The army has formed and the road is open. On the tenth of Ramadan, in the eighth year after the Hijra, the Prophet ﷺ leaves Madinah at the head of ten thousand and turns toward the city that drove him out. Makkah does not yet know he is coming.
But before the gates of Makkah come into view, the road itself delivers something the march was not planned around: men. Four men, every one of them once an enemy, every one of them now hurrying to reach Islam before it arrives without them. Today is their day. It is a day about the door that stays open until the very last moment, and about who is small enough to walk through it.
Leaving, and the man no one remembers
He ﷺ marched out of Madinah on the tenth of Ramadan, and left the city in the hands of a companion almost no one has heard of, before this day or after it: Abu Ruhm al-Ghifari. There is a quiet lesson in that name alone. Every major companion you know joined this march. Someone still had to mind Madinah, and the someone was not a famous man. The great names were all on the road to Makkah; the watch was kept by a man history barely records, and there is no shame in being the one who holds the home front while the others ride.
He ﷺ and his companions were fasting, and he did not break that fast inside the city. He waited until they reached a place called Kadid, outside Madinah, and only there did he break it, and the people broke theirs with him. Dr. Yasir Qadhi pauses on this, because most of the scholars build a ruling on it: travel does not begin from inside your walls. You do not shorten your prayer in your own house, and you do not skip the fast of a travel-day before you have actually left. If your journey is in Ramadan, you begin the day fasting, and you keep fasting until your city is genuinely behind you. The Sheikh makes it concrete for the rest of us: you cannot break your fast in the airport. The departure starts when the city ends.
The last man ever to emigrate
Barely two days out, still less than halfway, they passed the valley of al-Juhfah, and coming the other way, from Makkah toward Madinah, was a small caravan: women, children, and at its head the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ, al-Abbas. He was coming as a muhajir. He had no idea any of this was happening. The march was a secret so tight that even Makkah did not know; an uncle on the road to join the Muslims certainly did not.
And so Allah handed al-Abbas an honor that no one after him would ever receive. The Prophet ﷺ was the last of the prophets; there is no prophet after him. Al-Abbas, by meeting the army here, became the last of the emigrants: there is no hijrah after the conquest, and he made it in just under the wire, never even reaching Madinah. The Prophet ﷺ rejoiced at the sight of his uncle, told him to settle his family somewhere safe and then catch up, and al-Abbas, riding light, soon rejoined the slow-moving host.
When al-Abbas had truly entered Islam is a question the scholars argued over for pages, and the Sheikh lays out their range of opinions without forcing one. What he will say with confidence is this: after the Battle of Badr, al-Abbas knew Islam was true. Whether he declared it then or kept it hidden as the Prophet's ﷺ man inside Makkah, his heart had already turned. He waited a long time. He did not wait too long.
The cousins who were turned away
وَقَالُوا لَن نُّؤْمِنَ لَكَ حَتَّىٰ تَفْجُرَ لَنَا مِنَ الْأَرْضِ يَنبُوعًا أَوْ تَكُونَ لَكَ جَنَّةٌ مِّن نَّخِيلٍ وَعِنَبٍ فَتُفَجِّرَ الْأَنْهَارَ خِلَالَهَا تَفْجِيرًا أَوْ تُسْقِطَ السَّمَاءَ كَمَا زَعَمْتَ عَلَيْنَا كِسَفًا أَوْ تَأْتِيَ بِاللَّهِ وَالْمَلَائِكَةِ قَبِيلًا أَوْ يَكُونَ لَكَ بَيْتٌ مِّن زُخْرُفٍ أَوْ تَرْقَىٰ فِي السَّمَاءِ وَلَن نُّؤْمِنَ لِرُقِيِّكَ حَتَّىٰ تُنَزِّلَ عَلَيْنَا كِتَابًا نَّقْرَؤُهُ ۗ قُلْ سُبْحَانَ رَبِّي هَلْ كُنتُ إِلَّا بَشَرًا رَّسُولًا
“And they say, "We will not believe you until you break open for us from the ground a spring, or [until] you have a garden of palm trees and grapes and make rivers gush forth within them in force [and abundance], or you make the heaven fall upon us in fragments as you have claimed or you bring Allah and the angels before [us], or you have a house of ornament [i.e., gold] or you ascend into the sky. And [even then], we will not believe in your ascension until you bring down to us a book we may read." Say, "Exalted is my Lord! Was I ever but a human messenger?"”
