Surah Al-Fath, The Victory

Surah 48 · 29 verses · revealed at Medina

Al-Fath is the clearest example in the Qur'an of a text that disagrees with the people it was revealed to.

The setting is the treaty of Hudaybiyyah. The Muslims had travelled to Mecca intending to perform the pilgrimage and were turned back. The agreement reached was, by any ordinary reading, humiliating: they would go home without entering the city, return the following year instead, and hand back anyone who came to them from Mecca without permission while Mecca kept anyone who went the other way. Some of the companions were openly distressed. One asked directly whether they were not in the right.

The surah was revealed on the journey back, and its first words call this a clear victory. Not a setback to be endured, not a step towards a victory later — a victory, now, in the thing they had just signed.

What followed proved the point within two years. The truce ended the fighting long enough for people to meet and talk, and more entered Islam in that period than in the two decades before it. Mecca was taken without a battle.

The surah also records the pledge given under a tree at Hudaybiyyah, when the Muslims promised not to flee, and speaks of God's approval of those who gave it. And it recounts a dream of the Prophet in which the Muslims entered the Sacred Mosque in safety — a dream that had appeared to fail, and had not.

It closes with a description of the community itself: hard against opposition, merciful among themselves, their mark upon their faces from prostration.

Surah Al-Fath on this site

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Surah Al-Fath, The Victory

Surah Al-Fath on this site

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