By this night, Makkah is almost empty of believers. For three and a half months they have been slipping away to Yathrib, family by family, house by locked house, until the only ones left are the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, Ali, and a scattering of women and children. Everyone else was free to go. He ﷺ alone was still waiting, because for him, leaving required permission from heaven.
Day 27 is the hijrah itself, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi pieces the night together the way the sources demand, report by report: a veiled visitor at the hottest hour of the day, a father weeping for joy, a girl tearing her belt in half with her teeth, a parliament voting on a murder, a crack of rock with room for two, and a bounty hunter who rode out for a hundred camels and rode home carrying the promise of an emperor's bracelets.
Umar leaves in daylight
Before the Prophet's ﷺ own departure, one last emigration deserves its scene. Every Muslim who left Makkah left the same way: quietly, at night, telling no one. One report remembers a single exception. Umar ibn al-Khattab, radiyallahu anhu, strapped on his sword, slung his bow and arrows, walked to the Kaaba dressed for the road, and made tawaf seven times in front of everyone. Then came the announcement: whoever among you wants his mother to mourn him tonight, his children to wake as orphans, his wife to sit as a widow, let him meet me beyond this valley, for I am making hijrah.
No one met him. And the moment shows you what Allah had answered years earlier, when the Prophet ﷺ prayed: O Allah, strengthen Islam with whichever of the two Umars is more beloved to You. One was Umar ibn al-Khattab. The other was the man history calls Abu Jahl, whose given name grew from the same root. Allah loved one of them for this religion. Keep your eye on the other; he will spend the rest of this night, and this episode, working for the dark.
The visitor at the hottest hour
The most authentic account of these days is a child's. Aisha, radiyallahu anha, was around six or seven, and she narrates in Bukhari: I cannot remember a day when my parents were not Muslims, and not a day passed without the Prophet ﷺ visiting our house, morning or evening. When the command to emigrate came, Abu Bakr readied a camel and asked his permission to go, because the companions asked him ﷺ before everything. Wait, he ﷺ told him, I hope that Allah will give me permission too. Abu Bakr heard what lay underneath it: are you hoping for my companionship? Yes, he ﷺ said. So Abu Bakr prepared two camels instead of one and fed them for it: penned them, salted their feed so they would drink deep, and fattened them for the desert for what Aisha calls four months. It was closer to three and a half; she rounded up.
Which day was it? Dr. Yasir Qadhi is careful here: no hadith names the date. What the sources give is the day of the week, for Ibn Abbas reports in Sahih Muslim that the milestones of his ﷺ life fell on Mondays: born on a Monday, made a prophet on a Monday. Working the calendars backward, modern researchers settle on Monday the 26th of Safar, in the thirteenth year of the dawah. Notice that: the hijrah did not happen in Muharram. The companions later opened the calendar at Muharram for reasons of their own; the journey itself belongs to Safar.
The day announced itself strangely. Noon, the furnace hour, when Makkah shuttered itself and slept the nap he ﷺ himself encouraged. Through the deserted streets came a figure with his turban wrapped across his face, and the household knew him anyway, the way you know someone you love by his walk. Aisha remembered the alarm in the room: no one comes at this hour unless something grave has happened. He ﷺ asked Abu Bakr to clear the house. Messenger of Allah, said Abu Bakr, there is no one here but your family. The nikah to Aisha had already been contracted, though she would not join his household for years; behind the curtain of that small house, a girl sat listening to history arrive. Then he ﷺ said it: Allah has given me permission to leave. And Abu Bakr begged, by my mother and my father, has permission been given for me to accompany you? Yes, he ﷺ said. Companionship.
Aisha said afterward: I never knew a person could weep for joy until I saw my father weep that day. Then Abu Bakr offered what he had been fattening for months: two camels ready for the desert, and one of them is yours. And the Prophet ﷺ, who had never owned a camel, answered: only if I pay its price. He would not ride the greatest journey of his life on a borrowed good deed. Part of it was the perfection of his manners, a man who never once cashed in his station. And part of it was a hunger of another kind: he wanted the reward of the hijrah whole, paid from his own pocket, shared with no one.
She of the two belts
The house became a departure point within the hour, and it ran on its women. Asma, radiyallahu anha, Abu Bakr's eldest, bundled food and provisions for the road and found nothing to tie the bag with. So she took off her own belt, tore it in two with her teeth, kept half for her garment and tied the saddlebag of the Prophet ﷺ with the other. Heaven liked the trade. She is Dhat an-Nitaqayn to the end of time: she of the two belts.
