Ramadans That Changed The World · AlMaghrib Journals

The Fire That Scorched The Earth

AlMaghrib — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:14:02 GMT

Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!

September 3, 1260.

The 25th of Ramadan.

A fasting army, outnumbered and outmatched by every military calculation known to the age, lines up in a narrow valley in Palestine, near a place called Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath.

In front of them stands a force that had up until now been unstoppable.

An army that had shattered China, swallowed Persia whole, dissolved the greatest Islamic caliphate in history into dust, and left a trail of ash from the central asian steppe to the gates of Cairo.

These were the Mongols, under the rule of Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan.

An army before whom kings fled, cities surrendered without a fight, and generals wept.

The Mamluks were told by their own emirs at the war council that this was suicide. That no one defeats the Mongols. That they should wait. Negotiate. Survive.

Their Sultan looked at them and said: whoever fears death, leave now.

Nobody left.

That moment, on a blazing morning in Ramadan, is where this story ends.

But to understand what it means, you have to understand how the world got there.

The Spark That Lit The Flame

It began, as so many catastrophes do, with a moment of colossal, almost inexplicable arrogance.

The year is 1218.

Genghis Khan, already master of Mongolia and much of China, sends a trade caravan westward toward the Khwarazmian Empire, a powerful Muslim state that ruled much of what is now Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The caravan was enormous, around 500 merchants and escorts, laden with silk, gold, silver, and furs. The message it carried was clear: I want trade, not war.

The governor of the border city of Otrar, Inalchuq, accused the merchants of being spies and had every last one of them executed. Then he sold their goods in the markets of Bukhara.

What happened next speaks to Genghis Khan’s character and, in some ways, his code. He did not immediately invade. Instead, he sent three ambassadors, one Muslim and two Mongols, directly to Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, the ruler of the empire, to demand that the governor be handed over and the caravan’s blood be answered for.

The Shah had the Muslim ambassador beheaded. He shaved the beards of the two Mongols, symbols of masculine honor in their culture, and sent them back to Genghis Khan with the severed head as his reply.

Among the Mongols, ambassadors were considered sacred and inviolable. There was no greater insult.

Genghis Khan climbed a mountain, bowed his head to the ground, and wept. Then he said:

“I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”

He came. With everything he had.

The Punishment That Remade the World

What followed is almost too vast to comprehend.

Genghis did not simply march an army into Khwarezm. He descended upon it from multiple directions simultaneously, dividing his forces in a way his enemies had never seen, striking from angles they could not predict. City after legendary city fell. Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, Nishapur, one of the greatest cities on earth, home to 150,000 books in ten libraries, razed to nothing.

The Persian historian Juvayni, writing in the aftermath, described cities so thoroughly destroyed that it was impossible to tell where the walls had stood. Population estimates for the region before and after the invasion suggest that tens of millions perished, not only in the fighting but in the famines and diseases that followed. Some historians estimate that Central Asia lost up to three-quarters of its population in the span of a few decades.

The Shah Muhammad II, who had sent back that severed head so arrogantly, spent the last days of his life as a fugitive, hunted across his own crumbling empire until he died alone on a small island in the Caspian Sea, stripped of everything he had once ruled.

Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his empire did not stop. His sons and grandsons carried the fire westward, and when they turned toward the heart of the Muslim world, what they found was already half-broken.

The Night Baghdad Burned

February 13, 1258.

This date is seared into the memory of this ummah the way few others are.

Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, arrived at Baghdad with what was perhaps the largest Mongol army ever assembled, having been given a fifth of the entire empire’s fighting men for the task. His mission was explicit: end the Abbasid Caliphate.

Baghdad was not merely a city. It was the beating heart of Islamic civilization. Since the 8th century it had been the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, the symbolic center of the Muslim world, a city that at its peak housed over a million souls, home to the legendary Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, whose scholars had translated, preserved, and expanded the knowledge of the ancient world. While Europe was in the depths of its Dark Ages, Baghdad’s streets were lit, its hospitals were staffed, and its astronomers were mapping the stars.

Caliph Al-Musta’sim, the last of the Abbasid line, did none of the things a ruler should do when a force like this appears on the horizon. His advisors convinced him to scale down the army. He hoarded his treasury rather than use it to raise soldiers. He reportedly wept at threats but did not act on them.

Hulagu demanded surrender. The Caliph refused. The siege lasted twelve days. The city’s fortifications were breached within two of them.

What followed was a week of massacre and destruction that contemporaries struggled to put into words. Scholars and historians recorded that the Tigris ran black with the ink of burned books and red with blood. The streets were piled with the dead. The great libraries were destroyed. The House of Wisdom, centuries of accumulated human knowledge, was fed to the Mongol fires.

The Caliph himself, the last successor to a line stretching back five centuries, was executed. According to most accounts, because the Mongols considered it forbidden to spill royal blood on the earth, he was wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by horses.

Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله, who had already written about what he considered the unbearable calamity of the Crusades, wrote of the Mongols: “Even Antichrist will spare those who follow him, though he will destroy others; these Tatars spared no one.”

The caliphate was over. Five hundred years of institutional continuity, gone in a week.

And the Mongols were not finished.

When the Islamic World Stood at the Edge

Damascus fell in March 1260 without a fight. Aleppo had been sacked before it. Gaza. Nablus. The Mongol forces, under Hulagu’s general Kitbuqa, pressed southward with nothing in their path.

