Lessons of al-Hudaybiyyah: Modern Political Thought

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The most contemporary, and, Dr. Qadhi notes, most controversial, application of al-Ḥudaybiyyah is to the situation of Muslims living in the West. He recalls giving this very lesson after the events of 2001, finding it acutely relevant.

He frames the backdrop candidly: Muslims worldwide suffer under policies, political, economic (he singles out the IMF's treatment of poor and Muslim countries), and military, that many read as an all-out war on Islam itself, a reading that has driven a tiny militant fringe to claim it obligatory to fight, and even that it is unlawful for Muslims to live in or pay taxes to Western states. Dr. Qadhi states his own view plainly: he does not see Western foreign policy as a war on Islam per se, were the oil-lands Buddhist and the Palestinians Confucian, he argues, the policy would be much the same, driven by self-interest rather than a desire to destroy the religion, while affirming without qualification that a believer's ultimate loyalty (walāʾ) is to Allah and His Messenger above all else.

From al-Ḥudaybiyyah he draws the operative principle: different factions of the Ummah may hold different political treaties and alliances, even with declared enemies of Islam like Quraysh. What was forbidden to the Prophet ﷺ under the treaty was permitted to Abū Baṣīr and Abū Jandal, who stood outside it, the Prophet ﷺ could not shelter or strike, but they could raid freely. So what is lawful for one Muslim group may be unlawful for another. Applied today: a Western Muslim's visa or passport is itself a treaty carrying an implicit covenant, to be a law-abiding, non-treacherous citizen, and that covenant is binding, an amānah with Allah, however many "Abū Baṣīrs and Abū Jandals" one sees suffering; one makes duʿāʾ for them and says Allah will make a way out, but never acts treacherously, for "the believer is never a traitor."

Dr. Qadhi rejects the objection that al-Ḥudaybiyyah was unique to the Prophet ﷺ, an attitude that, he says, would dissolve the whole Sīrah, since the Prophet ﷺ acts as an example for the Ummah. No later scholar may call a modern treaty a "clear victory" as the Qurʾān did this one, but scholars of every era may reason (ijtihād) from it to their own context. He is careful to limit his own ruling to the Western context he lives in and speaks for, explicitly not judging Muslims defending lands under foreign invasion, which he says is not his subject, while telling the fringe enticed by militant rhetoric to study al-Ḥudaybiyyah and weigh the broader benefit: some fifty million Muslims in the West, no caliphate to migrate to, and an adversary incomparably stronger. Covenant and honesty come first.

❧A modern footnote

Dr. Qadhi closes with a historical curiosity: in 1994 Yasser Arafat likened the Oslo Accords to al-Ḥudaybiyyah, if the Prophet ﷺ could treat with Quraysh, he could treat with Israel, and in 1999 the then-unknown Daniel Pipes built an article, "Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy," on that remark, casting it as a coded signal that the treaty was mere pretext to be broken at the first opening. Dr. Qadhi finds the episode more revealing of Islamophobic method, treating an ordinary public statement as secret cipher, than of Arafat, and striking for how an event of fourteen centuries ago still echoes in modern politics.