Abu Bakr, meanwhile, emptied the house of money. Ibn Ishaq's account remembers that he had forty thousand dirhams on the day he accepted Islam and five thousand left now; the missing thirty five thousand had gone to buy persecuted slaves out of their owners' hands, Bilal among them. The last five thousand, every coin, went into the saddlebag. His logic was love with a clear head: Makkah will not let two girls starve, but the road ahead has no neighbors, no guarantees, and no telling who will need paying off.
The bill for that generosity arrived quickly, and Asma paid it twice. First came her grandfather Abu Quhafa, Abu Bakr's own father, still a pagan, blind, old, and sharp tongued: your father has abandoned you, girls, and taken every coin with him. Asma filled the money pouch with pebbles, wrapped it in cloth, and set the old man's hand on it: no, grandfather, see, he has left us all this. He felt the weight and went away satisfied, and she said later: by Allah, he had left us nothing; I only wanted to quiet the old man. Then came Abu Jahl, hunting the fugitives, demanding to know where they had gone, and he struck her until she bled. She told him not one word.
Midnight in their parliament
وَإِذْ يَمْكُرُ بِكَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا لِيُثْبِتُوكَ أَوْ يَقْتُلُوكَ أَوْ يُخْرِجُوكَ ۚ وَيَمْكُرُونَ وَيَمْكُرُ اللَّهُ ۖ وَاللَّهُ خَيْرُ الْمَاكِرِينَ
“And [remember, O Muḥammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allāh plans. And Allāh is the best of planners.”
Surah al-Anfal 8:30 Read 8:30 with tafsir
Ibn Abbas pointed at this ayah and said: this is that night. While the camels stood ready, the chiefs of every clan of Quraysh met in secret session in Darun-Nadwa, the hall that served Makkah as its parliament. Every clan but one: Banu Hashim was not invited. And Sheikh Yasir pauses over two more empty seats, because even a murder committee kept rules. Abu Lahab was left out; however gladly his heart would have voted, no Arab could be seen blessing the killing of his own nephew, and what he does not know he can never be made to answer for. And Mut'im was left out, the man whose word of protection still covered the Prophet ﷺ; you do not invite a chief to watch you tear up his own guarantee. Their treachery kept, to the very end, a strange residue of tribal honor.
A knock interrupted the secrecy: an old stranger asking to join, a shaykh of Najd, he said, who had heard of the gathering and might benefit them with his wisdom. Ibn Abbas named that visitor plainly: Shaytan, come to make sure the night ended in blood (a report, the Sheikh notes, whose chain skips a generation, and a conclusion the night itself makes easy to believe). The options went around the room. Chain him up in a house? His words would leak through the stones; his followers would smuggle them out of Makkah. Exile him? You would only be delivering him to his followers, and he would return stronger. Then Abu Jahl said the thing on every mind in the room: none of you has the courage to say it, so I will. Why do we not kill him?
Even for them it was the unsayable; the Arabs did not kill their own in cold blood, and the shame of it would follow Quraysh forever. So Abu Jahl engineered the shame away. Let every clan send one strong young man. Let them strike together, as one hand, so that his blood lies on every sword in Makkah and no single house can be blamed. Banu Hashim cannot declare war on the whole city; they will have no choice but to accept the blood money, and it will be done. The stranger from Najd declared it the only intelligent plan. The young men were chosen on the spot and sent, that same night, to wait outside his ﷺ door. And here is the line the Sheikh wants you to carry out of this room: the timing of the hijrah was this meeting. Their plot set the clock for the escape Allah had already written. They plan, and Allah plans.
Walking out through Yasin
وَجَعَلْنَا مِن بَيْنِ أَيْدِيهِمْ سَدًّا وَمِنْ خَلْفِهِمْ سَدًّا فَأَغْشَيْنَاهُمْ فَهُمْ لَا يُبْصِرُونَ
“And We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier and covered them, so they do not see.”
