A year earlier, at Hudaybiyyah, the Muslims had set out for an umrah and been turned back at the edge of the sacred precinct. The treaty they signed there carried a quiet promise: next year, you may come, and Makkah will be yours for three days. This is the year that promise comes due.
They call it Umrah al-Qada, the umrah of making up, the make-up for the one they were not allowed to complete. And Dr. Yasir Qadhi pauses on something beautiful before the story even begins: in Allah's ledger, the first umrah was never lost. The Prophet ﷺ and the companions had been given its full reward at Hudaybiyyah, where they shaved their heads and turned home. So when you count his umrahs, this one is the first he actually performed, and yet it is the second he was rewarded for. The make-up was a mercy, not a debt.
Two thousand, and this time armed
In the month of Dhul-Qadah, in the seventh year after the Hijrah, the Prophet ﷺ left Madinah for Makkah with around two thousand Muslims. A year before, fourteen hundred had gone unarmed and been stopped on the road. This time the numbers had grown, and this time they brought their weapons: horses, bows, armor, everything an army carries. Not to break the treaty, but in case the Quraysh broke it first.
Word reached Makkah that two thousand armed Muslims were approaching, and the Quraysh sent out a delegation, led by the same envoy who had negotiated at Hudaybiyyah. He came to the Prophet ﷺ uneasy. We have never once known you to be treacherous, he said, in anything small or great. So what is this? We agreed you would enter with nothing but sheathed swords, and here you come with horses and bows and armor.
The answer was exact. We shall not enter Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ said, except as we agreed. We are not in Makkah yet. He had brought the weapons all the way to the edge of the haram, and there he left them, posting two hundred men to guard the cache outside the sanctuary while the rest went in. He would honor the letter of the treaty to the word, and he would not be caught defenseless if the Quraysh decided otherwise. Both at once.
A city that locked its doors
When the Muslims entered, Makkah split three ways. Some families bolted themselves inside their houses for the full three days. Another group gathered in Dar an-Nadwah, the assembly hall, the largest house in the city, and shut the door. And some left Makkah altogether, camping out in the surrounding valleys and hills until the visitors were gone. None of them wanted to be there for it, partly politics, partly fear. They were watching, and waiting for it to be over.
From inside that locked assembly hall, a rumor went out ahead of the Muslims. Most of the Quraysh had not laid eyes on their emigrant relatives in six and a half years, and someone decided to poison the reunion: Madinah has wrecked them. Its plagues and its fevers have left them thin and emaciated, weaklings now. There was a memory underneath the lie. When the companions first migrated, the climate of Madinah, with all its water and greenery and the diseases that came with them, had made them violently ill. Abu Bakr thought he was dying. Bilal, burning with fever, lay reciting poetry about how beautiful Makkah had been. The rumor traded on a real wound and twisted it: the émigrés have come home broken.
The tawaf they almost ran
When the Prophet ﷺ heard the rumor, he answered it not with words but with a body. He commanded the companions three things. Raise your voices with the talbiyah, out loud, so the whole city hears it. Bare your right shoulders. And for the first three circuits of the tawaf, move with ramal, a brisk, near-running stride, as fast as a man can go without quite breaking into a sprint.
Picture it. Two thousand men in ihram, shoulders bared, almost jogging around the Ka'bah, the talbiyah rolling off them in a single roar. The Quraysh watched from their rooftops and their hilltops and said: by God, there is nothing wrong with these people. We have never seen them stronger. The sunnah we keep to this day, the bared shoulder and the quickened pace of the first circuits, was born in that moment, as an answer to a lie. And the talbiyah itself was an answer: the Quraysh had a talbiyah of shirk, and here was the talbiyah of pure tawhid, broadcast over the heads of the very people who had driven them out.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi stops here to name what is really happening, because it matters far beyond that day. This is image. This is, in his words, legitimate PR, and it is a standard part of the seerah, not a departure from it. The same Prophet ﷺ who marched a man around the battlefield of Uhud in a way that would normally look like arrogance, and was told this is a walk Allah hates except here and now, is the same Prophet ﷺ who paraded the sacrificial camels before an envoy who revered them, and the same one who now shows a watching Makkah that his ummah is anything but broken. The lesson he draws is for us: when people say Islam is violent, or harsh, or cruel, we show them otherwise, not by changing the religion to suit them, but by demonstrating that the accusation was false to begin with. You do not soften the deen for the audience. You correct the picture they were handed.
Home, after six and a half years
The books of seerah say almost nothing about those three days, which tells you that nothing strange happened. He ﷺ stayed, he prayed, and we can assume he led the companions in the five prayers before the Ka'bah while the Quraysh kept their distance and kept their word. A quiet, peaceful three days. But under the silence the Sheikh asks you to feel something the records do not capture.
This was the city of his whole life. Fifty-three years of it. He ﷺ was walking past the house of Khadijah, past the corners where he grew up, past every street that held a memory good and bad, the city of his mother and father and grandfather, of Abu Talib, of everyone he had loved and lost. Think of how it feels to return to a home you have not seen in years, how the memories you had forgotten come flooding back. Now multiply that by a lifetime, and by a forced exile, and by the grave of the woman who believed in him first. We are not told what he felt. We are only left to imagine it, and the imagining is its own kind of prayer.
The marriage to Maymunah
On the way out, his uncle al-Abbas, radiyallahu anhu, made a suggestion: marry Maymunah. She was a widow now, a believing woman alone in a city of disbelievers with no one to care for her, and she was al-Abbas's sister-in-law. She had asked her sister to find her a husband; the family turned to al-Abbas, and al-Abbas, as her guardian, brought the proposal to the Prophet ﷺ, who knew her from the old Makkan days and agreed. So Maymunah became his wife.
