The believers who sailed home from Abyssinia came back for a Makkah that did not exist. A rumor had crossed the sea that Quraysh had accepted Islam, a tale that grew out of the prostration at Surah an-Najm and a story Dr. Yasir Qadhi weighed last week and set aside as baseless. On the road home, a passing caravan told them the truth: nothing has changed. Your people are as you left them.
Day 17 is the story of what they did next, and it carries three treasures: Abu Bakr handing back the only protection he had rather than quiet his Qur'an, a second and far larger migration setting sail, and Ja'far ibn Abi Talib standing in a bribed court, refusing to bow, and telling a king the truth so beautifully that the king wept.
Seventeen come home to nothing
Around seventeen souls had made that first migration; the strongest count the Sheikh gives is twelve men and five women. When the false good news reached them, they packed up their exile and headed home, and on the way they eagerly asked the first caravan they met: have our people entered Islam? The answer landed like a stone. Makkah is as it was, and the religion is still being hunted. Some of them said it out loud: let us turn around now. But stand where they stood, with home, kin, and everything they owned one ridge away, and you will understand why they pressed on to see for themselves.
Only there was no simply walking back in. Leaving had meant, in the Sheikh's modern phrasing, cancelling their own passports: they had broken from their tribes, and in a world built entirely on who protects whom, that left them exposed. To abandon your land, in that age, was so heavy a thing that exile would later stand in Islamic law as a punishment in its own right; these believers had inflicted it on themselves for la ilaha illa Allah. Now each returnee needed a new patron, a fresh sponsor, before Makkah would tolerate the sight of them.
The protection of Allah is enough
Rewind to the day the first migrants left, because Abu Bakr radiyallahu anhu had set out with them. Of the greatest companions, only he and Uthman ibn Affan could have gone at all: Umar had not yet accepted Islam, and Ali was still a boy of nine or ten. On the road toward the sea the caravan passed the lands of Ibn ad-Daghinah, chief of a neighboring tribe and an old trading partner of Abu Bakr, and when he heard where they were going and why, he could not accept it. A man like you, he said, does not deserve to be driven out. Let me intercede. He went to the Kaaba and announced his protection over Abu Bakr, and Quraysh, unwilling to snub a neighboring chief, agreed, on one condition: Abu Bakr must not pray in public.
So Abu Bakr went home and did something the books record as a first: he extended his house and turned the addition into a place of prayer, the first masjid ever built, it is said, and he prayed there, out loud, exactly within the letter of the agreement. But his recitation refused to stay private. His daughter Aisha tells us he was a man easily moved to weeping: when he recited the Qur'an, he wept. Ibn Ishaq describes the women and children of Quraysh gathering in amazement to listen. In a small, silent city, that beautiful, breaking voice carried for blocks, and Quraysh could feel their own families leaning toward it.
They sent for Ibn ad-Daghinah: the condition must be taken back; he cannot pray even in his own house. The chief came to Abu Bakr carrying the only two options left, stop praying or release me from my word, and you already know which one Abu Bakr chose. I return your protection to you, he said, and I am content with the protection of Allah. From that day until the hijrah he lived in Makkah with no cover at all. That is why, in the scene the Sheikh told two weeks earlier, when Abu Bakr flung himself between the Prophet ﷺ and the man strangling him, crying out, would you kill a man for saying, my Lord is Allah, the mob could beat him until he could not rise for over a week, and no one was obliged to lift a finger.
The eye that grew jealous
ذَرْنِي وَمَنْ خَلَقْتُ وَحِيدًا وَجَعَلْتُ لَهُ مَالًا مَّمْدُودًا وَبَنِينَ شُهُودًا
“Leave Me with the one I created alone And to whom I granted extensive wealth And children present [with him]”
Surah al-Muddaththir 74:11-13 Read 74:11 with tafsir
The returnees now ran the same calculation one by one. Uthman ibn Maz'un, one of the famous early companions, a man with many stories in the seerah and an early death ahead of him, reached out to an old friend: al-Walid ibn al-Mughirah. This is the father of Khalid ibn al-Walid, the rival of Abu Jahl, one of the most powerful men in Makkah, and the very man these ayat describe: created alone, granted stretching wealth and sons all around him, the man who turned the Qur'an over and over looking for something to call it and finally settled on a strange kind of magic. Al-Walid announced his protection publicly, as treaties were made, and it held perfectly. Not a hair on Uthman's head was touched.
