The Clear Victory

In the sixth year, the Prophet ﷺ saw in a true dream that the believers entered Makkah and performed the pilgrimage in security. So he set out with around fourteen hundred Companions in pilgrim garb, driving sacrificial animals, unarmed but for travellers' swords, intending only umrah. Quraysh, their pride unable to bear the sight of Muhammad ﷺ entering their city, blocked the road with cavalry, vowing he would not enter.

The Muslims halted at a place called Hudaybiyyah, on the edge of the sanctuary. Messengers passed back and forth. When the rumour spread that Quraysh had killed the Prophet's ﷺ envoy Uthman (ra), the Prophet ﷺ gathered the believers under a tree and took from them a pledge unto death, the Pledge of Ridwan, the pledge of Allah's good pleasure, which the Qur'an honoured: Allah was pleased with the believers when they pledged to you under the tree.

Then a treaty was negotiated, and its terms galled the Companions to their core: the Muslims would turn back this year without umrah and come the next; there would be a ten-year truce; and, most bitterly, any Makkan who fled to the Muslims would be returned to Quraysh, but any Muslim who defected to Quraysh would not be returned. Even the document wounded their pride: when the scribe wrote in the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, Quraysh objected, and the Prophet ﷺ had it changed to in Your name, O Allah; when he wrote Muhammad the Messenger of Allah, they objected, and he ﷺ erased Messenger of Allah with his own hand.

Umar (ra) came to the Prophet ﷺ in anguish: are you not the Messenger of Allah? Are we not upon the truth? Then why do we give in to our religion's humiliation? The Prophet ﷺ answered only: I am the Messenger of Allah, and I do not disobey Him, and He will not abandon me. The believers were so crushed they hesitated to shave and slaughter, until on Umm Salamah's (ra) wise counsel the Prophet ﷺ went out and did so himself, and they followed.

On the road home, Surah al-Fath descended: indeed, We have granted you a clear victory. And so it proved. The truce opened the roads; for the first time Muslims and pagans mixed in peace, and Islam spread faster in those two years than in all the nineteen before, more entered the religion in that span than in the entire history of the call. The setback at Hudaybiyyah was the doorway to the conquest of Makkah itself. What looked like the worst day was the turning of the whole tide.