She would be the last woman the Prophet ﷺ married, and, decades later, the last of the Mothers of the Believers to pass away. There is a small, aching symmetry the Sheikh lingers on: the marriage was finalized at a place called Sarif, just outside Makkah, and many years on, returning for an umrah of her own, Maymunah died at that very same Sarif and was buried there. She married at Sarif and she was laid to rest at Sarif, a lifetime apart.
Here Dr. Yasir Qadhi handles a famous point of fiqh with care, because it has been misread for centuries. The Prophet's cousin Ibn Abbas reported that the marriage was contracted while the Prophet ﷺ was in ihram, and that report is authentic, which is exactly why it stirred such a debate, since one does not contract a marriage in the state of ihram. But Maymunah herself, whose own marriage this was, said plainly that he ﷺ had already left ihram when he married her. The Sheikh's verdict is gentle and firm: this was simply an honest mistake on Ibn Abbas's part, corrected by the one person who would know best, and there is no shame in saying so of a great companion.
A feast they would not stay for
On the third day the Quraysh came: the time is up. The Prophet ﷺ tried to renegotiate. Would it really harm you, he asked, if I stayed a little longer? I have just married. Let me be a groom among you, and tomorrow we will lay out a great feast, come and eat with me. He was offering them a celebration, and using it to win a few more days in the city that held his heart. The Quraysh would not bend. We have no need of your food, they said, bluntly. Three days are up. Peace be upon you, now go.
So he honored the treaty and left without incident, completing the marriage only later, at Sarif. But the Sheikh draws out what the Prophet ﷺ was reaching for in that offer, because it is easy to miss. These were the same people who had besieged Madinah at the Trench, the same people who had done everything they had done. And now that the upper hand was his, his instinct was not to crush them but to feed them. He used his own wedding as dawah: let me throw you a party, break bread with me. Because when you eat at the same table, hatred cools and anger settles. He no longer needed to be on the defensive. He could afford to be generous, and generosity was the strategy. They were too stubborn to accept, but the hand was extended, and the Sheikh ties it straight to our own lives: this is who we are, a people who sit and eat even with those who oppose us, hoping hearts will soften.
The orphan everyone wanted
As the caravan filed out of Makkah, a small girl, six or seven years old, came running after them, calling out: O my uncle, O my uncle, do not leave me here, take me with you. She was Umayrah, the daughter of Hamza, the martyr of Uhud. Her father was gone, and she had been living with extended family in Makkah, and she wanted to be with the Muslims. A child, somehow, choosing them.
Ali ibn Abi Talib, radiyallahu anhu, took her by the hand and gave her to Fatimah to raise. But then it became a happy quarrel. Zayd ibn Harithah stepped forward: the Prophet ﷺ made me Hamza's brother, so his niece is my charge. Ja'far ibn Abi Talib stepped forward too: she is my cousin, and my wife is her maternal aunt. Three of the greatest men of the ummah, each pressing his claim to a little orphan girl, each insisting he had the most right to care for her.
Dr. Yasir Qadhi will not let you walk past this. Fifteen years earlier, he says, no one would have fought for this child. A girl, and an orphan, she would have been lucky to be kept alive at all in the Makkah of the burial of infant daughters. And now three noble men are competing for the honor of raising her. That is what Islam did to the status of a girl in a single generation. The Prophet ﷺ settled it tenderly. To Ali: you are from me and I am from you. To Zayd: you are our brother and our mawla. To Ja'far: you resemble me most, in looks and in manners. He raised all three before he chose, so none would feel cast aside. Then he gave her to Ja'far, with a principle that became law: the maternal aunt holds the place of the mother.
The last to come before the door opened
لَا يَسْتَوِي مِنكُم مَّنْ أَنفَقَ مِن قَبْلِ الْفَتْحِ وَقَاتَلَ ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ أَعْظَمُ دَرَجَةً مِّنَ الَّذِينَ أَنفَقُوا مِن بَعْدُ وَقَاتَلُوا ۚ وَكُلًّا وَعَدَ اللَّهُ الْحُسْنَىٰ
“Not equal among you are those who spent before the conquest [of Makkah] and fought [and those who did so after it]. Those are greater in degree than they who spent afterwards and fought. But to all Allah has promised the best [reward].”
Surah al-Hadid 57:10 Read 57:10 with tafsir
This was the last psychological blow. The Conquest of Makkah was now around the corner, and the Sheikh points to the proof of it: in the months right after Umrah al-Qada, three of the most important men in Makkah crossed over, and it was no coincidence. They had seen the tide turn with their own eyes.
Amr ibn al-As, the brilliant diplomat, fled toward Abyssinia to wait out what he was sure was coming, and found that the very king he ran to for shelter was himself a secret believer, who looked him in the eye and told him to follow this man, for he is upon the truth. Khalid ibn al-Walid, the finest soldier the Quraysh had, the one who had broken the line at Uhud and been sent to block the Prophet ﷺ at Hudaybiyyah only to be outmaneuvered, finally said: it has become as clear as daylight, how long will we keep denying him? And his own brother's letter sealed it, carrying word that the Prophet ﷺ had asked after him by name and wished him among the believers. And Uthman ibn Talha, who held the keys of the Ka'bah itself, came with them. The three of them walked into Madinah together: the custodian of the sacred house, the master strategist, and the master statesman, all surrendering at once. Read that as Allah's decree, the Sheikh says, not as chance.
When Amr came to give his pledge, he made a condition: that all his past sins be forgiven, that he start with a clean slate. And the Prophet ﷺ smiled and told him what he did not yet know: that Islam erases what came before it, that the hijrah erases what came before it, and that the Hajj erases what came before it. They had come in late, after years of war on the other side. But Allah had already drawn the line that made room for them, and promised, to those who came early and those who came late alike, the best of rewards.