The Medinan Community

In the decade after the Hijra, the traditional biographies record the consolidation of a religious and political community at Medina, a series of confrontations with Mecca, and finally a largely peaceful return to the Prophet's ﷺ birthplace.

At a glance

At Medina, the sources describe the building of the Prophet's ﷺ mosque as the community's centre and the working out, verse by verse, of much of the law and ritual that the Meccan revelations had only sketched — prayer, fasting, alms, and the ordering of family and communal life. Many of the longer, legislative sūras of the Qurʾān are, in the traditional classification, Medinan.

The decade is punctuated by the encounters Chronicle records as separate events: the battle of Badr (2 AH / 624 CE), reversal at Uḥud (3 AH / 625), and the defence of Medina at the Battle of the Trench (5 AH / 627). The biographies then turn to the treaty of Ḥudaybiyya (6 AH / 628), a truce with the Quraysh that the tradition reads as a diplomatic turning point, and to its collapse, which precedes the largely bloodless entry into Mecca in 8 AH / 630 and the rededication of the Kaʿba to the worship of the one God.

The sīra closes with the Farewell Pilgrimage of 10 AH / 632, at which the Prophet ﷺ is remembered as delivering a sermon on the sanctity of life, property and the ties of kinship, and with his death shortly after at Medina. What followed — the question of who should lead the community — is treated in Chronicle's articles on the Caliphate and, from a differing vantage, on the Imamate; the traditions part company precisely here, and Chronicle records both.

Related in Chronicle

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.