The trench and Banū Qurayẓah

In the fifth year the confederates came. On the counsel of Salmān رضي الله عنه al-Fārisī رضي الله عنه a trench was dug across the exposed northern approach; the Prophet ﷺ carried earth with them, stone tied to his stomach from hunger, and they sang as they worked. The siege lasted about a month under cold, hunger and the treachery of Banū Qurayẓah, until a wind scattered the camps. He ﷺ said afterwards, 'Now we shall go to them, and they shall not come to us.'

• 33:9–11 — 'When they came at you from above you and from below you... there the believers were tested.'
• 33:22 — The believers' response: 'This is what Allah and His Messenger promised us.'

• A Persian companion's foreign expertise was adopted without hesitation — wisdom has no ethnicity.
• Al-Aḥzāb records both the sincerity and the hypocrisy of that month, side by side.

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4103; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1803

Banū Qurayẓah had broken the covenant during the siege of the trench, negotiating with the confederates while the city was surrounded. When the armies withdrew, the Prophet ﷺ was commanded to go to them, and they were besieged for twenty-five nights until they surrendered and asked that Saʿd ibn Muʿādh رضي الله عنه judge them — their old ally, now dying of a wound from the trench. He judged that the fighting men be killed and the women and children taken captive, a ruling matching the law in their own scripture. The Prophet ﷺ said Saʿd had judged by the judgement of Allah.

• The judgement came from an arbitrator they themselves named.
• This was treason inside a siege, judged as such — not a ruling about a religion.

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3043, 4122; ar-Raḥīq al-Makhtūm, al-Mubārakpūrī