Participation in Hilf al-Fudul & Praise in Prophethood

The valley of Makkah, in the year the master chronology assigns to the pact of chivalry, was a city recovering from the shock of its own lawlessness. The sacrilegious war had ended months before, the blood of the sacred months had been spilled at Ukaz and its satellites, and thoughtful men of Quraysh were asking one another what their city was becoming, where the stranger could no longer sell his goods without fear, and where the cry of the wronged might rise from the slope of Abu Qubays and find no answer. Into this wounded hour came the summons to the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an, and walking with the men of his own house came the twenty-year-old son of Abdullah, the young Muhammad ﷺ, giving his hand alongside his uncles to a pact whose single article was justice. The telling of this event is brief, but its meaning reaches to the horizon of prophethood itself, for the future Messenger of Allah ﷺ joined an alliance of virtue in his youth and then praised it, in the fullness of his prophethood, in words the believers have carried for fourteen centuries: that he would not exchange his share in it for red camels, and that if he were summoned to it in Islam he would answer.

Let the reader first see the house into which the youth was called. Abdullah ibn Jud'an al-Taymi, the chief of the clan of Taym and one of the wealthiest men of Makkah at that time, opened his large house, as Martin Lings records in this project's knowledge base, as a meeting place for all lovers of justice, and the clans gathered there in earnest discussion. Ibn Kathir names the men of Hashim, Zuhrah, and Taym as those who assembled under the host's roof, where he prepared food for them; Lings adds that Muttalib and Asad were well represented and that they were joined by some of the sons of Adi, while other authorities count al-Muttalib and Asad among the founders from the beginning. The variations in the lists do not disturb the substance, which every source shares: a body of the noble houses of Quraysh, moved by the injustice done to a stranger who had no patron in the city, resolved to found an order of chivalry for the furtherance of justice and the protection of the weak. The founding of that order and the oath at the Kaaba belong to the event that precedes this one in the chronology; what belongs here is the presence, the pledge, and the lifelong praise of the best of the sons of Hashim.

That presence is certified in the strongest way, by the Prophet's ﷺ own tongue. Ibn Kathir transmits from al-Bayhaqi a channel rising through al-Zuhri from Muhammad ibn Jubayr from his father Jubayr ibn Mut'im (may Allah be pleased with him), that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: I was a witness, with my uncles, to the pact, and I would not have wanted to renege on it for the very choicest herd. The words with my uncles deserve the believer's pause. The youth of twenty did not drift into the assembly as a spectator; he came with the elders of his own blood, the men of Hashim whose acknowledged head, his uncle al-Zubayr ibn Abdul-Muttalib, was remembered as the first man who suggested and advocated the pact. Lings preserves the scene in his rendering of the earliest sources: Zubayr of Hashim was one of the founders of this order, and he brought with him his nephew Muhammad, who took part in the oath. The uncle brought the nephew; the nephew gave his hand; and the hand that would one day receive the pledge of the Helpers at Aqabah and the bayah of multitudes beneath the Kaaba itself was first pledged, in the years of his youth, to the defence of the wronged.

The content of the pledge, as the channels preserve it, was as pure as its cause. In the version Ibn Kathir cites from al-Humaydi, from Sufyan ibn Uyayna, the Prophet ﷺ described what the confederates bound themselves to in the house of Ibn Jud'an: they made an agreement to return any excess to those who had owned it, and that no one should take unfair advantage of anyone. Here is the whole ethic of the pact in two clauses: what exceeds the right is to be restored to the one from whom it was taken, and no wrongdoer is to profit from the weakness of his victim. The other channels word the undertaking in the idiom of the desert court: to act in unison with any wronged person against the wrongdoer until his rights were fulfilled, for so long as the sea makes wool wet and the mountains of Thabir and Hira remain firmly set in their place. Ibn Kathir records the dating on the authority of the scholars: the pact of al-Fudul was concluded twenty years before the prophethood, in the sacred month of Dhu al-Qa'da, some four months after the sacrilegious war, which is to say when the young Muhammad ﷺ was twenty years of age; and Ibn Kathir himself, weighing the chronology of his sources elsewhere, observes that the war and the pact came in one and the same year of the Prophet's ﷺ twentieth year.

