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The Hijrah — The Night They Came to Kill Him
Quraysh chose one man from every clan so that no single family could be blamed for the murder. The Prophet (SAW) walked out through them, spent three days hidden in a cave with Abu Bakr while search parties stood close enough to be seen, and rode north to a city that had been waiting for him. Muslims still count their years from that journey.
The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 15
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 episodes 27 and 28.
By the end of Chapter 14 the Muslims had gone north and Makkah was emptying. Quraysh understood what that meant, and they called an emergency council.
The decision
They met at Dar an-Nadwa, the assembly house where Makkah's business was settled. Banu Hashim were not invited, for obvious reasons.
Three options were put forward.
Imprison him. Rejected — his message would keep spreading from the cell, and his followers would eventually come for him.
Exile him. Rejected, and this one shows how much they had come to fear him: turn him loose on the tribes of Arabia and he would win them over and come back at the head of an army.
Then Abu Jahl proposed the plan they took. Choose one strong young man from every clan of Quraysh. Have them strike together, as one.
The point was not the killing. The point was the arithmetic afterward. Banu Hashim could not fight all of Quraysh at once, and they could not single out one clan for revenge when every clan's blade was in it. They would have to accept blood money. The murder would be, in effect, unpunishable.
Quran“And remember when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you, or kill you, or evict you. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.”
The preparation
He had been getting ready for months.
Abu Bakr (RA) had been fattening two camels for about three months, waiting for permission to travel. When the Prophet (SAW) came to his house in the middle of the day — unusual enough that Abu Bakr knew something had happened — and told him God had given permission to emigrate, and that they were going together, Abu Bakr wept.
Then he offered the Prophet (SAW) one of the camels as a gift. It was refused. He would take it only at full price. A journey like this was not going to be made on someone else's expense.
His daughter Asma (RA) packed the provisions, and when there was nothing to tie the bag with, she tore her waistband in two and used the halves — which is why she is remembered as Dhat an-Nitaqayn, "she of the two belts."
Abu Bakr took his entire remaining wealth with him. His blind father came by afterward, upset that he had left the family with nothing. Asma sat the old man down in front of a cloth-covered niche she had filled with pebbles, let him feel the weight of it, and told him her father had left plenty. She lied to spare an old man's worry.
The escape plan was detailed, and every piece of it was a precaution:
- His son Abdullah would spend days in Makkah listening to what Quraysh were saying, and come to them at night.
- Amir ibn Fuhayrah, a freed slave, would drive sheep over Abdullah's footprints to erase them.
- Abdullah ibn Urayqit — a professional guide, and not a Muslim — was hired to take them by back routes.
- They would head south, the wrong direction entirely, and wait three days for the search to burn itself out.
Walking out
That night, the men gathered at his door.
Ali (RA) was asked to sleep in the Prophet's bed wearing his cloak, so the watchers would see the outline of a sleeping man — and to stay behind afterward to return the belongings people had left with him for safekeeping.
Read that last part twice. Makkah was trying to kill him, and the men trying to kill him were still using him as their safe-deposit box, because everyone knew he did not steal. He would not leave the city until their property was returned.
He walked out through them, reciting from Surah Ya-Sin:
Quran“And We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier and covered them, so they do not see.”
None of them saw him leave. (This account comes from Ibn Ishaq's early biography rather than the rigorous hadith collections — worth knowing as you read it.)
Before he left the city he stopped, looked back, and said that it was the most beloved land of God to him, and that he would never have left if his people had not driven him out.
Three days in the cave
They went south to Thawr, a mountain about an hour and a half's climb from the city, and squeezed into a crevice barely big enough for two men.
Quraysh went wild. They put a bounty of a hundred camels on him — dead or alive — and hired an expert tracker.
The tracker was good. He followed the trail to the base of the mountain and up to the mouth of the cave itself, and search parties came to stand outside it.
From inside, Abu Bakr (RA) could see their feet.
Hadith“I said to the Prophet while I was in the cave: 'If any of them should look under his feet, he would see us.' He said: 'O Abu Bakr! What do you think of two, the third of whom is Allah?'”
The Quran preserves that moment — and it is the only place in the Quran where Abu Bakr appears:
Quran“When the two were in the cave and he said to his companion, 'Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us.' And Allah sent down His tranquillity upon him.”
