Seeds in Yathrib — Six Men at a Pilgrimage Fair

The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 13

The life that changed the world — written for non-Muslims, beginners, and the curious.

Adapted from Dr. Yasir Qadhi's seerah lecture series. This chapter draws on episode 24.

After the Night Journey, the practical situation in Makkah had not improved at all. He was still a man without protection in a city that wanted him gone.

So he did something that looks, at first, like desperation — and turned out to be the most consequential strategy of his life.

Working the fairs

Once a year, pilgrimage brought tribes from across Arabia into the valleys around Makkah. For a few weeks the city filled with outsiders — people who were not Quraysh, not invested in Quraysh politics, and not yet told what to think about him.

He walked among them and made an offer: take me in, protect me, and let me deliver this message.

Changing tribal affiliation was rare in Arabia but not unheard of. He was asking for asylum and a platform — and he did it year after year.

Abu Lahab followed him through the camps. Wherever the Prophet (SAW) stopped to speak, his own uncle would arrive behind him and tell the tribe to ignore him and stay on the ways of their fathers. Imagine making your case to strangers with a relative walking behind you undermining every word.

The offer he refused

Two of those encounters are worth telling, because of what they show about what he would and would not trade.

The tribe of Kindah was powerful, and its chief was interested — genuinely interested. His people had once held a kingdom and lost it, and he could see what a movement like this might do for them. So he asked the practical question: if we back you and you win, does the leadership pass to us afterward?

The answer was no. Authority belongs to God, who gives it to whom He wills — it was not his to promise.

Kindah walked away. They were not willing to risk their lives for a movement without a guaranteed share of the power.

He had just been offered a serious tribal army, and he turned it down rather than mortgage the message. A man in his position — no protector, no city, a following you could fit in a room — said no to the one thing he needed most, because the price was the truth.

He also went to Banu Shayban, taking Abu Bakr (RA) with him, whose knowledge of Arab genealogy made him invaluable in these conversations — he could tell you who a tribe was, who they were feuding with, and how to address them.

Banu Shayban listened seriously, and he recited to them from Surah Al-An'am and this verse:

Quran

“Indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct and giving to relatives, and forbids immorality and bad conduct and oppression. He admonishes you that perhaps you will be reminded.”

— Surah An-Nahl 16:90

Their elders were impressed. But their military chief explained the problem: they had a treaty with the Persian Empire, and their territory sat on its border. They could shelter him from Arab enemies, but not from Persia.

A qualified yes, which is a no. He told them plainly that the empire they were afraid of would fall. Within a couple of decades of his death, it had.

The oasis to the north

Roughly two hundred and fifty miles north of Makkah lay an oasis then called Yathrib — a fertile pocket of date palms ringed by fields of black volcanic rock.

Three things about that city had been quietly setting the stage for years.

First: it was exhausted from civil war. Two Arab tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj, had been fighting each other for generations. It had culminated a few years earlier in the Battle of Bu'ath, which gutted both sides and killed off most of the senior leadership. What remained was a younger generation, sick of the bloodshed, and — crucially — no single strongman able to dominate the city.

Aisha (RA) later described that battle as something God arranged in advance:

Hadith

“The day of Bu'ath was a day which Allah caused to take place just before the mission of His Messenger, so that when Allah's Messenger came to Madinah, they had already divided and their chiefs had been killed.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 3767

A city with a strong ruler has no vacancy. A city that has just destroyed its own leadership is looking for someone from outside it can all accept.

Second: it had Jewish tribes. Yathrib was home to three of them — Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza. It was one of only two places in the region with a substantial Jewish population.

That mattered enormously. The pagan Arabs of Yathrib had spent generations living beside neighbors who believed in one God, had scriptures and prophets and religious law, and could read. Concepts that would sound absurd to a Makkan pagan — one God, revealed books, prophets, resurrection — were ordinary background furniture in Yathrib.

Third — and this is the sharpest irony in the chapter — their Jewish neighbors had been telling them a prophet was coming. In disputes it was used as a threat: a prophet is due, and when he comes we will follow him and deal with you.

So when six men from Yathrib heard a man in Makkah claiming to be exactly that, they had a reaction available to them that no Makkan had: this is the one we were warned about — and he isn't theirs, he's ours.

The Quran addresses this directly:

Quran

“And when there came to them a Book from Allah confirming that which was with them — although before they used to pray for victory against those who disbelieved — but when there came to them that which they recognized, they disbelieved in it.”

— Surah Al-Baqarah 2:89

Six men

At a place called al-Aqabah, near Mina, the Prophet (SAW) came across a small group of men and asked who they were. They were from the Khazraj.

He asked — and the detail is telling — whether they were the Khazraj who were allies of the Jews. He knew exactly who he was talking to.

He sat with them and explained. There were six of them. They had no tent, no standing, and no ability to offer him anything. He gave them his full attention anyway.

And they believed — for reasons they said out loud among themselves. This is the prophet the Jews have been threatening us with. Let's not let them get to him first.

Among them was As'ad ibn Zurarah (RA), who would matter a great deal shortly.

They went home and started talking. Within months there was barely a household in Yathrib that hadn't heard about it. The next pilgrimage season they came back — more than twice as many. The season after that, they came back to make a formal commitment.

What that actually meant

Hold the two halves of this chapter next to each other.

In Makkah he had preached for over a decade — enduring boycott, torture, exile, and the loss of his family — and won a community small enough to fit in one house. He had approached the great tribes of Arabia and been refused by every one of them, sometimes over a single condition he wouldn't concede.

Then six men with nothing, whom nobody would have picked, stopped to listen at the roadside. And within about three years their city would send a delegation asking him to come and lead it.

He hadn't been aiming at Yathrib. He had been expecting something to come out of Yemen. The opening came from a direction he wasn't watching:

Quran

“And whoever fears Allah — He will make for him a way out, and will provide for him from where he does not expect.”

— Surah At-Talaq 65:2–3

There's a plainer lesson too, and Qadhi puts weight on it. The Prophet (SAW) gave the same care to six nobodies with no tent as he gave to the chief of Kindah. He had no way of knowing which conversation was the one that mattered.

It turned out to be the one with no obvious upside.

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Up next: The Pledge — a young teacher is sent north alone to a city that has never seen a Muslim, and comes back having converted much of it. Then seventy-five people slip out of their camps in the middle of the night to make a promise that means war.