They had marched for ten days. They had camped outside Makkah for almost three weeks. They had come in white, unarmed, carrying nothing but sacrificial animals and the longing to see the Kabah. And today, day 66 of the seerah, they would sign a treaty that felt to every one of them like a slap across the face, then turn around and go home without ever touching the House.
This is the hardest day in the whole journey so far, and the reason is simple: it is the day a believer in chains begged the Prophet ﷺ for rescue and was sent back. Watch how the Companions broke, watch how the Prophet ﷺ held, and watch what Allah said about all of it before they even reached Madinah.
The boy in the chains
The terms were still being argued, not yet written. Suhayl ibn Amr, the Quraysh negotiator, had pushed through the cruelest clause of all: any man who fled Makkah for Madinah, even as a Muslim, would be returned, while no Muslim who abandoned the faith and ran back to Makkah would ever be handed over. A one way street. The Companions were objecting out loud, which was not even their place in a negotiation, because every muhajir among them knew this clause was aimed at people exactly like them. Had it existed six years earlier, there would be no Islam in Madinah at all.
And then, into that exact moment, came Abu Jandal. He was Suhayl's own younger son, kept in a Makkan dungeon and tortured for two or three years, and when he heard the Muslims were camped just outside the city he saw the one chance of his life. He broke out and dragged himself to the camp, chains still on his wrists, the marks of the whip and the lashing open and bleeding on his chest, and he threw himself among the believers crying out: O Muslims, save me. His father saw him across the distance and turned to the Prophet ﷺ at once: this one, Muhammad, is the very first you return to me under our terms.
Here Dr. Yasir Qadhi pauses you, because what the Prophet ﷺ did next he says he has found nowhere else in the entire seerah. The Prophet ﷺ pleaded. He asked Suhayl to make this one an exception, to gift the boy to him, and when Suhayl refused he asked again, and again, three and four times, a Messenger of Allah ﷺ begging a pagan for the life of one tortured believer. Suhayl would not move: take the treaty as it is or there is no treaty. And Abu Jandal, watching his father on one side and the Prophet ﷺ on the other, cried out the question that has echoed for fourteen centuries: will you return me to the idolaters when I have come to you as a Muslim?
Be patient, Abu Jandal
The Prophet ﷺ could not save him, so he gave him the only thing left to give. He turned to him directly and said: be patient, Abu Jandal, and count on the reward, for Allah will make for you a way out. Then Umar ibn al-Khattab, unable to bear it, walked up beside the boy and said the same words the Prophet ﷺ had said, and then added something far more militant. He told Abu Jandal that the blood of these pagans was worth nothing, and as he said it he let his eyes fall to his own sword, a silent invitation: here it is, use it. But that would have meant striking his own father and Suhayl's companion, and in the end Abu Jandal could not, and he did not lift it.
So Abu Jandal was put back in his chains and led back toward Makkah, the camp watching him go. The most they could win for him was a single promise extracted from one of the Quraysh delegates: that he would no longer be tortured the way he had been. Years later, at the battle of Siffin, an old Companion would try to calm two Muslim armies on the edge of war by reaching back to this very day. Always blame your own opinion before you blame the Qur'an and Sunnah, he said, for I remember myself on the day of Abu Jandal, and had I been able to reject the command of the Prophet ﷺ, I would have done it. He did not even call it the day of Hudaybiyyah. He called it the day of Abu Jandal, because that is the wound that never fully closed.
