He ﷺ has barely dismounted. Yesterday the camel knelt where Allah willed it, and a city began learning to call itself Madinah. Now watch what the Prophet ﷺ actually does with his first week in his new home. He does not build himself a house. He builds Allah a house, then another, and sleeps under borrowed roofs while the houses of Allah rise first.
Day 31 belongs to the first mosques: Quba, which the Qur'an calls founded on taqwa; the first Friday sermon of his ﷺ life, short enough to memorize; a joke in the dust that turned out to be a prophecy; and a dawn call that arrived in a dream and became law on his ﷺ word. Dr. Yasir Qadhi walks it stone by stone.
A Monday in Quba
Start with a small act of honesty that tells you what kind of teacher you are walking with. Ask almost anyone for the date of the arrival and you will hear the 12th of Rabi al-Awwal. Dr. Yasir Qadhi unpicks it gently: one early book of history records that the Prophet ﷺ left Makkah on the 1st of that month, the ride to Madinah took a fast rider three and a half days and a slow caravan up to nine, and he ﷺ had also spent two or three hidden nights in the cave of Thawr. Add it up and the 12th will not stretch to fit; the 8th or the 9th fits well. The deeper truth is that nobody was keeping calendars; it was a different world, and what the people of that morning actually remembered was the day itself: a Monday.
And it was nearly noon. The news of his ﷺ departure had outrun him by days, so every morning the believers walked out to watch the southern road, and every morning the desert sun defeated them by ten or eleven and sent them home. He ﷺ arrived in the empty hour, around midday, the road deserted, which is why the first voice to announce him belonged to a man up a date palm.
Madinah in that year was not one town but a constellation of little settlements scattered across the oasis, and the farthest of them out toward Makkah was Quba. So Quba received him ﷺ first, and he lodged with a Companion most of us have never been taught to name: Kulthum ibn Hidm, an elderly man of the Ansar. We know almost nothing else about him. We know only that Allah kept him alive exactly long enough to host His Messenger ﷺ, and that soon afterward he became the first Muslim to die in Madinah after the arrival. A whole quiet lifetime, preserved, it seems, for one honor. By day, some reports add, the Prophet ﷺ would receive his stream of visitors in the house of Sa'd ibn Khaythamah, a bachelor whose home could absorb the crowds, and return to Kulthum's house at night; Abu Bakr lodged with another family of the Ansar.
The mosque founded on taqwa
لَا تَقُمْ فِيهِ أَبَدًا ۚ لَّمَسْجِدٌ أُسِّسَ عَلَى التَّقْوَىٰ مِنْ أَوَّلِ يَوْمٍ أَحَقُّ أَن تَقُومَ فِيهِ ۚ فِيهِ رِجَالٌ يُحِبُّونَ أَن يَتَطَهَّرُوا ۚ وَاللَّهُ يُحِبُّ الْمُطَّهِّرِينَ
“Do not stand [for prayer] within it - ever. A mosque founded on righteousness from the first day is more worthy for you to stand in. Within it are men who love to purify themselves; and Allāh loves those who purify themselves.”
Surah at-Tawbah 9:108 Read 9:108 with tafsir
Here is the wonder waiting for him ﷺ in Quba: Madinah was already praying. The believers had a place they gathered, makeshift, nothing purpose-built, and they had something more startling still, Jumu'ah. From Makkah, where persecution made any public gathering impossible, the Prophet ﷺ had sent word to establish the Friday prayer, and for around a year the Muslims of Madinah, Mus'ab ibn Umayr among them, had been praying a Jumu'ah their Prophet ﷺ himself had never once in his life been free to pray. The Sheikh lingers on the strangeness and sweetness of it: Jumu'ah is one of the rare commands of Islam the Companions lived before he ﷺ could.
