The Pledge — A Teacher, a City, and a Promise of War

The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 14

The life that changed the world — written for non-Muslims, beginners, and the curious.

Adapted from Dr. Yasir Qadhi's seerah lecture series. This chapter draws on episodes 25 and 26.

At the end of Chapter 13, six men from Yathrib had heard the message and gone home talking. This chapter is what grew out of that.

The first pledge

The following pilgrimage season, twelve men came down from Yathrib to meet him at al-Aqabah — ten from the Khazraj and two from the Aws.

That second number matters. The Aws and Khazraj had been killing each other for generations. This was the first time they stood on the same side of anything.

The commitment they made was entirely about how a person lives. Ubadah ibn as-Samit (RA) preserved the terms: to worship none but God, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to kill their children, not to slander one another, and not to disobey him in what is right.

Hadith

“Whoever among you fulfills it, his reward is with Allah; and whoever falls into any of that and is punished in this world, it is an expiation for him.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 18

There is not a word about armies, protection, or politics in it. For that reason it's known as the pledge of the women — not because women took it, but because these were the same terms women were given when they accepted Islam. A moral commitment, nothing more.

Remember that, because the second pledge is going to look very different.

One man sent north

Then the Prophet (SAW) did something that decided the future: he sent one person back with them to teach.

He chose Mus'ab ibn Umayr (RA) — a young man from a wealthy Makkan family who had famously given up a life of comfort for this faith. He went alone, to a city where he knew almost nobody, with no authority except knowing the Quran.

He led the prayers, taught, and held the first Friday congregation in the city.

Within a year he had brought most of Yathrib to Islam. Set that against thirteen years of preaching in Makkah, and it is difficult to overstate: one young teacher out-converted the entire Makkan campaign, in about a twelfth of the time.

Qadhi is careful about why, and it isn't that Mus'ab was superhuman. Yathrib had no persecution, no Quraysh, no vested establishment defending idols and pilgrimage revenue. It had a population already used to monotheism, and a leadership class thinned out by civil war. The soil was different.

The spear that came to throw him out

The most famous day of Mus'ab's mission started as an eviction.

Sa'd ibn Mu'adh and Usayd ibn Hudayr were the two rising leaders of the Aws. Word reached them that a Makkan was in the city converting their people. Sa'd sent Usayd to deal with it.

Usayd arrived with his spear and made his position clear: stop misleading our weak, or you're finished here.

Mus'ab (RA) answered with a question. Will you sit and listen? If you like it, take it. If you don't, I'll stop.

Usayd conceded that was fair, and sat down.

Minutes later he was asking what a person does to enter this religion. He washed, said the declaration of faith, and prayed two units — then went back to Sa'd.

Sa'd took one look and said the man who left was not the man who came back.

So Sa'd went himself, angrier. And got the same offer: sit, listen, and decide. He sat. He listened. He accepted.

Then Sa'd walked to his people, the Banu Abd al-Ashhal, and asked them a single question: what do you say about my standing among you? They said he was their leader and their best. He told them he would not speak to a single one of them until they believed.

By the end of the day, effectively the entire clan was Muslim.

That is what the Prophet's whole strategy of approaching chieftains had been aiming at for a decade — and it happened in an afternoon, in a city he had never set foot in, because a young man with no weapon offered a hostile man a fair hearing instead of an argument.

Usayd (RA) is also the companion of one of the loveliest incidents in the collections: reciting the Quran at night with his horse tied nearby, he saw something like a canopy of lamps above him. The Prophet (SAW) told him those were angels, come down to listen, and that had he continued reciting until morning, people would have seen them (Sahih al-Bukhari 4811).

The night pledge

The next year, seventy-five Muslims from Yathrib came to Makkah with the pilgrimage — seventy-three men and two women — hiding their faith from the pagan relatives they travelled with.

They slipped away in the middle of the night, one and two at a time, to a mountain pass at al-Aqabah.

This meeting was not about personal conduct. This was a request for a city to take in a hunted man and defend him against all of Arabia.

Abbas, the Prophet's uncle — still not a Muslim at this point — came along and spoke first, as family. His message was essentially a warning to be honest with themselves: he has honour and protection among us here. If you cannot truly protect him, say so now and leave him where he is.