The terms nobody wanted
Once the clause stood, the rest of the treaty was set down. There would be peace for ten years, no fighting between the two sides. Any tribe in Arabia could now enter into alliance with the Muslims or with the Quraysh, and whatever terms bound the two sides would bind their allies too. As for the pilgrimage the Muslims had come for: not this year. Let no Arab say the Muslims had forced their way in. Next year the Quraysh would empty the city for three days and the Muslims could perform it then, and leave. Ali ibn Abi Talib wrote the document, and witnesses signed for both sides.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi asks you to lift your eyes off the humiliation for a moment and see the thing the Companions, in their pain, could not yet see. For the very first time, the Muslims were being treated as an equal. You do not write a treaty except with a power you recognize, and here were the Quraysh, sitting at the same table, forced to negotiate with the religion they had spent two decades trying to crush. And notice what is happening underneath: one side at that table is a faith, the umma, and the other is a tribe, a bloodline. The whole of Arabia was being quietly sorted into two, Islam on one side and everything else on the other. This treaty was the precursor to the conquest of Makkah and to the day, only a few years away, when idol worship would be wiped from the face of the Arabian Peninsula entirely.
Are you not the Messenger of Allah?
The anger in the camp had to go somewhere, and it went where the deepest love often hides. Umar came to the Prophet ﷺ and fired a series of questions he already knew the answers to. Are you not the Messenger of Allah? Yes. Are we not upon the truth and our enemies upon falsehood? Yes. Then why, Umar pressed, do we accept this humiliation in our religion? And the Prophet ﷺ answered with the only answer there was: I am the Messenger of Allah, and I will not disobey Him, and He will help me. Umar tried another angle, the dream of praying at the House, and the Prophet ﷺ asked him: did I ever tell you it would be this year? Next year, he said. You will go, and you will make tawaf.
Then Umar went to Abu Bakr and asked him the very same questions, and Abu Bakr, without ever having heard the Prophet's ﷺ replies, gave Umar the very same answers, word for word, and then said something sharper: man, hold fast to the stirrup of his saddle, for by Allah he is the Messenger of Allah and he will not disobey his Lord. Dr. Yasir Qadhi lingers here on a side of Abu Bakr we forget. We picture him soft, weeping, gentle, and he is all of that, but when the moment demands a man, no one is firmer, not even Umar. This is the rank of Abu Bakr: the one person with the standing to put Umar in his place, the same way he would steady the entire umma on the day the Prophet ﷺ died.
And the Sheikh is careful and clear about Umar, because some have tried to use this day against him. Umar's anger was never about ego or wounded pride. It was rage on behalf of the religion he loved, a man who could not stand to see Islam, as he saw it, trampled. He overstepped, and he knew it, and he spent the rest of his life making it up: freeing slaves, fasting, praying, doing good deed after good deed in the hope of forgiveness for that day. Neither the Prophet ﷺ nor Abu Bakr ever held it against him. They understood it for what it was, the misfire of a heart that loved too fiercely.
Stand up and shave
وَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْكُمْ أَن تَنكِحُوهُنَّ إِذَا آتَيْتُمُوهُنَّ أُجُورَهُنَّ
“And there is no blame upon you if you marry them when you have given them their due compensation [i.e., mahr].”
Surah al-Mumtahanah 60:10 Read 60:10 with tafsir
It was over. The Prophet ﷺ told them to stand, slaughter their animals, shave their heads, and turn for home, the pilgrimage abandoned where they stood. And then something happened that Dr. Yasir Qadhi says he has found nowhere else in the entire seerah: he gave a command, and not one Companion moved. He said it a second time. No one moved. A third time, and still the camp sat frozen, too crushed to lift a hand. He went back into his tent, and his wife Umm Salamah saw the agitation on his face. When he told her, she gave him the wisdom of a moment: do not say another word to them, O Messenger of Allah. Go out, call your barber, and shave your own head. When they see you do it, they will follow. He did, and the instant the Companions saw his blade touch his own hair, the spell broke and they fell over one another to do the same.
Two new things were born from this day that are still the law of every Muslim. First, what to do when you set out for the sacred House and cannot reach it: wherever you are stopped, by a closed road or a plague or a crisis, you slaughter, you shave, you leave the state of ihram, and you make it up later. The Companions had never seen it done, because it had never needed doing. And second, when the question came of the believing women, Allah revealed the verse above, that they were to be tested and, if true in faith, never returned, their dowries repaid to the men they left, and lawful to marry once their waiting period passed. The Prophet ﷺ had bound himself to the exact letter of the treaty, and the letter had said man, not woman. So the women stayed. Once again, a clause the Quraysh wrote to wound them had a door in it they never noticed.
