The early emigration to Madinah

A scream over the sleeping camps

إِنَّ الشَّيطانَ لَكُم عَدُوٌّ فَاتَّخِذوهُ عَدُوًّا ۚ إِنَّما يَدعو حِزبَهُ لِيَكونوا مِن أَصحابِ السَّعيرِ

“Indeed, Satan is an enemy to you; so take him as an enemy. He only invites his party to be among the companions of the Blaze.”

Surah Fatir 35:6Listen Read 35:6 with tafsir

Set the scene the way it actually happened: middle of the night, the last night of Hajj, when every camp in Mina is dead asleep and the desert is so silent a single voice can carry across the valley. The Prophet ﷺ has planned this meeting like a man who knows that trusting Allah and tying your camel are the same instruction: the timing chosen for when Makkah least suspects it, Ali and Abu Bakr posted as lookouts, his uncle Abbas at his side. The first covenant of Aqabah, a year earlier, had carried no politics and no protection. This one is different. This is the covenant of war: you will protect me as you protect your own women and children. They asked what they would get in return. He ﷺ said: Jannah.

Before the pledging began, one of their own rose and begged them to slow down: do not be hasty; understand what you are saying yes to. You will bury sons. You will widow your women. The Arabs will come at you as one bow. If you are not ready, excuse yourselves tonight, and perhaps Allah will excuse you; do not promise and then break. They shouted back: remove your hand, let us pledge! And one by one, more than seventy hands took his ﷺ hand, while the two women among them pledged by word alone, for the Prophet's ﷺ hand never touched the hand of a woman who was not his. Off to the side stood Abbas, still reckoning by the old tribal arithmetic, muttering that he saw only young faces and none of the elders he knew. He was righter than he realized: these were new faces because a new era was beginning.

Then the scream. From somewhere in the valley a voice shrieked over the tents: O people of the camps, do you not know that the blameworthy ones have gathered with the religion-leaver to make war on you? The Prophet ﷺ knew exactly whose voice it was. He named the shaytan of that valley by his strange, knotted name (the names of the shayatin, the Sheikh notes, are always like that) and answered him aloud: I swear by Allah, I will deal with you. Think of what this moment means. Shaytan's whole craft is hiding, whispering, working unseen. This night he was so overwhelmed by what had just been sworn that he abandoned his own method and screamed to the human world to do something, because he could do nothing. The Qur'an told us to take him as an enemy; at Aqabah you watch the enemy panic.

The blood of the Yathrib men was up. Should we not fall on them tonight? We are seventy, armed; they sleep unarmed in their tents. Sheikh Yasir holds you in this scene, because it is the first time in thirteen years of beatings, boycotts, and graves that the Prophet ﷺ has anything like a fighting force behind him, and every human instinct says now. He answered: I have not been commanded to do this. No massacre of sleeping men, not even these men. The meeting dissolved into the dark as quietly as it had gathered. In the morning, Quraysh delegations stormed camp to camp demanding answers, and at the tents of the Khazraj the pagans of the tribe swore by Allah, truthfully, that they knew of no such meeting, while the Muslims simply stood silent behind that oath, unwilling to lie even to save themselves.

The women who kept the pledge

Do not skim past those two women. The Prophet ﷺ did not tell the men of Yathrib to leave their women in the tents; the women came, they pledged, and their pledge was not a softer edition. The first covenant had been nicknamed the covenant of women because it carried no commitment to fight. This one was the covenant of war, and the promise the two women gave was the same promise the men gave. Their oath was counted in full, and they were held to it, and they held to it.

Of one of them, history kept barely more than a line: she was a cousin of Muadh ibn Jabal, and the rest belongs to Allah. The other, Nusaybah, turned one sentence in a dark valley into half a century of proof. At Uhud she fought to shield the Prophet ﷺ and walked off the field carrying twelve wounds. Years later, when word spread that Uthman had been killed and the Prophet ﷺ called for hands a second time, hers was among them. Her son grew into a soldier and was butchered by Musaylimah the false prophet, and in the wars after the Prophet's ﷺ passing she marched against the man who did it. And in her sixties, an old woman fighting behind Khalid ibn al-Walid against the Romans at Yarmuk, she lost her hand. Then the record falls quiet. She gave the oath of Aqabah once, and spent the rest of her life paying it as if it had been sworn that morning.

