The Hijra to Medina

The migration of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE — the Hijra — became the pivot of Islamic history and the starting point of the Muslim calendar.

At a glance

In the traditional narrative, delegations from the oasis town of Yathrib, some 340 kilometres north of Mecca, met the Prophet ﷺ at ʿAqaba and pledged to receive and protect him and his community. As pressure in Mecca grew unbearable, the believers emigrated in groups, with Muḥammad ﷺ and Abū Bakr among the last to leave. Yathrib would come to be called simply al-Madīna, "the City" — Medina.

The Hijra was more than a change of place. It converted a persecuted preaching movement into a self-governing community with the Prophet ﷺ as its arbiter. The early document the sources call the "Constitution of Medina" is remembered as binding the emigrants (muhājirūn), the Medinan converts (anṣār, the "helpers"), and the town's Jewish tribes into a single mutual-defence compact — an arrangement historians often read as one of the first written communal charters of its kind.

So decisive was the event that, a generation later, the caliph ʿUmar is reported to have fixed the start of the Islamic lunar calendar not at the Prophet's birth or the first revelation but at the year of the Hijra — dates ever since counted AH, anno Hegirae. The pairing off of muhājirūn and anṣār as "brothers" is likewise recalled as the founding act of a community defined by faith rather than lineage.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.