Then came the words that made this event immortal. In after-years, when the revelation had come and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had stood upon Safa and endured the enmity of his city, he would still speak of that early pact with a tenderness that instructs the believer's heart. In the account of Ibn Ishaq, as Lings renders it from the earliest sources, he said: I was present in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an at so excellent a pact that I would not exchange my part in it for a herd of red camels; and if now, in Islam, I were summoned unto it, I would gladly respond. Consider what the red camels were in the speech of Arabia. The red camels, humr an-naam, were the emblem of the utmost wealth, the prize beyond which the desert imagination had no richer figure; a man who possessed herds of them had arrived at the ceiling of the world's goods. The Prophet ﷺ set his share in a pact of justice above them all. Not the gain of the alliance, for it brought him no gain; not the glory, for it conferred no title; but the act of standing, once, publicly, on the side of the wronged, he counted dearer than the choicest wealth of his people, and he said so from the height of prophethood, with the Quran descending upon him and the Garden before him.

The honesty of the sirah requires the student to trace the channels of so great a saying, and the channels reward the tracing. Ibn Kathir devotes to the report a chapter of his Sira entitled the chapter of how the Messenger of Allah ﷺ witnessed the pact of al-Fudul, and he sets down within it several converging lines. From Jubayr ibn Mut'im, through the chain of al-Zuhri, comes the version already quoted, and al-Bayhaqi notes that Bishr ibn al-Mufaddal related the same words from Abd al-Rahman. A further channel, which the printed text transmits from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), runs: the only pact I witnessed Quraysh make was that of al-mutayyabin, and I would not have abrogated it in return for the choicest herd. And from al-Humaydi, from Sufyan ibn Uyayna, comes the version which names the house and the content: I witnessed in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an a treaty to which I would have responded positively if, during Islam, I had been invited to participate in it. Four lines of transmission, rising from different Companions, agreeing that the Prophet ﷺ witnessed the pact in his youth, that he counted it beyond price, and that its excellence did not expire with the coming of Islam.

The one apparent discord in these channels is the name. Two of the lines say al-mutayyabin, the pact of the perfumed ones, which the ancients of Quraysh had sworn generations earlier in the quarrel over the prerogatives of Qusayy's inheritance; and the scholars did not leave the difficulty alone. Al-Bayhaqi transmits an explanation identifying the mutayyabin with Hashim, Umayyah, Zuhrah, and Makhzum, and then remarks with scholarly candor that he does not know who it was who said it, since the explanation is interpolated within the tradition. The decisive observation is the chronological one, and it belongs to the biographers: the Prophet ﷺ was not yet born at the time of the pact of al-mutayyabin. Some of the biographers therefore maintained, and Ibn Kathir records their reasoning and endorses it, saying that in his view there is no disputing it, that what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ witnessed was the pact of al-Fudul, sworn in the house of Ibn Jud'an, and that the name of the older pact entered the wording through the transmission of the narrators, the two covenants being alike in kind. This is the sirah's own method: the discord is displayed, weighed, and resolved upon evidence, and the believer's confidence in the event is not weakened but educated, for the report stands upon the agreement of every channel in its substance.

The closing words of the Prophet's ﷺ praise carry a moral principle that the scholars of this Ummah have drawn out ever since. If I were summoned unto it in Islam, he said, I would gladly respond. The jurists of the sirah have read in this a lesson of the first consequence: that a covenant made for the establishment of justice and the relief of the oppressed retains its excellence even when its partners are not Muslims, and that cooperation upon righteousness is not bounded by the confessional walls of the participants. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, would later command in the Book revealed to the same tongue that the believers cooperate upon righteousness and piety, and never upon sin and transgression. The pact of al-Fudul was precisely the former, and the Prophet's ﷺ willingness to honor it anew in Islam revealed that Islam had not come to abolish justice among men but to perfect it. What a light this throws upon the Messenger's mission: the Quran did not introduce justice to Makkah as a stranger, but found it surviving in fragments among the tribes, gathered the fragments, purified them, and raised them into law for all mankind.

Did the pact work? The sources answer with more than one scene. The immediate fruit was the recovery of the wronged man's goods: the confederates, says Ibn Kathir, 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, and the wealthy wrongdoer, for all his clan's power, found no protector among the houses that had abstained from the pact. The league then entered the memory of Makkah as a power in being, and Ibn Kathir transmits the strange and stirring episode of the Khath'amite girl, related by Hassan ibn Thabit in a report Ibn Kathir sets down with the remark of its unusual character: a pilgrim of Khath'am whose daughter al-Qatil was seized by Nubayh ibn al-Hajjaj, whereupon the father stood at the Kaaba and called upon the men of the pact, and men flocked to him from every side with swords unsheathed, crying: help is here; what is the matter? And the girl was brought out to them that same hour. The report of the girl belongs to a later day of the city's story, and its channel is not of the strongest; it is set down here as the biographers set it down, as remembered evidence that when the pact was invoked in Makkah, the oppressed found an army where the law of the desert had offered him only patience.

