The siege came at the tail end of a rapid campaign. Mecca had fallen to Muhammad's forces in January 630 CE. When the tribes of the surrounding region organized a coalition to check his growing power, the Muslims met them at the valley of Hunayn and, after absorbing an ambush, routed the combined Hawazin and Thaqif forces. Survivors fled to Ta'if, the Thaqif tribe's fortified home, and the city became the natural next target. But Ta'if was different. Its walls were high and well supplied. It had been a pilgrimage center and commercial rival to Mecca for generations, housing the idol of the goddess al-Lat, whom the people called the lady of Ta'if. Open-field tactics that worked at Hunayn would not work here.

Muhammad's army laid siege with every tool available. They cut down vineyards and orchards, trying to pressure the Thaqif economically. They deployed catapults and the manjaniq, a traction trebuchet used across the medieval Arab world. Later Muslim historians record that Muhammad's forces even attempted the Roman testudo, locking shields overhead to advance on the gates. The defenders dropped heated iron onto the shield roof, breaking the formation. An offer of freedom to any enslaved person who defected drew only ten people out of the city. The Thaqif held. One of their principal leaders, Urwah ibn Mas'ud, was away in Yemen, leaving other chiefs to manage the defense, which they did with unexpected tenacity.

Abu Sufyan ibn Harb lost an eye in the fighting. When he reported the loss to Muhammad, tradition records the Prophet offering him a choice between prayer for its restoration or its reward in paradise. Abu Sufyan chose paradise. After fifteen days of little progress, with soldiers becoming restive and the sacred pilgrimage months approaching, Muhammad consulted his advisors, and, according to tradition, received guidance in a dream. He lifted the siege. The Muslim forces withdrew toward Mecca. By the strict accounting of battlefield outcomes, Ta'if had won. By the longer view Muhammad was already taking, the episode was not a defeat so much as a pause.

Within a year, Ta'if accepted Islam. Not by siege, not by storm, but by negotiation. The Banu Thaqif sent a delegation to Mecca and asked to continue worshipping al-Lat for three years. Muhammad refused. Accounts preserve reports of a plot against his life that failed during the negotiations. Eventually the Thaqif agreed to surrender and disarm. In parallel, Muhammad had persuaded Malik, chief of the Banu Hawazin, to convert in exchange for the return of his family and property captured at Hunayn. Malik then turned his fighters against Ta'if's ability to graze its livestock outside the walls, tightening the economic noose that had begun during the siege. The combination of isolation, diplomacy, and Malik's blockade did what catapults had not.

The name Ta'if means the circulated or encircled, after the wall the Thaqif had built in pre-Islamic times. That wall held against Muhammad's army in 630 and is the reason the city's conversion came through treaty rather than conquest. Today Ta'if is a mountain resort city of more than 600,000, famous for its roses and its summer coolness, and for being called the unofficial summer capital of Saudi Arabia. But the old name still describes the place. Encircled by mountains, encircled by orchards, encircled once by a wall that turned back one of the most successful military commanders of the seventh century, the city remains the place where, at least once, the siege did not work.