The echo of the stranger's cry had not faded from the valley when the conscience it awakened found its leadership. Ibn Kathir, setting down the received account, records the fact in a sentence the reader should not pass over quickly: the first man who suggested and advocated the pact was al-Zubayr, son of Abdul-Muttalib. This was the same al-Zubayr who had risen in the assemblies at the sound of the verses from Abu Qubays, saying that this matter cannot be ignored; the same al-Zubayr who was now the elder and head of the clan of Hashim, who had carried the banners of his house through the Sacrilegious War and had taken his nephew, the future Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, with him to those fields. In the arithmetic of Makkah his word weighed as the word of the house of the Prophet's ﷺ grandfather; and in the days after the mountain-top cry he spent that weight upon a single idea: that the wrong done to one stranger from Zabid must be made impossible for every stranger who should ever come to this city. It is one of the quiet grandeurs of the sirah that the initiative came from the Prophet's ﷺ own uncle, and the believing reader may see in it the providence of Allah preparing His Messenger's ﷺ house to stand at the head of the city's movement toward justice, years before that justice was to receive its revealed form.
A council of the willing needs a roof, and the roof it found tells its own story. Ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar, in the account Ibn Kathir transmits, states why the house was chosen: the tribes assembled for the pact in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an because of his high reputation and age. Here was a chief of the clan of Taym, and, as Lings records, one of the wealthiest men in Makkah at that time, who now offered his large house as a meeting place for all lovers of justice. Quraysh had long possessed a hall for its public counsels, the Dar an-Nadwa founded by Qusayy, where the elders had convened the affairs of the sanctuary and the city; but no assembly of the old hall had ever been summoned for the rights of a foreign stranger. Now a private house of the clan of Taym performed for Makkah's awakened conscience what the civic hall performed for its politics, and the host spared nothing for the occasion: Ibn Kathir records that Abdullah ibn Jud'an prepared food for the confederates who gathered under his roof. The believer who knows what hospitality means in the Arabian code will read that clause with respect, for the sharing of food in that world was the visible sign of a covenant: men who ate together in the house of a chief were declaring, before they swore a word, that they had become one household in the matter for which they had met.
Who then sat at that table? The sources answer with lists that converge upon the same core. Ibn Kathir's own account of the founding names the men of Hashim, Zuhrah, and Taym ibn Murrah who assembled in the home of Abdullah ibn Jud'an. Ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar transmits the fullest roll: the pact made there at his house was between Banu Hashim, Banu al-Muttalib, Banu Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, Zuhrah ibn Kilab, and Taym ibn Murrah; the printed translation of Ibn Kathir renders one of these clans as Banu Abd al-Muttalib, but the parallel lists of al-Mubarakpuri and Lings, which name al-Muttalib plainly, settle the reference as the clan of al-Muttalib ibn Abd Manaf, the old allies and kinsmen of Hashim. Al-Mubarakpuri's Sealed Nectar counts the same five houses, representatives of Banu Hashim, Banu al-Muttalib, Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, Zuhrah ibn Kilab, and Taym ibn Murrah; and Lings, reading the politics of the assembly, adds that from the ancient grouping of the Scented Ones only the clans of Abd Shams and Nawfal were absent, while Hashim, Muttalib, Zuhrah, Asad, and Taym were all well represented, joined by Adi, which had belonged to the rival coalition. Let the believer read those names with the eye of faith, for they are heavy with the future: Hashim and al-Muttalib were the clans of the Prophet's ﷺ own house; Zuhrah was the clan of his mother Aminah; Taym was the clan that would give Islam its first caliph, Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him), who stood in that gathering as a young man beside his father Abu Quhafah, as Lings records; and Adi was the clan that would give Islam its second caliph, Umar (may Allah be pleased with him). The houses of the two future pillars of the faith swore on that day beside the house of the future Messenger ﷺ himself, and none of them yet knew what they were rehearsing.