The name itself is a sermon. Quraysh called the alliance Hilf al-Fudul, saying of its members that they entered into the matter fadlan, in excess and excellence, for they went beyond what custom required of kin in behalf of a stranger who was no kin at all. The word fadl, whose plural is fudul, is the Quran's own word for the excellence that exceeds obligation, and the scholars of the Arabic tongue delighted in the double sense: the pact of excellences, the pact of restoring the excess. Others traced the name to a covenant of the ancient tribe of Jurhum, sworn in behalf of victims against oppressors by three of its leaders, each of whom bore the name al-Fadl; Ibn Qutayba transmits the three names one way, and other transmitters another way, and Ibn Kathir records the difference without forcing it. Whichever derivation the reader holds, the name confesses the same truth: that a city which had forgotten the wronged was remembering them, and that the youth of Hashim stood among the remembrancers. The Prophet ﷺ never forgot the word; the scholars note that his praise of the pact is the praise of the fadl, the excellence beyond duty, which is why he ranked it above the red camels: it was a treasure of virtue, and virtue is the only wealth that does not depreciate.

The uncle who brought him left the pact a manifesto in verse, and the verses are preserved in Ibn Kathir's account. Al-Zubayr ibn Abdul-Muttalib swore: let us make a pact against them, though we are all members of one tribe; we shall call it al-fudul; if we make a pact by it, the stranger shall overcome those under local protection, and those who go around the Kaaba will know that we reject injustice and will prevent all things shameful. And again: al-fudul made a pact and alliance that no evildoer shall dwell in Makkah's heart; this was a matter they firmly agreed, and so the protected neighbor and the unprotected stranger are safe among them. What a text for a youth to carry in his heart from his twentieth year: the security of the stranger named in the same breath with the security of the neighbor, and the expulsion of the evildoer from the heart of the sacred city. The believer who knows what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ later said of the rights of the neighbor, and what he wrote into the treaty of Madinah for the Jews and the weak and the stranger, will hear in al-Zubayr's verses the smaller stream flowing toward the greater river, and will remember that the nephew stood among the men who swore them.

The pact also carried, quietly, the first recorded public standing together of two men whose friendship would change the world. Lings, following the earliest sources, notes that among those present in the house of Ibn Jud'an was the host's first cousin Abu Quhafah of Taym, together with his son Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him), who was a year or two younger than Muhammad ﷺ and who was to become his closest friend. Before the cave of Thawr, before Yathrib, before the years of patient striving for Allah, the two young men stood in the same hall and gave their hands to the same covenant of justice. The believers do not build doctrine upon the coincidence, but what believer's heart does not warm at the sight? The friendship that would bear the weight of Islam in its most fragile decade was formed in a city where the two families already shared a pact, a table, and a cause; and al-Siddiq, the truthful one, whose surname would be sealed at the morning of the Night Journey, began his public life beside the Trustworthy in an alliance for the wronged.

The event closes, as the best of the sirah closes, upon the providence of Allah. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, whom Allah preserved from prostration to any idol, from the wine and the night gatherings of his age, and from every abomination of the jahiliyya, was not preserved from the labors and the covenants of virtue. He carried stones for the Kaaba and earned wages upon the hills; he stood in the council of chivalry beside his uncles; he gave his name to the defence of a Yemeni stranger whose face he may never have seen. And when prophethood came, he did not repudiate the young man he had been; he praised him, as it were, by praising the pact of that young man, and he taught the Ummah by it that no season of the servant's life is wasted which is spent standing for justice. To the young of this Ummah the lesson is priceless: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was doing, at twenty, what the faith of his fortieth year would crown, which is to side with the oppressed against the oppressor until justice is done.

The house of Ibn Jud'an has long since gone the way of all the houses of Makkah, and the red camels of Arabia are dust; but the words spoken of the pact outlived the city that heard them first. Every league of the mighty since that day has been weighed against the measure of al-Fudul: whether it stands with the wronged or with the wrong; whether the stranger within its gates may cry out and be answered; whether its members would trade their share of it for the wealth of the world and know themselves the poorer by the bargain. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, answered the question once for all time in the hearing of his Companions: not for red camels, not for the choicest herd of the earth, would he surrender the memory of having stood for the wronged in Makkah when he was twenty years old. The believer who longs for his company in the Garden may begin where his youth began: where the cry of the oppressed is heard, there let my hand be found, for that is where the hand of the best of creation was first publicly pledged.