Note what he was afraid of. Abu Bakr says elsewhere that he was not frightened for himself — if he died, he was one man. He was frightened for what would be lost if they found the other one.
You may have heard about a spider's web across the entrance and two pigeons nesting there. Qadhi's assessment is worth passing on honestly: the spider's web has the strongest support of the three, in Musnad Ahmad; the tree and the pigeons come from much later sources with weak chains. They can be told, as long as they are not presented as established fact.
The hunter who turned back
On the third night the guide arrived and they rode north.
Suraqah ibn Malik was sitting with his tribe when a man mentioned seeing three riders on the coast road. Suraqah knew instantly what that was worth. He talked the group out of it — that'll be so-and-so, I saw them myself — then quietly went home, armed himself, and rode out alone to collect a hundred camels.
He got close. And his horse's forelegs sank into the ground and threw him.
He got up, consulted his divination arrows — which told him not to go — ignored them, remounted, and closed in again. The horse sank again.
By the third time, Suraqah had worked out what he was dealing with and changed sides entirely. He called out for safe conduct and rode up unarmed.
What he described afterward is the detail that sticks. As he approached, Abu Bakr kept turning around, watching, anxious. The Prophet (SAW) did not look back once. He was reciting, steadily, as though nothing was happening.
Suraqah asked for something in writing — a guarantee of safety for the day this man's people came out on top. It was written and handed over.
He rode back and spent the rest of the day steering every search party he met away from the coast road.
Eight years later, when Makkah fell, Suraqah produced that piece of writing and it was honoured. He accepted Islam. And there is a postscript: he was told that day that he would one day wear the bracelets of the Persian emperor. Years after the Prophet's death, when Persia fell, Umar (RA) called Suraqah forward and put the emperor's bracelets on the wrists of a Bedouin from Banu Mudlij.
The tent of Umm Ma'bad
Further along the road they stopped at the tent of an old Bedouin woman, Umm Ma'bad, and asked to buy food. She had none — the drought had left her nothing, and the only animal at the tent was a goat too weak and old to be worth milking, left behind when the flock went out.
He asked permission, touched the goat, prayed over it, and milked it. It filled a vessel. Everyone drank, he drank last, and it filled again.
When her husband came home and saw milk in the tent, he asked where it had come from. She described the visitor to him — and the description she gave is one of the most detailed physical portraits of the Prophet (SAW) that survives, from a woman who had met him once for an hour.
Her husband recognized immediately who had passed through. They both accepted Islam.
He was a fugitive with a hundred-camel price on his head, moving fast, and he still stopped, and people still believed. He converted two or three households on a journey he was making to save his life.
Tie your camel
Look back over the whole escape.
Three months of preparing camels. A decoy in the bed. A non-Muslim guide chosen precisely because nobody would connect him to them. The wrong direction on purpose. A boy for intelligence. Sheep to erase footprints. Three days of waiting.
This is the man being carried by revelation, who had been taken to Jerusalem and back in a night — and he planned like someone with no divine help at all.
That's the balance the seerah keeps insisting on: tie your camel, then trust God. Trust is not a substitute for preparation. It is what you have left once the preparation is done — which is why, with the search party's feet visible from the cave mouth, the man with nothing more to do was completely calm.
Why the calendar starts here
He arrived at the outskirts of the city as a man who had spent thirteen years being mocked, boycotted, stoned, and finally hunted — and he arrived to find people who had been walking out every morning to watch the road for him.
The city stopped being Yathrib — a name carrying a sense of blame and blight — and became al-Madinah, "the City," and in full, the City of the Messenger of God.
When Muslims later needed to fix a starting point for their calendar, they did not choose his birth, the first revelation, or any battle or conquest.
They chose this: the year a persecuted community stopped being refugees and started being a society. Every Islamic date since is counted from that migration.
Which is a statement about what the faith thinks is worth commemorating. Not a birth, and not a victory — the moment a group of believers finally got somewhere they could actually build.
Up next: The Madani Era — the Prophet (SAW) enters Madinah as its leader, and for the first time the message has a city to govern. Everything changes: mosques, treaties, neighbours who are not Muslim, and enemies who are not far away.
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