Why these clans, and not the others? The answer reaches back a hundred years into the constitutional memory of Quraysh, and Ibn Kathir sets it out in the course of the same chapter. When Qusayy, the founder of the city's assembly, grew old, he bequeathed the offices of the sanctuary, the feeding and watering of the pilgrims, the raising of the banner, the guardianship of the Kaaba, and the convening of the council, to his son Abd al-Dar; and after his death the clan of Abd Manaf, the house of another of his sons, disputed the bequest. Partisans gathered to both sides, and the partisans of Abd Manaf sealed their league with a rite the old sources remember: they brought a bowl filled with perfume, dipped their hands into it, and swore allegiance to one another, then wiped their hands upon the corners of the Kaaba; and they were named the Mutayyabin, the Scented Ones. Against them the house of Abd al-Dar and its friends made their own confederacy, and into that second bloc, the Confederates, the generations had sorted the clans of Makhzum and Sahm and Jumah and Adi ibn Kab. It was that ancient sorting which had answered the Zabidi merchant with blows; and it was the other line, the Scented Ones of Abd Manaf's houses with their near kindred Zuhrah and Taym and Asad, that now gathered in the Taymite's hall, while Adi, alone of the old Confederates, crossed the divide for the sake of the stranger. The beauty of the new pact lies precisely here: it took the instrument the old quarrels had forged, the hilf, the sworn alliance, and pointed it away from clan advantage toward justice itself; the machinery of faction was converted, for one shining hour, into the machinery of conscience.
The deliberation beneath that roof is described by Lings in words worth keeping: the gathered clans decided, after an earnest discussion, that it was imperative to found an order of chivalry for the furtherance of justice and the protection of the weak. The terms they fixed are transmitted in more than one form, and each form adds a stroke. Ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar's account states the charter in its broadest reach: they made a pact and agreement that they would support any man in Makkah who was wronged, whether from their own people or someone who had merely come there, against whoever had wronged him, and that they would ensure that his rights be upheld. The al-Humaydi transmission, which the participation of the Prophet ﷺ in this pact makes famous, carries the same charter in the idiom of restitution: they agreed to return any excess to those who had owned it, and that no one should take unfair advantage over anyone. Read the two together and the single article of the alliance stands complete: prevention and remedy, standing with the wronged against the wrongdoer, and the restoring of everything taken, whoever took it and whoever lost it, with no distinction between the man of Quraysh and the man from beyond the mountains who had no name and no sword in the city. No statute of any empire of that age was more universal in its protection than this article sworn by the merchants of a desert town.
Then came the ceremony, and Lings has preserved its sequence as no other source has. The confederates went in a body to the Kaaba, and there they performed a rite of covenant that drew the House of Allah itself into their oath: they poured water over the Black Stone, letting it flow into a receptacle, and each man drank of the thus hallowed water; and with their right hands raised above their heads they vowed that henceforth, at every act of oppression in Makkah, they would stand together as one man on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor until justice was done, whether the oppressed were a man of Quraysh or one who had come from abroad. Ibn Kathir's account sounds the same vow in the register of the desert court: they established their pact, swearing by Allah that they would act in unison with any wronged person against the wrongdoer until his rights were fulfilled, for so long as the sea wets wool and the mountains of Thabir and Hira stand firm in their places, and that they would bring solace to people as long as they lived. The believer should pause upon that oath's horizons. The sea that wets wool: the endless, unhurried faithfulness of the ocean is made the measure of the covenant. And the two mountains named, Thabir the sentinel on the road of the pilgrims, and Hira, the rugged peak to the north of the valley: within twenty years the same Hira would hold, in the cave upon its crown, a praying soul from the very clan that swore this oath, and the first words of the Quran would descend upon him there. Allah, whose wisdom writes long sentences across the pages of history, suffered the oath of justice to name the mountain of revelation before the revelation came, as if the mountain itself were being reserved as a witness that Makkah's best men had once bound themselves, in ignorance yet in earnest, to the very cause His Book would command.
