There are moments when the most important strategic question is not what you should do next, but what kind of situation you are actually in.

 

It is an elementary question, yet much of what passes for strategy begins one step too late. We debate tactics, quote principles, assess personalities, and argue about what Islam requires before properly identifying the nature of the situation in front of us. Are we negotiating or reconciling? Are we dealing with an opponent or a partner with whom we disagree? Is this a misunderstanding to be resolved, a threat to be contained, an opportunity to be developed, or an attack against which something must be defended? Are we trying to win an argument, preserve an institution, protect a community, build a relationship, buy time, change the environment, or simply survive until circumstances improve?

 

Get that diagnosis wrong, and much of what follows can be wrong with it.

 

The mistake becomes particularly dangerous when made in the name of Islam. A person can quote the right verse, invoke an authentic hadith, and identify a genuine Islamic virtue and still arrive at the wrong strategy because he has applied the right principle to the wrong reality. Patience is Islamic, but patience does not mean passivity in every circumstance. Reconciliation is Islamic, but not every conflict is resolved through reconciliation. Courage is Islamic, but courage does not require confrontation whenever confrontation is available. Consultation is Islamic, but consultation does not mean that every matter remains indefinitely open for discussion. Firmness has its place, concession has its place, secrecy has its place, and transparency has its place. The difficult work is often not knowing that these things exist within Islam but knowing which of them the situation before us requires.

 

The Sīrah of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ is one of the greatest correctives to a flattened understanding of Islamic strategy because the Prophet ﷺ was unwavering in principle while remarkably adaptive in strategy. The Messenger ﷺ who endured persecution in Makkah was the same Messenger who fought at Badr. The commander at Badr was the same man who accepted the difficult terms of Ḥudaybiyyah. The Prophet ﷺ who authorised strategic deception during the siege of Madinah was the same Prophet who later entered Makkah at the height of his power and extended an extraordinary amnesty to people who had persecuted him and his followers for years. The Sharīʿah had not changed from one personality to another; what had changed were the circumstances, and as the circumstances changed, so too did the strategy required to navigate them faithfully, and perhaps nowhere is this more visible than during one of the darkest periods Madinah ever faced...

 

 

In the fifth year after the Hijrah, news reached Madinah of a mobilisation unlike anything the Muslims had previously confronted. Quraysh was coming from Makkah, joined by Ghatafān and other tribes in a Confederate force far larger than anything the Muslims could field. This was neither Badr nor Uḥud repeated on a larger scale. A coalition had been assembled with the capacity to overwhelm Madinah, and preparing for it required more than simply repeating the methods that had worked before.

 

It was Salman al-Fārisī رضي الله عنه who suggested digging a trench across the exposed approaches to the city, drawing upon a defensive technique known in Persian warfare but unfamiliar in the normal pattern of Arabian combat. The significance of the suggestion lay not merely in the engineering of the trench, but in the way the problem itself was understood...

 

If the Muslims had confined themselves to asking how a much smaller force could fight a much larger one, their strategic choices would have remained trapped inside the assumptions of the approaching enemy. The trench introduced another possibility: why should the Muslims fight the battle in the form for which their opponents had prepared?

 

The Muslims could not wish away the disparity before them. They could not summon thousands of additional men into Madinah, nor could they prevent the Confederate tribes from arriving once their mobilisation was under way. Those were realities with which any serious strategy had to begin. Yet accepting a reality is not the same as accepting the strategic significance that an opponent expects that reality to have.

 

The trench altered that significance. The Confederates retained their numerical superiority, their cavalry, their weapons and their fighting men, but the environment in which those advantages were supposed to operate had changed. The Muslims had not changed the number of men approaching Madinah; they had changed what those numbers could achieve. A force assembled for one kind of confrontation arrived to discover that the confrontation itself had been redesigned.

 

There is something else worth observing in the ease with which Salman's suggestion could be considered. The idea was Persian, but the Prophetic community did not suffer from the institutional insecurity that makes people suspicious of an idea because it was “not invented here." The question was not whether the method originated within an Arab military tradition, but whether it was useful, lawful, and appropriate to the objective. From this we learn that strategic maturity is able to benefit from knowledge wherever it is found without surrendering the principles by which that knowledge is judged.