Surah al-Isra 17:90-93 Read 17:90 with tafsir
Two more men slipped out of Makkah in fear and hurried to meet the army before it could reach the city. Both were cousins of the Prophet ﷺ. Both had spent years hurting him. Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith was a poet, and he had aimed his poetry at the Prophet ﷺ like a weapon, ridiculing him and his message for years. The other cousin, Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah, had stood before the chiefs of Quraysh and thrown a sneer in the Prophet's ﷺ face: I will never believe in you, he said, until you climb a ladder into the sky in front of us and bring back down a book we can read, and even then I am not sure I would believe.
That exact mockery, the Sheikh notes, is written into the Qur'an. Allah recorded the demand of the deniers, the spring from the ground, the garden, the sky torn down in pieces, the house of gold, the climb into heaven, the book in hand, and answered all of it in a single dignified line placed in His Prophet's ﷺ mouth: Exalted is my Lord. Was I ever but a human messenger?
Now these two cousins came begging. They went first to the Prophet's ﷺ sister-in-law and wife, Umm Salamah, asking her to intercede. She felt for them and carried their request inside. The answer came back hard: I have no need for them. He ﷺ would not even grant them an audience.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi stops here, because this stings people who only know the gentle Prophet ﷺ. How could he refuse them? But mercy that never once shows a hard edge cannot govern, cannot teach, cannot protect; people simply take it. The general rule of his life ﷺ was forgiveness; the exception, deliberately, was that crossing the line had a cost. And there was wisdom hidden inside the refusal: it was a test. An insincere man, turned away, gets angry and leaves. A man who has finally understood what Islam is will not leave. He will stand at the door and refuse to go.
I will not go back
Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith did not leave. He raised his voice where he knew the Prophet ﷺ could hear it, and he lifted his small son by the hand and called out: if you will not see me, then my son and I will walk into the desert until we die of hunger and thirst. I am not going back to Makkah. Call it emotional blackmail if you like; it worked, because the heart it was aimed at was a soft one. This was his cousin and his cousin's child, his own nephew, blood he had grown up beside. He ﷺ let them in.
Abu Sufyan had a poem ready, as he always did, but this one had turned all the way around. One line ran: a guide other than myself guided me to Allah, a guide whom I kept pushing away at every chance, and still he kept guiding me. When he reached that line, the Prophet ﷺ struck him lightly on the chest, the way you push a brother, and said: yes, you pushed me away every time you could. He was hurt, and he said so, and then he forgave. This same Abu Sufyan would prove his faith soon after at the battle of Hunayn, standing firm and shaming those who fled.
So three men of the old enemy had already come home: al-Abbas the uncle, and the two cousins. The Sheikh frames the whole day this way. The conquest had not begun, and Islam was already winning the people who mattered most, one at a time, on an open road.
Ten thousand fires in the dark
Twenty kilometers from Makkah, at a place called Marr az-Zahran, the army made its final camp. In the morning they would march in. And here the Prophet ﷺ gave an order that says everything about how far the world had turned: light your fires. Every man, light his own. There was no need to hide their numbers now, no need for the old caution. Ten thousand fires bloomed in the dark until the plain itself seemed to be burning, as far as the eye could see.
Makkah was a shadow of itself. Fifteen years of emigration, of losses, of tribe after allied tribe accepting Islam, had emptied it out. The few who remained could not field an army and their old allies would not come. The Sheikh names the reversal plainly: three years earlier, the whole of Arabia had massed at the gates of Madinah to wipe Islam out. Now Islam was at the gates of Makkah, and Quraysh had no one left to call.
