Years later, in Madinah, Aisha radiyallahu anha asked him a tender question: was there ever a day harder for you than Uhud? She had watched the wounds of Uhud almost take his life, and she could not imagine worse. He ﷺ answered immediately, yes. The worst day his people ever gave him was a day she had never heard of, the day of Aqaba, outside a green city in the mountains called Ta'if.
This is that day. It comes weeks after the Year of Sorrow, after the graves of Khadija and Abu Talib were still fresh, when Makkah had become a place with no one left to protect him. Hold it gently. Almost everyone first hears this story as a child, and almost no one outgrows it, because it is here, with blood in his sandals and not a soul on his side, that the mercy of the Messenger ﷺ shows its full size.
Why Ta'if
وَقَالُوا لَوْلَا نُزِّلَ هَٰذَا الْقُرْآنُ عَلَىٰ رَجُلٍ مِّنَ الْقَرْيَتَيْنِ عَظِيمٍ
“And they said, "Why was this Qur'ān not sent down upon a great man from [one of] the two cities?"”
Surah az-Zukhruf 43:31 Read 43:31 with tafsir
For ten years he ﷺ had never once thought of leaving Makkah. Not through the boycott, not through the insults, not through the years of being ignored. A person stays with his own people for as long as it is humanly possible, and he stayed. It was only when Abu Talib died and Abu Lahab withdrew his protection, leaving him with no legal standing at all, a man anyone could harm and no one would answer for, that he began, for the first time, to look for another city.
The city he chose was Ta'if, and Sheikh Yasir explains why it was the natural choice. It was the nearest large city to Makkah, the twin and the rival of the Quraysh, close enough that the two cities knew each other family by family. It was even cited by the Quraysh as one of the two great cities of Arabia: when they sneered that revelation should have come to some grand man, this is the verse that records it, a great man from one of the two cities. And one of the three chieftains of Ta'if had married into the Prophet's ﷺ extended family. There was even a thread of blood. If anywhere would listen, it would be here.
The walk, and the tying of the camel
He went on foot, and he went quietly, taking only Zayd ibn Haritha radiyallahu anhu, the freed man he loved like a son. Ta'if sits high in the mountains; the climb is a day and a half, two days, of winding paths, and a mount would have spared his body. He took none. To be seen leaving on a camel would have raised suspicion, and suspicion could have gotten him stopped, or worse, before he ever left.
Sheikh Yasir lingers on this, because it cuts against a lazy idea of faith. Trusting Allah does not mean acting recklessly. The man with the most complete trust in Allah who ever lived still planned to the last detail, crossed every t, slipped out of the city like a man going for an evening stroll, so that no one would know. You do everything in your power, perfectly, and then you place the outcome in Allah's hands. That is what trust actually looks like.
And by walking out, he was doing something heavier than travel. With his protection gone, every move was a statement. To leave Makkah at all was to cut the last fraying tie to the Quraysh, to accept the limbo Abu Lahab had left him in. He turned his back on the only home he had ever known, and walked toward a city that might say yes.
Rejected, and stoned out of the city
Ta'if was ruled by three brothers, the sons of Amr, who had agreed to share their father's chieftaincy between them. He ﷺ went to all three, presented the message of Islam, and asked them to believe. They rejected him, and they did it with the cruelest sarcasm. One said: if Allah truly sent you, I may as well tear down the covering of the Kaaba. The second: could Allah find no one better than you to send? The third refused even to speak: if you are a prophet you are too great for me to address, and if you are lying you are too low for me to bother with.
Even then, rising to leave, he ﷺ was still planning. He asked them one thing: if you will not accept me, at least do not tell the Quraysh I came. He was protecting what little ground he had left, and it seems they granted him that much. Then, according to the stronger reports, he did not simply leave. He stayed in Ta'if for around a week, working the marketplace, going to the common people now that the leaders had refused, because wisdom courts the powerful but never writes off the masses. Later converts from Ta'if would remember him preaching in their streets, and no one answering.
And when it looked as though one or two might actually listen, the leaders panicked. They set the town's mob on him, the riffraff and the idle, and told them to drive this man out with stones. They pelted him until the blood ran. Zayd threw his own body in the way and was wounded from head to foot, but two men cannot shield each other from a whole city. By the time they let him go, his sandals were soaked through with his own blood.