Ibn Kathir also preserves the chronology with a precision rare in the pre-Islamic record: the authorities stated that the pact of al-Fudul was concluded twenty years before the prophethood, in the eleventh month, Dhu al-Qa'da, that date being some four months after the Sacrilegious War, which had burned in Sha'ban of the same year. Here are the two fixed points on which this project's master chronology stands: the peace of the war, and then, in the sacred month when war itself was unlawful and the pilgrims traveled unafraid, the oath of the alliance; and the stranger's cry from Abu Qubays hanging between them, in the first weeks after the fighting, as Lings frames the scandal that tested the city. In the assembly of that Dhu al-Qa'da stood the young Muhammad ﷺ, twenty years old, the son of Abdullah of the house of Hashim, present with his uncles among the men of his clan; his own testimony to that day, the pledge his right hand gave, and the praise he would lavish upon this pact in the years of his prophethood are the subject of the event that follows this one, and this account leaves them there. What belongs to this page is the fact the whole city knew before the sun set: Makkah had a league, and the league had a single article, and the article was justice.
The first act of the new confederacy was already determined, for their charter had been drafted in the wounds of one particular man. Ibn Kathir records the deed in the plainest words: the confederates walked over to al-'As ibn Wa'il and took away from him the goods of the man from Zabid and returned them to him. Consider what those words contain. The wealthy notable of Banu Sahm, who had counted on the silence of his confederates, looked up to find standing at his door a delegation drawn from the strongest houses of the city, sworn, feasted, covenanted at the Black Stone itself, with no quarrel of their own and nothing to gain but the fulfillment of their oath; and Lings adds the detail that completes the arithmetic of power: not one of the clans which had abstained from the pact offered the Sahmite their assistance. The coalitions that had roughed up the stranger would not spend a single spear on his adversary's behalf. So the goods went back to the man of Zabid, his price, or the substance of it, restored by a writ that existed in no archive but lived in the resolve of the sworn houses; and the news of it went with the caravans down every road out of Makkah, to the fairs and the ports and the towns of the Yemen: that in the city of the sanctuary there was now a power to which the stranger could appeal, and that the appeal of the Zabidi merchant had emptied the stronghouse of a Qurashite noble. Al-Mubarakpuri compresses the consummation into a line, saying that the parties to the confederacy convened their meeting and managed to force the Zubaidi's money out of al-'As ibn Wa'il; and the whole institution of the pact was vindicated in its first case, as a law is vindicated when its first enforcement is against the powerful.
Quraysh themselves gave the alliance its name, and the naming is a small sermon. The word reached the city's speech, as Ibn Kathir transmits it, in the saying that those men entered into that matter fadl, in excellence and excess, going beyond what custom required, beyond the duty of kin, on behalf of one who was no kin at all; and so the pact was called Hilf al-Fudul, the alliance of the excellences, or of the surplus rights restored. The name's fuller harmonics, and the old tracing of the word through the chiefs of Jurhum who each bore the name al-Fadl, belong to the telling of the next event, where the Prophet's ﷺ love of the word is recorded; what matters to this page is the public verdict it embodies: the city itself acknowledged that what these houses had done was more than duty, was fadl, the beautiful overplus of virtue, and it was ashamed, in the way cities are ashamed, only after the fact.
What, then, was this pact in the constitutional memory of Makkah? The Arabs had long known the hilf, the sworn alliance, as the basic instrument of public order in a land without courts; the Mutayyabin and the Confederates of Qusayy's quarrel had been hilfs, and every client and every weak clan lived by seeking one. But the hilfs of the past had been instruments of advantage, sworn by factions to hold what they had or seize what they lacked; their protection followed the map of interest. Hilf al-Fudul was the first alliance in the city's memory whose membership was defined not by whom one was against but by what one was for, and whose protection followed the map of right alone: any wronged person, any wrongdoer, no matter of kin or covenant, no matter stranger or native, until the right was done. Lings calls it an order of chivalry, and the later Islamic tradition would see in it the seed of the futuwwah, the spiritual chivalry of the Muslim guilds and knighthoods, which traced its ideal lineage to this Makkah oath. In the language of this project it may be called the first law above kinship that the Hijaz knew: imperfect, unrevealed, unable to save its sworn members from death or its host from eternity's question, as the last section of this account will confess, but real, effective in its day, and astonishingly ahead of its age; a human covenant that had reached, by the light of conscience alone, to within a hand's breadth of the commandments of justice that Allah would reveal through the Prophet ﷺ.