 

The Muslims dug under immense pressure, and when the Confederate armies eventually arrived, the trench frustrated the type of assault they had anticipated. Yet the success of the physical defence did not end the crisis. As the siege continued, the battlefield began to move into places no trench could protect.

 

 

A siege is not simply a military event; rather, it is psychological. There is hunger, exhaustion, rumour, waiting, and the persistent uncertainty of not knowing when or where the decisive moment will come. The enemy remains close enough to sustain fear but distant enough to prolong it.

 

The Qur'an takes us directly inside that experience:

 

إِذْ جَاءُوكُم مِّن فَوْقِكُمْ وَمِنْ أَسْفَلَ مِنكُمْ وَإِذْ زَاغَتِ الْأَبْصَارُ وَبَلَغَتِ الْقُلُوبُ الْحَنَاجِرَ وَتَظُنُّونَ بِاللَّهِ الظُّنُونَا ۝ هُنَالِكَ ابْتُلِيَ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ وَزُلْزِلُوا زِلْزَالًا شَدِيدًا

 

“When they came at you from above you and from below you, when the eyes grew wild and the hearts reached the throats, and you began entertaining various thoughts about Allah. There the believers were tested and shaken with a tremendous shaking.”

 

The battlefield therefore existed simultaneously on several levels. There was the physical defence of Madinah, the management of alliances, the gathering and verification of intelligence, the maintenance of internal security, and the preservation of morale. The same external circumstances were producing radically different internal responses.

 

 

Banū Qurayẓah, whose relationship with the Muslims was governed by covenant, became implicated in the Confederate threat. If that covenant had indeed been broken, the strategic map changed dramatically. The Muslims would no longer be dealing only with a large external force held back by the trench; they would have to consider a potential threat emerging from within the very area the trench had been designed to protect.

 

Yet the strategy was not reorganised on the strength of rumour alone. The Prophet ﷺ sent senior Companions to establish what had happened. Information had to be verified before a new reality was allowed to dictate action. That discipline is easily lost in institutions, communities, and movements where an untested report can travel rapidly from “someone has said” to “we know” and then become the foundation upon which consequential decisions are made.

 

Once the position of Banū Qurayẓah became clear, however, the strategic reality had changed, and with it the range of responses that had to be considered.

 

 

At another point during the siege, the Prophet ﷺ explored the possibility of reaching an arrangement with Ghatafān under which they would withdraw in return for a portion of Madinah's date harvest, reported in the Sīrah as one third.

 

The proposal reveals another dimension of the strategy at Khandaq. The Confederate army appeared from the outside as a single overwhelming force, but a coalition is rarely as singular as it looks. Quraysh, Ghatafān and the other participants did not necessarily possess identical motivations, interests, or levels of commitment. Counting the members of an alliance tells us its size; it does not necessarily tell us its cohesion.

 

The Prophet ﷺ therefore explored whether the threat could be reduced by separating one of its components rather than defeating every component simultaneously. If a major participant could be induced to withdraw, the arithmetic of the conflict would change without a battle having been fought against that participant at all.

 

Before such an arrangement was concluded, the Prophet ﷺ consulted Saʿd ibn Muʿādh and Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah رضي الله عنهما, the leaders of Aws and Khazraj. Their first concern was revealing. They asked if this was something Allah had commanded, in which case there was nothing for them to deliberate over, or was it a strategic judgement intended to relieve the pressure upon Madinah? When they understood it to be the latter, they expressed their view that the concession should not be made, and the proposed arrangement was not concluded.

