh and Banu Kinanah on the one side and the Qays Aylan tribe on the other, wars which continued with varying fortunes and considerable loss of human life for a number of years. The dates are held apart by the scholars with open honesty, and this event will weigh them in their place; the war itself must first be told.
The spark was struck at the fair of Ukaz, the greatest of the seasonal markets of the Hijaz, and it began, as the desert's tragedies so often began, with the economy of protection. Al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir, the Arab king of al-Hira who kept the frontier for Persia, sent a caravan of musk to the fair, a cargo of honor and profit, and such a caravan required a protector, a man of a great house whose name would shield the goods along the road. The protector chosen was Urwa al-Rahhal ibn Utba of the Banu Amir, a clan of the Hawazin tribes and thus of the party of Qays Aylan. Ibn Kathir, transmitting Ibn Hisham's fuller account, records the resentment this choice provoked: al-Barrad ibn Qays, a man of the Dumrah clan of Kinanah, came to Urwa and demanded of him whether he really intended to grant protection in defiance of Kinanah's will; and Urwa answered him with the sentence that cost him his life: yes, and in defiance of everyone. Lings compresses the same history into a single line of great force: a profligate of Kinanah had treacherously murdered a man of Amir, one of the Hawazin tribes of Najd, and had taken refuge in the impregnable fortress-township of Khaybar. Behind the murder lay the older quarrel of who should hold the custom of the roads, and the caravan of musk was its occasion rather than its cause.
The killing itself was a double outrage, and the Arabs knew it at once as such. Urwa set out with the trading party, and al-Barrad followed him, waiting upon his chance; and when the party reached the high ground near Ukaz, and Urwa's watchfulness relaxed, al-Barrad fell upon him and killed him, and this, as Ibn Kathir's transmission states plainly, was during the sacred month. The month of the truce was made the month of the murder; the fair's peace was broken upon the road to the fair; and the deed was compounded, in the manner of that age, by the boast. Al-Barrad himself made verses upon his crime, verses Ibn Kathir preserves, glorying that he had raised his hand against Urwa and brought him down like a felled tree; and the poets of the wronged side answered, Labid ibn Rabi'a among them, announcing to the dead man's kin where vengeance was owed. Labid, whose tongue would one day be given to the Quran when Islam came to claim the poets, here fanned a feud in the old coin of the trade; and the fair of Ukaz, which had been designed by the Arabs' ancestral wisdom as the place where quarrels were settled, became the place from which a war was declared.
The news ran to Makkah with the speed that bad news keeps. A man arrived and told Quraysh of it, in the words of the account: al-Barrad has killed Urwa, and during the sacred month, at Ukaz. What followed showed both the solidarity and the scruple of the Meccans. Quraysh rode out against the killer's kin, moving without the knowledge of Hawazin; and when Hawazin learned of the expedition they pursued, and caught the Meccans before they could reach the sacred territory. The two sides fought until nightfall; and then the men of Quraysh passed inside the boundary of the haram, and Hawazin gave up the pursuit, unwilling to carry the fighting into the inviolable ground. Even in the first heat of the feud the old law asserted itself: the sanctuary itself was not yet to be a battlefield, though the season's peace had already been trampled and the war had drawn its first blood at the sanctuary's very threshold. The believer marks the irony heaven permitted: the men who had profaned the month sheltered behind the precinct, and the precinct sheltered them, for Allah's decrees are not repealed by the sins of the men who stand under them.
Then the war settled into its pattern. For days after that first encounter, as Ibn Kathir transmits, the parties met in successive engagements, the people going forth under various banners, with a leader of each of the tribes of Quraysh and Kinanah, and a leader of each of the tribes of Qays. The alignment was written in the old confederacies: Quraysh, bound by treaty to Kinanah, marched with Kinanah, and Harb ibn Umayya, on account of his standing and descent, as the Sealed Nectar renders it, led Quraysh and their allies. In the first day of the main fighting, Ibn Ishaq notes, Qays had the better of the field against Kinanah until midday, and by midday the victory had turned to Kinanah and their confederates; such reversals were the ordinary weather of Arabian battle, where the charge of a single clan could swing a day. It was in these arrays, though the present event's account of that belongs to the event which follows, that the young Muhammad ﷺ was present with his uncles, fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years old, watching the muster of his people and learning in his body what the feuds of the jahiliyyah were.
Al-Suhayli, whose explanations Ibn Kathir sets beside the narrative, counted out the war's battles and corrected its name. Al-Fijar, he notes, is spelled with the vowel of qital, fighting, and the Arabs counted four wars of Fijar in their history, which al-Masudi the genealogist of the age recorded entire; the last of them all was this one involving al-Barrad. Its fighting, al-Suhayli states, consisted of four battles: the battle of Shamta and the battle of al-Abiya, both near Ukaz; the battle of al-Sharab, which was the major battle, and the one which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ attended; and the battle of al-Harira, near Nakhla. For the day of al-Sharab the chieftains of the Quraysh-Kinanah alliance, Harb ibn Umayya and his brother, named Sufyan in the edition's rendering of the account, bound themselves by a pact that they would not take to flight; and on that occasion Qays were defeated, save the Banu Nasr, who held their ground. The reader who would reconcile Lings' count of five days of actual fighting with the four battles need not strain: four engagements, some spanning more than one day, scattered over years of armistice and muster, were all the combat the desert's economy could afford, and all it needed.