Hulagu himself sent messengers to Cairo, to the ruler of Egypt, the last major Muslim power left standing. The letter was designed to break the will of whoever read it:

“We are the army of God in His land… Surrender yourselves to us before the lid is lifted, at which point you will have cause to regret. Your fortresses will not stop us, the armies that fight us will not benefit, and your supplications against us will not be heard. So receive tidings of humiliation and degradation.”

In response to letters like this, rulers across the region had surrendered. An-Nasir Yusuf, the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, had fled rather than fight. Most of the Muslim world appeared to be in collective paralysis.

But the man who read this letter was not like the others.

His name was Sayfuddin Qutuz.

The Slave Sultan

To understand Qutuz, you have to know where he came from.

He was born a Khwarazmian prince of Turkic origin, a child of the very world Genghis Khan had annihilated. When the Mongols destroyed the Khwarazmian Empire around 1231, the young boy was captured, separated from everything he had ever known, and sold as a slave. He was taken to Damascus, then to Egypt, where he was purchased by the Mamluk sultan of Cairo.

The Mamluks were a unique institution, slave soldiers trained from boyhood in both Islamic sciences and the art of war. They were purchased as children, raised as warriors, educated as scholars, and often freed to serve as the most elite military caste in the Muslim world. Many of them rose to extraordinary positions of power. Some became sultans.

Qutuz was one of those who rose. Over decades of service, he became the most powerful figure behind the Egyptian throne. When the Mongol threat made clear that the fifteen-year-old boy-sultan on the throne could not lead a defense, Qutuz stepped forward and took it. Not out of ambition alone, but because he understood something that those around him did not.

He had been a boy when the Mongols destroyed his world. He had lost his home, his family, his dignity, his freedom, to this same force now bearing down on Egypt. He knew who they were. He knew what they did.

And he had spent decades waiting.

When his emirs told him at the war council that no one had ever defeated the Mongols, Qutuz stood up and said: “O amirs of the Muslims, you all know the Mongols have destroyed the lands of Islam, killed the men, enslaved the women and children. If you are unwilling to fight them, who will stand against them? You are the remnant of Islam.”

Then he said: “I will go alone and fight them if you will not. And if I die, I die. But I will not surrender this ummah to humiliation.”

The emirs followed him.

When Hulagu’s messengers arrived in Cairo with the demand for surrender, Qutuz did something no ruler in the Mongol advance had done. He had them killed, and their heads displayed on the Bab Zuweila gate of the city.

He had just told the most powerful military machine in the world to come and get it.

The Valley of Goliath

The two forces met on September 3, 1260, in a narrow valley in southeastern Galilee, near a spring in Palestine.

Ain Jalut. The Spring of Goliath.

The name was not coincidental. This was the same valley where, centuries before, a young shepherd boy named Dawud عليه السلام had stepped forward alone to face a warrior giant that an entire army had refused to fight. Now, on the 25th of Ramadan, another Muslim force fasting in the heat of the Palestinian summer was about to reenact something of the same defiance.

Hulagu had returned east with the bulk of his forces after the death of the Great Khan, leaving his general Kitbuqa in command of a reduced but still formidable force of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 battle-hardened Mongol veterans who had never tasted defeat.

Qutuz’s strategy was built on knowledge. His general Baybars, who commanded the vanguard, knew this terrain intimately. He had been a fugitive here once, and now he would turn the land itself into a weapon.

The Mamluks concealed the bulk of their forces in the highland hills surrounding the valley and sent Baybars forward with a smaller force to draw the Mongols in. Baybars did what only the best commanders can do under fire: he engaged the Mongols, skirmished, provoked, and then retreated, step by step, pulling Kitbuqa and his cavalry deeper into the valley, deeper into the trap.

At the height of the battle, the Mamluk left wing broke under the Mongol pressure. The line was collapsing.

At that moment, Sultan Qutuz tore off his helmet so every soldier could see his face, charged forward, and cried out three times:

“Wa Islamah! Wa Islamah! Wa Islamah!”

O, Islam. O, Islam. O, Islam.

The cry was not a battle cry. It was a prayer. It was the cry of a man who had nothing left to offer except everything. The cry of someone who understood that what stood or fell in that valley was not just an army, but something far larger.

The soldiers heard it. And something shifted.

The line held. Then it pushed. The hidden forces in the hills poured down. The Mongols were surrounded on three sides. Kitbuqa himself was killed in the fighting. The Mongol force was broken, and what remained was pursued all the way to Baysan, and there, broken again.

For the first time in the memory of a generation, the Mongol advance had not only been stopped. It had been reversed.

What the Ummah Lost Immediately After

Qutuz never made it back to Cairo.

On the way home, at the height of the greatest victory the Muslim world had seen in a generation, a plot was hatched among his own commanders. Baybars and his allies approached the Sultan during a break in the march. Baybars asked to speak with Qutuz privately. When they were close, Baybars struck him down.

The man who had held the ummah together at its darkest moment was killed by his own general before he could reach home.

It is one of the bitter ironies of Islamic history. A man who gave everything for the ummah, denied even the dignity of dying in battle.

But his name and his cry, Wa Islamah, outlived him by centuries. And something he could not have anticipated followed in the decades after.

When The Conquerors Are Conquered

Here is the thing about the Mongols that no one who watched their advance could have predicted.

They destroyed everything… but then Islam absorbed them.