The Sheikh pauses here over a truth both sad and strangely comforting: there were tens of thousands of companions, and for most of them we do not own two facts; for many, not even a name. We could not document one generation of our own city, let alone theirs. Whole lifetimes of sacrifice are filed with Allah alone. The handful of stories we do have, like Nusaybah's, are not the exceptions; they are the visible edge of a buried treasury.

Were it not for the hijrah

Understand what the people of Yathrib were actually afraid of that night. Not death; they had volunteered for that. Their question was more tender: when Allah gives you victory and your own city finally wants you back, will you leave us? And the Prophet ﷺ answered with an oath of his own, the old Arabic formula that means we are now one: my blood is your blood, my ruin is your ruin. Notice, too, the direction of the invitation. He ﷺ never imposed himself on Yathrib; they asked to adopt him, they offered the protection, they set their own necks under the load. And he kept his word to them for the rest of his life: even after Makkah was conquered, he ﷺ turned around and went home to Madinah.

The Sheikh lets you see that promise tested, years ahead of our story. After one of the later campaigns, the Prophet ﷺ gave enormous gifts to the newly conquered chiefs whose faith was still soft: to one of them, an entire valley of sheep, a gift so absurd the man went home telling his people to embrace Islam, because this man gives like someone who does not fear poverty. The Ansar, who had done the fighting, felt the sting of it; they are human, as we are. So the Prophet ﷺ gathered them, only them, into a tent and asked: are you not happy that the people go home with sheep and dirhams and dinars, and you go home with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ? And the men who had once pledged in a dark valley wept.

It is in that tent that he ﷺ said the words Bukhari and Muslim carry: were it not for the hijrah, I would have been a man of the Ansar; and if the Ansar walked into one valley and all of mankind walked into another, I would walk in the valley of the Ansar. He taught that loving the Ansar is part of iman and hating them is a mark of hypocrisy. Fourteen centuries later, that ruling has not expired; loving those people, by name and by debt, is still part of our religion.

And rewind to see how patiently this was all built. It began with six men of the Khazraj, a delegation so minor they did not even have a tent of their own at Hajj. The Prophet ﷺ did not trivialize them, and Sheikh Yasir says, wallahi, this is for him one of the great lessons of the whole seerah: be genuine and sincere with every opportunity, because you do not know who is standing in front of you. Those six became twelve, then a teacher was sent north and Islam entered house after house of Yathrib, and within a year there were a couple of hundred Muslims and more than seventy of them riding back to pledge. Underneath it all, Allah had been preparing the city before His Prophet ﷺ knew he needed one: a long civil war between Yathrib's two tribes, raging while Abu Talib still lived and Makkah paid no attention, had been a gift wrapped in advance. And the bitterest irony: the People of the Book in Yathrib had boasted for generations that a prophet was coming and that with him they would crush their pagan neighbors. The neighbors they mocked heard the message first, recognized it from the mockery itself, and believed. The boast flipped onto the boasters. These are the ways of Allah.

One seerah, many doors

Stand back from the story for a moment and count the phases you have walked through in twenty six days: a secret dawah, then a public preaching that answered persecution with patience, then a political asylum under a just king in Abyssinia, and now a political emigration to a city that has invited him ﷺ to lead it. Ahead lie treaties of peace and open war. So a question rises that echoes straight into our century: is the seerah a ladder, each phase abrogating the one before it, so that only the final phase counts? Or is it a corridor of doors, all of them valid, each opened by its circumstances?

A small, hard minority of scholars said ladder. Ibn Hazm of al-Andalus argued it most fiercely, and the Sheikh asks you to notice when he was writing: the beginning of the decline of his homeland, desperation bleeding into deduction. But the majority of scholars across the centuries answered: nothing here was abrogated. Every phase remains alive in the Book and the seerah, waiting for the circumstances that call for it.

Here Dr. Yasir Qadhi speaks frankly, and this judgment is distinctly his: a single unified program imposed on the whole ummah is, in his words, naive. What is happening in one Muslim land is not what is happening in another, and none of it is what is happening in the West. The scholars of every land must open the seerah fresh, in the light of their own street. And for Muslims living as small minorities in Western lands, he points to the model that fits closest, though no model fits like a glove: Abyssinia. Believers with no designs on the throne, asking only the freedom to worship Allah and live their faith openly, honest residents of a land whose system is what it is. He said it from a minbar in Memphis in 2012, and it reads like it was said this morning.