Then one of them, Abu al-Haytham ibn at-Tayhan, asked the question everyone was thinking, and it was blunt: we would be breaking our existing alliances for you — and if God gives you victory, will you go back to your own people and leave us?

The Prophet (SAW) smiled. My blood is your blood. Your destruction is my destruction. I am of you and you are of me.

He kept that literally. Eight years later, when Makkah — his birthplace, his family, his home — surrendered to him, he turned around and went back to Madinah. He died there, and he is buried there.

The warning before the promise

Then As'ad ibn Zurarah (RA) — one of the original six from Chapter 13 — physically took hold of the Prophet's hand before anyone could swear, and stopped the whole proceeding.

He told his own people exactly what they were signing. Taking this man in means war with all of Arabia. It means your best men killed. It means fathers burying sons and sons burying fathers. If you can face that, take the pledge. If there's any doubt in you, walk away now — that's more honest before God.

Nobody had asked him to say it. He was talking his own people out of it, to make sure that if they went ahead, they went ahead with their eyes open.

Their answer was to tell him to move his hand off the Prophet's, because they wanted to put theirs there.

They pledged to hear and obey in hardship and ease, to spend in God's cause, to command good and forbid wrong, to speak the truth wherever it landed them, and to defend him as they would defend their own families.

One of them asked what they would get for it. The answer was one word: Paradise.

Seventy-three men gave their hands on it. The two women gave their word — the Prophet (SAW) never took the hand of a woman not related to him.

Getting out

Word leaked. By morning Quraysh were moving between the camps demanding to know what had happened.

The Muslims of Yathrib said nothing. What saved them was that the pagan Khazraj in the same camp — who genuinely had no idea — swore truthfully that no such meeting had taken place.

Some of the Ansar offered to attack Quraysh while they slept. The Prophet (SAW) refused: that is not what I have been commanded to do. They had the numbers, the surprise, and the grievance, and he still said no. That instruction had not come.

Leaving Makkah

Now that there was somewhere to go, he told the Muslims to go.

They left in ones and twos, quietly, because Quraysh had begun blocking departures — a community they had spent thirteen years trying to break was now, in their view, escaping to build a power base.

Three of those departures are worth telling.

Abu Salamah and Umm Salamah (RA) left together and were caught. Her family seized her; his family seized their son, and in the struggle the child's arm was pulled out of its socket. Her husband was made to go on alone. She was held for roughly a year, going out to the edge of the valley to weep, until her relatives finally shamed the family into letting her go. She then crossed the desert to Yathrib escorted by a man who was not yet a Muslim, Uthman ibn Talha, who walked the entire way and turned back at the gates.

Suhayb ar-Rumi (RA) — an Arab raised in Roman captivity who had bought his own freedom and built a fortune — was surrounded as he tried to leave. He told them he was a better archer than any of them and they knew it, but offered a deal: he'd tell them where his money was if they let him pass. They took it. He arrived in Yathrib with nothing but his clothes. The Prophet (SAW) told him twice over that his transaction had been profitable, and this verse is read in connection with him:

Quran

“And of the people is he who sells himself, seeking the pleasure of Allah. And Allah is Kind to His servants.”

— Surah Al-Baqarah 2:207

Umar (RA) did the opposite of quiet. He armed himself, walked to the Kaaba, circled it publicly, prayed, and announced to the assembled Quraysh that he was leaving — and that anyone who wanted his mother to mourn him was welcome to follow him out of the valley.

Nobody followed.

Not everyone got out. Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi'ah was talked into turning back by his half-brother Abu Jahl, who claimed their mother had sworn off food and shelter until she saw him. Umar warned him it was a lie. It was — Ayyash was bound and imprisoned in Makkah, and had to be broken out later.

Makkah emptied of Muslims. Houses stood locked and abandoned.

Almost everyone was gone. The Prophet (SAW) was still there — along with Abu Bakr, Ali, and those too weak or too imprisoned to travel.

And Quraysh could see exactly what was happening. A man they had failed to silence for thirteen years now had a fortified city, an army of volunteers, and a road out.

They decided he could not be allowed to reach it.

Quran

“And remember when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you, or kill you, or evict you. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.”

— Surah Al-Anfal 8:30

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Up next: The Hijrah — one man from every clan of Quraysh surrounds his house with drawn swords. What follows is a three-day hunt, a hundred-camel bounty, and the journey that Muslims still date their calendar from.