 

The fact that the arrangement was not ultimately concluded does not make the episode strategically insignificant. The Prophet ﷺ himself explained that he had considered it because the tribes of Arabia had converged upon Madinah and he wanted to break something of their collective strength. The purpose was therefore not simply to purchase relief with dates, but to alter the composition of the threat by separating Ghatafān from the wider coalition. The sources do not establish that the Prophet ﷺ later informed Ghatafān that the leaders of Madinah had rejected the proposal, and it would be wrong to speculate beyond what is reported. What the episode does show clearly is that He was willing to engage one component of an apparently unified enemy according to its own interests rather than treating the coalition as a single indivisible bloc. Internally, the matter remained subject to consultation; externally, there was no need to expose the details of that consultation. The broader strategic lesson is that an alliance that appears overwhelming when viewed as one body may look very different once its members are understood according to their separate motivations, interests, and vulnerabilities.

 

There is considerable depth in that exchange. Revelation remained beyond negotiation, while strategic judgement remained capable of consultation, assessment, and revision. In other words, the authority of the Prophet ﷺ did not turn every strategic preference into revelation simply because it was his preference. Nor did consultation diminish leadership. The distinction between immutable guidance and human judgement was itself part of the maturity of the Prophetic community.

 

 

Nuʿaym ibn Masʿūd رضي الله عنه belonged to Ghatafān. During the siege he came to the Prophet ﷺ having embraced Islam secretly, while his people remained unaware of his conversion. Measured purely in manpower, one additional Muslim could hardly alter the balance at the trench. Nuʿaym, however, possessed something more valuable in that particular moment than another sword. He possessed relationships, access, and credibility. The detailed account preserved in the books of Sīrah describes the Prophet ﷺ authorising him to weaken the coalition as he was able. The broader Prophetic principle is authentically established:

 

الْحَرْبُ خُدْعَةٌ

 

Nuʿaym understood the vulnerability hidden inside the apparent strength of the coalition. He approached Banū Qurayẓah, with whom he had an established relationship, and invited them to consider their position carefully. Quraysh and Ghatafān were not residents of Madinah. If the siege failed or became too costly, they could return to their own lands whilst Banū Qurayẓah could not. Their homes, families, and wealth were there, and they would remain to face Muhammad ﷺ after the others had departed.

 

He therefore advised them not to commit themselves fully unless Quraysh and Ghatafān first handed over leading men as hostages, thereby providing security that they would not simply abandon them. Nuʿaym then went to Quraysh and warned them of the opposite danger. Banū Qurayẓah, he suggested, had begun regretting their actions and might attempt to repair their relationship with Muhammad ﷺ by requesting leading men from Quraysh and Ghatafān and handing them over to him. He delivered a similar warning to Ghatafān and then events were allowed to do the rest...

 

When Quraysh sought further commitment from Banū Qurayẓah, Banū Qurayẓah demanded hostages. Each party suddenly encountered precisely the behaviour Nuʿaym had prepared it to fear. Banū Qurayẓah saw evidence that their allies might abandon them; Quraysh saw evidence that Banū Qurayẓah might betray them.

 

Nuʿaym had not removed thousands of soldiers from the battlefield. Quraysh remained Quraysh, Ghatafān remained Ghatafān, and Banū Qurayẓah remained physically where they had been. Their weapons had not disappeared and their men had not vanished. What changed was the confidence connecting those components.

 

This reveals something profound about the nature of strategic power. Organisations, alliances and institutions are not merely collections of resources. Their strength depends upon the relationships between those resources: confidence, communication, incentives, expectations, timing, and coordination. If those relationships fracture, the same resources can produce an entirely different strategic outcome.

 

The pattern was not altogether different from the trench itself. The Muslims could not alter the Confederates' numerical superiority, so they altered the terrain through which that superiority had to operate. Nuʿaym could not remove the constituent parts of the coalition, so he altered the trust through which those parts operated together.

 

Good strategy therefore begins with reality, but it does not assume that every feature of reality is equally fixed. Numbers may be fixed while terrain is not. Resources may be fixed while alliances are not. An opponent's strength may be fixed while the conditions that allow him to deploy that strength can be changed. The strategist has to distinguish between what must presently be accepted and what can still be shaped.

 

 

 

It would be easy to read the story of Nuʿaym and conclude that Islam operates according to one ethical framework in ordinary circumstances and permits the gloves to come off when the situation becomes sufficiently serious. That would misunderstand what happened.

 

The Sharīʿah never comes off!