It held too well. Ibn Ishaq says Uthman would move through the city and watch the Muslims being persecuted, Bilal, Ibn Mas'ud, the ones who had come back from Abyssinia with no powerful friend, while he walked untouched, and the safety began to eat him alive. How are they suffering while I sit in security? He went to al-Walid: O my uncle, take your protection back. The old man was baffled: has anyone harmed you, have I fallen short? Neither, said Uthman. I cannot bear to see my brothers and sisters suffer while I am free. They went to the Kaaba and dissolved the pact in public, Uthman insisting before everyone that the choice was his own and no failing of al-Walid's.
Walking back, he passed a gathering where Labid, one of the giants of Arabian poetry, a guest of Quraysh who would one day accept Islam, was reciting: truly everything besides Allah is worthless. You have spoken the truth, Uthman called out. The Prophet ﷺ himself would later call that the truest line any poet ever said, one of the only scraps of poetry he ever quoted. Then Labid continued: and every blessing, without doubt, must vanish. You lie, said Uthman, the bliss of Jannah never ends. A guest of honor heckled in open majlis: a man rose in anger and struck Uthman until his eye swelled shut. Al-Walid came running, ready to restore everything: see what leaving my protection costs? And Uthman gave the answer the seerah never let go of: by Allah, my other eye is in need of what this eye has received. He refused. Keep the Sheikh's balance here, though. Other companions kept their protectors, and there is no blame on them at all. People stand at different levels, and the deen has room for every one of them.
Help from the strangest house
Abu Salamah, husband of Umm Salamah and a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ through his mother, the sister of the Prophet's ﷺ father Abdullah, had a harder map to read. By tribe he was Banu Makhzum, the house of Abu Jahl, the last door on earth he could knock on. So he sent instead to his mother's brother, Abu Talib, the man already carrying the heaviest protection in Makkah, and Abu Talib simply said yes.
Banu Makhzum arrived in a fury: you have taken your nephew Muhammad from us, and now you shelter our own tribesman too? This is our affair, our honor. The old man answered with the plainest logic he had: if I am going to give protection to one nephew, why can I not give it to the other? They surrounded his house, the argument heating toward something worse, and then help stood up from the one direction no one in the story expects: Abu Lahab. Have you not troubled this old man enough, he said. Let him be, or I will take his side in everything. And because Abu Lahab's weight could not be ignored, they backed down.
Hold both of the Sheikh's readings of that moment. Abu Lahab was not defending Islam; he was defending a brother, the same tribal love that moved Abu Talib himself, and that kind of love, real as it is, does not save a soul. And yet the Prophet ﷺ would say in Madinah, years later, that Allah sometimes helps this religion through a person who does not even believe in it. The day Banu Makhzum backed away from Abu Talib's door, the proof of it stood there wearing Abu Lahab's face.
Eighty sails south
Makkah, meanwhile, refused to change. The returnees stayed two or three weeks, long enough to confirm the persecution, and long enough for something else: every Muslim in the city heard firsthand what Abyssinia had actually been. A strange land, a strange tongue, a hard distance, yes. But no whips. The migrants had lived with food in their hands and safety in their streets, and as the Sheikh reminds you, after iman itself those are the two greatest blessings Allah gives anyone.
Here Dr. Yasir Qadhi offers a reading he is careful to mark as his own opinion: perhaps this is exactly why Allah allowed the first migration to end in a false rumor and a wasted journey. Nothing convinces like word of mouth. No announcement could have moved a third or more of Makkah's Muslims across the sea; seventeen returning eyewitnesses could, and did. When the second migration set out, more than eighty believers went, over four times the first count, and at their head walked Ja'far ibn Abi Talib radiyallahu anhu, the Prophet's ﷺ own cousin.
