An overview of the Hijrah

An overview of the Hijrah

By: Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford
19/12/2025

The meaning of the experience of the Hijrah was fully understood by the believers who lived through it. It meant for them the responsibility of transitioning Islam from a personal discipline to a settled way of life, a distinctive civilisation. The Hijrah was the first step –– a step from which there could be no coming back –– from subordination under the jurisdiction of non-believers to the establishment of Islam as an independent, sovereign jurisdiction. The Hijrah was understood from the beginning as a massive enlargement of the responsibilities of being Muslim, among which was the duty to prepare for sustained warfare with their persecutors. After the believers achieved political and military security, they honoured the greatness of this transition by marking the year of the Hijrah as Year One of the Islamic calendar. That happened during the caliphate of `Umar.

Despite obvious parallels with the commission of Musa, `alayhi s-salam, to liberate his people from the cruel jurisdiction of Pharaoh, the venture of the Prophet’s Hijrah, salla-llahu `alayhi wa-sallam, is unique in that it was followed through with great wisdom and consistent resolve and, with the help of Allah, it succeeded far beyond any reasonable calculation based on balance of forces in manpower, financial resources and equipment. The success of the Hijrah was due to both the depth of faith of the believers, and the quality of leadership, the intelligent planning, that guided it. The believers had to sacrifice almost everything of their ties to Most Makka, risking possibly permanent separation from close family, and separation from all the means of survival in their world –– their possessions, homes, businesses, land and livestock. They did not undertake this huge risk in the manner of a mass, panicked flight with enemies in hot pursuit. Rather, the Hijrah was a carefully conceived manoeuvre. The Makkans left in small groups by different routes, and at different times. Most importantly they went with somewhere to go. The Hijrah had a known destination.

The Prophet had accepted the refuge promised in Yathrib by fellow-Muslims from that settlement. Just as the Makkan Muslims were from different clans and tribes, so too the Yathribis were from different clans and tribes, but all had agreed to live as a unified community under the leadership of the Prophet, salla-llahu `alayhi wa-sallam, whose authority was the emerging Scripture and religion of Islam. Not all the Makkans who undertook the Hijrah reached Yathrib alive, but their effort was surely rewarded by Allah just as if they had. Thereafter, too, were many setbacks, severe defeats in battle, dissensions and backslidings, betrayals, and broken pledges. In other words, though the true believers, including the Prophet himself, believed in the victory Allah had assured to them, yet this was a faith bi-l-ghayb, that is, a faith in the unseen yet to come. And a want of perfect consistency is perhaps ingrained in Human nature, as Allah remarks about the misjudgement of Adam, `alayhi s-salam, which he repented fully and which Allah fully forgave. Yathrib did not become Madina with a magical suddenness; it needed building by human effort, a steadfast sacrifice of persons and possessions over many years. It needed enduring high morale among the believing men and women, together with the wisdom to preserve their unity, which demonstrated that they deserved the help of Allah, which is always near, and which brought them victory. The struggles of the Hijrah, the back and forth of gains and losses in iman and din, are recorded in the Qur’an, alongside the counter-examples of the wanderings of the people of Musa, `alayhi s-salam.
Lessons from the Hijrah in our time

In our time the need for Hijrah is felt –– the need for migration to a place of refuge where, liberated from the fitna of subjection and subordination to the lifeways of non-Muslims, Muslms can reset and rebuild the disciplines of a Muslim way of life that (as the Hijrah set out to achieve) extends beyond the basic rites of prayer and dietary regime to the large social, political and economic structures which ground, contain and constrain, and frame the aspirations which orient human effort. This need is still felt, but it is felt weakly, because there is not now any such place of refuge, any Yathrib, where small bands of Muslims could quietly go and find welcome, assemble and rebuild. Officially independent and sovereign Muslim countries are in reality nothing of the sort, since they have not been able to build up the necessary economic sovereignty that is a condition for secure governance; rather, they are caught up in financial and political webs that keep them trapped in instability and vulnerable to economic warfare, and then (when they have been weakened enough) military warfare and ‘regime change’. Muslims in Iran, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon have demonstrated that, despite these conditions, it is possible to find ways of surviving and resisting. That –– patient resistance, slow long-term building up of a resistance movement and the means for its survival and eventual independence –– is perhaps the only way that the lessons of the Hijrah can be lived now.

When the belief of a new believer is detested by family and friends as ‘cultural treason’, the believer may be subjected to passive persecution: verbal abuse, excluding the believer from family conversations and plans, deliberately including food items at meal-times so that the believer is forced to eat alone or go hungry, making nuisance and noise to interfere in the believer’s effort to pray; etc. Such treatment can be survived in the short term if the believer finds relief in the companionship and support of fellow-believers, outside the believer’s family and local circle. In the long term, pressures like this (esp. on wives from non-believing husbands) lead to a point where the believer must choose between continued association either with this family or with Islam. If the latter choice is possible, the lesson from the Hijrah is to prepare for the break, not rush out onto the streets, but have a place to go and a plan for how to survive.

The situation just described for the single person also happens for Muslim minorities living in societies that (without saying it out loud) view Muslim presence as ‘cultural infiltration’ and/or ‘cultural pollution’ and systematically subject the believers to personal harassment, to legal and illegal forms of economic outcasting, public denunciation and mockery of their beliefs and associated customs, and ‘turning a blind eye’ to blatantly illegal defacements, desecrations, and defilement, of Muslim places of assembly, including places of worship. In countries such as the UK, which have developed robust procedures to keep an eye on such abuses, Muslims still have to live with name-calling in the street; women are still frequently harassed for wearing the headscarf; faeces are still thrown at or into Muslim homes; the occasional pig’s head is still left inside mosques, and dogs let in while people are praying. Nevertheless, the authorities have legislation and established means to identify and punish criminal acts of this kind, which they tend to do discreetly, for the good reason of not aggravating the abuses with publicity. In such situations, Muslims should inform themselves of their legal rights, lose their inhibitions about claiming victimhood and report and prosecute crimes of the kind just mentioned much more often than they do.

More importantly, Muslims should be preparing for the now-inevitable economic failure that is coming to countries like the UK. Then they, along with other immigrant minorities, will be targeted and scapegoated. The tolerance in the UK is real now because it can be afforded; when it can’t be afforded, Muslims (alongwith others), will be quite explicitly reduced to second class status because British tolerance is not based on religious principle but political expediency. The economic status of most Muslims will fall dramatically, compared to the ‘host community’. Hijrah-like resistance could include building, under known, respected leadership, strong, local neighbourhood-solidarity structures, stocking up on necessary supplies and learning how to administer them: Islamic duties require that, when sharing out, all the needy in the neighbourhood are accounted equally, especially non-Muslims –– just as Muslims do in Ramadan. Nothing defeats prejudice more effectively or enduringly than personal contacts in times of crisis. No less important, Muslims should be building contact networks, through family or other connections, with Muslims in Muslim-majority countries, both to strengthen inter-Muslim commerce, and also to anticipate the worst-case scenario that Muslims are forcibly expelled. Basically: if the worst happens, have in mind a place to go to, and a plan for how to cope when you get there.

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