The man they caught

The pledge at Aqabah was given at night, in secret, by men from Yathrib who had come with the pilgrimage. What they agreed was that if the Prophet ﷺ came to their town they would protect him as they protected their own families — which, from Quraysh's side of it, was a foreign city agreeing to shelter the man they were trying to isolate.

Quraysh found out. Not in time to stop it, but in time to go after the people who had given it.

Most of the party got clear. Sa'd ibn Ubadah did not.

They caught him, tied his hands to his neck, and beat him, and brought him back into Makkah.

What got him out was not a rescue. It was a ledger.

Sa'd was a man of standing in a trading town, and Makkan merchants travelling north through Yathrib had relied on his protection to get their caravans through. When two of them heard who had been taken, they intervened — because he was useful to them, and because the arrangement worked both ways.

He was let go.

It is the same shape as the day Abu Dharr announced his Islam at the Ka'bah and was spared because his tribe sat on the road to Syria. Twice, in the same city, in the same years, a man is saved not by anyone's mercy but by somebody else's commercial arithmetic. The sources record both without comment, and the pattern is worth noticing: Makkah's opposition was real, and it was also a business, and the second thing sometimes limited the first.