Having survived the shock of Prophet Mohammed’s death, they had regrouped, and Omar probably understood that setting them a heroic quest at this juncture would consolidate and deepen their unity. In 15 AH (or thereabouts), near a town called Qadisiya, an Arab force traditionally numbered at thirty thousand warriors found itself facing a Sassanid army of sixty thousand crack troops. Only a river separated them. Several times, the Arab commander Waqqas sent envoys to negotiate with Rustum, the commander of the Sassanid force. As the story goes, General Rustum asked one envoy if he headed up the
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