Hulagu Khan, who had sacked Baghdad and extinguished the caliphate, had a grandson named Ghazan. In 1295, Ghazan Khan became the Ilkhan of Persia. The great-great-grandson of the man who had ordered the destruction of the Islamic world took the throne and declared:

There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger.

He adopted the name Mahmud. He minted coins bearing the shahada. He built mosques and funded scholars. Under his rule and the rules of his successors, the Ilkhanate, the very Mongol state Hulagu had founded over the ruins of Baghdad, became a Muslim state.

And the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that had swept across Russia and Eastern Europe, had already converted to Islam a generation earlier, through the efforts of unnamed Muslim merchants who had shared their faith with a prince named Berke Khan while he was hunting near Bukhara. He became Muslim in 1254, even as his cousins were destroying Baghdad. He eventually went to war against his own cousin Hulagu over the massacre of Muslims.

Islam spread not by armies in those lands, but by the same means it always spread best: by ordinary men and women whose faith was visible, genuine, and impossible to ignore.

The Mongols who came as the scourge of God, left as the servants of God’s deen.

Lessons From Ain Jalut

There are lessons layered into this story like sediment, and we could spend a Ramadan unpacking all of them. But let these be the ones that stay with you.

The first: What looks like total destruction is often total transformation in disguise.

The fall of the Abbasid Caliphate was, in purely worldly terms, one of the greatest catastrophes in Islamic history. Nothing was left. The institution that had provided 500 years of continuity to the Muslim world was gone. And yet, Islam did not die. It could not die. Because Islam was never in the Caliph’s palace. It was in the hearts of believers, in the scholars who gathered the scattered manuscripts, in the soldiers who stood at Ain Jalut, in the merchants who sat with Berke Khan near Bukhara and talked about their Lord.

Allah ﷻ reminds us in His Book: “Perhaps you dislike something which is good for you.” [Quran, 2:216]

The destruction of what seemed like an irreplaceable institution created the conditions for something new. Egypt became the new center of the Muslim world. The Mamluks became its guardians. And the Mongols, those unstoppable Mongols, became Muslims.

The second: Even the tyrants of history serve a purpose in the plan of Allah ﷻ.

Genghis Khan called himself the punishment of God. And in a painful, terrible way, he may not have been entirely wrong. The Muslim world he invaded was not the world of the Companions. It was fractured, corrupt, obsessed with internal power struggles. The Abbasid caliph was reportedly pleased when he heard his rival, Khwarizm Shah, was being crushed by the Mongols, because of their personal feud. He was sitting comfortable with his treasury while the walls of the ummah crumbled. Ibn al-Athir himself noted that the scholars of the time believed the invasions were a divine reckoning for the sins of the Muslim world.

We do not say this to excuse the Mongols, nor to diminish the suffering of the innocent. We say it because the Quran itself uses Fir’awn as a lesson, and Namrud as a parable, and makes the destruction of ancient civilizations a reminder for those who think power makes them permanent.

Those who were sent as punishment eventually became part of the family.

The third: Qutuz teaches us that the moment calls for the person, and sometimes the person has to call for the moment.

His emirs did not want to fight. The political calculation of survival was clear: submit, negotiate, survive. Qutuz refused the political calculation and chose the moral one. He stood up in that council and said, in essence: if not us, then who?

That is the question every generation of Muslims eventually has to ask. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

And it is worth noting: he did this while fasting. The battle was fought on the 25th of Ramadan. These men had been awake for fajr, had made du’a in the pre-dawn darkness, were running on dates and water and the promise of Allah ﷻ. And they broke the back of the greatest military force the world had ever seen.

Ramadan is not a time of retreat. It is not a month of soft voices and closed curtains. It is the month of Badr. The month of Ain Jalut. The month when this ummah has, again and again, found something it did not know it had.

And the fourth: the most powerful da’wah is not the army. It is the ordinary believer.

Berke Khan became Muslim because of merchants. Tughluq Timur Khan became Muslim because of a man named Jamal who called the adhan near the royal compound at fajr. Ordinary believers, unnamed in the history books, changed the fate of empires. Their reward is with Allah ﷻ. Their names may not be in any chronicle, but they are in something better.

You do not need a throne or an army. You need sincerity.

The Mongols swept through the world like a fire that no one could extinguish.

But fire does not destroy what is truly alive. It only reveals what was hollow.

And what was hollow, burned. And what was real, remained.

Islam remained.

The spring at Ain Jalut still flows.

The Long Road to Al Aqsa

AlMaghrib — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:30:54 GMT

Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!

July, 1187

Finally, they had them cornered.

Through the scorched hills near the town of Tiberias, towards the Sea of Galilee marched an army, 60,000 strong, the most formidable force assembled by the Crusaders, with the single aim of destroying the Muslim army and their leader, the Kurdish Sultan of Egypt and Damascus, who had been a thorn in the side of their kingdom for years.

This was their moment, here at the horns of Hattin.

The Muslims forces were stationed up against the sea, with nowhere to turn, the army of Guy De Lusignan could not let such an opportunity pass them by… and that’s exactly what the Muslims wanted them to believe.

13 years of battle and yet they hadn’t learned. This was not a rag-tag band of barbarians. This was the army of Salahuddin, and Salahuddin always plays the long game.

This wasn’t an ambush, this was a trap set in motion in the prior Ramadan, and what would follow is one of the most decisive military victories in the history of this ummah, and that would pave the final stone Salahuddin’s long road to Jerusalem.

