Abu Sufyan Pleads for the Treaty in Medina

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Realising the treaty was broken, Quraysh sent Abū Sufyān to Medina to beg its renewal, the chief who for a decade had entered Medina only as an attacker, at Uḥud and al-Aḥzāb, now coming to plead. This is one of the most striking episodes of the Sīrah, and in it the turning of the tide is laid bare: تُعِزُّ مَن تَشَاءُ وَتُذِلُّ مَن تَشَاءُ, "You honour whom You will and abase whom You will" (3:26).

❧The Prophet's Silence

By Ibn Isḥāq's account Abū Sufyān went first to the Prophet ﷺ and tried to reopen negotiations, but فَلَمْ يَرُدَّ بِشَيْء, the Prophet ﷺ gave him no answer at all. No "yes," no reassurance, nothing; and from that silence Abū Sufyān grasped that his situation was perilous.

❧Abu Bakr and ʿUmar

He sought out his old jāhiliyyah friend Abū Bakr, who told him flatly, لَا أَسْتَطِيع, "I cannot", I can do nothing for you. He turned to ʿUmar, his one-time business partner, who mocked him outright: "You think I would go to the Prophet ﷺ on your behalf? Never."

❧ʿAli, Fatimah, and the Child

He came at last to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, his closest kinsman in the city, begging him to intercede and not send him home empty-handed. Fāṭimah was there, and little Ḥasan playing at her side. ʿAlī answered, وَيْحَكَ يَا أَبَا سُفْيَان, "Woe to you, O Abū Sufyān! By Allāh, once the Prophet ﷺ has resolved a matter, we do not press him to change it." So Abū Sufyān turned to Fāṭimah: would she send her little boy to grant the Quraysh protection, and he would be honoured as Sayyid al-ʿArab, master of the Arabs, till the Day of Judgement? But Ḥasan was five years old, and the Prophet ﷺ had already named him a sayyid far greater than any Abū Sufyān could offer: إِنَّ ابْنِي هَٰذَا سَيِّد, "This son of mine is a sayyid" (Bukhārī), master of this Ummah and of the youth of Paradise. Fāṭimah replied that her son had not reached an age to grant protection, and that no one grants protection against the Prophet ﷺ.

❧The Announcement in the Masjid

Turning back to ʿAlī for any advice at all, almost in tears, he was told: "I know nothing that will help you, but you are the sayyid of Banū Kinānah," أَنْتَ سَيِّدُ بَنِي كِنَانَة (Kinānah being a name for the wider Quraysh). "Go to the masjid and grant protection to yourself before the people." For in Arab custom, adopted by Islam, any Muslim, man or woman, young or old, even one below the age of puberty, could grant a person protection (أَجَرْتُكَ, "I have given you my protection"), a kind of safe-conduct; it was such protection the Prophet ﷺ himself had needed on returning from Ṭāʾif. So Abū Sufyān stood and called out, أَيُّهَا النَّاس, "O people, I am Abū Sufyān; is there any who will give me protection?", but after the Prophet's ﷺ silence, no one dared, and he gained nothing.

❧Umm Habibah and the Bed

Before leaving he called on his own daughter, Umm Ḥabībah Ramlah bint Abī Sufyān, now a wife of the Prophet ﷺ, whom he had married while she was a lone emigrant in Abyssinia (the Najāshī hosting the walīma), whom he had not seen in some thirteen or fifteen years. As he moved to sit, she folded away the bedding. "Are you shielding me from the mattress," he asked, "or the mattress from me?" She said, "This is the bed of the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ, وَأَنْتَ مُشْرِكٌ نَجِس, and you are an unclean idolater", you shall not sit on it. (In fiqh a non-Muslim may touch such things; this was extra adab toward the Prophet ﷺ.) Even his daughter had turned him away, and he left her saying he did not know what evil had befallen her since she left him.

❧The Spectrum of Response

He returned and told Quraysh everything, and they said he had been made a fool of, a mere luʿba, a game, humiliated for nothing. And so the tables had not turned; they had turned. But note the range in the three responses: ʿUmar the harshest, mocking him; Abū Bakr in the middle, neither cruel nor soft, simply "I cannot"; ʿAlī the gentlest, hearing him out and even offering a course to try. From this we learn that a community's response to such a figure is rightly varied, some stern, some more open, the "good cop, bad cop" of human nature, pressure from one side and an opening from another. (Allāh later guided Abū Sufyān to Islam and forgave him, raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu, but not before he tasted this.)