To You I complain
قَالَ إِنَّمَا أَشْكُو بَثِّي وَحُزْنِي إِلَى اللَّهِ وَأَعْلَمُ مِنَ اللَّهِ مَا لَا تَعْلَمُونَ
“He said, "I only complain of my suffering and my grief to Allāh, and I know from Allāh that which you do not know."”
Surah Yusuf 12:86 Read 12:86 with tafsir
He walked out of Ta'if in what we would honestly call a state of shock. By his own telling, he did not come back to himself, did not know where he was, until he had reached a place miles outside the city. There, bloodied and utterly alone but for Zayd, he sat in the shade of a tree by a garden wall and raised the words preserved in Ibn Ishaq, the words one of our scholars said need no chain of narration, because you can hear from them alone that they came from the heart of a prophet.
O Allah, to You I complain of my weakness, my helplessness, my lowliness before people. O Most Merciful of those who show mercy. You are the Lord of the weak, and You are my Lord. To whom would You leave me? To a stranger who would meet me with a hard face, or to an enemy You have handed my affair? If You are not angry with me, I do not care; but Your wellbeing is wider for me. I seek refuge in the light of Your Face, by which all darkness is lit and the affairs of this world and the next are set right, from Your anger descending upon me or Your displeasure alighting on me. To You belongs the right to reproach until You are pleased. And there is no power and no strength except by You.
Sheikh Yasir asks you to notice what is, and is not, in this du'a. There is no question of why. Complaining to Allah is not only allowed, it is sunnah; Ya'qub said as much when his grief broke open: I only complain of my suffering and my grief to Allah. But there are two kinds of complaint. There is the complaint of Iblis, why did You do this to me, and that is not a sin but disbelief. And there is the complaint of the prophets, look at me, Ya Allah, have mercy on me, and that is the very essence of tawhid. His entire plea is the second kind. And listen for what frightens him most. Not the blood on his hands, not the stones. His one fear is the question, have I done something to displease You. As long as You are not angry, he says, I can bear anything. The pain of the body was nothing next to the thought of Allah's displeasure.
A bowl of grapes, and a man from Nineveh
It was as if the moment he said there is no power except by You, the answer arrived. The garden belonged, though he did not know it, to two of his own distant relatives from the Quraysh, the sons of Rabiah. They had watched from afar, seen the stoning, seen the blood, and felt for their bleeding kinsman. They sent their servant out to him with a bowl of grapes, the most soothing of fruits, set in front of him the instant his plea finished.
The servant was a Christian named Addas, from Nineveh, the only practicing Christian for hundreds of miles. When the Prophet ﷺ took the grapes and said Bismillah, Addas startled: that is not a phrase the people of this land say. He ﷺ told him it was something his Lord had taught him, and asked where he was from. Nineveh, said Addas. The Prophet ﷺ smiled: the city of Yunus ibn Mata, my brother, for he too was a prophet of Allah. Addas was stunned that anyone in that desert had ever heard the name of Jonah, and he bent and kissed the head and the hands and the feet of the Prophet ﷺ, and believed.
His own masters scolded him; his religion, they said, was better than this man's. But Sheikh Yasir draws the lesson the scene was built for. One small sunnah, a single Bismillah said openly and without shame, opened a heart. And there is a quiet symbolism in who Allah sent: a man from Nineveh, from the furthest edge of the known world. Even when those nearest to him, Makkah and Ta'if, had rejected him, the farthest corners of the earth were already recognizing the truth.
The angel of the mountains, and a mercy refused
Then comes the report in Bukhari, the part the eye of man could never have witnessed. As he sat there, he looked up and saw a cloud shading him, and in it was Jibril. Your Lord, the angel said, has heard what your people said to you, and He has sent the angel of the mountains, to be at your command. The angel of the mountains gave him salam, and offered: command me as you wish. If you want, I will fold these two mountains over them, and Ta'if would be crushed between them and gone.
Sheikh Yasir stops you here, because this is the heart of the whole day. The sarcasm of the chieftains was still ringing in his ears. The blood was still wet on his skin. He had every reason and every right to say yes. And he ﷺ said no. No, do not do that. Rather, I hope that Allah will bring forth from their loins those who will worship Him alone, associating nothing with Him.