But it didn’t start here; rather, it began in the darkest hour this ummah had seen in generations, and understanding that darkness is what gives this story its power.

The Ramadan That Changed Everything

The year is 1099.

Pope Urban II “guarantees” paradise to anyone who joins the Crusade to “reclaim the Holy Land.” He has told the people of Europe that Muslims have been persecuting Christians there, which is a lie.

From the time of Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه, Muslims, Christians, and Jews had lived in Jerusalem in relative harmony for centuries. None of that matters to the army marching toward it.

As the Crusaders move through the Muslim lands, devastation follows. In a town called Marra, they kill every man, woman, and child. They boast about it in letters home. In 1099, they reach Jerusalem, lay siege for 40 days, and when they finally break through the walls, the massacre is almost beyond description.

The historian Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله records that around 40,000 people were killed in the courtyards of Masjid al-Aqsa alone. He writes that blood ran through the streets up to the knees of men and their horses. What remained of the masjid was turned into a bathroom and a stable for pigs.

The news sent shockwaves through the Ummah, but the reaction?

Silence.

No army mobilized, no king or caliph moved to reclaim the sacred city. The ruling classes were engulfed in their own feuds and schemes at the time.

The first move did not come from a king or general, rather it came from a scholar one fateful Ramadan.

A judge from Damascus named al-Qadhi al-Harawi had witnessed the massacres with his own eyes. He fled to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, and arrived during Ramadan. On a Friday, in front of a fasting crowd, he ate. Publicly. To force them to listen.

When the crowd erupted at his audacity, he said: you are upset that I violated the sanctity of this day? What about the sanctity of your brothers and sisters in al-Aqsa?

The Khalifa himself wept at that statement, but again, nothing happened, because by 1099, the Abbasid Caliphate was a hollow symbol.

Real power had splintered across 22 warring city-states, each led by men more interested in their own territory than in the fate of Jerusalem. Some Muslim leaders had even struck agreements with the Crusaders, accepting humiliating terms, putting crosses on their masajid, all to preserve their own grip on power. The historian Ibn al-Jubayr surveyed the Muslim east around this time and wrote that it was as if the Muslims were living in the age of Jahiliyyah.

The fall of Jerusalem was the consequence of a rot that had already been eating the ummah from within for decades.

Division, corruption, love of the dunya over everything else.

The loss of al-Aqsa was a symptom, and regaining it meant to first address the disease.

So, the question then arises: how do you cure the disease?

Planting Seeds You Will Never See Bloom

The revival did not start with an army. It started with a school.

A Seljuk minister named Nizam al-Mulk understood something that many leaders miss: you cannot rule bodies if the hearts inside them are dead.

So he built. Across every major city in Iraq and Sham, he established the Nizamiyyah schools; full campuses with dorms, kitchens, and hospitals, offering free education to anyone who came.

Nizam al-Mulk himself wouldn’t see the extent of this new institution’s impact, as he was soon assassinated in broad daylight by the Hashashin before he saw the fruits of his work. But his legacy outlived his body.

Generations of scholars would be raised through these grand academies, and the crown jewel of them was none other than Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali رحمه الله.

Al-Ghazali had reached the top of the academic world. He had dismantled the philosophers. He had refuted the Ismailis. But he noticed something troubling in himself first. He was preaching things he was not sure he was actually living. The scholars were supposed to be the doctors of the hearts, but many of the doctors were sick themselves.

So he did something radical. He walked away from his prestigious post, went to live in obscurity in Sham, and worked as a janitor in a masjid while he wrote Ihya Ulum al-Din one of the most important books in Islamic history. His message was simple: the ummah cannot be revived by correct bodies with dead hearts.

Around the same time, Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Jilani رحمه الله was bringing the science of tazkiyah to the masses. He spent 50 years in relative silence, ensuring his life matched his words, before he spoke publicly.

Another man named Adi ibn Musafir رحمه الله went further still, as he left the cities entirely and lived among the most marginalized communities, in the mountains, among men considered the outcasts of society. He transformed them. And many of those same men later filled the ranks of the Muslim armies.

None of these men would live to see Jerusalem freed, but all of them were essential to it.

The Bridge Generation

From the scholars came the soldiers.

Imad al-Din al-Zangi رحمه الله inherited a politically reformed landscape and focused on what came next: unity and justice, by force if necessary.

He was hard and strict, but his methods saw results, as his forces gave the Muslims their first major military victory over the Crusaders in over 50 years, and that victory cracked open something that had been sealed shut: hope.

Imad al-Din reignited the Muslim imagination, he showed the Ummah that Al Aqsa was not forever lost, and that the holy land could indeed be liberated…

… and then he was assassinated in his sleep, [yes, there’s a pattern here].

His son, Nuruddin Zangi رحمه الله, is the figure in this story that most people have never heard of, and that is a tragedy.

Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله, a man who witnessed both the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Mongol invasion, who once wrote that he wished his mother had never given him birth because of what he had seen, said this about Nuruddin:

After the Rightly Guided Caliphs and Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, I have not seen a ruler more just, more devout, or more beloved.

Nuruddin was a scholar before he was a ruler. And that made all the difference.

