Diplomacy of the Prophet Muhammad in the Treaty of Hudaybiya (627 AD / 6 Hijri)

Author | Abbas Sharifa | April 2025

Introduction

The biography of Prophet – peace and blessings be upon him – offers rich material for understanding the depth of prophetic diplomacy in managing delicate interests, making the right political decision, and completing political negotiations professionally and competently. However, we live in a time when some researchers seem to evaluate politics through the lenses of an old vision of Islamic jurisprudence that divides human societies into unbeliever versus Muslim as if these were two sides of an utterly eternal conflict. They take rulings from books of legal politics dating back to a different temporal context and try to apply them indiscriminately to every time and place as if stability and permanence were a fundamental feature of those rulings. They show no sort of awareness of the interaction between the text and present circumstances.

In the biography of the Prophet, we notice how the clear distinction was made between a political alliance, even with non-Muslims, and that the Muslim state did not recognize some people who entered Islam and allegedly allied themselves to the Muslim state. This non-recognition came from the fact these new professed Muslims did not follow up their conversion with an official political pledge to the Muslim state, which usually defines the political relationships between the various parties and would officially make them enter into the circle of the religious community.

In this research paper, we have relied on a number of essential premises to understand the nature of the Prophet’s action and to determine the place of reference to and derivation from the Prophet’s biography, particularly for an important historical event: the Treaty of Hudaybiya and the wise management of the negotiations that preceded it, and the circumstances that followed it in implementing its provisions and the revocation of its conditions by the Quraysh, and its termination with the conquest of Mecca, to which the Holy Qur’an devotes an entire chapter, which is Surat Al-Fath (Qur’an: 48).

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