Did the league hold, after its founding day? The sources answer with scenes that carried its name across the generations. The reader will meet in the next event the famous account of the Khath'amite girl, whose father invoked the pact at the Kaaba and found the confederates at his side with swords drawn within the hour. But there is a later scene, transmitted by Ibn Kathir from Ibn Ishaq through Yazid ibn Abd Allah ibn Usama al-Laythi, from Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn al-Harith of Taym, which shows the covenant still alive in Madinah, half a century and more after it was sworn. Al-Husayn ibn Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) had a dispute over property at Dhu al-Marwa with al-Walid ibn Utba, who was then governor of Madinah under his uncle Mu'awiya, and al-Walid was using his power to press upon al-Husayn; whereupon al-Husayn swore by Allah that al-Walid would either do him justice or he would stand up in the mosque of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and invoke the pact of al-Fudul. Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who was present, swore that if al-Husayn invoked it, he would draw his sword and stand with him until his right was given or they died together; and when al-Miswar ibn Makhrama and Abd al-Rahman ibn Uthman of Taym heard of it, they gave the like answer. Then al-Walid ibn Utba treated al-Husayn justly and made him content. Consider what this report preserves: the name of a merchant's grievance from the jahiliyyah, sworn over water poured on the Black Stone, still carrying force enough in the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ himself to straighten the conduct of a sitting governor. Few covenants in the history of law can show so long a shadow.
One figure of the founding remains to be completed, and the completing belongs to the Prophet ﷺ himself. Abdullah ibn Jud'an, the aged host whose roof sheltered the council and whose food sealed the covenant, was a man of the most generous works; Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) bore the tradition, preserved in Sahih Muslim, that she asked the Messenger of Allah ﷺ about him, saying that Ibn Jud'an in the days of the jahiliyyah used to maintain the ties of kinship and feed the poor, and asking whether it would avail him; and the Prophet ﷺ answered that it would not avail him, for he never said, even once: my Lord, forgive me my sin on the Day of Judgment. Here is the sober hinge on which the whole event turns, and the believer must not turn it falsely. The nobility of the jahiliyyah could discover justice, could swear it, could enforce it, and could even exceed in it; what it could not do was save, for salvation is not the wage of virtue but the gift of faith, and the faith was not yet come. The host of the alliance of excellence died without submitting to the Messenger ﷺ whose uncle's pact he had sheltered; and the Prophet's ﷺ answer over his grave is at once the sternest and the gentlest sentence in this chapter: stern, because all the fadl of Makkah could not purchase one hour of the hereafter for its most generous son; gentle, because the answer itself was given by the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, whom the pact of that house had once sheltered, and in whose dispensation the memory of the just works of the dead unbelievers is handled with a care that honors the works while it mourns the workers. Thus the two endings of the story are one ending: the oath on the mountain named Hira awaited the revelation on Hira, and the justice of the best men of Makkah awaited the justice of Allah, and both arrived, in the mercy of Allah, through the same young man who stood among the swayers with his right hand raised. The believer who longs for a world of the wronged protected should begin where this story begins, with a covenant sworn in earnest, and end where it ends, in the knowledge that covenants are honored by men but perfected only by the Lord of men; and He, Glorified and Exalted be He, was watching over both the oath and the oath-takers, and preparing for the youngest of them a weight in the scales of history that no red camels of the Arabs could buy.