“the Holy Spirit has descended upon the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and he has ordered the pledge of allegiance; so come out in the name of Allah and give your pledge!” The Muslims then surged toward the Messenger of Allah ﷺ—he was beneath a tree—and they pledged to him that they would never flee.
The narrator went on at length, including the following: while the Muslims were still at al-Hudaybiyyah and before ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān had returned, they said, “ʿUthmān has slipped away, reached the House, and performed tawaf.” The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “I do not think he has gone around the House while we are being kept out.” They asked, “What would keep him from it, O Messenger of Allah, now that he is free?” He replied, “My assumption is that he will not circumambulate the Kaʿbah until he can do so with us.”
ʿUthmān then came back, and the Muslims said, “Have you satisfied your longing, Abū ʿAbd Allāh, by making tawaf around the House?” He answered, “What an ill opinion you have held of me! By Him in whose hand is my soul, had I remained there a full year while the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was encamped at al-Hudaybiyyah, I would not have gone around it before he did. Quraysh invited me to make tawaf, but I refused.”
Al-Bakkaʾī narrated from Ibn Isḥāq: ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī Bakr told me that when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ heard the report that ʿUthmān had been killed, he said, “We shall not move on until we meet the enemy.” He then called the people to pledge allegiance, and the Pledge of ar-Riḍwān took place beneath the tree. People used to say that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ pledged them unto death, whereas Jābir would say, “He did not pledge us unto death; rather, he pledged us that we would not flee.”
Yūnus related from Ibn Isḥāq: someone from the family of ʿUthmān told me that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ clasped one of his hands with the other and said, “This is for me, and this is for ʿUthmān if he is alive.” Later they learned that the report was untrue and ʿUthmān returned. No one held back from pledging to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ except al-Jadd ibn Qays, the brother of Banū Salama. Jābir said, “By Allah, it is as though I can still see him clinging to the armpit of the she-camel of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, while he was…”