What Is the Hijra?
The Hijra of 622 CE was the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. It marks the founding of the Muslim community and year 1 of the Islamic calendar.
The Hijra was the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to the oasis city of Yathrib (later Medina) in 622 CE. The event marks the founding of the Muslim umma (community) as a political entity, and it is the year 1 of the Islamic calendar. The Hijra is to Islam what the Exodus is to Judaism or what the resurrection is to Christianity: a foundational event of deliverance that gives the community its identity and shapes its sense of mission.
The choice of the Hijra as the starting point of the Islamic calendar, made by the caliph Umar in 637, reflects a particular understanding of the founding of Islam. Muslims could have chosen the year of the Prophet’s birth (traditionally 570), the year of his first revelations (610), or the year of his death (632). They chose instead the year of the Hijra, because it marked the moment at which the Muslim community ceased to be a persecuted minority in Mecca and became a self-governing political community in Medina. The Hijra is, in this sense, the moment at which Islam became a state as well as a religion.
The Event of the Hijra
The Hijra took place in September 622. The circumstances had been building for several years. The Muslim community in Mecca had grown slowly over the first decade of the Prophet’s preaching, but it had met with persistent opposition from the Quraysh, the merchant elite of Mecca. The Meccans saw the new monotheism as a threat both to the cult of the Kaaba, the principal sanctuary of the Arabian Peninsula, and to the trade that pilgrimage brought. The Muslims were subjected to a boycott, to insults, and to occasional physical violence.
Two events of 619 made the position of the Muslims in Mecca untenable. The first was the death of Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, who had been his most constant supporter. The second was the death of Abu Talib, the Prophet’s uncle, who had provided him with the protection of the Hashimite clan. With the loss of these two protectors, the Prophet became vulnerable to the assassination plots of the Quraysh. Around 620, a delegation of men from the oasis city of Yathrib, located some 320 kilometers north of Mecca, came to the Prophet and invited him to come to Yathrib to arbitrate the tribal disputes of the city. The Yathribites, who had been exposed to Islam through the visits of Muslims to the great fairs, were prepared to accept Muhammad as a mediator and, eventually, as a religious leader.
The actual Hijra was a small, clandestine affair. The Prophet and his close companion Abu Bakr slipped out of Mecca, eluded a Qurayshite search party, and took refuge in a cave south of the city for three days. The famous story of the spider’s web and the pigeon’s nest at the entrance of the cave is a later embellishment, but the basic facts are well established. The two men then traveled to Yathrib by a circuitous route, and the Prophet arrived in the city in September 622, where he was received with great enthusiasm by the Muslims of Yathrib and the Yathribites who had invited him.
The Constitution of Medina
The political foundation of the new community was the Constitution of Medina, a document preserved in the early biographical sources. The Constitution identified the various parties of Yathrib - the Muslim muhajirun (migrants from Mecca), the Muslim ansar (helpers of Medina), and the Jewish tribes of the city - as a single umma (community), bound by mutual consultation and mutual defense. It also provided for the joint defense of the city against external attack and the resolution of disputes. The Constitution is a remarkable document, both for its recognition of religious pluralism and for its creation of a new kind of political community in which tribal affiliation was, in principle, subordinated to religious belonging.
The Founding of the Community
The decade from the Hijra to the Prophet’s death in 632 is the period during which the institutions of the Islamic community were created. In Medina, the Prophet built the first mosque, established the practice of the call to prayer, organized the zakat (alms) system, and elaborated the rules of war and peace, of marriage and inheritance, of criminal and civil law. The first great battles of early Islam - the Battles of Badr (624), Uhud (625), and the Trench (627) - were fought in the Medinan period. The Prophet’s relations with the Jewish tribes of Medina, initially cooperative, deteriorated during this period, and the three major Jewish tribes - the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qurayza - were successively expelled or subjected to a controversial punishment whose details remain disputed.
The Hijra in the Islamic Calendar
The choice of the Hijra as the starting point of the Islamic calendar, made by the caliph Umar in 637, was a deliberate symbolic act. The calendar is a purely lunar one, with twelve months of 29 or 30 days, and a year of 354 or 355 days. The Islamic year is therefore about 11 days shorter than the solar year, and the Islamic months move through the solar year in a cycle of about 33 years. The use of a lunar calendar reflects the early Islamic rejection of the Sasanian solar calendar and the use of the lunar calendar of the pre-Islamic Arabs.
The dating of events in the Hijri calendar is central to Islamic identity. The years of the Prophet’s life are reckoned in Hijri, and the Islamic festivals, including Ramadan, the Hajj, and the Eid celebrations, are all dated by the Hijri calendar. The use of the Hijri calendar, alongside the Christian or common calendar, is a major feature of the modern Islamic world.
The Hijra as a Continuing Model
In the Islamic tradition, the Hijra is not only a historical event; it is also a continuing spiritual and political model. The muhajirun, the migrants from Mecca, are revered in the Qur’an and the hadith as the exemplars of faith willing to leave their homes and possessions for the cause of God. The Prophet’s statement that “the hijra does not cease so long as there is a battle to be fought for the faith” (al-Bukhari) has been invoked by Muslims in every age to justify migrations in the cause of religion. The Hijra remains, in modern Islam, both a historical event and a paradigm of religious devotion.