Surah Yasin 36:9 Read 36:9 with tafsir
That same evening Jibril came down with the order: leave now, tonight, for Allah has told him ﷺ what the parliament decided. The famous details of the next hour come from Ibn Ishaq without a chain of narrators, and the retelling keeps them exactly as the Sheikh hands them on: beloved, less than certain, and not one of them difficult for Allah. Ali, the young man raised in the Prophet's ﷺ own household, eighteen or nineteen now, lay down in his ﷺ bed, so that any eye pressed to the window opening would see a sleeper and relax. And the Prophet ﷺ stepped out of his front door, through the cordon of chosen swordsmen, reciting the opening of Surah Yasin and casting dust on their heads as he passed. Not one of them saw him ﷺ. They discovered the dust in their hair, and the decoy in the bed, only after he was gone.
He ﷺ went through the dark to Abu Bakr's house, and the two of them rode. Where the last buildings of Makkah gave out, he stopped and turned for one look, and spoke to his city: you are the most blessed land on earth and the most beloved of it to me, and had my own people not expelled me, I would never have left you. He would not stand in Makkah again, except for one brief visit, until he entered it as its conqueror eight and a half years later.
Stand at this hinge for a moment. Thirteen and a half years earlier, in the first trembling days of revelation, the old scholar who believed him had said: I wish I could be a young man, alive, on the day your people drive you out. Will my own people drive me out? he ﷺ had asked, astonished. Yes, came the answer: no man ever brought what you bring without being made an enemy. Now the words were coming true to the letter, at the city limits, in the dark. Prophecies in this story do not rust.
Three quiet jobs and a hired guide
وَمِنْ أَهْلِ الْكِتَابِ مَنْ إِن تَأْمَنْهُ بِقِنطَارٍ يُؤَدِّهِ إِلَيْكَ وَمِنْهُم مَّنْ إِن تَأْمَنْهُ بِدِينَارٍ لَّا يُؤَدِّهِ إِلَيْكَ إِلَّا مَا دُمْتَ عَلَيْهِ قَائِمًا ۗ ذَٰلِكَ بِأَنَّهُمْ قَالُوا لَيْسَ عَلَيْنَا فِي الْأُمِّيِّينَ سَبِيلٌ وَيَقُولُونَ عَلَى اللَّهِ الْكَذِبَ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ
“And among the People of the Scripture is he who, if you entrust him with a great amount [of wealth], he will return it to you. And among them is he who, if you entrust him with a [single] coin, he will not return it to you unless you are constantly standing over him [demanding it]. That is because they say, "There is no blame upon us concerning the unlearned." And they speak untruth about Allāh while they know [it].”
Surah Aal Imran 3:75 Read 3:75 with tafsir
Madinah lies due north of Makkah. The cave of Thawr lies due south, a hard climb nearly three hours the wrong way. That was the plan's first stroke: turn your back on your destination and let the hunt exhaust itself northward. They would lie three days and three nights in the rock, then loop down toward the coast near what is today Jeddah and ride a back road north that only the desert tribes knew. Fourteen centuries later, engineers with maps drew the modern Makkah to Madinah highway along the easiest line through the land, and it runs close to the hijrah's route. The back road was the best road all along.
Around the cave, Abu Bakr's long planning unfolded as three quiet jobs. His son Abdullah, a sharp boy nobody bothered to watch, moved through Makkah's markets by day with his ears open and came out to the cave with food, drink, and the day's intelligence. A shepherd, a man Abu Bakr had once bought out of slavery and freed, grazed his flock back and forth across the boy's tracks until the sand kept no testimony. And a hired guide held the secret of the back road: a Bedouin of a distant tribe, not of Quraysh, and not a Muslim.
Sit with that last one, because the Sheikh does. The two most wanted men in Arabia placed their lives in the hands of a pagan, for a fee that was a fraction of the bounty his silence was worth, and he kept faith. The scholars went looking for this man and found almost nothing; we do not even know whether he ever accepted Islam. What we do know is the judgment of the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr: this man is honest, and honesty is real wherever it lives. The Qur'an says it of the People of the Book in this very ayah: some will return a fortune intact, some will cheat you of a single coin. Faith and trustworthiness are two separate tests, and for this road, the two travelers hired proven trustworthiness.
Two in the cave, Allah the third
Quraysh woke to dust on their swordsmen and a cousin in the bed, and the bounty went out across the desert: a hundred camels for the two of them, dead or alive, no questions asked. A camel was the car of that Arabia; imagine a hundred of them for one fugitive who, until that week, had never owned even one. Riders combed every road north and found nothing, because the trail ran south. So they bought expertise: a master tracker, a private detective of footprints and camel sign, who followed the traces from Abu Bakr's door all the way to the foot of Thawr and stopped: from here the mountain takes them, and I can read no further.
