In his Muhammad and the Believers, Fred Donner identifies a critical gap in early Islamic historiography. Donner judiciously observes that the prophet’s military campaigns (maghāzī) against Dūmat al-Jandal are “especially poorly understood.” The elusive strategy behind Muhammad’s northern campaigns against Dūma is a complex and deeply entrenched problem in maghāzī historiography. Classical and modern historians of the maghāzī have long wrestled with the northern question. Although in tacit agreement that “the road north had a prominent place in Muhammad’s strategic thinking,” historians such as W. Montgomery Watt are completely at variance with one another about what precipitated the first invasion in 5/626. Fraught with chronological inconsistencies and contradictions, it is evident that the northern question cannot be treated in isolation. In the case of Dūma, the literary character of the maghāzī reports further compounds the problem. For instance, although al-Wāqidī’s account is rich in narrative detail, the fact that “al-Wāqidī outstrips Ibn Isḥāq,” leads Donald P. Little to adopt the view that motifs in al-Wāqidī deliberately function “to give his expanded narration of events some degree of thematic unity.” In point of fact, Alois Musil concludes that “interwoven into the account of al-Wāqidī is a legend heedful neither of the topographical nor of the chronological circumstances.” As the present study demonstrates, the solution to the northern problem requires a closer inspection of the topography of these campaigns, as well as the narrative structure of the extant maghāzī-material. This article’s multi- and interdisciplinary approach combines history, topography, archaeology, and narratology to shed light on this complex problem that has proven to be remarkably resistant to conventional analysis. To this end, the present work gathers and analyzes every available primary and secondary source on Dūma from the ancient, classical, and late antique periods. Framing the problem in terms of the economic realities of first/seventh century Arabia, the present study calls into question the prevailing scholarly view that Dūma fell in 9/630-31. For this purpose, the final and decisive expedition against Dūma in 12/633 is reconstructed. These research findings confirm Musil’s claim that Abū Bakr’s “expedition to Dūma was imperative because of military and commercial policy,” the precedent for which had been well established by Muhammad. Through a thorough analysis, this study carefully unravels the tangled strands of early Islamic historiography to expose the strategy behind the northern maghāzī.