Not everyone re-crossed. Uthman ibn Affan stayed behind and would later make his hijrah to Madinah. Mus'ab ibn Umayr, the gentle youth whose own mother and father had tortured him worst of all, chose to remain at the Prophet's ﷺ side, and within a few years would be the first man he ﷺ ever sent to Madinah. But run the numbers the Sheikh insists on. Makkah's tribes were tens, not thousands; Banu Hashim was ten brothers. The whole city held perhaps five hundred to a thousand souls, so eighty departures meant a tenth of Makkah or more walking out, an embarrassment without precedent anywhere in Arabia, and it landed on the proudest tribe of all, the custodians of the haram. Quraysh decided the bleeding had to be stopped.
Leather, bribes, and a king who listens
وَمَكَرُوا وَمَكَرَ اللَّهُ ۖ وَاللَّهُ خَيْرُ الْمَاكِرِينَ
“And they [i.e., the disbelievers] planned, but Allāh planned. And Allāh is the best of planners.”
Surah Aal Imran 3:54 Read 3:54 with tafsir
Their weapon was the oldest one: money. Quraysh chose two envoys, chief among them Amr ibn al-As, not yet a Muslim and already the shrewdest political mind they had; once he accepts Islam, the Sheikh reminds you, we say nothing but good of him, but at this stage that cunning serves Quraysh. With him went a second man whose name the scholars differ over. They were loaded with Makkah's most prized export, fine camel leather, and pointed at the court of the Najashi. Najashi, the Sheikh explains, is a title like Caesar or Pharaoh; this king's own name was As-hama, and his grave is still known in that land. Dr. Yasir Qadhi mentions, almost in passing, that friends of his have stood at it.
Umm Salamah radiyallahu anha, who lived these years and became their chief narrator, tells what happened next. The Muslims had been received with the best of hospitality, secure in their religion, free to worship, and, she says, they never heard so much as one word of ridicule. Then the envoys arrived and worked the court before they ever worked the king, pressing leather into every minister's hands with the same whisper: when we ask tomorrow for our runaways, counsel him to hand them over, and remember this gift. Before the throne, their pitch touched every nerve a ruler has: foolish youths who abandoned our religion without entering yours, inventors of something new, rebels against their own elders; we know their faults better than anyone; give them back. And the bribed ministers rose on cue: they speak sense, return them.
The Najashi refused to be hurried. No, by Allah, he said: people who chose my land over every land, and asked for my protection, will not be handed over until I hear them speak. The Prophet ﷺ had called him a just king, and here was the proof, a king with no earthly reason to listen to a band of refugees insisting on hearing both sides. The Sheikh sets the whole scene under one ayah: they planned, and Allah planned.
We will say what our Prophet ﷺ taught us
قَالَ إِنِّي عَبْدُ اللَّهِ آتَانِيَ الْكِتَابَ وَجَعَلَنِي نَبِيًّا
“[Jesus] said, "Indeed, I am the servant of Allāh. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.”
Surah Maryam 19:30 Read 19:30 with tafsir
The summons terrified them. None of them had ever stood before the king, and now the palace wanted all of them, to answer for their religion with their future hanging on the answer. What will we say? Ja'far gave them the sentence that became the day's spine: we will say what our Prophet ﷺ taught us, and we will not change the truth, whatever happens. At court the two envoys prostrated before the throne, as everyone did before the kings of that age. Ja'far walked in upright and would not lower his head an inch. Our Prophet ﷺ has told us, he said, that we prostrate to no one but our Lord. Their lives hung on this audience, and they opened it by declining its etiquette.
The king asked the obvious question: what is this religion of yours, that is neither your people's, nor mine, nor any that we know? And Ja'far, through a translator, on the spur of the moment, gave one of the most beloved speeches in our history. O King, we were a people of jahiliyyah: we worshipped idols, we ate dead flesh, we committed indecency, we cut the ties of kinship, we wronged our neighbors, and the strong among us devoured the weak. We were like that until Allah sent us a messenger from among ourselves, a man whose lineage and house we knew, whose truthfulness we knew, who had never told a lie in his life. He called us to worship Allah alone and to leave the stones and idols our fathers served. He commanded us to speak truthfully, to keep our trusts, to join the ties of kinship, to be good to our neighbors; he forbade us blood and false witness, the property of the orphan and the slander of chaste women; he ordered us to pray, to fast, to give. So we believed him. And for that our own people tortured us, to force us back to the idols, and when they overwhelmed us, we came out to your land, and chose you above every other king, hoping we would not be wronged in your presence.
