Makkah has opened. The man this city once drove into the desert is standing at the doors of the Ka'bah with those doors thrown open behind him, and the people who hunted him are gathered in front of him, waiting to learn what a conqueror does with the ones who wronged him. He tells them: go forth, you are free. And then, instead of a reckoning, the rest of the day fills up with something gentler and stranger: a voice on the roof of the Ka'bah, a line of hands on a hill, and a slow trickle of old enemies finding their way back, one heart at a time.
This is the fifth of our days inside the conquest, and it is the day the doors of Allah stand open and the only question left in Makkah is who will walk through them.
Go forth, you are free
Picture the scene, because the symbolism is too obvious to miss. The Prophet ﷺ stands at the open doors of the Ka'bah, the house at the center of the world he was born into and exiled from, and around him press the people of Makkah: the families of those who tortured his companions, the sons of those who plotted his death, the woman who had mutilated his uncle. By every law their century knew, this was the hour of revenge.
He gives them a single sentence instead: go forth, you are free. The doors of the house are open, and his invitation is open with them, anyone who wishes may enter Islam. Dr. Yasir Qadhi lingers here on the picture itself, the doors of Allah flung wide and the Messenger ﷺ at the threshold calling a beaten city in, because mercy at the height of power is the whole lesson of the day. Strictness was the rare exception, shown only so the line would not be crossed. Mercy was the rule, and the rule was winning.
The voice on the roof
Then he gave one of the most famous instructions of his life. He told Bilal radiyallahu anhu to climb to the top of the Ka'bah and call the adhan from the highest point in Makkah. Even someone who knows almost nothing of this religion knows this much: that Allah honored Bilal to be the first human being ever to call the adhan over the holiest of houses.
Sit with what that voice had been through. It was the voice that cried out the oneness of Allah in the valleys of Makkah while his tormentors crushed him under the noon sun for saying it. It refused to break. And so it was that exact voice, the Sheikh draws out, that Allah chose to lift, literally and figuratively, above the Quraysh who had once stood over it. An Abyssinian with no lineage, no clan, no claim on this city, sent up onto its summit to proclaim the testimony of faith on behalf of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. The one who held firm through humiliation is the one raised at the hour of honor. As they were dealt with, so they were repaid: good for good.
Below him the elite of Quraysh listened. Attab ibn Asid, the full brother of Abu Jahl, said he thanked God his father was already dead and did not have to see this black man chosen above them. Al-Harith ibn Hisham said that if he truly believed this man was upon the truth, he would follow him. And Abu Sufyan, a Muslim now for only a few hours, held his tongue and said: I will say nothing, for if I did, these very stones would tell him what I said. He had come to believe the Prophet ﷺ was a prophet, yet faith had not yet settled into his heart. When the Prophet ﷺ passed them later, he told each man, word for word, exactly what he had said while no one was listening. Al-Harith took the testimony on the spot.
The hill where it ended, where it began
وَرَأَيْتَ النَّاسَ يَدْخُلُونَ فِي دِينِ اللَّهِ أَفْوَاجًا
“And you see the people entering into the religion of Allah in multitudes,”
Surah an-Nasr 110:2 Read 110:2 with tafsir
From the Ka'bah he made his way to Safa and sat down. There he received the bay'ah, the oath of allegiance, from everyone willing to embrace Islam, and they came in throngs, lining up, crowding around him, hand after hand after hand. This is that promised ayah made visible in front of you: the people entering the religion of Allah in multitudes.
And the place could not have been more perfect. Safa is where the public call began, nearly twenty years earlier, the day he ﷺ first climbed it to warn his clans. Now the whole circle closes on the same stone. Where the da'wah started, there it is sealed, and the man who once stood up on that hill to a hostile city now sits on it to receive that city home. The bulk of Makkah accepted Islam in this single stretch.
The door that closed behind them
One exchange from that hill became a ruling for the whole ummah. A companion brought his own blood brother, freshly arrived, and asked the Prophet ﷺ to grant him the reward of the hijra, the migration, the way the early emigrants had earned it. It is one of the most famous things said during the conquest, recorded in Bukhari and Muslim: there is no hijra after the conquest of Makkah.
For eight years the great hijra to Madinah had been an obligation on every believer, your Islam was deficient without it. The day Makkah opened, that door shut. The Sheikh is careful about what this does and does not mean: the one and only Hijra, the migration that defined a generation, was now complete and could not be joined late. Personal migrations would still happen, a believer fleeing persecution for the safety of his faith, but the great communal Hijra was finished. What remained, the Prophet ﷺ said, was jihad and good intention. If the brother truly longed for that rank, the road ahead, against Rome and Persia, and a sincere heart, would still carry him there.
The women's pledge, and Hind behind the veil
يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ إِذَا جَاءَكَ الْمُؤْمِنَاتُ يُبَايِعْنَكَ عَلَىٰ أَن لَّا يُشْرِكْنَ بِاللَّهِ شَيْئًا وَلَا يَسْرِقْنَ وَلَا يَزْنِينَ وَلَا يَقْتُلْنَ أَوْلَادَهُنَّ وَلَا يَأْتِينَ بِبُهْتَانٍ يَفْتَرِينَهُ بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِنَّ وَأَرْجُلِهِنَّ وَلَا يَعْصِينَكَ فِي مَعْرُوفٍ ۙ فَبَايِعْهُنَّ وَاسْتَغْفِرْ لَهُنَّ اللَّهَ ۖ إِنَّ اللَّهَ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
“O Prophet, when the believing women come to you pledging to you that they will not associate anything with Allah, nor will they steal, nor will they commit unlawful sexual intercourse, nor will they kill their children, nor will they bring forth a slander they have invented between their arms and legs, nor will they disobey you in what is right, then accept their pledge and ask forgiveness for them of Allah. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.”