He ﷺ stayed in Quba through the week, and part of the reason was a traveler still on the road. Ali radiyallahu anhu had remained three extra nights in Makkah, handing back the deposits the Makkans had entrusted to the very man ﷺ they were trying to kill, then set out by the short main road while the Prophet ﷺ had gone by the cave and the long way around. He caught up at Quba on the Wednesday or Thursday, and in those same days the work began: the reports say the Prophet ﷺ set the first stone of Masjid Quba with his own hands, Ali and Abu Bakr continued after him, and the Ansar carried the building home. The first purpose-built mosque in the history of Islam.
The verse above came down later, and it came down forbidding. The hypocrites of Madinah would eventually raise a mosque of their own as a weapon (its story is waiting further along in the series), and Allah commanded His Prophet ﷺ never to stand in it: stand instead, He said, in the mosque founded on taqwa from its first day, full of men who love to purify themselves. The majority of the scholars of tafsir, the Sheikh notes, read that as Masjid Quba, in whose vicinity the hypocrites' building stood. And a hadith in Abu Dawud tells how, when the verse came down, the people of Quba were asked what they had done to be praised so. Their answer was disarmingly practical: water. They washed after answering nature's call, where most of that world only wiped. No scholar ever made water obligatory for it, the Sheikh adds in passing, but it is the better way, and Allah loved them for loving it.
Yet in another authentic hadith a Companion asked the Prophet ﷺ to his face which mosque the verse meant, and he answered: by Allah, it is this mosque of mine. So which is it? Both, and the reconciliation is itself the teaching: both mosques were founded on taqwa from their first day, and he ﷺ said it of his own so that nobody would imagine Quba outranked it. He never stopped loving Quba, though. Ali relates that every single week he ﷺ would ride or walk out to it and pray two rakaat there, and he left his ummah a standing offer: whoever purifies himself in his house, then comes to Masjid Quba and prays in it, carries away the reward of an umrah.
The first Friday
On the Thursday night he ﷺ announced that in the morning he would enter the city itself. The Ansar turned out more than five hundred strong, dressed in their ceremonial best, armor and blades worn the way you wear honor, a welcoming guard for the man ﷺ who had left Makkah hunted, with a single companion. And on that road, between Quba and the city, the sun tipped past its height and Friday came due. So the first Jumu'ah of the Prophet's ﷺ life was prayed in neither of his mosques: he stopped where the hour found him, in the quarter of one of the Ansar clans along the way, and prayed there, and the people of that place later raised a mosque of their own over the spot. A third mosque, planted by a pause.
Then he ﷺ stood and gave the first khutbah of his life, preserved by Ibn Ishaq through a chain with a touch of weakness, the kind the scholars allow themselves to relate. Before its words, notice its size. Every khutbah of his ﷺ that survives runs three to five minutes; he counted a short sermon and a long prayer among the marks of a man who has understood the religion, and his own salah always outlasted his speech. Sheikh Yasir is honest about why we have inverted that: Friday is now the only hour most of the ummah spends inside a mosque at all, so the world's khutbahs have stretched to carry a week of teaching. His ﷺ first listeners needed no topping up; their iman ran at another voltage.
And what did he ﷺ choose for the first sermon in his new homeland? Giving. He urged them to be generous, and set the urging between two certainties: death is coming, and Allah will ask every soul what it was given and what it sent ahead. Inside the khutbah sits a line his ummah has never stopped repeating, carried independently in Bukhari: whoever can shield himself from the fire with even half a date, let him do it; and whoever cannot find that much, then with a good word, for the good deed is repaid ten times over. Then he sat down.
Of course the first sermon was a call for sacrifice, the Sheikh says: a community was about to be built out of nothing, and there was never a moment the ummah needed givers more than at its birth. And mark the method. Hope and fear arrive together, the promise beside the warning, Jannah beside the fire. Some faiths of our age keep only the warm half and call the other backward; the Qur'an keeps both, because human nature answers to both.
