Lessons from the hijrah

Milk from a dry goat

Somewhere on that road, in open desert about an hour and a half's drive from Madinah today (the highway exit still carries her name), an elderly bedouin woman named Umm Ma'bad sat in a worn tent, waiting for her husband to return from searching for food. She heard travelers outside asking permission to enter, and she let them in without a second thought: she was old, she was poor, and there was nothing in her tent worth taking. She did not know the two men. One was Abu Bakr. The other was the most hunted man in Arabia ﷺ.

They asked to buy food, and the detail matters: two desperate travelers who still would not ask for it free, though desert custom would have excused them. She apologized: nothing, nothing at all. Then the Prophet ﷺ noticed the goat in the corner. An old goat, long past milking, long past bearing young, not even sent out to graze: an animal waiting for the day it would be slaughtered. He asked her permission to milk it. She nearly laughed: that day is long gone, but do what you like. So he ﷺ mentioned the name of Allah, made du'a, and passed his hand under the udder, and the udder filled, right then and there. Abu Bakr milked it until the vessel brimmed. They drank, and they left the rest for her and her husband.

When her husband came home and found milk waiting, he could not believe it; they had gone days without it. From this goat? So she described the stranger: handsome, long haired, neither tall nor short, one of the most detailed physical portraits of the Prophet ﷺ that has reached us, and it came from a woman who hosted him for an hour. Her husband knew at once: those are the two the Quraysh are searching for, and one of them, you know, claims to be a prophet. She answered from what her own eyes had just seen: that is no claim. He is a prophet. Both of them accepted Islam, and the whole story reaches us narrated in her own voice.

She was not alone. The reports mention another two or three souls on that road who met him ﷺ and accepted Islam, some without even leaving us their names. Sit with that, because it is the quiet miracle of the journey: a man fleeing for his life, an entire city's bounty on his head, and he keeps pausing to invite strangers to Allah. Four or five people entered Islam on the road of the hijrah itself. Wherever he ﷺ went, he was spreading good; no fear was heavy enough to switch off the dawah.

One more meeting on that road needed quick wits. In deep desert, travelers drift toward each other just to trade news, so a passing caravan veered over to greet the two riders, and someone in it recognized Abu Bakr from an old trading expedition. These were not Quraysh; they had heard of no bounty. Then came the question: who is this man with you? Abu Bakr answered without missing a beat: he is my guide, guiding me to the path. The caravan heard a hired guide for the desert. Abu Bakr meant his guide to Jannah. The scholars call it tawriyah, the permitted double meaning: what English would call a white lie, except that not one word of it is false. And a small detail hides inside the answer: by then their actual hired guide had finished his work and turned back, so from here, the two of them knew the way.

Tie your camel, then let go

Now step back and look at the architecture of this escape, because here the lessons begin. Abu Bakr, told only that the Prophet ﷺ hoped to have a companion and that inshallah it would be him, immediately set two camels aside and fattened them for the desert. The Prophet ﷺ arrived at his door with his face covered, at hours no one would expect, and had the room emptied before a word of the plan was spoken. Ali was left behind in his ﷺ bed, so that anyone peering through the window would see a sleeping figure tossing and turning. They slipped out in the dead center of the night and covered their tracks. Abu Bakr's son Abdullah came each morning with the news of Makkah, food was quietly prepared by Asma, and the guide they hired was a man they could trust and the Quraysh would never suspect. Every detail was locked down twice.

And the man at the center of all that planning, the one with more right than anyone alive to lean on Allah and do nothing? He took every precaution there was, and then let go of them completely. Out in the open desert he ﷺ rides calm, reciting Qur'an, not so much as glancing left or right. It is Abu Bakr who cannot be still: now riding ahead, in case danger comes from the front, now dropping behind, in case it comes from the back, his heart pounding, and never once for himself. When Suraqah came hunting them, it was Suraqah and Abu Bakr who noticed each other from afar. The hunted man ﷺ never turned his head.

