The Pact
Failing to break the Prophet ﷺ by violence — he was guarded by his clan — and alarmed by the conversions of Ḥamzah and ʿUmar and the asylum in Abyssinia, Quraysh moved against the clan itself. In the seventh year of the mission the chiefs drew up a written pact: none would marry into Banū Hāshim and Banū al-Muṭṭalib, none would buy from them or sell to them, until they surrendered Muḥammad ﷺ for death. The document was hung, for solemnity, inside the Kaʿbah.12
Abū Ṭālib — a pagan defending his nephew on pure honour — led both clans, Muslim and idolater alike, into the shiʿb, the narrow ravine of his family's quarter east of Makkah. Only Abū Lahab stayed outside, siding with Quraysh against his own blood.1
Three Years of Hunger
The blockade held, with slackenings, for nearly three years. Food entered only when a sympathetic kinsman drove a loaded camel to the mouth of the ravine by night and let it wander in — as Hishām ibn ʿAmr did repeatedly, and as Ḥakīm ibn Ḥizām did for his aunt Khadījah. The trapped families were reduced to eating the leaves of trees; Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ recalled the cry of children hungry in the dark. Khadījah's fortune, poured out for the besieged, was consumed in these years — and so, by their end, was her strength and Abū Ṭālib's.123
The Annulment
The pact collapsed from within. Hishām ibn ʿAmr quietly recruited four others of standing — Zuhayr ibn Abī Umayyah, al-Muṭʿim ibn ʿAdī, Abū'l-Bakhtarī, and Zamʿah ibn al-Aswad — and by arrangement they rose one after another in the sanctuary assembly to denounce the pact as an iniquity they would no longer countenance. Abū Jahl's protests were shouted down. When they went to tear up the document, the sīrah relates what Abū Ṭālib had already told them from his nephew: worms had eaten the parchment, sparing nothing but the opening formula, “In Thy name, O God.” The clans came out of the ravine in the tenth year of the mission — free, and gravely weakened.124