 

There is no Islamic category in which the nobility of the objective suspends every restriction upon the means. Warfare itself has limits. Covenants create obligations. "Treachery" is not simply another word for "cleverness." Non-combatants have protections. Property has rulings. An action does not become lawful merely because the person committing it believes passionately in his cause.

 

What changes is not whether the Sharīʿah governs the situation, but how the situation is legally and strategically characterised and, therefore, which rulings govern conduct within it.

 

War is not ordinary commerce. An active military enemy is not merely a business competitor. Reconciliation between believers is not identical to negotiation with an adversary. A binding covenant changes what may be done with a party. Necessity has legal consequences, but necessity is not a blank cheque. Capability matters. Consequences matter. The relative weight of benefit and harm matters.

 

The juristic tradition developed a sophisticated vocabulary for thinking about precisely these kinds of problems. The jurist does not merely ask whether an action appears desirable in isolation. He considers its cause, conditions, consequences and relationship to the purposes of the Sharīʿah. Means are examined in relation to their ends. Benefits and harms are weighed. The principle of sadd al-dharāʾiʿ considers when apparently permissible means must be restricted because of what they lead towards, while iʿtibār al-maʾālāt demands attention to the consequences towards which actions are likely to lead.

 

Underlying all of this is something more elementary and frequently neglected: before determining what the Sharīʿah requires of a situation, we must understand the situation sufficiently well to characterise it correctly.

 

The juristic concept of taḥqīq al-manāṭ speaks, in part, to the work of determining how the relevant legal basis applies to the concrete reality before us. A ruling is not applied to an abstraction; it is applied to something that must first be properly understood.

 

Accordingly, strategy faces an analogous problem, since we cannot select the correct Islamic strategy for a reality we have incorrectly diagnosed.

 

 

Muslims sometimes speak about strategic questions by asking whether we are in a “Makkan phase” or a “Madinan phase”. There is value in recognising the profound change that occurred with the Hijrah, but even this distinction can become another form of simplification if turned into a formula.

 

Which moment in Makkah? Which moment in Madinah?

 

Madinah immediately after the Hijrah was not Badr. Badr was not Uḥud, Uḥud was not Khandaq, Khandaq was not Ḥudaybiyyah, and Ḥudaybiyyah was not the Conquest of Makkah. Even within the Madinan period, the Muslims moved through radically different configurations of strength, vulnerability, covenant, conflict, opportunity and responsibility.

 

The Prophet ﷺ remained the same Prophet throughout. His submission to Allah did not oscillate according to circumstances, but the strategic manifestation of that submission could look dramatically different because the circumstances themselves were dramatically different.

 

And if we leave the trench and travel forward to Ḥudaybiyyah, this becomes especially apparent...

 

Remember, the Muslims had travelled intending ʿUmrah and were prevented by Quraysh from entering Makkah! Negotiations followed, and eventually a treaty was drafted whose terms many of the Companions found extremely difficult. They would return without performing the ʿUmrah for which they had travelled. Some of the provisions appeared unequal, and even the language in which the agreement was written became a point of contention.

 

After persecution, expulsion, Badr, Uḥud, and Khandaq, it was understandable that some of those present struggled to comprehend why concessions should now be made.

 

Yet the Qur'an described what followed as a fatḥan mubīnā (a clear victory)!

 

Confused? The apparent paradox begins to disappear once we understand the strategic objective. The immediate aim was not necessarily to defeat the Quraysh at the negotiating table but to reshape the environment in which the Islamic mission operated. The agreement interrupted hostilities, made the political reality of the Muslims increasingly difficult to ignore, gave tribes greater freedom to form alliances, increased movement and interaction, and created space for developments that continuous warfare had previously constrained. I explore this episode and its wider strategic significance in greater detail in a dedicated article on my website titled The Microscope and the Telescope: A Prophetic Framework for Seeing Systems.

 

 

Place Khandaq beside Ḥudaybiyyah and the danger of simplistic appeals to the Sīrah becomes obvious. At Khandaq, the Prophet ﷺ authorised measures designed to fracture an enemy coalition. At Ḥudaybiyyah, he accepted terms that some of his closest companions initially experienced as deeply unfavourable. Which was the Prophetic strategy? Both were!