Sheikh Yasir is exact about what this means, because believers get it wrong in both directions. Hiding in the cave was not a failure of tawakkul; it was tawakkul. Tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah: you plan meticulously, down to the decoy in the bed, because our religion does not ask you to act like a fool, and then you attach your heart not to the plan but to the One the plan was for. They did not stand at the mouth of the cave daring Makkah to do its worst. They hid. And when Abu Bakr's heart raced anyway (if one of them simply looks down at his feet, he will see us), the Prophet ﷺ calmed him, and Allah handled the rest: a dove, the reports say, and a spider's web across the opening, if those reports are authentic, and the Sheikh weighs them honestly: there is nothing wrong with citing them. What is beyond doubt is that men stood close enough to be heard, and Allah simply did not let them look down.

The second of two

إِلَّا تَنصُرُوهُ فَقَدْ نَصَرَهُ اللَّهُ إِذْ أَخْرَجَهُ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا ثَانِيَ اثْنَيْنِ إِذْ هُمَا فِي الْغَارِ إِذْ يَقُولُ لِصَاحِبِهِ لَا تَحْزَنْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ مَعَنَا ۖ فَأَنزَلَ اللَّهُ سَكِينَتَهُ عَلَيْهِ وَأَيَّدَهُ بِجُنُودٍ لَّمْ تَرَوْهَا وَجَعَلَ كَلِمَةَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا السُّفْلَىٰ ۗ وَكَلِمَةُ اللَّهِ هِيَ الْعُلْيَا ۗ وَاللَّهُ عَزِيزٌ حَكِيمٌ

“If you do not aid him [i.e., the Prophet (ﷺ)] - Allāh has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out [of Makkah] as one of two, when they were in the cave and he [i.e., Muḥammad (ﷺ)] said to his companion, "Do not grieve; indeed Allāh is with us." And Allāh sent down His tranquility upon him and supported him with soldiers [i.e., angels] you did not see and made the word of those who disbelieved the lowest, while the word of Allāh - that is the highest. And Allāh is Exalted in Might and Wise.”

Surah at-Tawbah 9:40Listen Read 9:40 with tafsir

Years later, that cave received its own ayah, and the timing is half the lesson. This verse came down in one of the last surahs to be revealed, when the Muslims stood at the very peak of their power after the conquest of Makkah. And at that summit Allah told them: if you do not help him, it changes nothing. Allah already helped him, back when an entire city was out to kill him and the full census of Islam on the road was two people. The second of two.

Inside the cave he ﷺ had said five words to his friend: do not grieve, Allah is with us. The ayah records what Allah did next: He sent down His sakinah, His tranquility, upon him, so that the hunted man was the calm one, and He aided him with soldiers no one saw. Some scholars, in one interpretation, count the humble dove and spider among those unseen soldiers, the army that kept anyone from imagining the crevice was worth a glance. And to the thousands reading this ayah at the height of victory, the message lands plainly: none of you were able to help him then, and I did not need you. I sent an army you could not see.

Before moving on, the Sheikh pauses on a treasure buried in the wording: he said to his companion. Abu Bakr is the only human being whose companionship of the Prophet ﷺ Allah Himself testified to directly in the Qur'an; every other companion's rank is real but inferred, while his is spelled out in revelation. And by the unanimous agreement of every group in this ummah, the man in that cave was Abu Bakr and nobody else. So whoever denies that Abu Bakr was the Prophet's ﷺ companion is not quarreling with history. He is quarreling with the Qur'an.

They call it Yathrib, it is Madinah

وَإِذْ قَالَت طَّائِفَةٌ مِّنْهُمْ يَا أَهْلَ يَثْرِبَ لَا مُقَامَ لَكُمْ فَارْجِعُوا ۚ وَيَسْتَأْذِنُ فَرِيقٌ مِّنْهُمُ النَّبِيَّ يَقُولُونَ إِنَّ بُيُوتَنَا عَوْرَةٌ وَمَا هِيَ بِعَوْرَةٍ ۖ إِن يُرِيدُونَ إِلَّا فِرَارًا

“And when a faction of them said, "O people of Yathrib, there is no stability for you [here], so return [home]." And a party of them asked permission of the Prophet, saying, "Indeed, our houses are exposed [i.e., unprotected]," while they were not exposed. They did not intend except to flee.”

Surah al-Ahzab 33:13Listen Read 33:13 with tafsir

Before the Prophet ﷺ enters his city, learn her name, and notice who in the Qur'an refuses to use it. When fear needed stoking and believers needed scattering, it was the hypocrites who cried: O people of Yathrib. The Qur'an only ever places the old name on their tongues; Allah Himself calls her al-Madinah, and so does His Messenger ﷺ. That is not an accident of vocabulary. It is the city's biography told in two names.

