Answering Objections to Islam · Prophetic Biography
Rules of Warfare in the Prophetic Practice
In short
- 1.Explicit prohibition on killing non-combatants, monks and hermits.
- 2.Prohibition on burning trees, killing livestock and mutilating bodies.
- 3.Total combat deaths across the Prophet's (SAW) campaigns number in the low hundreds on both sides combined.
The claim being examined
Islam is presented as spread by the sword, with the Prophet (SAW) as a warlord whose campaigns had no ethical restraint.
The Islamic position
The prophetic instructions to armies prohibited killing women, children, the elderly, monks and labourers, destroying trees and crops, or mutilating the dead — restrictions issued in a context where the surrounding norm was unrestricted plunder.
Analysis
Abu Bakr (RA)'s ten instructions to Usama's army codify what the Prophet (SAW) practised, and they anticipate the substance of non-combatant immunity by more than a millennium. The historical scale matters too: the aggregate death toll of every engagement in the Prophet's (SAW) lifetime, on all sides, is around a thousand — small enough that later chroniclers could name the dead individually. That is not the arithmetic of conquest by terror.
From the Qur'an
وَلَا تَعْتَدُوٓا۟ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلْمُعْتَدِينَ
walā taʿtadū inna l-laha lā yuḥibbu l-muʿ'tadīna
Do not transgress limits; Allah does not love transgressors.
From the Sunnah
The Prophet forbade the killing of women and children.
Abu Bakr's instructions: kill no child, woman, or aged man; cut down no fruit tree; harm no monk in his cell.
Sources
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