The miracle, the Sheikh says, is not that the angel came, or that the mountains could be folded. The miracle is that a man treated like this, fresh from this rejection and this wound, still had mercy enough in his heart to refuse, and to ask instead for the children of his attackers to be guided. If somebody says one sharp word to us, we will not forget it for ten years. He was stoned out of a city, and he prayed for that city's future. This is what it means that he was sent as a mercy to all the worlds. And it came true: years later he ﷺ himself would bring Ta'if into Islam, and the very ground where he was tortured is, to this day, a place where Allah is worshipped five times a day.
The jinn of Nakhlah
وَإِذْ صَرَفْنَا إِلَيْكَ نَفَرًا مِّنَ الْجِنِّ يَسْتَمِعُونَ الْقُرْآنَ فَلَمَّا حَضَرُوهُ قَالُوا أَنصِتُوا ۖ فَلَمَّا قُضِيَ وَلَّوْا إِلَىٰ قَوْمِهِم مُّنذِرِينَ
“And [mention, O Muḥammad], when We directed to you a few of the jinn, listening to the Qur'ān. And when they attended it, they said, "Listen attentively." And when it was concluded, they went back to their people as warners.”
Surah al-Ahqaf 46:29 Read 46:29 with tafsir
يَا قَوْمَنَا أَجِيبُوا دَاعِيَ اللَّهِ وَآمِنُوا بِهِ يَغْفِرْ لَكُم مِّن ذُنُوبِكُمْ وَيُجِرْكُم مِّنْ عَذَابٍ أَلِيمٍ
“O our people, respond to the Caller [i.e., Messenger] of Allāh and believe in him; He [i.e., Allāh] will forgive for you your sins and protect you from a painful punishment.”
Surah al-Ahqaf 46:31 Read 46:31 with tafsir
On the road back he camped in a desert grove in the valley of Nakhlah, still ten days from any home, the wounds not yet washed, the scars not yet healed. And as was his habit, no matter how broken the day, he stood in the cold of the night to pray tahajjud. He never abandoned that prayer, not in travel, not in injury, not while bleeding in the middle of the desert. Most of us can barely manage the five in our comfort.
And as he recited his Qur'an in the dark, something happened that no human eye on earth could see, something only Allah could have told us about afterward. Allah turned a party of jinn toward him to listen. When the world of men had mocked him, the world of the jinn fell silent: listen attentively, they told one another, and they did not move until he finished. Then they went back to their people, not merely as believers but as warners, mini-messengers, calling their own: O our people, respond to the Caller of Allah and believe in him.
Sheikh Yasir reads the symbolism plainly, and it is overwhelming after the week he has had. Even if every human you can see seems to have turned away, the truth is not contained by the reach of men. The near rejected him; the far, a Christian from Nineveh, accepted him. The seen rejected him; the unseen, the jinn of Nakhlah, stopped in their tracks to listen. No power on earth can wall in the spread of what is true.
How he came home
There was still the matter of getting back into Makkah, a city he had effectively renounced by leaving. Zayd asked him the obvious thing: how will we even enter, now that you have been driven out? He answered, Ya Zayd, Allah will make for us a way and a relief; Allah will not abandon His Prophet. This is where tawakkul finally has its place: I have done everything I could, I have fallen short in nothing, and now the rest is His.
He sent quietly to a few men of the Quraysh he judged might be sympathetic, asking for protection. Two declined with flimsy, embarrassed excuses, the embarrassment itself a sign their hearts were not as hard as the others. The third said yes: Mut'im ibn Adi, the same man who had helped break the boycott. Mut'im armed his sons, sent them out to escort the Prophet ﷺ in, stood at the Kaaba, and announced to all of Makkah that Muhammad ﷺ was under his protection. He died a pagan, and yet years later, after Badr, the Prophet ﷺ said that had Mut'im been alive and asked him for the prisoners, he would have released them all for his sake.
Sheikh Yasir draws the last lesson here, and it is a striking one. Not all who reject the faith are alike. A person may not share your belief and still stand for justice, for truth, for the protection of the weak; Allah can give victory to this religion through such people. There is no shame in honoring them for the good they do, in forming alliances with the Mut'ims of every age, as long as you keep the line clear: you honor the justice, not the disbelief. The Prophet ﷺ would not pray over Mut'im, would not make du'a for him, but he repaid his decency with a praise that has lasted until today.