Two years before the hijrah, in the tenth or eleventh year of the dawah, he ﷺ had told the Muslims of a dream: I saw myself emigrating to a land of date palms. He guessed at two famous date towns far across the peninsula, and it was neither. The answer arrived when the people of Yathrib embraced Islam and invited him: the city in the dream was theirs, an ancient town ringed with volcanic rock and sitting on a secret of water, a river running beneath the ground, enough to raise palm groves famous across Arabia. He ﷺ was shown his new home by its trees.

He also said: I have been commanded to migrate to a city that devours all other cities; they call it Yathrib, and it is Madinah. From this the scholars draw a real ruling: islamically, the name Yathrib is retired, and one narration teaches that whoever says Yathrib should say al-Madinah. The old name grew from roots the scholars trace to blame and to corruption, and the Prophet ﷺ never left an ugly name standing on a person, let alone on his city: one woman embraced Islam carrying a name that meant sour, and he renamed her sweet on the spot.

The Arabs heaped names on whatever they held grand, and no city collected more: the historians of Madinah, as-Samhudi among them, gathered over a hundred of her names, and one early scholar wrote that no city known to Islam has more. Yet he ﷺ himself used only two or three. Al-Madinah: the city, as if there were no other. And a pair of sister names that both mean the pure, the source of purity, the exact opposite of everything the old name had carried.

A city soaked in du'a

He ﷺ asked Allah for the love of her: O Allah, cause us to love Madinah as we love Makkah, or even more. And the du'a took visible root in him: a companion describes how, returning from an expedition, the moment the outline of Madinah rose in the distance he ﷺ would urge his mount to go faster. Even the landscape was folded into the love. Of Mount Uhud he said: this is a mountain that loves us and we love it, and he called it one of the mountains of Jannah.

He ﷺ prayed over her economy, of all things: O Allah, bless us in our sa' and our mudd, the scoops and measures of the marketplace, and the meaning carried in that hadith is that food bought in Madinah simply stretches further, the same measure sufficing more people. Then he asked higher still: O Allah, place in Madinah double the blessing You placed in Makkah. That du'a kept the scholars debating. Imam Malik, a son of Madinah and perhaps a little partial to her, held her to be the holiest of lands, even while agreeing that a prayer in Makkah is worth one hundred thousand and a prayer in Madinah one thousand. Others said the two cannot be ranked like that: each is blessed in its own way. Makkah, in the majority's view, was blessed from the day the heavens and earth were created and Ibrahim announced it; she holds the first masjid ever raised on this earth, and the greater reward in prayer. Madinah's blessing began the day her Prophet ﷺ moved in. Two cities, two glories, and the believer is not asked to choose.

Then come the protections, and these are not weak whispers: narration after narration sits in Bukhari and Muslim. Iman itself, he ﷺ said, returns to Madinah the way a desert animal returns to its burrow: the instant it senses threat, it darts home. When faith is hunted everywhere else, Madinah is where it runs; she will be the bastion of Islam. The Dajjal himself will not enter her: he will come meaning to destroy, and two angels will meet him at her approaches and expel him, which is why the early teaching says: if you hear of him, head for Madinah. And no plague will ever enter her. Fourteen centuries have tested that sentence: famines have come, but the great plagues swept the world, the bubonic plague returned, the influenza of 1918 tore across the globe, and pilgrims kept arriving in Madinah from every infected corner of the earth, and the city stayed untouched.

The protection has teeth. No one plots against Madinah, he ﷺ warned, except that Allah dissolves him as salt dissolves in water. And whoever commits a crime in her, or innovates evil in her, or shelters a criminal in her, on him is the curse of Allah, of the angels, and of all mankind, and nothing he offers, obligatory or voluntary, will be accepted from him. A huge blessing, and a very dangerous warning, in the same breath.