A land of date palms and black stone

After Aqabah, the Prophet ﷺ gathered the Muslims, most likely in the house of al-Arqam where so much of this story has already happened, and made the announcement they had waited thirteen years to hear: I have been shown the land of your emigration, a land of date palms lying between two plains of volcanic rock. For a little while the destination hung unnamed; in one version he ﷺ wondered at first whether it might be one of Arabia's other famous date countries. Then certainty came: it is Yathrib. Sheikh Yasir adds an aside you will never forget on your next umrah: fly into Madinah in daylight and look out the window. The two black harras are still there, porous, ragged lava rock that neither hoof nor foot can cross, exactly the frame the Prophet ﷺ described before he had ever seen the city.

Permission was given, and the exodus began the only way it could: in ones and twos, in secret. Things in Makkah were at their worst, and the Quraysh would tolerate almost anything except watching their problem walk away from them. The books record that the first to leave was Abu Salamah, a man already stamped twice for Allah: he and his wife Umm Salamah are counted among the few who made both hijrahs, Abyssinia first, and now this. He was not himself of Quraysh; he had settled in Makkah among his wife's people. So he reasoned that leaving was nobody's business but his own, and packed in the open: one camel, his wife, their baby son.

Quraysh met him on the road with weapons. You, they said, may go; we renounce you. But your wife is ours, a daughter of Quraysh, and you will not take her. Her clansmen dragged her back. Then his own kinsmen arrived, pride stung, and answered: in that case the boy is ours. And between the two clans a two year old was pulled back and forth, an actual tug of war over a child, until his small arm was wrenched from its joint and his mother cried out for them to take him. Abu Salamah rode into exile utterly alone: wife held in one house, son carried to another, everything he loved divided between two tribes who wanted neither, only the win.

Umm Salamah radiyallahu anha tells the rest herself. Every day, for a year and a half, she walked out to the edge of the city, to the farthest place from which Makkah is still in sight, and sat in the desert and wept: a husband gone one direction, a son held in the other. At last some of her cousins were cut by the sight of her and shamed the elders into mercy. She was released; tempers had cooled enough that her boy was put back in her arms. And this young mother set her child on a camel and walked into the open desert toward a city two weeks away, with no guard, no guide, and no plan except the only one she named: I have Allah.

The noblest escort in Arabia

إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَأمُرُكُم أَن تُؤَدُّوا الأَماناتِ إِلىٰ أَهلِها وَإِذا حَكَمتُم بَينَ النّاسِ أَن تَحكُموا بِالعَدلِ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ نِعِمّا يَعِظُكُم بِهِ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كانَ سَميعًا بَصيرًا

“Indeed, Allāh commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice. Excellent is that which Allāh instructs you. Indeed, Allāh is ever Hearing and Seeing.”

Surah an-Nisa 4:58Listen Read 4:58 with tafsir

Just beyond the city she was seen by Uthman ibn Talhah, a young man of Quraysh riding home from an expedition, and not a Muslim. A woman alone with an infant in open desert, beyond the last rooftops, in the country of wolves and worse. Where are you going? To my husband in Yathrib. And who is with you? No one but Allah. He said: by Allah, you will not be left like this, and he took the halter of her camel and began to walk.

He walked the entire way, Makkah to Yathrib, two weeks on foot, leading her camel by hand, and he did not speak a word to her the whole road. When it was time to rest he would seat the camel, then turn his back and walk away so that she could dismount unseen; he slept apart, by the animal; in the morning he readied her mount and turned away again. At the edge of Yathrib he pointed: your husband is in that village. Then he turned around and walked home, two more weeks, with no camel and no reward, having asked for nothing. Umm Salamah said it plainly for the rest of her life: I have never seen a nobler gentleman among the Arabs than him.

Now watch Allah repay a debt no one else even recorded. The woman this pagan honored was to become a Mother of the Believers: Abu Salamah would later die, and the Prophet ﷺ would marry her. And for Uthman himself, Allah held a gate open: he embraced Islam in the last small batch of converts before the conquest of Makkah, slipping in among those the Qur'an sets in a degree above, the ones who gave and strove before the conquest (Surah al-Hadid 57:10), at the final hour.

Then came the conquest itself, and the honors of the Kaaba were being assigned. The Prophet's ﷺ uncle Abbas, already entrusted with watering the pilgrims, asked to hold the keys of the House as well, and it was then that this ayah came down: render the trusts to their people. The Prophet ﷺ sent Ali to place the keys of the Kaaba in Uthman's hands with words like a deed of title: with you and your descendants until the Day of Judgment; none will take it from you but an oppressor. Fourteen and a half centuries have passed, and the family that opens the door of the Kaaba to this day traces back to him: the man who once walked a stranger's camel across Arabia and never looked at her.