The words that converted a chief
The second half of the sermon, in Ibn Ishaq's record, opens with the words Muslims still open sermons with, khutbat al-hajah: all praise is for Allah; we praise Him, we seek His help, we ask His forgiveness; we take refuge in Allah from the evils of our souls and from our wrong deeds; whomever Allah guides, none can lead astray, and whomever Allah leaves to stray, none can guide; and I bear witness that none deserves worship but Allah, and that Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger. Oddly, the record places these words at the head of the second part rather than the first, where he ﷺ usually put them; the Sheikh flags the puzzle and leaves it with Allah.
Do not let familiarity flatten those lines; they once converted a man all by themselves. Back in Makkah, a chief of the tribes of Yemen named Dimad al-Azdi, a healer by trade, had arrived so thoroughly warned about the dangerous sorcerer Muhammad ﷺ that he stuffed his ears with cotton. Then he reasoned himself brave: I am an intelligent man; if he is mad, I will treat him. He pulled the cotton out, walked up, and heard exactly this opening. Repeat what you just said, he demanded, and the Prophet ﷺ did. I have memorized the poetry of men and of jinn, Dimad finally said, and by Allah I have never heard anything like these words: you must be a man whom Allah inspires. He accepted Islam before the actual speech had even begun. Ibn Taymiyyah later wrote a treatise on those few lines, Ibn al-Qayyim filled pages on them, and in our own era al-Albani gave them an entire book.
Where the first half of the khutbah asked for their hands, the second asked for their hearts. The truly successful one, he ﷺ told them, is the one whose heart Allah has made beautiful and brought into Islam out of disbelief. Love Allah with the whole of your heart. Never tire of the speech of Allah and never tire of His remembrance, for Allah chooses what He wills, and He has chosen the Qur'an and dhikr as the best of deeds; do not let your hearts grow hard. Worship Allah and join nothing to Him; be true to Him in all that you say; and love one another with the spirit of Allah between you, a phrase so singular that the Sheikh says he has found it in no other hadith. The last word was a warning dressed as a fact: Allah hates that His covenant be broken.
Action, then spirit; the hand, then the heart; fear braided with hope: an entire religion folded into a few minutes, twice. And one prescription from that first khutbah is still waiting on most of us fourteen centuries later: a daily dose of the Qur'an and a daily dose of dhikr, the two things he ﷺ named that keep a heart from hardening.
A mosque at the center of everything
فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ وَيُذْكَرَ فِيهَا اسْمُهُ يُسَبِّحُ لَهُ فِيهَا بِالْغُدُوِّ وَالْآصَالِ
“[Such niches are] in houses [i.e., mosques] which Allāh has ordered to be raised and that His name be mentioned [i.e., praised] therein; exalting Him within them in the morning and the evenings”
Surah an-Nur 24:36 Read 24:36 with tafsir
رِجَالٌ لَّا تُلْهِيهِمْ تِجَارَةٌ وَلَا بَيْعٌ عَن ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ وَإِقَامِ الصَّلَاةِ وَإِيتَاءِ الزَّكَاةِ ۙ يَخَافُونَ يَوْمًا تَتَقَلَّبُ فِيهِ الْقُلُوبُ وَالْأَبْصَارُ
“[Are] men whom neither commerce nor sale distracts from the remembrance of Allāh and performance of prayer and giving of zakāh. They fear a Day in which the hearts and eyes will [fearfully] turn about -”
Surah an-Nur 24:37 Read 24:37 with tafsir
The khutbah done, he ﷺ rode on into the city, the camel knelt where yesterday's episode left her, and Abu Ayyub's household took him in. And the first work he ﷺ turned to, before any business of the new community and before any home of his own, was the same work he had just left behind in Quba: a mosque. Do the count with the Sheikh, because the arithmetic is the sermon. Within roughly five days of reaching his new city, the Prophet ﷺ had begun two mosques, three if you count the prayer stop a grateful clan later built over, and he still did not have a roof to his name. Allah's house went up before his own.
