The chapter
Every Hajj season the Prophet ﷺ walked the tribal camps at the pilgrimage fairs, offering the message to whoever would listen, and being refused by tribe after tribe, year after year. Then, at the pass of Aqabah near Mina, he met six men of Khazraj from Yathrib. Their city knew the vocabulary of prophecy from its Jewish tribes; the Jews had long warned of a prophet whose time had drawn near. The six listened, and recognized. They believed, and carried Islam home.
The following season, twelve returned and gave the First Pledge of Aqabah: to associate nothing with Allah, not to steal, not to commit zina, not to kill their children, not to slander, and not to disobey him in what is right, the same covenant of moral reconstruction the Qur'an records as the women's pledge. The Prophet sent back with them Mus'ab ibn Umayr, the perfumed aristocrat turned first ambassador of Islam, to teach Qur'an in Yathrib. Within a year, through his patient door-to-door recitation, there was hardly a house of the Ansar without Islam in it, chiefs like Sa'd ibn Mu'adh embracing it in a single sitting, and their clans with them.
Then the Second Aqabah, in the dark of the night of the days of Tashriq: seventy-three men and two women, meeting in secret while their caravan slept. This pledge was of a different order, not ethics only, but protection and war: to shelter him as they sheltered their own women and children if he came to them. His uncle Abbas, still on his people's religion, spoke first to test their seriousness; the Ansar answered through As'ad ibn Zurarah and al-Bara' ibn Ma'rur with full knowledge of the cost: war with the Arabs entire. "And what is ours, O Messenger of Allah, if we fulfill it?" He said one word that ended all negotiation: "Al-Jannah." They said: stretch out your hand.
Twelve deputies (nuqaba') were appointed over the pledgers, and the door of the Hijrah swung open. The Qur'an sealed the two parties into one sentence forever: those who believed and emigrated and strove, and "those who gave shelter and aided", al-Ansar, named by Allah. The Codex marks this node as the geopolitical pivot of the Seerah: the night Islam acquired an address.