The Archers, the Turn, and the Aftermath

The battle opened well for the Muslims, and the Meccan line began to give way. Seeing the apparent victory, most of the archers left their post on the hill to join in gathering the spoils of the retreating Meccan camp, against the order they had been given. Khalid ibn al-Walid, commanding the Meccan cavalry on the flank, saw the hill exposed and led his horsemen around it to strike the Muslim force from the rear, turning an apparent victory into a rout. Muhammad himself was struck and wounded, losing a tooth and suffering a cut to his face, and for a time a rumor spread through the field that he had been killed. His uncle Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the champions of Badr, was killed in the fighting, and his body was mutilated afterward by Hind bint Utbah, whose father had died at Badr.

Quraysh did not press the advantage into an assault on Medina itself, and withdrew after the battle, so Uhud registered as a serious reversal rather than a decisive Meccan victory. The Quran addresses the defeat at length in Surah Al Imran, treating the archers' abandonment of their post as the cause of the reversal and framing the whole episode as a test of the community's discipline rather than evidence against its cause. Modern historians generally follow the broad shape of the traditional account while noting, as with Badr, that its troop figures come from within the Islamic historical tradition rather than an outside record.