Allah calls the mosques His own houses, and in Surah an-Nur He shows you what they are for: His name raised and remembered in them morning and evening, by people no buying or selling can pull away. Now watch everything that one courtyard became. It was the school, where the circles of knowledge met. It was the council chamber, where he ﷺ would one day ask the Companions, before Badr and before Uhud, what do you think we should do: the nearest thing the young community had to a parliament. It was the social heart of the city, where the Companions laughed and told stories of their jahiliyyah days while he ﷺ sat among them; weddings were celebrated in it; armies formed their ranks inside it and marched from its door; the Qur'an itself spread outward from it.
And it was a roof for whoever had none. Every homeless newcomer was housed in it, for he ﷺ said, in an authentic hadith, that the masjid is the home of every person of taqwa. The Sheikh hears both meanings at once. Where does a person of taqwa feel most at home? There. And the Muslim with no home at all discovers that Allah's house is his. The Prophet ﷺ lived the first meaning visibly, spending more time in his masjid than in his own rooms, and soon the mosque would even become a university with resident students, the people of Suffa, whose story is tomorrow's.
One correction to the imagination before you leave the building site. Do not picture a single mosque serving the whole oasis: Madinah was a string of settlements, some of them an hour and a half apart on foot, and in time at least a dozen neighborhood mosques stood across it. His ﷺ mosque was simply the center and the largest, and, as far as the reports tell, the only one in which Jumu'ah was prayed.
The son of Sumayyah
Back at the building site, the Sheikh adds a story he almost ran out of time to tell, and it carries one of the weightiest prophecies in the seerah. The Prophet ﷺ did not supervise the work; he labored in it, hauling stone like everyone else. The sight of him ﷺ carrying rock pulled poetry out of the Companions, a line they chanted as they worked: if we sit back while the Prophet ﷺ labors, that, from us, is the deed gone astray.
Through the dust came Ammar ibn Yasir, the young man Makkah had orphaned twice over: his father Yasir and his mother Sumayyah were the first martyrs of this ummah. He was in his twenties, coated head to foot in dust, and carrying two of the great quarry stones while everyone else carried one. So he lodged a complaint, the way you do with someone you love: Messenger of Allah, they are killing me, two stones on me and one on them. He did not mean it, the Sheikh smiles, and the smile carries fiqh: the Companions joked with their Prophet ﷺ, a joke understood as a joke is no lie, and his ﷺ own jokes, unlike ours, never bent the truth even in play.
The Prophet ﷺ smiled back, brushed the dust from him with his own hand, and answered with words that would take decades to unfold: they are not killing you, son of Sumayyah; the ones who will kill you are the group that has gone beyond the bounds, al-fi'ah al-baghiyah. And softer words beside them: everyone here is earning one reward, and you are earning two. And the last thing you drink in this world will be a glass of milk. Hear the name he ﷺ chose. Not Ammar: son of Sumayyah, raising the first martyr of Islam in her son's own honor, and the Companions called him Ibn Sumayyah ever after.
Decades later, an old man in his late sixties stood with Ali against the forces of Mu'awiyah in the war that broke the ummah's heart. In his camp he was handed milk and drank it, went forward into the fight, and an arrow found him. The Companions remembered the building site, and for Ahlus-Sunnah the hadith became the sign that Ali radiyallahu anhu was the closer of the two to the truth, said with all the adab the subject deserves: Mu'awiyah sincere yet mistaken, and not a bad word about either of them. Some of the greatest Companions refused to take any side at all; asked in an earlier dispute whether he stood with the party of Ali or the party of Aisha, Ibn Abbas answered, I am on the team of Muhammad ﷺ. What no Sunni doubts, the Sheikh finishes, is what that dusty afternoon proved: the Prophet ﷺ was given knowledge nobody else had, down to the last glass of milk.
