Umrah al-Qadiyyah (Fulfilled Umrah)

# Umrah al-Qadiyyah (The Compensatory Umrah)

The Umrah That Was Owed

Umrah al-Qadiyyah — the Compensatory Umrah, or the Umrah of Fulfillment — was performed in Dhul-Qa'dah 7 AH, exactly one year after the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had prevented the Prophet ﷺ and his companions from completing their intended Umrah. The treaty had stipulated that the Muslims would turn back in 6 AH and return the following year for three days to perform Umrah unmolested. The Quraysh agreed to vacate Mecca for the three days, withdrawing to the surrounding hills, and to return once the Muslims departed.

The compensatory Umrah carried enormous symbolic weight. The companions who had turned back at Hudaybiyyah — many of them anguished at being turned away from the House of Allah after years of separation — now returned to Mecca not as suppliants asking for entry but as parties to a treaty that the Quraysh had agreed to honor. The very Quraysh leaders who had driven the Muslims from Mecca now watched from the hills as the Muslims circumambulated the Kaaba. The reversal was visible and complete.

The March to Mecca

The Prophet ﷺ departed Medina with approximately 2,000 companions — all those who had been at Hudaybiyyah and been turned back, plus others. The companions entered the state of ihram at the miqat, as required. They arrived at Mecca in the condition of pilgrims: unarmed except for the travelers' swords in their sheaths, which the treaty permitted. The Quraysh had agreed to leave the city for three days and they kept that agreement, watching from the surrounding heights as the Muslim community they had expelled performed tawaf around the Kaaba.

A detail preserved in the seerah narrations describes the Prophet ﷺ instructing the companions, as they entered into the tawaf, to perform the raml — to walk briskly and assertively in the first three circuits. The Quraysh had reportedly spread a rumor that the Muslims were weakened by the fever of Medina. The raml was a display of physical strength and vitality: the companions circled the Kaaba with purpose and energy, demonstrating that they were not diminished. This is the origin of the raml as a Sunnah of tawaf observed in Hajj and Umrah to this day.

The Marriage to Maymunah

Among the notable events of Umrah al-Qadiyyah was the marriage of the Prophet ﷺ to Maymunah bint al-Harith. The marriage was concluded while the Muslims were in Mecca and was arranged partly through the mediation of Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet's ﷺ uncle. The Prophet ﷺ invited the Quraysh to a wedding feast — an act of social outreach and peace-building — but the Qurayshi emissaries came to the Muslim camp and told him his three days had expired and he must leave. The Prophet ﷺ honored the terms of the treaty and departed, with Maymunah accompanying him. They completed the marriage outside Mecca at a place called Sarif. Maymunah became the last of the Prophet's ﷺ wives and is recorded in the hadith literature as a woman of particular religious knowledge and piety. She lived until approximately 63 AH.

Bilal's Adhan in Mecca

The narrations record that Bilal ibn Rabah called the adhan over the Kaaba during the three days of Umrah al-Qadiyyah. This was a moment of extraordinary spiritual power: Bilal — the Abyssinian slave who had been tortured on the hot sand of Mecca for accepting Islam, who had been bought and freed by Abu Bakr, who had been the first muezzin of Islam — calling the adhan over the very city and the very people who had tortured him. The Quraysh who had withdrawn to the hills looked down and heard the voice they had once tried to silence calling the call to prayer over the House they had claimed was theirs.

The three days of Umrah al-Qadiyyah were an enactment of what the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had made possible — the peaceful entry of Muslims into Mecca as Muslims, performing Muslim worship, under terms that the Quraysh had agreed to. It was also, as the seerah scholars have noted, a rehearsal: two years later, the same routes, the same approaches, the same city — but under entirely different circumstances and with no three-day limit.

The Quranic Context

Surah al-Fath (48:27) had anticipated this return: "Allah has confirmed for His Messenger the vision in truth: you will surely enter al-Masjid al-Haram, if Allah wills, in safety, with your heads shaved and hair shortened, not fearing." The verse was revealed shortly after Hudaybiyyah and its fulfillment in Umrah al-Qadiyyah was noted by the companions explicitly. The entry into Mecca in safety, with heads shaved and hair shortened, in the prescribed condition of ihram — exactly as the vision had described — was the first of the Quran's Hudaybiyyah promises to be visibly fulfilled. The second — the eventual opening of Mecca itself — came two years later.

The Strategic Significance

Umrah al-Qadiyyah demonstrated something that the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah had theorized but not yet proven: that the Quraysh would honor agreements with the Muslim community and that peaceful interaction between the two was possible. The three-day visit passed without incident. The Quraysh kept their word. The Muslims performed their Umrah, contracted a marriage, and departed on schedule. This demonstration of the treaty's functionality was the foundation on which the subsequent Islam of Khalid ibn al-Walid, Amr ibn al-As, and Uthman ibn Talha was built — leading figures of the Quraysh who converted in the period between Umrah al-Qadiyyah and the Conquest of Mecca. The peaceful encounter at Umrah al-Qadiyyah, in which Muslims and Qurayshis observed each other at close range with no violence, was part of what moved certain Qurayshi hearts toward the conclusion that the Islam they had been resisting was not what they had feared. Khalid ibn al-Walid later said that when he saw the Muslims performing tawaf with discipline and devotion, something shifted in his understanding that months of argument had not achieved. The Umrah was, in this sense, da'wah by presence — the simple visible enactment of Muslim worship in the city where the Quraysh had claimed Islam had no right to exist.

Sources: Sahih al-Bukhari (Kitab al-Umrah, Kitab al-Maghazi); Sahih Muslim; Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-Nabawiyya; Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wan-Nihayah; Surah al-Fath (48:27)