The Migration (Hijrah) of the Prophet Muhammad

When Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA) needed a fixed starting point for the Islamic calendar, he passed over the Prophet’s ﷺ birth and the start of revelation and chose instead a single migration: the flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, undertaken only after thirteen years of the Muslim community absorbing everything Mecca could throw at it.

Hijrah: Thirteen Years of Persecution First

Those thirteen years included economic boycott, physical torture of the enslaved and socially vulnerable among the early Muslims, and the deaths of converts under persecution. Some had already left in stages for Abyssinia before Medina was ever an option, where the Christian ruler An-Najashi granted them protection and, according to accounts preserved in the seerah literature, refused to hand them over to a Meccan delegation sent to retrieve them.

An Assassination Plot and a Deliberate Decoy

Meccan leaders eventually agreed on a plan to kill the Prophet ﷺ outright, assigning a representative from every clan to strike together so that no single family could be blamed for his death. Warned in advance, he had his cousin Ali (RA) sleep in his bed as a decoy while he and Abu Bakr (RA) slipped out of the city and hid for three days in the cave of Thawr, south of Mecca, while search parties combed the surrounding hills.

“Do Not Grieve; Indeed Allah Is With Us”

Surah at-Tawbah preserves the moment inside that cave when Abu Bakr (RA), seeing the feet of the search party just outside, feared they would be found. The Prophet’s ﷺ answer was brief: “Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us” (9:40). Widely preserved accounts add that a spider’s web and a bird’s nest at the cave’s entrance contributed to the search party passing it by unexamined. When it was safe to move, the two did not take the direct northern road toward Medina at all. They hired Abdullah ibn Uraiqit, a guide who was not yet Muslim but was trusted for his knowledge of the desert, and travelled instead along a longer, little-used route closer to the Red Sea coast, reaching Quba on the outskirts of Medina after roughly eight days of travel. It was at Quba that the first mosque of the Islamic era was built, during a four-day stay before the final short leg of the journey into the city itself.

Welcomed by the Ansar

In Medina, the Prophet ﷺ and the Meccan migrants, the Muhajireen, were received by the local Muslim community, the Ansar, who shared their homes, land, and wealth with them so thoroughly that the Quran later praises their generosity in Surah al-Hashr, describing them as preferring the migrants over themselves even while in need themselves (59:9). One of the Prophet’s ﷺ first acts in the city was formally pairing individual Muhajireen with individual Ansar as brothers, a bond recorded as extending even to inheritance rights in the earliest period.

From Persecuted Minority to Established Community

The Hijrah changed the Muslim community’s circumstances entirely – from a persecuted minority with no independent standing in Mecca to a community with its own city, its own governance under the Constitution of Medina, and the freedom to worship, teach, and grow openly. That transformation is precisely why Umar (RA) later fixed on this event, rather than any other in the Prophet’s ﷺ life, as the calendar’s starting point: not the message alone, but the moment it became a functioning, self-sustaining community.

The Villagers of Medina Singing Him In

Seerah accounts describe the arrival at what was then still largely known as Yathrib as open public celebration rather than quiet resettlement. People had gone out to the outskirts each morning for days, watching for him, and when he finally appeared they greeted him with visible joy, some reportedly singing a welcome preserved and repeated in later generations. Several of the city’s leading families competed for the honor of hosting him; he declined all of them, instead letting his camel walk freely and choosing to stay wherever it knelt on its own – the spot that became the site of the mosque he built there. Scholars read the choice as deliberate: letting circumstance rather than his own preference settle a decision that, made any other way, risked favoring one clan over the rest of a city he had arrived in as an outsider.

That instinct – to let structure rather than personal preference settle a potentially divisive choice – resurfaces throughout the Medinan period, including in the address recorded in The Farewell Sermon of the Prophet Muhammad, delivered a decade after this arrival.