 

 

Imagine approaching Ḥudaybiyyah as though you were still standing behind the trench. Every concession would appear to be weakness, every compromise capitulation, and every attempt to create space through negotiation a failure of courage.

 

Now reverse the error and approach Khandaq as though you were at Ḥudaybiyyah. Keep negotiating when an existential threat is already mobilised. Treat coordinated hostility as a misunderstanding requiring better communication. Continue conceding because concession produced a fatḥ somewhere else under entirely different circumstances.

 

 

The problem would not necessarily be the evidence being quoted. The problem would be the failure to understand the paradigm in which that evidence was being deployed.

 

This reflection reaches far beyond questions of warfare or politics...

 

•  A Muslim institution facing internal disagreement needs to know whether it is dealing with sincere disagreement, poor communication, incompetence, competing visions, personal ambition or deliberate sabotage. Those are not the same problem and cannot responsibly be treated as though they were.
• A community negotiating with government needs to understand whether the person across the table is functioning as a partner, regulator, political actor or adversary, and whether that relationship is itself changing.
•  A business must distinguish ordinary commercial competition from conduct designed unlawfully to injure it.
• A leader receiving criticism must determine whether he is facing an attack requiring a response or sincere advice that his ego simply does not enjoy hearing.
• Even within families, enormous damage can be done when someone imports the paradigm of litigation into a situation that actually requires reconciliation.

 

The reverse errors are equally destructive! People sometimes insist upon reconciliation where boundaries are required, confrontation where patience would produce a better outcome, secrecy where trust requires transparency, or transparency where legitimate confidentiality is essential.

 

 

Some people instinctively want the gloves on. They prefer dialogue, patience, diplomacy, accommodation and assuming the best. These can all be Islamic virtues in their proper place. Others instinctively want the gloves off. They prefer confrontation, exposure, mobilisation, firmness and refusing to concede. Courage and firmness are equally capable of being Islamic virtues in their proper place.

 

 

The Sīrah refuses to allow us this kind of simplicity. The Prophet ﷺ waited, and he moved. He forgave, and he fought. He negotiated, and he refused. He concealed intentions on some occasions and announced them openly on others. He accepted an apparently painful concession at Ḥudaybiyyah and dug a trench when Madinah needed defending. At the Conquest of Makkah, possessing a degree of power he had never possessed during the years of persecution, he did not behave as though greater capability automatically demanded greater vengeance.

 

What remained constant throughout was not a particular tactic or strategic temperament, but the Prophet's ﷺ unwavering fidelity to Allah and to the mission entrusted to him, together with an extraordinary ability to understand the reality before him and respond to it in the manner that reality required.

 

To do this requires far more than simply knowing a collection of Islamic principles; it requires the judgement to understand when, where and how those principles should shape our response to the reality before us.

 

 

There is a temptation when discussing contemporary Muslim strategy to believe that our primary deficiency is a shortage of Islamic references. Sometimes it is. Yet there is another deficiency that is far harder to detect, precisely because it can coexist with considerable Islamic knowledge: we may possess the evidence while misunderstanding the reality to which we are attempting to apply it.

 

A person can know that Islam commands patience but fail to recognise that his patience has become an excuse for institutional paralysis. Another can know that Islam commands the defence of truth but fail to recognise that what he calls firmness is damaging a relationship the Sharīʿah would rather preserve. A leader may correctly understand the importance of consultation but fail to recognise when consultation has become a means through which responsibility is indefinitely avoided. Someone may invoke the Prophetic willingness to negotiate without recognising that the party opposite him is using negotiation merely to gain time. Another may invoke Khandaq while behaving as though every disagreement is an existential siege.

 

In each of these cases, the Islamic principle itself may be entirely sound; the deficiency lies in how the situation has been diagnosed and, consequently, how that principle has been applied.

 

This is why the question “What does Islam say?” remains indispensable, but it cannot always be the first analytical question. Before applying revelation to a circumstance, we must know enough about the circumstance to know what we are applying revelation to.