Surah al-Mumtahanah 60:12 Read 60:12 with tafsir
When the men had finished, the women of Quraysh were called, and he took their pledge upon the very conditions Allah lays out in this ayah. Among them, hidden behind a full face veil, stood Hind bint Utbah, the wife of Abu Sufyan, the woman who had done to the body of Hamza radiyallahu anhu what every listener knows and dreads to repeat. She had reason to fear, and reason to hide.
But Hind could not hold her tongue, and her tongue gave her away. When he said do not associate anything with Allah, she muttered that he was asking of them what he had not asked the men, an assumption that was simply wrong. When he said do not steal, she shot back that she used to take from Abu Sufyan's wealth without his knowing, and Abu Sufyan, in the crowd, hurried to forgive whatever was past. The Prophet ﷺ said: are you Hind? She admitted it and begged pardon, and he did not punish her, and he did not say you are forgiven. He simply moved on. The Sheikh stops you on how perfect that was: it is easier to forgive a wrong done to yourself than one done to someone you love, and harder still when it was done to the dead. He neither struck back nor pretended the wound was nothing. He let it go and let her go.
When he said do not commit unlawful relations, she snapped, does a free woman do such a thing? And when he said do not kill your children, came the line that undid the room: as for that, we raised them as little ones and you killed them as grown men at Badr. It was so sharp, so unexpected, that one of the great companions sitting behind the Prophet ﷺ burst out laughing and fell onto his back. And it is recorded that the Prophet ﷺ never took a woman's hand in pledge; his word to them was the pledge itself.
The fear of the Ansar
Quietly, the Ansar of Madinah began to ache. They watched him return to the city of his birth, watched his kin and his cousins and the Quraysh come pouring into Islam, and a thought went around among them: now that he is home, softness for his own people has taken hold of him, he will forget us. At the root of it was not jealousy so much as love, the fear of a beloved drifting back to where he came from.
Jibril brought him their words, yet the first thing he did was ask them, did you say this? out of pure courtesy, to give them the chance to speak, even though he already knew. They confessed. And then he reminded them who he was: had he not, years ago at Aqabah, made them a promise that his life was their life and his death their death? Who did they think he was, that he would break it now? He was theirs, he told them, in living and in dying, gathered into them and no longer merely a man of his own clan. The Ansar wept, and asked forgiveness, and he forgave them, and Allah and His Messenger believed their excuse.
The ones who came in slowly
قَالَتِ الْأَعْرَابُ آمَنَّا ۖ قُل لَّمْ تُؤْمِنُوا وَلَٰكِن قُولُوا أَسْلَمْنَا وَلَمَّا يَدْخُلِ الْإِيمَانُ فِي قُلُوبِكُمْ ۖ وَإِن تُطِيعُوا اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ لَا يَلِتْكُم مِّنْ أَعْمَالِكُمْ شَيْئًا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
“The bedouins say, "We have believed." Say, "You have not [yet] believed; but say [instead], 'We have submitted,' for faith has not yet entered your hearts. And if you obey Allah and His Messenger, He will not deprive you from your deeds of anything. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful."”
Surah al-Hujurat 49:14 Read 49:14 with tafsir
The Prophet ﷺ stayed in Makkah for about three weeks, and the holdouts came in over those days, one reluctant heart at a time. Islam, the Sheikh reminds you, arrives in levels: Allah Himself tells the bedouins not to claim belief when they have only just submitted, for faith had not yet entered their hearts. He saw it then and we see it now, that for someone not raised inside this faith, surrender can take time, and our part is to be the more patient and the more generous.
There was Fadala, a young man so enraged by the defeat that he hid a dagger and crept up behind the Prophet ﷺ during his tawaf, meaning to kill him and not caring that he would die for it. The Prophet ﷺ turned: is this Fadala? What were you intending? Nothing, he lied, I was only remembering Allah. The Prophet ﷺ laughed at the open lie, laid his hand on Fadala's chest, and in that instant, Fadala later said, no one on earth was more beloved to him than the man before him. The plot dissolved into faith.
There was Safwan ibn Umayyah, who fled toward the sea to drown himself rather than live under this, until his cousin caught him at the shore carrying the Prophet's own turban as a token of safety, and brought him back. The Prophet ﷺ gave him four months to decide, asked nothing of his heart, and later, after Hunayn, gave him a whole valley of spoils until Safwan said only a prophet could give like this, and his hatred turned to love. There was Suhayl ibn Amr, the proud negotiator of Hudaybiyyah, who locked himself in his house in terror and sent his son to beg protection, and was told to be received with respect and never stared at in anger, for he was a man of intelligence and honor who would come to Islam when he saw it. And there was Abu Quhafah, the aged blind father of Abu Bakr radiyallahu anhu, led in by the hand, for whom the Prophet ﷺ said, you should have left the old man at home, we would have come to him, the dignity of the elder honored for the sake of his son. One by one, the city he had been driven from came home.