Day of Decision: The Battle of Badr

Definitive account of the Battle of Badr, complete with colour photographs, maps and diagrams.

In the Quran it is called Yawm al-Furqan, ‘The Day of Decision’. In Ramadan, in the year 2 AH, two armies met at Badr, a remote spot in the Arabian desert. A small but well-equipped army of about one thousand pagans was defeated by just 313 Muslims, ill-equipped but divinely aided and spiritually unconquerable.

To outsiders, this would have seemed no more than a minor skirmish between desert tribesmen. Neither the combatants, nor the location, nor the outcome had the least importance in the eyes of the wider world, where in those days the two major powers were the Persian and Byzantine empires. And yet Muslims consider Badr the most momentous battle in history. Had the leading Muslims not survived, there would have been little prospect of Islam, the last true religion, surviving. The world’s history would have been unimaginably different.