Mr. President, You Are Signing a Hudna

In the year 628, Muhammad marched toward Mecca with some 1,400 followers, intending to perform a pilgrimage. The Meccans, who controlled the city, blocked him. Rather than fight from a position of weakness, Muhammad negotiated. The result was the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a ten-year truce, and on its face the Muslims got the worse end of it. The terms were humiliating enough that his closest companions, Umar among them, openly objected. Muhammad would not enter Mecca that year. Defectors fleeing Mecca for the Muslim camp would be returned; defectors fleeing the other way would not. It looked like a surrender.

The truce was a ten-year agreement. It lasted two. In those two years, the breathing room it bought was used exactly as a strategist would use it. Freed from confrontation with Mecca, Muhammad turned and conquered the Jewish stronghold of Khaybar, distributing its spoils. The community grew faster in those two years of “peace” than in all the years of open war before it. The truce was the most productive military and political instrument of his career, precisely because it was peace on paper and consolidation in fact.

When an allied tribe gave Muhammad a pretext, he declared the treaty void, marched on Mecca in 630, no longer with 1,400 men but with 10,000, and took the city. The ten-year truce had served its entire purpose in twenty-four months: it let the weaker party become the stronger party, after which the paper was torn up.

In Islam, peace is not the opposite of conquest. Peace is a superior method of conquest. The truce is when the work gets done.

The Pattern Across the Centuries

You might think a seventh-century episode has no bearing on a 2026 negotiation. The opposite is true. Hudaybiyyah is not remembered as a one-time event; it is enshrined as sunnah, the normative example every devout Muslim is taught to imitate. Surah 48 of the Quran, titled “The Victory,” was revealed about this very truce, recasting a humiliating compromise as a divine triumph. When scripture itself canonizes a tactical retreat as victory, the lesson is accept the weak terms now, call it a win, and wait.

This is why modern Muslim leaders cite Hudaybiyyah by name whenever they sign with an adversary. Yasser Arafat did it most famously. In May 1994, months after signing the Oslo Accords with Israel, he spoke in a mosque in Johannesburg and compared the accords directly to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, while calling for jihad to reclaim Jerusalem. He was telling his fellow Muslims that Oslo was exactly what Hudaybiyyah had been: a temporary arrangement with a stronger enemy, to be honored only as long as it served the cause. He said it again years later, declaring that he had chosen the “Peace of the Brave” out of faith in the Prophet’s conduct at Hudaybiyyah. The West heard “peace process.” His base heard “Hudaybiyyah,” and they understood exactly what he meant, that the handshake on the White House lawn was a tactic, not a reconciliation.

The pattern recurs across Islamic history wherever a Muslim power found itself temporarily outmatched. The early caliphates signed truces with Byzantium and broke them when the balance of forces shifted. In Islam the world is divided into the House of Islam and the House of War, and between them there can be no permanent peace, only the temporary suspension of hostilities. The jurists capped the hudna “truve” at ten years precisely because of the Hudaybiyyah precedent, a truce was understood as a finite, renewable tactical instrument, not a final settlement. Permanent peace with a non-Muslim sovereign was a theological impossibility, because it would mean conceding that some portion of the earth would remain permanently outside the rule of Allah.

The Ottoman Empire signed and broke treaties with European powers as the military balance dictated, treating each agreement as binding only while Istanbul was the weaker or the satisfied party. Closer to our time, the logic surfaces every time an Islamic movement enters a ceasefire while openly describing it as a pause. Hamas has used the word hudna explicitly and repeatedly, offering “truces” while stating plainly that the underlying objective never changes. The truce buys reconstruction, rearmament, the rebuilding of tunnels and rockets, and then it ends.

What This Means for Friday

Look at what the Islamic Republic itself said today, on the very day of the announcement. Iran’s own deputy foreign minister, confirming the agreement, stated that it “does not signify trust in the enemy and was drafted in an atmosphere of continued distrust.” Their state television aired a banner declaring that the United States “was forced to sign an agreement to end the war.” This is not the language of a party seeking reconciliation. This is the language of a party that views the agreement as a tactical necessity extracted under pressure, which is to say, the language of Hudaybiyyah.

The blockade that was strangling them lifts immediately. The Strait of Hormuz reopens, and their oil flows again, refilling the treasury that funds Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the militias in Iraq. Sanctions relax. In exchange, The U.S. receives promises, an end to military operations, a pledge to abandon the nuclear weapon, assurances about nuclear waste to be verified later. You are giving them the tangible and immediate restoration of their strength. They are giving you the intangible and deferred promise of their restraint.

This is the exact shape of Hudaybiyyah. The weaker party, cornered, accepts terms that relieve the immediate pressure and restore its capacity to fight another day, while conceding nothing that cannot later be reclaimed. The regime that has chanted “Death to America” for forty-six years, that calls your nation the Great Satan as an article of faith, has not undergone a conversion this week. It has run out of room, and it is buying time.

Mr. President,

Every concession you grant should be reversible and conditioned on sustained, verified performance over years, not gestures delivered before the ink dries. Front-load their obligations; back-load your relief. Do not hand over the permanent restoration of their economy in exchange for promises that can evaporate the moment you leave office.

Keep the pressure latent and instantly restorable. The only thing that makes a hudna hold is the certainty that the stronger party will re-impose the cost the instant the truce is violated.

Hudaybiyyah held for two years because Muhammad was not yet strong enough to break it; it broke the moment he was. Your deterrent must be structured so that the day they calculate they can resume is the day they also calculate they will lose. Peace with this regime will last exactly as long as their weakness lasts, and not one day longer, unless you make the weakness permanent and the cost of breaking faith unbearable.

The men signing in Switzerland on Friday know the story of Hudaybiyyah. It is in their scripture, their schools, their sermons. The question is whether the man signing across from them knows it too. Now you do.

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Danny Burmawi is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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