It was a guess, but it was the best lead in three days, and the chiefs themselves climbed, Abu Jahl among them. Understand the geometry of the moment: the cave of Thawr is not a chamber, it is a crevice you wiggle into, with room for barely two, and its mouth sits at the level of a standing man's feet. It looks like nothing more than a crack in the rock, which is exactly what saved them, and Abu Bakr could see their sandals. He whispered: if one of them looks down at his feet, he will see us. And the answer came back, calm as a man at home, the sentence preserved in Bukhari that deserves memorizing: what do you think of two, when Allah is the third of them?
What about the spider spinning its web across the mouth of the cave, the tree, the nesting pigeons? Here is the Sheikh's weighing, kept exactly: the spiderweb comes in Musnad Ahmad with a slight weakness, and it is the strongest of those reports; the leaning tree and the pigeons arrive with generations missing from their chains. Narrate them without embarrassment, and without certainty; nothing in them would be hard for Allah. But notice what the soundest report makes the shield that day: not silk and feathers. A sentence of tawakkul, and eyes that Allah simply did not permit to look down. The hunters walked over the cave and went home. On the morning after the third night, the guide arrived with the camels.
The hunter and the bracelets of Kisra
Word spread that three riders had slipped away: the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, and a guide. One man nearly cashed the bounty, and he told the story on himself, in the first person, for the rest of his life. Suraqa ibn Malik, a chief among the desert clans, was sitting with his tribesmen when a man came back from the hunt: I have just seen three riders in the distance; I am certain it is the ones Quraysh wants. Suraqa wanted a hundred camels with no partners. Those are not the three, he said smoothly, that is the party of so and so, I know them. He sat a while longer to play it cool, then slipped home, armed himself, mounted his warhorse, and galloped.
What happened next he swore to himself. At first sight of them his horse sank into the ground and threw him. He cast the azlam, the divining arrows the pagans consulted before a venture, and drew: do not proceed. Greed remounted him. The horse went down again; the arrows refused again; he rode a third time, close enough now to call out to them, and the horse plunged hardest of all, and in one version a smoke rose between him and the riders. I knew then, Suraqa said, that this was a force beyond me, and that this man's affair was going to prevail. And the bounty hunter called out to his prey, begging safe conduct. He had been watching them as he closed in: one rider could not be still, wheeling to the rear, then spurring to the front, fear wearing him like a coat, and none of it for himself. That was Abu Bakr. The other rider never once turned his head: settled in the saddle, reciting, as unbothered as a man riding home.
Suraqa asked for the guarantee in writing, and it was written for him on a piece of leather. He offered them provisions; they took nothing. One request only, from Abu Bakr: keep our secret. He kept it, and turned for home. When Abu Jahl later mocked him in scathing verse for letting them slip, Suraqa answered in verse: had you stood where I stood and seen what my horse did, you would not say a word. But the strangest gift came as he turned to leave. The Prophet ﷺ, a hunted refugee with a price on his head and one newly bought camel to his name, said: how will it be with you, Suraqa, on the day you wear the two bracelets of Kisra? Kisra: the emperor of Persia, the way you say the king when on all the earth there is only one king, a man famous for his gold. Suraqa could barely stammer the name back. The Prophet ﷺ did not even elaborate.
Hold the receipt to the end of the story. Eight or nine years later, after the conquest of Makkah, at Hunayn, Suraqa came forward holding a worn piece of leather; the promise of safety was honored, and Suraqa accepted Islam and became a companion. Within six or seven years of the Prophet's ﷺ passing, the Persian empire itself buckled; Qadisiyyah was the beginning of its end, and the treasures of its palaces were carried into the masjid of Madinah. Umar looked at the heaped gold of an empire and said: where is Suraqa? They brought him, an old Bedouin now, and Umar sat him in his own place, found the two bracelets in the treasure, and clasped them onto his wrists, and the masjid shook with takbir. In one account they walked him around Madinah wearing them, because everyone knew the promise; it had become legend while it waited. Praise be to Allah, said Umar, who stripped these from the emperor of Persia and dressed a Bedouin of the desert in them.