A clear victory
إِنَّا فَتَحْنَا لَكَ فَتْحًا مُّبِينًا
“Indeed, We have given you, [O Muḥammad], a clear conquest.”
Surah al-Fath 48:1 Read 48:1 with tafsir
On the road back, somewhere in the long ride home, Umar was riding heavy with what he had said. He came alongside the Prophet ﷺ and greeted him. No reply. He greeted him again. Nothing. A third time, and silence, and Umar's heart sank: may my mother lose me, I am finished. Then a rider came: the Prophet ﷺ is calling for you. Umar went expecting the worst, and instead found the Prophet's ﷺ face shining with a joy that lit it up, reciting a surah that had just come down from the heavens, whole and entire, the surah named al-Fath, the Victory, and it opened with the words above.
Is this a victory? a Companion asked, the same question Abu Jandal's chains had made every one of them doubt. Yes, the Prophet ﷺ said, it is a victory. And Umar set his camel racing up and down the lines crying out that Allah had granted them a clear victory, the same Umar who days earlier could see only defeat. The Prophet ﷺ said of this surah that it was more beloved to him than everything the sun rises upon. Dr. Yasir Qadhi draws out a delicate point the Companions taught us by their own turnaround: their hearts flipped the instant the revelation came, which shows they had always understood the difference between the Prophet's ﷺ own human judgment, which they were free to question with respect, and the command of Allah, which is binding the moment it descends and beyond all argument.
Like a plant that delights the sower
وَمَثَلُهُمْ فِي الْإِنجِيلِ كَزَرْعٍ أَخْرَجَ شَطْأَهُ فَآزَرَهُ فَاسْتَغْلَظَ فَاسْتَوَىٰ عَلَىٰ سُوقِهِ يُعْجِبُ الزُّرَّاعَ
“And their description in the Gospel is as a plant which produces its offshoots and strengthens them so they grow firm and stand upon their stalks, delighting the sowers.”
Surah al-Fath 48:29 Read 48:29 with tafsir
The surah closes by painting the Companions themselves, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi makes sure you feel why. Allah likens them to a seed a farmer plants that pushes out its shoots and grows tall and firm until it stands proud on its own stalk and delights the one who sowed it, and the sower here is the Prophet ﷺ, gladdened by what his Companions became. It was a brutal test. They were emotional, they were heartbroken, they nearly could not obey, but when it came down to it, they followed. And the Sheikh asks you honestly: can you picture any other community on earth following their leader through a day like that, the ihram, then the humiliating terms, then Abu Jandal turned away before their eyes, and still staying, still obeying? Allah saw the tree he had grown, and He praised it in words that will be recited until the end of time.
Then came the proof that the whole bitter treaty was a victory in disguise. A believer named Abu Basir fled Makkah for Madinah, and when the Quraysh sent for him the Prophet ﷺ, keeping his word to the letter, handed him back to their two envoys. On the road Abu Basir killed one of them and the other raced back in terror. He returned to the Prophet ﷺ, who would not shelter him but turned away with a hint, and Abu Basir understood and fled to the coast and set up camp on the trade road. Abu Jandal, that same boy in chains, escaped again and joined him, and then the converts who could not reach Madinah came one by one until they were seventy, eighty strong, raiding every Quraysh caravan bound for Syria. Within a year the Quraysh themselves came begging the Prophet ﷺ to take these men into Madinah and call off the bleeding. The very people they had fought to keep out, they now pleaded for him to take in. You cannot outwit Allah. He is the best of planners, and the boy whose chains broke every heart at Hudaybiyyah was the one who led that whole caravan of believers home.