The end came by words, and this is one of the parts of the story the believer should hold dear. After the battle of al-Harira the two parties agreed to meet in force at Ukaz the following year, and when the appointed assembly stood drawn up, Utba ibn Rabi'a of the clan of Abd Shams rode out on his camel between the lines and called out his question: O tribe of Mudar, what is it you are fighting for? They asked what he proposed, and he answered: peace. Upon what terms, they demanded; and he laid out the arbitration that ended the war: we pay you blood-money for your dead, and we leave men with you as hostages to guarantee the payment, and we forgo the blood-money that is owed to us. When they asked who would guarantee such a peace, he answered: I; and to their question who he was, he gave his name: Utba ibn Rabi'a. On those terms the peace was made, and the guarantors, forty men of Quraysh among whom the account names Hakim ibn Hizan, were sent over into the hands of the other side; and when the clans of the Banu Amr ibn Sa'da'a saw the hostages actually delivered into their keeping, they gave up their claims, and the Sacrilegious War was at an end. Blood-money for blood, hostages for guarantee, waived claims for peace: the desert, which had no courts, had remembered in its extremity that it had arithmetic, and the war closed not with a tombstone but with a ledger.
Now the chronology must be weighed with the honesty this project owes its readers. Ibn Ishaq's notice, as Ibn Kathir transmits it, is that the Sacrilegious War raged at a time when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was twenty years old; Ibn Hisham's notice, transmitted from the grammarians, is that it broke out when he had reached fourteen or fifteen; Lings, compressing the same traditions, describes a conflict that dragged on for three or four years with only five days of actual fighting; and Ibn Kathir himself, in the chapter that follows the war in his book, records the statement of the authorities that the pact of al-Fudul was concluded twenty years before the prophethood, in Dhu al-Qa'da, some four months after the Fijar war, because the Fijar occurred in Sha'ban of the same year. Read together, the reports give the shape this event has followed: a war that broke out in the Prophet's ﷺ mid-teens, smoldered through several years of intermittent engagements, and was closed by arbitration in the season of Sha'ban in the year he was twenty, four months before the alliance of chivalry that the war's discontent had made ready. Some of the later chroniclers stretched the span of the hostilities in their reckonings, and the span has been discussed ever since; the received chronology of this project holds the window of his fifteenth to nineteenth years for the fighting, with the peace following at the close. The believer loses nothing by the openness of the arithmetic: the war's fact is carried by every line of the tradition, and its lesson does not depend upon which of its years was longest.
What the war meant, the Quran itself allows the Ummah to measure, for the Book would one day be asked the very question this war had raised. Fighting in the sacred month: the questioners came, and the answer came down: they ask you about the sacred month, fighting therein; say: fighting therein is great, a grave matter; and then the verse, weighing all the wrongs in one scale, adds that barring from the way of Allah and disbelief in Him and the sacred mosque and expelling its people are greater with Allah, and that persecution is greater than killing. And the Book had already fixed the calendar itself: the count of the months with Allah is twelve, in the Book of Allah, the day He created the heavens and the earth; of them four are sacred; that is the right religion, so do not wrong yourselves in them. The months belong to Allah; their peace is His ordinance; and the men of Fijar, who made the month lawful for their swords, were trespassing not upon a custom of their ancestors but upon an order of their Maker, dimly remembered and soon to be declared. Al-Mubarakpuri named the war precisely in this light: it was called sacrilegious because the inviolables were made violable, the prohibited months being included.
And where did the war leave the people who had fought it? Lings, with the insight of the tradition behind him, draws the consequence that leads to the events that follow this one in the chronology: the war helped to fan the growing discontent which every settled community feels with the law of the desert. The leading men of Quraysh had traveled to Syria and seen the relative justice of the empire's courts; they knew that in Abyssinia a man could obtain redress without recourse to the feud; but in Arabia there was no comparable system of law by which a victim of crime, or his family, might obtain justice, and the Sacrilegious War, like other conflicts before it, set many minds thinking of ways and means to prevent the same thing from happening again. This time, Lings writes, the result was more than thoughts and words: there was now a widespread readiness to take action. The soil was plowed; the seed would be a stranger's cry from a mountain above the city, and the harvest would be the oath of the Alliance of Chivalry, the pact of al-Fudul, to which the events now approaching in this chronology bear witness. Allah was preparing, through the very agony of the jahiliyyah, the thirst for justice that His revelation would one day fill.
For the sacred months themselves, the last word belongs to the Prophet ﷺ who watched this war as a youth. Years later, at the Farewell Pilgrimage, in the last sermon of his blessed life, the matter was sealed in the hearing of the multitude, transmitted by Abu Bakrah (may Allah be pleased with him) in both Sahih collections: verily time has come round like the day Allah created the heavens and the earth; the year is twelve months, of which four are sacred, three in succession and Rajab of Mudar, which comes between Jumada and Shaban. The man who had seen the month of the truce broken at Ukaz in his boyhood stood in his sixtieth year at the head of a nation and proclaimed the months' sanctity as revelation's own ordinance, and the calendar that the Arabs had held in inherited honor he set upon the foundation of the Book. What the believer takes from the war of Fijar, then, is not the fascination of the feud but the fear of the sin: that men who know a law of Allah and break it for gain or for pride write their own indictment; that the seasons and the sanctuaries of the Lord are not resources to be drawn upon in the hour of rage; and that Allah, patient beyond all patience, sends His correction in His time, through the very child who stood among the baggage of a broken truce, gathering the arrows his uncles had shot, and keeping his own hand clean until the day when the sword would be carried only by command.