The man whose trade could not lose

وَمِنَ النّاسِ مَن يَشري نَفسَهُ ابتِغاءَ مَرضاتِ اللَّهِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ رَءوفٌ بِالعِبادِ

“And of the people is he who sells himself, seeking means to the approval of Allāh. And Allāh is Kind to [His] servants.”

Surah al-Baqarah 2:207Listen Read 2:207 with tafsir

Suhayb's whole life had been a climb. An Arab boy of a northern tribe, captured in the raids of jahiliyyah and sold into slavery among the Romans, he grew up far from home: fluent in Latin (the only companion who ever was), fair and ruddy like the people who raised him, speaking Arabic with a foreigner's accent, which is why Makkah called him Suhayb the Roman though there was not a drop of Rome in him. Sold back into Arabia, he worked his way to the famous house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an, bought his own freedom with his own labor, and built himself into a businessman with savings buried safely in the earth, the way you banked money in a world without banks. He accepted Islam in the earliest batch, on the same day as his closest friend Ammar, and the two were never afterwards apart.

When Suhayb rode out for Yathrib, a Quraysh militia caught up and ringed him. One man alone against a posse: so he stood, drew his bow, and made them an accounting: O Quraysh, I have forty arrows in this quiver, and by Allah none of you will reach me until I have spent every one of them, and then comes my sword, and none of you will take me until it has taken him first. They believed him; life is sweet, and nobody volunteered to be first. Then he offered the other ransom. What if I tell you where my wealth is buried? Will you let me go? Deal, they said. So he told them where the earnings of an entire life lay hidden, the freedom money, the climb, all of it, and he walked on to Madinah with nothing but the clothes on his back.

And here is the moment Allah pinned above the whole exodus. When the Prophet ﷺ saw him arrive, he smiled before a word of explanation was possible: your trade has profited, your trade has profited. No rider could have outrun Suhayb with the news; Jibril had already carried it, and revelation had already framed it: there are people who sell their very selves seeking the pleasure of Allah. Stand in his sandals at the gate of that city, penniless twice over, and hear heaven itself announce that you got the better end of the bargain.

A mother's vow and a brother's camel

When Umar prepared his own hijrah, he made a pact with two companions, Ayyash and Hisham: meet at dawn at a named valley outside Makkah; whoever is missing when the light comes has been taken, and the rest must ride. Dawn came, and Hisham was not there. Umar and Ayyash rode north and made it.

Then two riders arrived from Makkah: Abu Jahl and his brother, who were, by one mother, the half brothers of Ayyash. They brought a story sharpened on a whetstone: your mother has sworn an oath to Allah that no shade will touch her head until she sees your face; she sits in the sun, she will not eat, her hair is matted and crawling, she is dying of grief for you. Umar saw through it instantly: they are tricking you; by Allah, if hunger bites your mother she will eat, and if the sun burns her she will take the shade. He offered his own wealth: if it is money you are going back for, take from me whatever you want, only do not go. But Ayyash's heart had already melted for his mother, so Umar gave him the last protection he had: take my camel, she is stronger and faster than theirs; at the first scent of treachery, turn her around and fly.

On the road, the brothers let the miles and the chatter loosen him, and then Abu Jahl sighed that his own camel had grown weary: brother, let me ride behind you on yours. The moment Ayyash knelt the camel, they were on him. They bound him, carried him back, and paraded him into Makkah in ropes, crying: this is how we deal with our fools. He found Hisham already taken, exactly as feared, and the two were thrown into a dungeon Quraysh had set up just for them: a private prison for two believers whose only crime was the road.

The Prophet ﷺ made his own hijrah soon after (that story is tomorrow's), and from Madinah he did not forget the men in the dark. He ﷺ would rise from ruku in the prayer itself and call out for them: O Allah, rescue them; O Allah, rescue the weak and oppressed among the believers; O Allah, lay Your grip upon Quraysh. And he kept asking aloud: who will go and bring them back to me? One man finally stood: the older brother of Khalid ibn al-Walid, the same blood that bravery comes from. He walked into Makkah alone, by night, found a dungeon whose location was nobody's public knowledge, came in over the roof, cut their ropes, and brought both men home to Madinah. That is all the detail history kept, and Sheikh Yasir laughs that Hollywood could not write it better: this, he says, is the real stuff. Hisham would live to die a free man's death years later, fighting the Romans at Yarmuk.