Mecca's defeat at Badr in the previous year had cost Quraysh several of its leading men, and in the following year it raised a force reckoned by tradition at around three thousand, considerably larger than the army sent to Badr, under the command of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb. It marched on Medina rather than waiting to be raided again. Muhammad, after consultation, chose to meet the Meccan force in open ground near Mount Uhud, a low ridge just outside the city, rather than withstand a siege inside Medina itself, a decision tradition records as taken against his own preference and in deference to the younger men who wanted to fight.
Before the battle, Muhammad posted a company of archers, numbered in the sources at about fifty, on a low hill overlooking the Muslim position, with explicit instructions to hold it regardless of how the battle went, so that the Meccan cavalry could not use the position to turn the Muslim flank. Roughly a third of the force that had set out from Medina, under Abdullah ibn Ubayy, withdrew before the fighting began, reducing the Muslim army that actually engaged to around seven hundred men against the much larger Meccan force. The debate over where to meet the Meccan force divided Muhammad's companions: some favored remaining inside Medina and letting a siege exhaust the larger army, while others, many of them younger men who had missed the fighting at Badr, pressed to meet Quraysh in the open. Muhammad set aside his own preference for the defensive plan and led the force that marched out to Uhud.