The speech that held the city

Makkah had been Muslim for about two years. Two years is nothing. A great many people in that city had spent two decades opposing the Muslims and had accepted Islam only when the city was taken.

So when the news came that the Prophet ﷺ had died, the place started to go. People began saying openly that they were done with it.

The governor was a young man and the situation was past him.

Suhayl ibn Amr stood up.

There is a specific irony here that the sources do not comment on and do not need to. The man who steadied Makkah for Islam was the man Quraysh had used for twenty years as the voice against it — the negotiator at Hudaybiyyah, the prisoner at Badr whose speaking Umar had wanted permanently stopped.

He told them that this had happened to no one but a man who had died, and that the thing itself would go on. He told them what he had seen of it and where it had already reached. And he told them that anyone who was frightened should be frightened of what came next rather than of the news itself.

The city held.

The Prophet ﷺ had refused, years earlier, to let Umar disable him — on the grounds that he might one day take a stand that would not displease him. The reports place this day as that.