She blesses both halves of a believer's story, the living and the dying. Madinah is better for them, if they only knew, he ﷺ said: no one leaves her, no longer wanting to live in her, except that Allah replaces him with someone better. She is a hard land, fierce heat and lean seasons, and that is exactly the point: whoever bears her difficulties patiently, he ﷺ promised to intercede for him on the Day of Judgment. Then further: whoever among you is able to die in Madinah, let him die in Madinah, for I will intercede for the one who dies there. Umar radiyallahu anhu built an impossible du'a on that promise: O Allah, grant me martyrdom in Your cause and death in the city of Your Messenger ﷺ. Those around him wondered how the two could ever meet; martyrs fall at the far borders of the empire, not at home. Allah accepted both halves, and Umar died a shahid, in Madinah.

And her very soil is honored. Al-Baqi is the most blessed graveyard in the world: over ten thousand companions lie there, nine of the Prophet's ﷺ wives (all but Khadijah), his son Ibrahim, his aunt Safiyyah, his descendants, and early giants of scholarship. One night a wife of his ﷺ woke to find him gone, and learned on his return where he had been: Jibril had come to him in the night and told him to go and pray for the people of al-Baqi. So he left his bed in the dark to stand among his buried companions and make du'a for them. The city is blessed down to her graves.

Only two harams

إِنَّ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا وَيَصُدُّونَ عَن سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ وَالْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ الَّذِي جَعَلْنَاهُ لِلنَّاسِ سَوَاءً الْعَاكِفُ فِيهِ وَالْبَادِ ۚ وَمَن يُرِدْ فِيهِ بِإِلْحَادٍ بِظُلْمٍ نُّذِقْهُ مِنْ عَذَابٍ أَلِيمٍ

“Indeed, those who have disbelieved and avert [people] from the way of Allāh and [from] al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, which We made for the people - equal are the resident therein and one from outside - and [also] whoever intends [a deed] therein of deviation [in religion] by wrongdoing - We will make him taste of a painful punishment.”

Surah al-Hajj 22:25Listen Read 22:25 with tafsir

Madinah is not only blessed; she is a haram, and the word is precise. A haram is a sanctuary in the legal sense: a stretch of land inside which things that are halal everywhere else become haram. Weapons are not carried there except for true necessity, like the guards of the sanctuaries today. Armies do not enter: even the Prophet ﷺ said Allah permitted him Makkah for only a part of a single day, and no one after him. Blood is not shed. The natural greenery is untouchable, down to a leaf on a tree and the grass underfoot (farmers' crops and the needs of building are the scholars' exceptions). You do not even pick up a lost item from its ground; elsewhere you may, there you leave it where it lies. Everything inside is under Allah's protection.

That is what Makkah had been since Ibrahim. The Qur'an declares that whoever enters her shall be safe (Surah Aal Imran 3:97), and even jahiliyyah honored it: a man would see the murderer of his own father making tawaf and not raise a hand against him. The ayah above goes further still: in Allah's sanctuary, merely intending wrongdoing invites a painful punishment; you do not have to succeed to be guilty. And into this exact category the Prophet ﷺ lifted his new city, making du'a in words like these: O Allah, Ibrahim was Your servant and he declared Makkah a sanctuary; I am Your servant and Your Prophet, and I declare Madinah a sanctuary, between her two lava plains. Madinah became the second haram of this religion.

Now listen carefully, the Sheikh says, because this next sentence upsets people: there are exactly two harams in our religion, Makkah and Madinah. Not three. Jerusalem, the land of al-Masjid al-Aqsa, is beloved and blessed beyond doubt, a place we should visit and pray in, where the most authentic narration counts one prayer as two hundred and fifty. But blessed and haram are two different words. No scholar of Islam ever counted Jerusalem a haram in the legal sense: her animals may be hunted and her trees may be cut, and the rulings of the sanctuary simply do not apply; the name people use for her precinct is popular vernacular, not fiqh. Hold the rule the way the episode hands it to you: every haram is blessed, but not every blessed place is a haram.

Why Madinah?

Step back from the blessings and ask the planner's question. There were already Muslims in Abyssinia, under a king who had embraced the faith; if Allah had wanted, the Prophet ﷺ could have been sent to him. So why this city? The episode answers with adab first: these are the wisdoms the scholars have traced, and the full ledger of reasons is with Allah. Then it opens the map. Madinah sits at a thinking distance from Makkah: seven or eight days by caravan, three and a half for a hard rider. Not so close that an army could simply surprise her, not so far, like Abyssinia, that the dawah would lose the peninsula. She is dead center in the Hijaz, the Hijaz dead center in Arabia, within reach of the one city that would have to be won for all of it to follow: Makkah.

