For nine years in Madinah he ﷺ did not make Hajj. Then, in the tenth year of the Hijra, the obligation came down, and he announced that he would go. The word ran out across Arabia like water finding every crack, and the people came: from every tribe, every valley, every direction, tens of thousands of them, walking to Madinah just to stand where he stood and do what he did.
He would make the pilgrimage exactly once in his life. Everything the ummah knows about how to perform Hajj, every ruling and every detail, comes from these few days. And he knew, with a quiet certainty the people around him did not yet share, that he was saying goodbye.
Take your rites from me
وَلِلَّهِ عَلَى النَّاسِ حِجُّ الْبَيْتِ مَنِ اسْتَطَاعَ إِلَيْهِ سَبِيلًا
“And [due] to Allāh from the people is a pilgrimage to the House - for whoever is able to find thereto a way.”
Surah Aal-Imran 3:97 Read 3:97 with tafsir
When exactly Hajj became obligatory is a question the scholars have long turned over, and Sheikh Yasir lets the debate stand rather than flatten it: some place the verse in the tenth year, others earlier. What is not in doubt is the verse itself, the one that lays the duty on every soul who can find a way to the House. As soon as he ﷺ announced he was going, Madinah began to swell. People flocked from across the land, and they kept coming, along the whole road, until Jabir radiyallahu anhu could say that he looked in front and saw nothing but riders and walkers, looked behind, to his right, to his left, and saw the same: humanity as far as the eye could reach. Never in his life had the Prophet ﷺ stood before a larger gathering.
He told them plainly: take your rites of Hajj from me. He understood that whatever he did, they would copy, and that this single pilgrimage would teach the ummah forever. So he moved through it deliberately, an example in every step. He left Madinah, entered the state of ihram, and made his way toward Makkah, and the people around him had already begun to call it by a name. They called it the farewell pilgrimage, Hajjat al-Wada, while he was still among them, sensing the goodbye in it without quite understanding that he ﷺ would soon be gone.
The day of Arafah
إِنَّ الصَّفَا وَالْمَرْوَةَ مِن شَعَائِرِ اللَّهِ
“Indeed, aṣ-Ṣafā and al-Marwah are among the symbols of Allāh.”
Surah al-Baqarah 2:158 Read 2:158 with tafsir
The fullest record of these days is the long hadith of Jabir, four pages preserved in Muslim, narrated when Jabir was a blind old man and the great-great-grandson of the Prophet ﷺ came to ask him: tell me about his Hajj. Jabir told it all, and the brand of it is everywhere in how Muslims pray and walk and supplicate to this day. At the Kaba he ﷺ made his tawaf, hurried in the first three rounds and walked the last four, prayed behind the Maqam of Ibrahim, and went out to Safa. There he recited that Safa and Marwah are among the symbols of Allah, and said: I begin with what Allah began with. Then he ran where our mother Hajar once ran, between the two hills.
On the ninth, the day of Arafah, he did something the Quraysh of old would never have done. They had invented a private elitism: too holy, they imagined, to leave the sacred precinct, they used to stand at its very edge rather than go out to the plain of Arafah with everyone else. The new Muslims among them assumed he ﷺ would keep their old habit. Instead he passed straight through and camped at Namira, on the line where the Haram ends and Arafah begins, and the moment the sun crossed its peak he went out onto the plain itself. He gathered the people, and after he spoke he prayed Dhuhr and Asr together, shortened, with one adhan.
Then he went to the foot of the mountain, faced the qiblah, and raised his hands. And he did not lower them. Sheikh Yasir asks you to sit with this, because anyone who has stood at Arafah knows the body gives out after twenty or thirty minutes in that heat. He ﷺ stood from the afternoon until the sun set and the last yellow light drained from the sky, his hands lifted the entire time, asking and asking and asking. That is the heart of Hajj. When the sun was fully down he mounted his camel, pulled its rein close so it would not rush, and went out toward Muzdalifah with his hand out to the crowd, telling them again and again: slow down, slow down, there is no need to hurry.
This day I have perfected your religion
الْيَوْمَ أَكْمَلْتُ لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ وَأَتْمَمْتُ عَلَيْكُمْ نِعْمَتِي وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ الْإِسْلَامَ دِينًا
“This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islām as religion.”
Surah al-Ma'idah 5:3 Read 5:3 with tafsir
It was on that plain, on the day of Arafah, that the verse came down. The Prophet ﷺ was standing among a hundred thousand or more, the whole of Arabia gathered to one place, when Allah revealed that today He had perfected the religion, completed His favor, and chosen Islam for them. Sheikh Yasir is careful to note this is not the last verse of the Qur'an, for there were still about three months of his life ﷺ left and other verses would yet come. But what a moment for it to descend: the religion declared complete at the very peak of its glory, when not a single idol was worshiped anywhere in the peninsula, when the Arabs had come in whole to Islam.
The day held a second gift the people barely noticed. That Arafah fell on a Friday. Later a Jewish man would say to Umar radiyallahu anhu: you have a verse in your Book that, had it come to us, we would have taken its day as a festival. Which verse, Umar asked. The man recited this one. And Umar told him: I know exactly when it was revealed. Our Prophet ﷺ was standing at Arafah, on the day of Arafah, on a Friday. It was already a day of celebration twice over.