The adhan arrives in a dream
Meanwhile the prayer itself was settling into its final form. Since the night of Isra and Mi'raj, which the Sheikh places most likely in the tenth or eleventh year of the dawah, the believers had prayed five times a day, but every prayer had been two rakaat. Aisha radiyallahu anha relates, in Bukhari, that when they came to Madinah the prayers were set as you know them now: Dhuhr, Asr and Isha rose to four, Maghrib stood at three, Fajr kept its two, and the original two was preserved as a mercy for the traveler. Around the obligations, the sunnah prayers took their places.
Then, within his ﷺ first month or two in the city, came a question that hiding had never let them ask: how do you call an entire city to prayer? He ﷺ put it to the Companions in open consultation. A bell, like the Christians? He ﷺ disliked bells; the angels, he said, do not accompany a caravan that carries one. A horn, like the shofar the Jews sounded? Set aside as well. Other ideas rose and fell, and the meeting closed with nothing chosen.
That night, Allah settled in sleep what the council could not settle awake. Abdullah bin Zayd of the Ansar dreamed of a man selling the very instruments they had been debating, and tried to buy one, to call the Muslims to prayer, he explained. Shall I not show you something better, the seller said, and taught him the words the earth has never since stopped hearing: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, through to the end of the adhan. He woke with the dream blazing in him, threw on his clothes and went straight to the Prophet ﷺ, who listened and gave his verdict: it is a true dream, in sha Allah. Then: stand with Bilal on the roof of the masjid and cast the words to him one by one, for his voice is the loudest. So, the Sheikh smiles, the first adhan was technically given twice at once, whispered phrase by phrase by Abdullah bin Zayd and proclaimed to the world by Bilal. Before it finished, Umar ibn al-Khattab came hurrying into the masjid, his lower garment trailing half tied: Messenger of Allah, I saw these same words in a dream. Allah had scattered the gift across more than one sleeper, and willed whose mouth would reach His Prophet ﷺ first.
Two reflections of the Sheikh's to keep. First, the law: the adhan is the only piece of the Sharia that arrived through the dream of a Companion, and even then it was not the dream that legislated it but the Prophet's ﷺ ruling upon it; this ummah does not take its religion from dreams. Second, the mystery: Dr. Yasir Qadhi went looking for any scholar who explains why Allah chose this one ritual to arrive this one way, and found no one; and he went looking for Abdullah bin Zayd and found a man remembered for almost nothing else, the Companion of the dream of the adhan, as Ibn Hajar sums him up. You can sense from the narrations that he hoped to be the muadhdhin himself; the calling went to Bilal's voice, and his remained the dream. Why him? What was his secret with Allah? We will never know in this world, and the Sheikh calls this one of the quiet sorrows of studying the seerah, how many of its heroes survive as a single line. The Prophet ﷺ portioned the blessings according to what each man carried, and Allah portioned the honor according to what He knew.
Two rooms against the mosque wall
The mosque took some two or three weeks to raise. Only then did he ﷺ build his own lodging, and lodging is the right word: rooms set against the mosque wall, not a house apart from it. He had two wives then, Sawdah and Aisha, in the years between Khadijah's passing and the marriages still to come, so two rooms went up beside the masjid, the only homes connected to it. The wives he ﷺ married years later lived in a row of houses on a separate block, with no doors opening onto the mosque, for by then the city had built itself in close around it.
And one undated tenderness from inside those rooms, kept because of what it teaches about giving. Sawdah radiyallahu anha had married him ﷺ in Makkah when she was already elderly, senior to him in age. At some point in Madinah, a year no one recorded, she came to him with a gift nobody had asked of her: Messenger of Allah, I am an old woman, and I know you prefer the company of Aisha, so I gift my night to her. She wanted nothing but his ﷺ pleasure, the Sheikh says, and she knew exactly what would bring it. He honored her always, sitting with her by day; the nights became Aisha's doubled portion; and so the room history remembers as the room he ﷺ lived in, the one against the wall of his mosque, was Aisha's. One more of the blessings of Aisha, handed to her by an older woman's open hand.