In the following years the initiative passed to the Meccans, who twice attacked Muhammad and Medina, first at the Battle of Uhud (625) and then at the Battle of the Ditch (627). The former was a defeat for Muhammad and the latter a stalemate, but Muhammad profited from both battles. He had survived the worst Mecca could do, and even managed on each occasion either to exile or execute some of the remaining Jewish clans, confiscate their property, and expand his influence over the desert tribes.

Cambridge University Press, 2002

Khaybar (or Ka'ba as it was named then), is an oasis some 95 miles to the north of Medina. Whereas Mecca is famous for its barrenness, pre-Islamic Medina (Yathrib) probably looked somewhat like this. Ka'ba, which was inhabited by the Jews before the rise to Islam, fell to Muhammad in 628.

From this point, however, Muhammad relaxed rather than intensified the pressure on Mecca, for his object was not to fight Mecca to the death but to convert her people to Islam. In 628 Muhammad and a large group of followers made the pilgrimage to the Ka'ba, and proposed adopting it as part of Islam. They did this to show that Islam was an Arabian religion and would preserve the pilgrimage rites in which Mecca had so great a stake. The Meccans, however, were wary of Muhammad's intentions and intercepted him at a place called al-Hudaybiya. There Muhammad concluded a truce in which the Meccans agreed to admit the Muslims for the pilgrimage, but Muhammad had to drop his demand that he be recognized as the Prophet of God. Further, he even agreed to an unequal arrangement whereby children who left Mecca to become Muslims would have to be returned if they did not have parental consent, while Muslim apostates would not be returned. At one level the treaty was an embarrassment to Muhammad, but at another he made tremendous gains. Meccan hostility was allayed, and the treaty confirmed what Meccan failures at the Battles of Uhud and the Ditch had shown--that Muhammad was a power to contend with and that Mecca had given up her efforts to defeat him. Sniffing the wind, Arabian tribes continued to throw in their lot with Muhammad. Two years later, in 630, Muhammad completed his triumph over Mecca. A dispute between client tribes of Mecca and Medina broke the truce, but Meccan leaders surrendered the city. Muhammad gave amnesty to almost everyone and generous gifts to the leading Quraysh. The idols of the Ka'ba were destroyed, and it was declared the holiest shrine of Islam.

The victory over Mecca was also the culmination of Muhammad's tribal policy. Throughout the eight-year struggle, Muhammad had tried to gain control of the tribes in order to subdue Mecca. Missionaries and embassies were sent throughout Arabia, factions loyal to Muhammad were supported, and tribes were raided to compel them to pay allegiance and zakat, the alms tax, to Muhammad. He regarded the tax as a sign of membership in the Muslim community and acceptance of himself as Prophet. The bedouins looked on it as a tribute plain and simple, and conspired to evade it as soon as they could. Muhammad's successes had resulted in the cutting off of Mecca's trade. Then, with Mecca finally subdued, many Arabian tribes accepted Islam. By the end of his life Muhammad had created, for the first time in centuries, a large-scale Arabian federation of oases and tribes, and had provided a solution to the destructive anarchy of Arabian life.