Where his father’s gatherings were full of helmets, Nuruddin’s were full of turbans. He abolished unjust taxes entirely, replacing them with a culture of voluntary sadaqa encouraged by the scholars. He built over 40 schools in Aleppo and Damascus alone. He banned corruption and alcohol from his military camps. His focus was not just on military strength but on justice rooted in the Sharia of Allah, because he understood, as the Quran says, that no human effort alone can unite hearts. Only Allah does that.

When Nuruddin came to Damascus, he did not have to conquer it. The people opened the gates for him, because they had seen what justice looked like in the lands he already governed, and they wanted it.

Nuruddin then set his eyes south. Egypt, still under the crumbling Fatimid dynasty, was in danger of falling to the Crusaders. He sent his best general, Asaduddin Shirkuh, with orders to secure it.

Shirkuh brought with him his reluctant young nephew, a 20-something who was perfectly content with life in Damascus and wanted nothing to do with war.

His name was Yusuf ibn Ayyub, and the world would come to know him as Salahuddin.

The Man Himself

The Fatimids, after Shirkuh died suddenly, looked at this young man of 29 and thought: he is the weakest option. We can control him.

So they made him wazir of Egypt, and that was the greatest miscalculation in their history, because again, Salahuddin always plays the long game.

Salahuddin’s defining quality was not military genius, though he had that. It was not political shrewdness, though he had that too. It was compassion. His advisors reportedly hid his money from him because every time he saw someone in need, he would give. When he liberated Jerusalem and the wealthy paid ransoms to leave while the poor could not, Salahuddin paid the ransom for approximately 20,000 people himself.

He was also patient in a way that is almost difficult to comprehend.

When Nuruddin pressed him to move toward al-Aqsa, Salahuddin said “we are not ready,” and he was right. What he had inherited in Egypt was catastrophe. Two hundred years of Ismaili rule had left the country in ideological, economic, and social ruin. People were so poor they were eating cats and dogs, and the Ismaili’s were mainly concerned with propagating their deviant theology.

So Salahuddin spent a decade rebuilding Egypt before he ever marched toward Jerusalem.

He turned the Fatimids’ largest prison into a school. He transformed al-Azhar, then the primary college of Ismaili heresy, into a bastion of Sunni scholarship standing to this day. He built a navy from nothing. He strengthened every coastal city, thinking not just about taking Jerusalem but about the European counter-attack that would inevitably follow. He disbanded and rebuilt the Egyptian army. He even launched a program where dedicated teachers would walk blind community members from their homes to the masjid to learn Quran recitation. His own sister trained as a pharmacist and distributed medicine for free.

He rebuilt the rituals of Egyptian society around the Quran, replacing the habits the Ismailis had ingrained over two centuries. Many scholars believe this is the origin of Egypt’s famous culture of Quran recitation that endures even now.

Only when Egypt was strong, unified, and spiritually rooted did Salahuddin turn north.

Return to Hattin

Which brings us back to that July morning in 1187.

The Crusaders’ downfall at Hattin was not an accident. Salahuddin had studied them. He knew how they thought. He knew that if he threatened Tiberias, the Crusader leadership would feel obligated to march out and relieve it, even in the brutal summer heat, even if it meant crossing waterless terrain.

He sent cavalry to harass them constantly as they marched, preventing rest, draining morale, and he had ensured that every water source along their route was cut off.

By the time the Crusaders arrived near Hattin, they were delirious with thirst. Their horses were dying. Their army of 60,000 was already broken in spirit before the battle even began. Salahuddin then split them, allowing the strongest portion to push toward water while cutting them off from the rest of the army.

The battle was, in truth, already over.

The Muslims made quick work of their counter attack, and soon enough the last tent of the Crusader camp collapsed, and Salahuddin fell into sajdah out of gratitude to Allah.

The aftermath was mercy, as captured leaders were treated with honor, and within months, on the 27th of Rajab, Salahuddin entered Jerusalem.

What Salahuddin Left Behind

When Salahuddin was dying, he gave his son a final wasiyya. Given everything he had sacrificed — ten years without sleeping in his own bed, decades on the battlefield, the weight of an ummah on his shoulders — you might expect his last words to be about strategy. About holding Jerusalem. About power.

He said: Have taqwa of Allah. Protect the hearts of people. Be careful of what lies between you and people, for it will not be forgiven except by them. As for what lies between you and Allah, He is the Most Forgiving.

The key to everything, even at the end, was the heart and its connection to Allah.

Ibn Shaddad closes his biography of Salahuddin with words for us to ponder over:

Their long years now seem like a few moments. Their endless struggles feel like a dream that passed in the blink of an eye. Their hardship ended, but their reward and their remembrance never will.

Lessons from 88 Years of Hardship

We may not see the liberation we are working toward in our lifetime, but neither did Nizam al-Mulk, neither did Nuruddin, neither did al-Qadhi al-Harawi, who ate publicly in Ramadan just to make people listen.

What we do, in our homes, our masajid, our communities, will either contribute to the revival of this ummah or delay it.

We may not be the generation that gains all the glory, praise, and adoration, but we can be the bridge generation, the generation that may not enjoy the fruits of their efforts in this life, but will enjoy endless reward in the next, in sha Allah, for the seeds of change they planted.

The ball is in our court, and so if you want this Ramadan to change your world, start planting those seeds today.

As Ibn Shaddad said: Their hardship ended. Their reward never will.

The Battle of Truth & Falsehood

AlMaghrib — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:20:36 GMT

Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

The plan was simple:

Intercept the Makkan caravan and take back what’s rightfully ours.