Then the geology, which reads like fortification. Madinah is naturally protected on three sides. East and west lie the two harrahs, plains of old volcanic rock, a surface that is neither sand nor stone nor gravel, ground no army can march and no camel train can cross. South, toward Makkah, the approach chokes in dense palm plantations that one wanderer can thread and a thousand soldiers cannot. One open stretch remained, a few miles wide. Hold that fact: when the Battle of the Trench comes, the single ditch the Prophet ﷺ digs will run exactly across that gap. You cannot moat an entire city in a week; you can moat a few miles. It was a divine wisdom poured out in lava, ages before there were any Muslims to shelter behind it.

Add the people. Yathrib had never been conquered, never bowed to any tribe or throne, and a people never broken keeps the fighting spirit a newborn state would need. Then came the strange gift of Bu'ath: a civil war between her tribes that had dragged on for a generation or more, some said a hundred years, others forty or fifty, and that, just before the hijrah, accomplished what no strategist could. The old chieftains, power hungry and locked in their ways, fell in those wars. What remained was young blood: open minded, sick to death of funerals, ready to welcome a leader from outside the bloodstained tribes, someone neutral, someone clean. They found him ﷺ. Nobody in Makkah was monitoring the wars of Bu'ath, but Allah has a plan, and while the dots are being drawn no one can read them; when everything finishes, you connect them and stand amazed.

And the most intimate reason of all: blood. Of all the tribes of Arabia, the Prophet ﷺ had a direct blood tie to this one city, and the story of how is a small saga by itself. His great-grandfather Hashim, the great trader of Quraysh, used to pass through Yathrib on the road to Syria. There he saw Salma: an energetic, striking businesswoman, daughter of a chieftain, so strong willed that she married and divorced men of her own choosing. He proposed through her father, and she set her terms: she would stay in her city, keep her trade, and any child of theirs would remain with her. Hashim agreed. Their time together was short; on a later journey he died far from home, in Gaza, in Palestine.

Salma was carrying his son, and told the Quraysh nothing. The boy was born with a streak of white in his hair, so they called him Shaybah, and he grew up a child of Yathrib while his father's people knew nothing of him. Years later a traveler noticed unmistakable Quraysh features on a Yathrib boy and asked who his father was; the boy answered proudly: Hashim. The news raced to Makkah, and Hashim's brother al-Muttalib rode quietly north, found the twelve or thirteen year old, and talked him onto a camel with promises of his father's rank and a grand future (a voluntary kidnapping, you could say, and every promise would come true), then sped away without facing Salma. As they entered Makkah, people asked: who is this boy, some slave you bought? Al-Muttalib, not wanting the news to spread, kept quiet, and so the boy was nicknamed Abd al-Muttalib, the slave of al-Muttalib. Sit with what that means: Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ, was raised in the very streets and houses his grandson would one day call home. Is this not Allah's plan working through history?

So when Yathrib chose him ﷺ, she was not choosing a stranger. Through Salma he was a second cousin of the Khazraj, and the Arabs kept lineage the way we keep photographs, twenty generations deep, by heart: kinship through a mother weighed lighter in that culture than through a father, but blood is blood, and they knew exactly whose blood he was. He ﷺ had even seen those streets once, as a five year old, brought by his mother Aminah to visit their Yathrib kin (it was on the road home that she died), and it is no coincidence that when he entered Madinah he lodged in the house of Abu Ayyub, his closest relative among the Ansar. Wider still: the Aws and Khazraj were Qahtani Arabs, the Yemeni line he ﷺ praised (iman is Yemeni, and wisdom is Yemeni), while the tribes ringing Quraysh were all Adnani, so in the new ummah the two ancient halves of the Arab family fused and no one could rally the peninsula against the Muslims on tribal blood again: a sign that this religion had come to bury ethnic pride altogether. And for two centuries the Aws and Khazraj had lived beside the Jewish tribes of Yathrib, a people of scripture who spoke of prophets, of a book, of a law, and held all of it over their neighbors' heads as a boast. The boast turned over in Allah's hand: when the awaited prophet actually came, those who had been waiting refused him, and those who had only overheard the waiting recognized the truth and ran to it. Why Madinah? Because long before anyone thought to ask, Allah had already answered.