Al-Abbas, the brand-new emigrant whose conversion Quraysh did not yet know about, felt the old pity for his former people stir. He begged the Prophet ﷺ to let him go and try to spare them a battle. The Prophet ﷺ gave him his own mule to ride, and sent him into the night.
The chieftain on the Prophet's mule
In the dark al-Abbas overheard three men of Quraysh who had crept out to scout the strange fires. The loudest of them was Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, the great chieftain of Makkah, the last senior leader Quraysh had left after Badr took the rest. They could not make sense of what they were seeing; it never even occurred to them that the Muslims could be this many. Al-Abbas called out to him: this is the army of Muhammad ﷺ, and if he takes the city by force, your head is the first that falls. Come with me, and I will ask him to spare you.
Abu Sufyan, seeing no other road, climbed up behind al-Abbas on the Prophet's ﷺ own mule, and the two of them rode straight through ten thousand men who would each have happily killed him, every campfire they passed challenged and then waved on, because the mule of the Prophet ﷺ meant protection, no questions asked. Then they passed Umar, who recognized the chieftain at once and leapt up calling for his execution: Allah has delivered the enemy of His Messenger to us with no treaty to protect him. Al-Abbas threw out a tribal argument, that Umar would never want to kill a man of his own clan, and Umar shut it down cold. Your becoming Muslim, he told al-Abbas, was more beloved to me than my own father becoming Muslim, only because it brought the Prophet ﷺ more joy than my father's Islam ever could. How dare you play the tribe card with me. The Prophet ﷺ ended the standoff: take him to your tent, al-Abbas, and bring him to me in the morning.
All night al-Abbas worked on him, and at dawn brought him in. Isn't it time, the Prophet ﷺ asked him, that you knew there is no god but Allah? Abu Sufyan answered with the highest praise an Arab can give, may my mother and father be ransom for you, how gentle you are, how merciful, how good to your kin, and then admitted: by Allah, had there been any other gods, they would have done something for me by now. He had finally seen it. And the Sheikh draws out how slow that seeing was: these were men who watched the Prophet ﷺ for twenty-three years and still half-believed in their idols. Faith is not a five-minute conversation. Abu Sufyan accepted that there was no god but Allah, then balked again at the second half: as for Muhammad, I am not yet sure. Al-Abbas, out of patience after a long night, told him bluntly to submit or be killed. It was not the Prophet ﷺ who threatened him, and we do not threaten people into faith; it was an exhausted friend. And reluctantly, Abu Sufyan said the shahada in full.
It is not a kingdom
Al-Abbas knew his man. Ya Rasul Allah, he said, Abu Sufyan loves his pride; give him something to hold onto. So the Prophet ﷺ granted him an honor: when Makkah is entered tomorrow, whoever stays in the Sacred Mosque is safe, whoever stays in his own home is safe, and whoever enters the house of Abu Sufyan is safe. His house, alone, would become a place of refuge. You meet people where their dignity lives, and a proud man was handed a way to stand tall inside his own surrender.
Then the Prophet ﷺ sent al-Abbas to hold Abu Sufyan at a narrow neck of the valley, so the entire army would have to pass him as it marched. Banner after banner went by. Who are these, Abu Sufyan kept asking, and al-Abbas named them, tribe after tribe he had never imagined fighting under one flag, until he could only say: how could anyone stand against this. Last of all came the contingent of the muhajirun and the ansar around the Prophet ﷺ himself, and Abu Sufyan, staring at it, turned to al-Abbas: the kingdom of your nephew has become very great. And al-Abbas corrected him with one sentence that holds the whole meaning of the day: it is not a kingdom. It is prophethood.
Stand where Abu Sufyan stood and feel the turn. Eight years ago this same Prophet ﷺ slipped out of Makkah in the night with one companion and hid in a cave while Quraysh hunted him for his life. Now he returns at the head of ten thousand, and the chieftain of Quraysh watches the banners pass and submits. Where are the proud ones now, the ones who tortured and plotted and drove him out? Gone, every one, and the matter belongs to Allah and to no one else.