The Madinan years open with a community that has left everything behind and is defending its existence. They close with a society that feeds its poor, settles its disputes, keeps its treaties, and answers for the people under its protection. This course follows that arc and asks what carried a community from one end of it to the other.

It is not a timeline of battles. Each episode is read for what it produced. The strategy that carried it: consultation, intelligence, deterrence, the decision to fight or to hold, and the discipline to recover from a reversal. The rulings drawn from it: how a treaty is kept, how conduct is constrained, how captives and those under protection are treated. And the settlement that followed, which is where most of the material on service and community building sits.

The sequence runs from the first expeditions, which secured alliances and applied pressure without bloodshed, through Badr and the year that followed it, to Uhud and the failure of discipline there. It continues through the siege of Khandaq, the securing of Madinah, and the northern campaigns at Khaybar and Mu’tah, and it closes with the opening of Mecca and the expedition to Tabuk. Particular attention is given to what the record shows about restraint: the treatment of prisoners after Badr, the pardon of an assassin at Zi Amr, and the amnesty granted at the opening of Mecca to those who had persecuted the community for two decades.

The course also addresses the claim that Islam was spread by the sword. It does so from the record itself rather than by assertion, on the view that a student who has worked through the material in detail is better placed to answer the claim than one who has only been told that it is false.

Taught from the primary Seerah sources by Dr. Sherif Ahmed and Br. Abdel-Kader Darwich. The course suits students who know the Seerah in outline and want to work through the Madinan years in detail, and those who expect to teach or speak on this material. Open enrollment, with no prerequisites.