Sheikh Yasir slows down over this speech the way you would over a jewel. Composed with no warning, in a hostile court, it reads its listener perfectly: to a Christian king Ja'far speaks of a messenger, a category the king's own scripture had taught him to love, and in five minutes the accused have become the wronged. This, the Sheikh says, is why the Prophet ﷺ put Ja'far at the head of the eighty: leadership is personality and eloquence, and he carried both. Then came the request that turned the room. Do you have anything of what he brought from Allah? Yes. And of everything he could have chosen, Ja'far recited the opening of Surah Maryam, the surah of the virgin, the cradle, and the child who announced himself the servant of Allah.
For long minutes the recitation rolled through that hall, and Ibn Ishaq records that the patriarchs wept without understanding a word; when it was translated, the Najashi wept with them and said: by God, this and what Musa and Isa brought have sprung from one and the same fountain. Then he turned to the envoys: go. I will not hand them to you, and do not even think of asking again.
A twig, a parchment, and a funeral prayer
Amr was not finished. Leaving the hall, he whispered to his companion: tomorrow I have one final trick. The gentler man tried to dissuade him, whatever else they are, they are our relatives, but the next morning Amr stood before the throne again: they say something monstrous about Isa the son of Maryam; ask them. The summons that followed frightened the Muslims more than the first one, and again Ja'far held the line: we will say what our Prophet ﷺ said, whatever comes of it. Asked about Isa, he answered: we say he is the servant of Allah, and His messenger, and a spirit from Him, and His word, which He cast to Maryam the chaste virgin. Every word true, and not one word more. The Sheikh pauses on the wisdom of it: Ja'far never lied and never groveled, but he also never volunteered an insult the moment did not require.
The Najashi bent down, picked up a twig from the floor, and said: by God, what you have said does not exceed what Isa said by even this much. Then he turned on the envoys: be gone, and take your gifts with you; I have no need of them. This time even the bribes already sitting in the ministers' houses were sent back. Umm Salamah remembered the two men leaving humiliated, debased, carrying home everything they had come with, and she remembered what followed: we stayed in the best of lands, with the best of neighbors, until we returned to the Prophet ﷺ in Makkah.
The king paid for that twig. Word spread that the Najashi had left the religion of his fathers, and a faction at court began moving toward revolt. His answer is one of this story's quietest treasures: he wrote on a parchment that he bore witness none deserves worship but Allah, and that Isa is His servant, His messenger, and His word, then tucked it inside his robe, over his heart, and summoned the agitators. Have I not been good to you? Just? Then what is your grievance? When they answered with their creed, he laid his hand over the parchment and swore: by Allah, this is exactly what I believe, and he let them understand it as they wished. Before that confrontation he had even sent secretly to the Muslims: if you hear I have been killed, there is a ship waiting with its captain under orders; board it and go where you will. He won, and the ship was never needed. And when a rival royal house later dragged the land into civil war by the banks of the Nile, the Muslims, in Umm Salamah's words, were never more terrified: they begged Allah to keep the just king in power, and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, another cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, volunteered to watch the battle from a distance and came back beaming: rejoice, the Najashi has won.
The believers would stay in his land some twelve years. From Madinah the Prophet ﷺ later wrote inviting him formally to Islam, and al-Bayhaqi records the reply: I am a Muslim, I believe in you and in all that you say, and if you command me, I will come to Madinah and serve you. Then one day the Prophet ﷺ came out to his companions with news no caravan could have carried yet, a journey of two weeks announced the very hour it happened: Jibril has informed me that a righteous brother of yours has died in a neighboring land. He lined the companions up and prayed janazah for the absent king, the only funeral prayer over an absent body he ﷺ ever prayed in his life. The scholars ask why him alone, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi, who has written separately on the question, inclines to the simplest reading: because in that land of his quiet, hidden faith, there had been no one to pray over him. The king who would not sell eighty strangers was sent off by the Prophet's ﷺ own takbir.