The Captives of Badr

Seventy prisoners of Quraysh sat in Madinah's hands, among them men who had persecuted the believers for years, and the Prophet's ﷺ own uncle Abbas, and his son-in-law Abu al-As. What to do with them was the new community's first test of victory's ethics, and the Prophet ﷺ consulted. Umar (ra) advised execution of the enemy's leaders; Abu Bakr (ra) advised ransom and mercy, hoping Allah might guide them. The Prophet ﷺ inclined to mercy.

The captives were treated with a gentleness that astonished them. The Companions, sharing little, gave the prisoners the bread and kept the dates for themselves; one freed captive remembered all his life that his Muslim captors fed him better than they fed themselves. Ransoms were set according to means; the poor were released for nothing.

And then a ransom of pure light: those literate captives who could not pay were set free in exchange for teaching ten children of Madinah to read and write. The men who had come to crush the believers paid for their freedom by lifting the believers' children out of illiteracy. In the city whose scripture had opened with the word Read, the spoils of its first great battle included literacy itself.

Revelation did gently correct the leniency on one point, that prisoners had been taken before the enemy was fully subdued, a matter of timing in war. But the deeper teaching stood: even flush with a victory granted by angels, against men with blood-debts owed, the default was mercy. Abbas (ra) and others among those captives would later become Muslims; the kindness shown to enemies in their lowest hour was itself a form of da'wah.