 

• What is actually happening? Who are the parties?
• What relationship exists between them?
• What obligations and covenants already govern that relationship?
• What is the objective? Which elements of the situation are genuinely fixed and which remain capable of being shaped?
• What capabilities exist?
• What happens if we act?
• What happens if we do not?
• What benefit are we seeking, what harm are we preventing, and what secondary consequences might our preferred course of action create?

 

Only after asking questions of this kind does “What should we do?” become a sufficiently mature strategic question.

 

 

This brings us back to the metaphor with which we began: should the gloves be on or off? Perhaps the real value of the question is that, by this point, we can see why it is ultimately inadequate.

 

The Muslim never removes the gloves of the Sharīʿah; there is no moment at which commitment to Allah’s limits is suspended so that strategy can operate without restraint. Strategy itself remains governed by those limits, but within them lies a far richer range of legitimate responses than our slogans and preferred temperaments sometimes allow us to imagine.

 

There are moments for patience and moments for movement, moments for openness and moments for legitimate concealment, moments for reconciliation and moments for defence. There are times to preserve an alliance and others to recognise the vulnerabilities within an opposing one; times to absorb pressure and others to reshape the environment so that the same pressure can no longer operate in the same way. The reality confronting us may not always be immediately changeable, but that does not mean its strategic significance is fixed.

 

The Muslims at Khandaq could not make thousands of Confederate fighters disappear, so they changed the terrain upon which those numbers mattered. Nuʿaym رضي الله عنه could not erase the Confederate coalition, so he changed the confidence through which the coalition functioned. At Ḥudaybiyyah, the Prophet ﷺ did not need to secure every immediate demand in order to transform the wider strategic environment. At the Conquest of Makkah, possessing overwhelming advantage did not oblige him to use every advantage in the harshest manner available.

 

Seen together, these episodes teach something far more demanding than “be strategic”. They teach us that Islamic strategy begins with an accurate reading of reality but never ends there. Reality must then be placed beneath revelation, examined through the purposes and limits of the Sharīʿah, and approached with sufficient intellectual flexibility to distinguish the objective from our preferred method of reaching it.

 

This is perhaps one of the reasons the Sīrah remains inexhaustible. If we read it merely to extract precedents, we can make it validate almost any temperament we already possess. A confrontational personality may gravitate towards the battles, while a conciliatory one finds reassurance in the treaties; the activist notices moments of decisive action, while the patient is drawn to episodes of endurance. Each can therefore leave the Sīrah believing that the Prophet ﷺ has confirmed the approach to which he was already naturally inclined.

 

A deeper study of the Sīrah, however, demands something more of us: that we understand why the Prophet ﷺ responded differently as circumstances changed while remaining entirely faithful to the same revelation. It requires us to examine not only what he did but also the reality in which he did it and to understand each action within the paradigm that made it the appropriate and wise response. It is in recognising this relationship between revelation, reality and response that Islamic strategy begins to reveal its true depth.

 

Our challenge is not to decide whether Islam teaches us always to keep the gloves on or always to take them off. Nor is it to decide whether our age is simply “Makkah” or “Madinah” and then import an entire strategy from whichever label we choose.

 

The challenge is to understand the landscape Allah has actually placed before us.

 

Sometimes there is a treaty waiting to be signed. Sometimes there is a relationship waiting to be repaired. Sometimes there is an opportunity that pride is preventing us from seeing. Sometimes there is an alliance whose apparent strength disguises deep internal weakness. And sometimes, while everyone around us is discussing how to fight the army approaching over the horizon, someone needs the clarity to realise that the first thing we should do is dig a trench.

 

The depth of Islam is found partly in precisely this: its principles are clear enough to guide us, yet rich enough to govern realities that are rarely simple. Faithfulness does not relieve us of the burden of judgement. It demands that we exercise it well.

 

Before asking whether the gloves should be on or off, therefore, we should ask the question upon which everything else depends:

 

 

Your brother
Sajid Umar
Location: 'somewhere en route to the hereafter'
22/03/1448 (AH) - 04/09/2026