Suhayl's Terms and the Arrival of Abu Jandal

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Suhayl, the ablest orator and negotiator of Quraysh (Khaṭīb Quraysh) and a member of its council, came with authority and a firm mandate: the Muslims would not enter Makkah this year, but could return the next on Quraysh's terms. Dr. Qadhi pauses on Suhayl himself, a bitter enemy who had fought at Badr, Uḥud, and the Trench, yet in whom the Prophet ﷺ, unlike ʿUmar, had long perceived a kernel of good, a reminder, recurring through the Sīrah, against the flat assumption that every disbeliever must be evil to the core.

Suhayl's central condition struck at the heart of the Muslims: that no man defecting from Quraysh to the Muslims, even one who had become Muslim, would be given refuge; every such person must be handed back. It was a demand born partly of Quraysh's trauma at losing people to Islam, and partly personal, for Suhayl's own sons had gone over. The Muslims recoiled, how could they return a believer who had chosen them?, and a commotion broke out, ʿAlī holding off from writing the clause.

And then, in what Dr. Qadhi calls one of the most starkly providential moments of the Sīrah, the very case walked into the camp. Suhayl's own son, Abū Jandal, a Muslim imprisoned and tortured by his family for years, had finally escaped, and now stumbled forward still dragging his chains, crying out, "Yā maʿshara-l-Muslimīn!" (يَا مَعْشَرَ الْمُسْلِمِينَ, "O company of Muslims!"), not knowing his own father sat across from the Prophet ﷺ, nor that the clause under debate was precisely this one. Suhayl turned to the Prophet ﷺ and said: this is the first man on whom the condition falls. There the account pauses, the treaty's cruelest test suspended at its sharpest point.