It is worth knowing, as the Sheikh points out, that the famous Hajjat al-Wada poster of one long sermon is really a gathering of several. He ﷺ spoke at Arafah, and again at Mina on the days that followed, the tenth and the eleventh and perhaps the twelfth, taking every chance to reach a crowd that size. What the books preserve from Arafah is the gist, and a companion in a far tent later said he could hear the Prophet's ﷺ voice clearly even from there, a voice carried, it seems, beyond what is natural.
Everything of the old days is under my feet
Listen to me, he ﷺ began, for I do not know whether I will meet you again after this year. Then he set the law of the new ummah against the lawlessness of the old. Your blood and your wealth are sacred to one another, he said, as sacred as this day, in this month, in this land. The law of the jungle that had ruled Arabia, where the strong took what they wanted, was finished. Everything of the days of ignorance, he said, is under my feet: the feuds, the customs, the idol-worship, trampled and gone.
And then he proved he meant it in the most costly way available to him: with his own family. The first blood-debt I cancel, he said, is the blood of my own kin. The first riba I abolish is the riba owed to my uncle Abbas. Both were real wealth owed to people close to him, and he wiped them out first, in front of everyone, so no one could say the new rules were for the weak and not the strong. Sheikh Yasir lingers here, because this is leadership by example at its purest: my own family will not profit from a feud, and my own family will not profit from interest.
Then he turned to something a seventh-century sermon had no reason to mention at all, and gave it a whole passage: fear Allah concerning women. He reminded them that a wife is taken under the trust of Allah and made lawful by His word, that she has rights over her husband as he has rights over her, that she must be provided for in fairness. There was no social pressure pushing him ﷺ to defend women that day; he did it because, as the Sheikh puts it, no community rises while its women are crushed. Finally he gave them the anchor: I have left among you that which, if you hold to it, you will never go astray, the Book of Allah. Then he asked the question that mattered most to him. You will be asked about me, so what will you say? They answered that he had conveyed the message and been true to it. He raised his fingers to the sky and said three times: O Allah, bear witness.
All of you are from one father
On the tenth, the day of sacrifice, he spoke again, and this time he made the crowd a little uneasy. What month is this, he asked, and they hesitated, the question so obvious they feared a trap, until he answered it himself: is it not Dhul-Hijjah? What day is this? The day of sacrifice. What place is this? This sacred land. Each obvious answer was a hook, because every Arab felt in his bones how sacred this month, this day, this place all were, and on that feeling he hung the lesson: your lives, your wealth, and now your honor too, your reputation safe from slander, are as sacred to one another as this day you all revere.
Then came the words Sheikh Yasir calls genuinely revolutionary, words preserved as an authentic hadith. All of you are from Adam, and Adam is from dust. There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor of a non-Arab over an Arab, nor of one color over another, except by piety. The Sheikh stops to weigh what this is. No philosopher, no thinker, no ruler in all of human history had ever stood up and declared every human being equal; every society, everywhere, had believed itself the better stock. And the one man who said it plainly was the man with the noblest lineage among all the Arabs, who had the most to lose by leveling it. That it came from him ﷺ, of all people, is itself a sign that it came from above him. Fourteen centuries later the world is still struggling to catch up to that sentence.
A hundred camels, and a knife he would not lift
He ﷺ had asked Ali radiyallahu anhu to bring a hundred camels up from Yemen for the sacrifice. On the day, he slaughtered sixty-three of them with his own hand, one camel, it is noted, for every year of his life, and gave the rest to Ali to complete the hundred. From every animal a piece was taken and cooked in one pot, and he ate from the meat and drank from its broth, teaching by doing that the sacrifice is eaten, shared, and given to the poor, the way Muslims still keep it.
Then a small moment that says everything about him. He went to the well of Zamzam, where his relatives were drawing water for the pilgrims, and they offered to let him draw it himself. He declined, and gave his reason: if I were to draw the water, the people would crowd in to take this duty from you, because they would want to do whatever I do. So I will not. He understood how fiercely they loved to follow him ﷺ, and rather than disrupt the men at their work or start a stampede of imitation, he simply drank from the cup they handed him. Even his restraint was a mercy.
The well of Khumm
One last incident closes these days, and Sheikh Yasir handles it with care, because it is read very differently across the schools. Ali radiyallahu anhu had come from Yemen leading his men and the wealth of the region. While he hurried ahead to meet the Prophet ﷺ, the man he left in charge handed out new garments from the collected charity to the whole party. Ali returned, saw it, and was angered, for that was not theirs to give, and ordered the clothes returned. The men were stung, and as soon as the Hajj was over they came complaining about him.
So at a place on the road, the well of Khumm, the Prophet ﷺ defended Ali warmly and rebuked the complaint. Whoever takes me as a friend, he said, let him take Ali as a friend; Ali is to me as Harun was to Musa. He told them plainly to stop bringing complaints against him. And he repeated his charge about his household: I leave you the Book of Allah, and fear Allah concerning my family. The Sheikh affirms every word of this, none of it denied, none of it hidden, all of it a genuine honor for Ali. But he is firm that the setting is the setting: it was an answer to men who had wronged Ali, not a contest over who would lead after him ﷺ. The simplest proof, he notes, is that when the Prophet ﷺ passed away months later, not even Ali's own supporters raised this moment as a claim on succession. Sunni Islam, the Sheikh says, hides nothing of Ali's virtue and competes with no one over it. We affirm the honor, and we do not read into it a politics that was never there.