It had been two years since the Hijra, when the Muslims were driven out of the city they knew and loved, and all their wealth had been unjustly usurped by the Quraysh.

Now, with the permission of Allah and His prophet ﷺ, they were finally taking it back, and while in times of peace, raiding caravans would be forbidden, this was war.

So, on the 17th of Ramadan, 313 had set out, with the Messenger himself ﷺ at the head of it all, lightly armed and with a couple of horses between them. This should have been more than enough to send the message across.

But what they met out on the barren plains was not a caravan, but an army, 1000 strong, with 200 mounted, armed to the teeth.

As it turned out, word had reached Abu Sufyan about the raid within enough time for him to divert his caravan, but that alone wasn’t enough for him. This was more than some potentially lost goods, this was the pride of the Quraysh being put on the line.

How dare these Muslims threaten our trade route? Who do they think they are?

Enraged, the chiefs of Makkah gathered and mobilized, and to ensure there was no turning back, Shaytan himself appeared, taking the form of one of their neighboring chiefs, and assuring them:

وَإِذْ زَيَّنَ لَهُمُ ٱلشَّيْطَـٰنُ أَعْمَـٰلَهُمْ وَقَالَ لَا غَالِبَ لَكُمُ ٱلْيَوْمَ مِنَ ٱلنَّاسِ وَإِنِّى جَارٌۭ لَّكُمْ ۖ

“Satan made their foul deeds seem fair to them, and said, ‘No one will conquer you today, for I will be right beside you’…”

[Quran, 8:48]

But in the end, even Shaytan saw what those two parties did not, and when the hour came, even he fled:

لَّكُمْ ۖ فَلَمَّا تَرَآءَتِ ٱلْفِئَتَانِ نَكَصَ عَلَىٰ عَقِبَيْهِ وَقَالَ إِنِّى بَرِىٓءٌۭ مِّنكُمْ إِنِّىٓ أَرَىٰ مَا لَا تَرَوْنَ إِنِّىٓ أَخَافُ ٱللَّهَ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ شَدِيدُ ٱلْعِقَابِ…

“…but when the armies came within sight of one another, he turned on his heels, saying, ‘This is where I leave you: I see what you do not, and I fear God- God is severe in His punishment.”

[Quran, 8:48]

The Muslims set out with a plan, the Quraysh set out with another, but above all others, Allah’s plan is always supreme.

وَإِذْ يَعِدُكُمُ ٱللَّهُ إِحْدَى ٱلطَّآئِفَتَيْنِ أَنَّهَا لَكُمْ وَتَوَدُّونَ أَنَّ غَيْرَ ذَاتِ ٱلشَّوْكَةِ تَكُونُ لَكُمْ وَيُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُحِقَّ ٱلْحَقَّ بِكَلِمَـٰتِهِۦ وَيَقْطَعَ دَابِرَ ٱلْكَـٰفِرِينَ ٧

لِيُحِقَّ ٱلْحَقَّ وَيُبْطِلَ ٱلْبَـٰطِلَ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ ٱلْمُجْرِمُونَ ٨

“Remember how God promised you [believers] that one of the two enemy groups would fall to you: you wanted the unarmed group to be yours, but it was God’s will to establish the truth according to His Word and to finish off the disbelievers; to prove the Truth to be true, and the false to be false, much as the guilty might dislike it.” [Quran, 8:8-9]

This wasn’t going to be a raid or skirmish, nor was it going to be the surprise attack that would destroy the believers.

This was the day that would forever change the course of history.

This was truth establishing itself by Divine right, and falsehood would be uprooted.

This was The Battle of Badr.

The Night Before The Battle

The question then came, whose fight was this?

The Ansar, the Muslims of Madinah, had vowed at the second pledge of Aqabah to defend the Prophet ﷺ as they would defend their own wives and children.

But the pledge was specifically within Madinah. Badr was outside the city. It didn’t ‘technically’ apply.

The Prophet ﷺ could have ordered them. If he had ordered, they would have obeyed. But that wasn’t his way. Instead, he stood among the companions and asked for shura, for consultation.

The Muhajireen, those who migrated from Makkah, kept standing up and pledging their support, but the Prophet ﷺ was clearly waiting for the Ansar.

Sa’d ibn Mu’adh رضي الله عنه read the room.

He stood and said: “By Allah, it seems as if you’re directing this at us, O Messenger of Allah.” The Prophet ﷺ said: “Yes.”

And Sa’d answered with words that lit up the face of Rasulullah ﷺ:

“We believe in you. We have testified to what you brought. We have given you our covenants. So go forward, O Messenger of Allah, wherever you wish, we are with you. By Allah, if you walked us into the sea, not a single one of us would stay behind. We do not dislike that you bring us face-to-face with our enemy tomorrow. Perhaps Allah will show you from us what will please your eyes.”

And with that, night came, and the Sahaba took to their tents, for the day ahead would be arduous.

On a night you might imagine would be full of restlessness and anxiety, the Companions slept, and slept deeply at that, with tranquility that Allah cast upon their hearts. All the while it rained heavily, settling the sand beneath their feet.

The Day of Badr

As the great battle drew near, the Prophet ﷺ turned to the qibla, with his hands raised so high that his shawl kept slipping from his shoulders, pleading to his Lord:

“”O Allah, accomplish for me what You have promised me. O Allah, bring about what You have promised me. O Allah, if this small band of Muslims is destroyed, You will not be worshipped on this earth.”

