The Pilgrims
In the sixth year the Prophet ﷺ dreamed that he entered the Sacred Mosque and made the circuit of the Kaʿbah. He called for the lesser pilgrimage — no war: pilgrim dress, garlanded sacrificial camels, travellers' swords only — and some fourteen hundred believers marched for the city that had hunted them for six years. Quraysh swore no pilgrimage would shame them that year and sent out their cavalry; the Prophet ﷺ swung through the ravines and camped at Ḥudaybiyyah on the edge of the sacred territory, where al-Qaṣwāʾ knelt and would not rise. “The One who restrained the elephant from Makkah,” he said, “has restrained her. By Him in whose hand is my soul, whatever course they ask of me honouring God's sanctities, I will grant it.”12
Envoys shuttled. When ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān — the one Muslim with strong protectors in the city — was sent in and rumour flew back that he had been killed, the Prophet ﷺ called the pilgrims to a pledge of death under the acacia tree: the Bayʿat al-Riḍwān, the Pledge of God's Good Pleasure, sworn hand upon hand while he said, “This is for ʿUthmān.” The Qur'an sealed it: “God was well pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you under the tree.”31
The Bitter Terms
ʿUthmān proved alive, and Quraysh sent Suhayl ibn ʿAmr to treat. The terms he extracted read like humiliation: the Muslims to turn back this year and return for three days' pilgrimage the next; a truce of ten years; any Makkan going over to Muḥammad ﷺ without his guardian's leave to be returned, but no Muslim defecting to Makkah to be sent back; the tribes free to enter either camp's alliance. Even the document was contested: Suhayl refused “Muḥammad, the Messenger of God,” and the Prophet ﷺ — ʿAlī, his scribe, unable to bring himself to strike the words — rubbed them out with his own hand and dictated “Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdillāh.”14
The camp was near mutiny with grief; ʿUmar himself demanded, “Why should we accept indignity in our religion?” — and repented of the question all his life. When the Prophet ﷺ ordered the pilgrims to sacrifice and shave where they stood, no one moved — until, on the counsel of his wife Umm Salamah, who travelled with him, he went out silently, sacrificed his own camel, and called his barber. The camp dissolved into obedience and tears. On the road home descended Sūrat al-Fatḥ: “Truly We have opened for you a manifest victory.” A companion asked: “Is it a victory?” He said: “Yes.”43
The Victory Unfolds
Time proved the verse. The truce dissolved the war fronts; Makkans and Muslims mingled and talked for the first time in years, and men entered Islam in the two years of peace in greater numbers, Ibn Hishām notes, than in all the years before — among them, decisive for what came after, Khālid ibn al-Walīd and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ. Even the extradition clause turned: returned converts like Abū Baṣīr gathered on the coast road as freelance raiders whom the treaty bound no one to control, until Quraysh themselves begged for the clause's annulment.15
Secure on the Makkan front, the Prophet ﷺ reduced Khaybar — the fortress-oasis that had bankrolled the Confederacy — in the seventh year, leaving its farmers on their land for half the harvest; and he lifted his eyes beyond Arabia. Letters went out under his seal to the powers of the earth: to Heraclius the Byzantine emperor — whose interrogation of the truce-bound merchant Abū Sufyān fills the celebrated ḥadīth at the head of al-Bukhārī's collection; to Chosroes of Persia, who tore the letter; to the Negus; to the Muqawqis of Egypt, who answered with gifts. The message of the cave of Ḥirāʾ was now addressed to emperors.61