The Migration (Hijrah) of the Prophet Muhammad

A look at hijrah in Islamic teaching, drawn from the Quran and authentic hadith.

The Hijrah, the migration of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, marks a turning point scholars treat as significant enough that the entire Islamic calendar is dated from it, rather than from the Prophet’s ﷺ birth or the start of revelation.

Hijrah: Thirteen Years of Persecution First

By the time the Hijrah took place, the small Muslim community had endured thirteen years of escalating hostility in Mecca – economic boycott, physical torture of the enslaved and socially vulnerable among them, and the deaths of early converts under persecution. Earlier groups had already migrated in stages to Abyssinia, where the Christian ruler An-Najashi granted them protection, according to accounts preserved in the seerah literature describing his refusal to hand them over to a Meccan delegation sent to retrieve them.

An Assassination Plot and a Deliberate Decoy

Hadith and seerah accounts describe Meccan leaders finally agreeing on a plan to assassinate the Prophet ﷺ using a representative from every clan striking together, so that responsibility for his killing could not be traced to any single family. Warned in advance, he had his cousin Ali (RA) sleep in his bed as a decoy that night, while he and Abu Bakr (RA) slipped out of the city, later hiding for three days in the cave of Thawr while search parties combed the surrounding hills.

“Do Not Grieve; Indeed Allah Is With Us”

Surah at-Tawbah recounts a moment inside that cave, when Abu Bakr (RA), seeing the feet of the search party just outside, expressed fear that they would be discovered, and the Prophet ﷺ answered, “Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us” (9:40) – a moment scholars cite as capturing the underlying trust in Allah that carried the migration through its most physically dangerous stretch, with a spider’s web and a bird’s nest at the cave’s entrance, according to widely preserved accounts, contributing to the search party passing it by unexamined.

Welcomed by the Ansar

Arriving 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 when they were themselves in need (59:9). One of the Prophet’s ﷺ first acts in the city was formally pairing individual Muhajireen with individual Ansar as brothers, establishing a bond of mutual support recorded as extending even to inheritance rights in the earliest period.

From Persecuted Minority to Established Community

The Hijrah transformed 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 ability to worship, teach, and grow openly. This is the reason the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), later chose the Hijrah rather than any other event in the Prophet’s ﷺ life as the fixed starting point for the Islamic lunar calendar, treating it as the moment Islam moved from a message under threat to a functioning, self-sustaining community.

The Villagers of Medina Singing Him In

Seerah accounts describe the arrival at Medina, then still largely known as Yathrib, as a moment of open public celebration rather than a quiet resettlement. The people of the city, having awaited his arrival for days, are recorded going out each morning to the outskirts of the settlement to watch for him, and when he finally appeared, greeting him with visible joy, some reportedly singing a welcome that has been preserved and repeated in later generations. The Prophet ﷺ is recorded declining offers from several of the city’s leading families competing for the honor of hosting him, instead letting his camel walk freely and choosing to stay wherever it eventually knelt on its own, at what became the site of the mosque he then built there – a decision scholars cite as a deliberate refusal to show favoritism toward any one clan in a city he had arrived in as an outsider, allowing circumstance rather than his own preference to settle a choice that could otherwise have created resentment among those left unchosen.

This theme connects directly to our article on The Farewell Sermon of the Prophet Muhammad. Readers wanting to verify the primary sources directly can consult Sunnah.com for the full Quranic text and hadith references.