Rasulullah ﷺ repeated this over and over, not from a place of doubt in Allah’s promise, but from a place of humility. He ﷺ was worshipping his Lord as a slave should; humbly, vulnerably, recognizing the gravity of his circumstances, and recognizing the only One who can give him victory. This is the etiquette of dua.

The Prophet ﷺ understood his circumstances; he understood what it meant to head into action without means, so he turned to his Lord with everything he had, because there is no other recourse.

Some of the Sahaba watched as Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه ran forward, draping the shawl back over the Messenger ﷺ each time it fell, saying:

“At peace, O Messenger of Allah. Allah will fulfill His promise to you.”

The same prophet who assured his companion during the Hijra, ‘Do not worry, Allah is with us,’ now receiving that same reassurance ahead of the battle of all battles.

The battle soon opened, as was the custom, with a duel.

Three of the Quraysh stepped out and called for worthy opponents from among the Muhajireen, and three answered:

Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, uncle of Rasulullah ﷺ . The Lion of Allah and His Messenger.

Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and now son-in-law to the Prophet ﷺ . The warrior who would go on to become the fourth khalifa in Islam.

Ubaydah ibn al-Harith, one who is not widely mentioned in the seerah, but who would on this day reach a legendary status.

Hamza رضي الله عنه struck down his foe, Utbah ibn Rabi’ah. Ali رضي الله عنه vanquished al-Walid ibn Utbah, but Ubaydah and his adversary, Shaybah ibn Rabi’ah, wounded each other gravely, and Ubaydah رضي الله عنه would be the first martyr of Badr as a result.

Thereafter, the battle was in full swing.

Swords clashed, blood spilled, dust filled the air, and one by one the vilest of the enemies of Islam met their end, chief among them Abu Jahl, who was the primary target of many.

Prior to the battle, two Ansari boys, both named Mu’adh, stood beside Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf رضي الله عنه on the battlefield. Separately, without the other knowing, each one whispered to him:

“Uncle, point out Abu Jahl to me. I heard he used to harm the Prophet ﷺ. I want to be the one to kill him today.”

These were young men, just in their teens, but their ambitions were lofty. Their goal wasn’t to survive, it was to give the most to Allah ﷻ that they possibly could. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf’s worry about having young fighters beside him disappeared instantly.

He pointed Abu Jahl out, the most defended man on the field, surrounded by Qurayshi warriors, in the thickest of the fighting, and without hesitation, both boys charged straight towards him.

Both boys struck him down together, and returned to the Prophet ﷺ cut, bloodied, but equally excited, both claiming to have killed him. When Ibn Mas’ud went to examine, he found Abu Jahl breathing his last breath, smuggly remarking, “Can there be a man more superior to one whom his own folk have killed?”

The Angels of Badr

The battle raged on, and as it did, something remarkable happened.

Amidst the dust clouds, the sound of cracking whips thundered through the air.

Enemy soldiers fell with burned lacerations searing their flesh.

A sound akin to raging stallions followed, with invisible riders commanding them, one shouting:

“Charge ahead, Hayzum!”

A brigade of angels entered the battle, 1000 strong, as Allah commemorates in His book:

إِذْ تَسْتَغِيثُونَ رَبَّكُمْ فَٱسْتَجَابَ لَكُمْ أَنِّى مُمِدُّكُم بِأَلْفٍۢ مِّنَ ٱلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ مُرْدِفِينَ

“When you begged your Lord for help, He answered you, ‘I will reinforce you with a thousand angels in succession.”

[Quran, 8:9]

The battle was over within a few hours. The Quraysh turned their backs and fled like Iblis before them, and Umar رضي الله عنه remembered a verse that had been revealed back in Makkah, which puzzled him at the time:

سَيُهْزَمُ الْجَمْعُ وَيُوَلُّونَ الدُّبُرَ

“Their forces will be routed and they will turn tail and flee.”

[Quran, 54:45]

Standing at Badr, watching the Quraysh flee, he finally understood.

The chiefs of Quraysh had been wiped out, many of their nobles were taken as prisoners of war, and the people of Makkah were beside themselves.

These were the same Muslims they had oppressed so brutally just two years ago.

This was the same Ibn Mas’ud who was beaten in front of the Ka’ba now standing over the corpse of Abu Jahl.

This was the same Bilal who was tortured with boiling stones under the blazing sun, now smiting his former master, Umayyah ibn Khalaf.

This was the same Muhammad ibn ‘Abdillah ﷺ , whose family had been driven into ghettos, now standing at the head of an army. The Messenger ﷺ , showing mankind now and forever that the promise of Allah is true.

That day was more than a battle in the empty desert.

It was a message that would rock the whole of Arabia, telling them of a new nation that was brewing, and a wave that would echo throughout the peninsula, and the world soon thereafter. A nation whose loyalty did not reside with any idol, but with the One true God. A people not bound by tribe, wealth, or by lineage, but by the brotherhood of faith and by the mutual aspiration of piety.

This truly was a day that truth prevailed over falsehood, and it unfolded one fateful Ramadan.

The lessons we can take from Badr are too many to enumerate, but one for us all to reflect on is this:

It’s not enough to simply ask for miracles; you have to put in the effort.

The Muslims came to Badr unprepared. The Prophet ﷺ knew it. That’s why he made dua with such urgency. Muslims cannot simply expect miracles without putting in the effort. At Badr, Allah ﷻ supplied the miracle, the angels, but the companions still showed up, still lined up, still charged.

The cause was still there, even if incomplete.

All of us seek miraculous change in Ramadan; it could be in our finances, our family life and relationships, for our parents, children, spouses, and so on…

But how many of us are making an effort to enact that change?

If you want a miracle this Ramadan, you have to pair your dua with action.

A Man, an Angel, and a Word From Allah

AlMaghrib — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:20:42 GMT

Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!

Words carry a lot of power.

They can make or break your day, they can bring hearts together or tear them apart.

They can inspire, motivate, and drive you to fulfill your greatest ambitions.

A single word can rock the entire world, and many Ramadans ago… it did.

So when we talk about Ramadans that changed the world, it’s only fitting that we begin with the word that would echo throughout all of time.

In the dead of night, on a lonely mountain, under the vast expanse of the heavens, at a distance overlooking the holy city of Makkah.

The place we now call the cave of Hira on Jabal al Nur was not what we see it as today. There was no village at its base, no well-trodden path, no tourists visiting from every which way.

It was quiet, unspectacular, the place you would go just to get away from the hustle and bustle of life, and indeed that was the purpose it served back then.

Muhammad ibn Abdillah, whose name today we do not utter without the salutation ﷺ , a shepherd turned merchant and family man, found sanctuary up in this small cave overlooking the city he called home.

It offered him the peace he needed to reflect and seek answers that neither his wife, his friends, nor his community could offer, but could only be found through God.

You see, he ﷺ was dissatisfied with the state of his society. In a city steeped in idolatry and hedonism, he ﷺ was the exception. Where people worshipped many gods, he recognised The One and only, where corruption was rampant, he stood out as As Sadiq and Al Amin; the truthful and upright.

Troubled by questions of his purpose, his place in the world, why wickedness and pagan superstitions surrounded him, he would retreat to his mountain sanctuary for days, even weeks at a time, with the occasional company of his dear wife and closest confidant, Khadijah, who would make the same arduous journey to bring him food and supplies.

With the strange occurrences over the past few months, seclusion became a more frequent part of his life.

He was often visited by dreams that would manifest soon after, rocks and inanimate objects would greet him in his day-to-day.

Now more than ever, he needed his time alone with his Lord…

…so it came as quite the surprise when an unexpected visitor made an appearance on a fateful Ramadan night.

That dark and claustrophobic cave suddenly grew bright and expansive, and at its mouth appeared a man. Inexplicably, abruptly, and without introduction, he approached Muhammad, grabbing him tightly, as if to affirm this was no apparition, this was no phantom, this was real.

The man spoke, “read”.

Muhammad ﷺ responded, “I cannot read.”

The man squeezed him and repeated, “read.”

Breathless, almost suffocating, Muhammad responded again. “I cannot read.”

A third time the man ordered him to read, and Muhammad ﷺ relented, “What do you want me to read?”

The man then proceeded to recite:

اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ ۝ خَلَقَ الْإِنسَانَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ ۝ اقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ الْأَكْرَمُ ۝ الَّذِي عَلَّمَ بِالْقَلَمِ ۝ عَلَّمَ الْإِنسَانَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ
“Read in the name of your Lord who created. He created man from a clinging substance. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous. He who taught by the pen. He taught man that which he knew not.”

(Quran, 96:1–5).

Upon his visitor’s exit, Muhammad ﷺ fled his sanctuary, hastily, in the dead of night, with no paved road or pathway to ease his journey home.

He arrived hastily at his family home, rushing to the tender and reassuring embrace of his dear Khadijah, saying breathlessly, “Cover me, cover me!”, and after some time to gather himself, he relayed what had transpired earlier that night.

Khadijah reassured her beloved, “Allah would not disgrace you. By Allah, you keep good relations with kith and kin, you are truthful, you help the downtrodden, are generous with your guests, and take care of those afflicted with difficulty.”

Following her words of reassurance, Khadijah suggested that he ﷺ speak to her cousin, the monk Waraqah bin Noufel, who, upon hearing the entire ordeal, affirmed:

”This is the same angel who was sent to Musa. How I wish I were young so that I might support you when your people drive you out!”

Drive him out? His own people? From his own town?

This was Muhammad ibn Abdillah ﷺ, the most upstanding and respected man in Makkah. The grandson of Abdul Muttalib, and from Banu Hashim, the most elite clan of the Quraysh.

Family and lineage were everything in that society, and the thought that a noble could be exiled so readily was unimaginable.

But Waraqah added:

“No one ever brought a message like this to their people except that they met him with hostility.”

Waraqah would not live long thereafter and would not witness the realization of that statement, when Muhammad ﷺ, who in that night became a prophet, would fulfil his role as the final messenger of Allah, and a mercy to all the worlds.

That world-changing mission began with one word:

اقْرَأْ, Read.

The first command Allah gave to the Prophet ﷺ was not pray, not unite your people, not free the slaves, but to read, to seek divine knowledge and guidance.

Because that is where everything begins.

There is no worship without knowledge, there is no personal or social reform without knowledge, there is no unity without knowledge.

There is a lesson in that for us all:

If you want your world to change this Ramadan, you have to start with divine knowledge.

May Allah grant us knowledge that benefits and transforms us this Ramadan and beyond.